McCarthy plays down Trump charges as former White House lawyer says evidence in case is ‘overwhelming’ – live

Trump, DeSantis and top Republican candidates to share stage at Iowa event

Every major Republican presidential candidate will share a stage in the early voting state of Iowa tonight, as Donald Trump continues to dominate in the polls despite his numerous legal liabilities.

Most of the 13 candidates will appear at the Iowa Republican party’s 2023 Lincoln Dinner fundraiser, giving them an opportunity to address donors and local party leaders with less than six months left before the state’s crucial caucuses.

The lineup of confirmed speakers for tonight are:

Donald Trump

Ron DeSantis

Mike Pence

Nikki Haley

Tim Scott

Vivek Ramaswamy

Asa Hutchinson

Larry Elder

Perry Johnson

Doug Burgum

Francis Suarez

Ryan Binkley

Will Hurd

The event is scheduled to begin at 7pm ET. We will be following it live here on the blog.

Updated at 19.19 EDT

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Most of the Republican speakers at tonight’s Lincoln Dinner did not take aim at any of their peers, but Donald Trump, who just left the podium to cheers, took several jabs at Ron DeSantis.

He continuously mispronounced his name, called out his opposition to ethanol production and argued that the Florida governor was lagging behind in the polls.

“I wouldn’t take a chance on that one,” Trump said of DeSantis.

Updated at 21.41 EDT

Will Hurd, a former US representative from Texas and lesser-known candidate in the Republican race, left the stage to the sound of boos after he said that Donald Trump is running for president just to stay out prison.

Updated at 20.53 EDT

At the podium now is former vice-president Mike Pence. He opens his speech by calling out what he sees as Joe Biden’s failing at the border and pro-choice stance.

“Joe Biden has been a disaster for America,” he tells the crowd.

In addition to standard conservative talking points on the national debt and national security, he also vowed to implement a ban on trans people in the military.

Updated at 20.39 EDT

We’re approaching the halfway point of tonight’s Lincoln Dinner in Iowa. So far, six Republican candidate hopefuls have given their spiel on their plans for the nation. They are:

Nikki Haley

Asa Hutchinson

Ron DeSantis

Tim Scott

Perry Johnson

Doug Burgum

Each speaker has called out salient issues in today’s culture wars like abortion access, healthcare for transgender children and ethnic studies in schools.

Updated at 20.38 EDT

Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, a potential Republican ticket frontrunner, just left the stage. He emphasized the policies that have allowed the state to “beat the left’s agenda”.

He also vowed to deploy the military to the southern border and use “deadly force” on cartels.

DeSantis’ assaults on transgender healthcare, abortion access and ethnic studies and LGBTQ+ education have been well-documented. In May, the Guardian published a story where wide minority groups warned of what the damage his presidency could do to the nation.

Read that piece here.

Updated at 20.38 EDT

Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina was the first presidential hopeful to address the Lincoln Dinner audience.

She emphasized the nation’s $32tn debt as well as the economic struggles facing many American families. She also took an unsurprising aim at the Biden administration, claiming that a 2024 win for Biden will mean that Kamala Harris is really the one winning the election.

Updated at 20.38 EDT

Iowa governor Kim Reynolds just stepped off of the Lincoln Dinner stage. During her speech she touted the state’s supermajority and passage of conservative education and abortion policies. She told the dinner audience:

We’re empowering parents and protecting life.”

Earlier this month state legislators voted to ban most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, a time before most people know they are pregnant.

Read more on the decision here.

Updated at 20.38 EDT

I’m Abené Clayton, reporting from the west coast.

The Lincoln Dinner, put on by Iowa’s Republican Party is underway.

All of the Republican candidates for president, except Chris Christie, will deliver speeches of up to 10min to the ballroom audience.

Up first were Jeff Kaufman a state representative and Kim Reynolds, the governor of Iowa.

I’ll be posting updates from the dinner here.

Updated at 19.25 EDT

At the Iowa Republican party’s 2023 Lincoln Dinner fundraiser, the super PAC backing Ron DeSantis has set up baseballs to throw at cans of Bud Light.

From the New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher:

Trump, DeSantis and top Republican candidates to share stage at Iowa event

Every major Republican presidential candidate will share a stage in the early voting state of Iowa tonight, as Donald Trump continues to dominate in the polls despite his numerous legal liabilities.

Most of the 13 candidates will appear at the Iowa Republican party’s 2023 Lincoln Dinner fundraiser, giving them an opportunity to address donors and local party leaders with less than six months left before the state’s crucial caucuses.

The lineup of confirmed speakers for tonight are:

Donald Trump

Ron DeSantis

Mike Pence

Nikki Haley

Tim Scott

Vivek Ramaswamy

Asa Hutchinson

Larry Elder

Perry Johnson

Doug Burgum

Francis Suarez

Ryan Binkley

Will Hurd

The event is scheduled to begin at 7pm ET. We will be following it live here on the blog.

Updated at 19.19 EDT

Along with two new charges of obstruction of justice, there was another new count of retaining classified material. Special counsel Jack Smith describes a July 2021 incident in which Donald Trump bragged about a “plan of attack” against another country in an interview at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey.

The former president then waved around the classified documents to his guests: a writer, publisher and two Trump staff members who all lacked security clearances “This is secret information,” he said, according to a recording cited in the documents, claiming that, “as president I could have declassified it” – but he had not.

The indictment says the document was returned to the federal government on 17 January 2022, which is the date Trump provided 15 boxes of records to the National Archives.

Trump now faces 40 criminal counts in the classified documents case alone. Ty Cobb, a former Trump White House lawyer, told CNN:

I think this original indictment was engineered to last a thousand years and now this superseding indictment will last an antiquity. This is such a tight case, the evidence is so overwhelming.

The new charges were made public hours after Trump said his lawyers met with justice department officials investigating his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, in a sign that another set of criminal charges could come soon.

Video from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida would play a significant role in the investigation because, prosecutors say, it shows his valet, Walt Nauta, moving boxes of documents in and out of a storage room – including a day before an FBI visit to the property – at Trump’s direction.

According to the indictment, Nauta met Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira at Mar-a-Lago on 25 June 2022. They went to a security guard booth where surveillance video is displayed on monitors and walked with a torch through a tunnel where the storage room was located, observing and pointing out surveillance cameras.

Two days later, according to the indictment, De Oliveira walked through a basement tunnel with a Trump employee to a small room known as an “audio closet”. The two men had a conversation supposed to “remain between the two of them”.

De Oliveira asked how many days the server retained footage. De Oliveira allegedly told the employee that “the boss” wanted the server deleted and asked: “What are we going to do?”

The indictment asserts that Trump called De Oliveira before and after the incident, and that Nauta and De Oliveira were also in contact.

Prosecutors further allege that, during a voluntary interview with the FBI last January, De Oliveira lied when he said he “never saw nothing” with regard to boxes at Mar-a-Lago.

De Oliveira was added to the indictment, charged with obstruction and false statements related to that FBI interview. This could impact the trial date, currently set for May next year, by which stage the Republican nomination may well have been decided.

A tunnel lit by torchlight. An attempt to delete incriminating camera footage. A “boss” whose orders must be obeyed. And all to no avail.

The latest criminal charges against Donald Trump, the former US president, conjure images of the hapless Watergate burglars or a mob movie with elements of farce.

But while they deepen Trump’s legal perils, analysts say, they will only harden his determination to regain the White House as his best chance of staying out of jail. Opinion polls show he remains the runaway frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2024.

Trump, who left office in January 2021, pleaded not guilty in Miami last month to federal charges of unlawfully retaining classified government documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and obstructing justice. Prosecutors allege that he put some of America’s most sensitive national security secrets at risk.

On Thursday they updated the indictment by accusing the former president of scheming with his valet, Walt Nauta, and a Mar-a-Lago property manager, Carlos De Oliveira, to hide surveillance footage from federal investigators after they issued a subpoena for it.

It was left to others to dwell on the irony of Trump, who spent much of the 2016 campaign savaging rival Hillary Clinton for deleting emails from a computer server as secretary of state, now standing accused of trying to delete security footage at his home.

The US is expected to announce a new military aid package to Taiwan worth $345m, according to US officials, a move that is likely to anger China.

The package includes man-portable air defense systems, or Manpads, intelligence and surveillance capabilities, firearms and missiles, AP reported, citing sources.

Congress authorized up to $1bn worth of Presidential Drawdown Authority weapons aid for Taiwan in the 2023 budget.

The latest package would be in addition to nearly $19bn in military sales of F-16s and other weapons systems that the US has approved to Taiwan.

Ron DeSantis suggests he would pardon Trump if elected

Florida governor Ron DeSantis indicated he would consider pardoning Donald Trump if he is elected president, a day after the former president was indicted on additional charges.

In an interview on the Megyn Kelly show, DeSantis was asked if he would commit to pardoning Trump on any federal charges. He replied:

Well, what I’ve said is very simple. I’m going to do what’s right for the country. I don’t think it would be good for the country to have an almost 80-year-old former president go to prison. It doesn’t seem like it would be a good thing.

And I look at like, you know, Ford pardoned Nixon, took some heat for it, but at the end of the day, it’s like, do we want to move forward as a country? Or do we want to be mired in these past controversies?

DeSantis previously said that, if elected, he would consider pardoning people involved in the January 6 insurrection, including Trump.

Updated at 17.48 EDT

Republican representative John James of Michigan weighed in on the debate over Florida’s controversial new curriculum standards for Black history, which include the contention that some Black people benefited from being enslaved.

James criticized Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor also running for the GOP presidential nomination, for supporting the new standards that require Florida teachers to tell middle school students people enslaved in the US developed skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit”.

Posting to Twitter, James said DeSantis should “put the shovel down” if he found himself “in a deep hole”, and that the Florida governor was “now so far from the Party of Lincoln that your [Education] board is re-writing history”.

It comes after DeSantis accused his GOP rival and the only Black Republican in the US Senate, Tim Scott, of laundering Democratic talking points after the South Carolina senator said slavery was “devastating”.

Addressing DeSantis, James wrote:

There are only five black Republicans in Congress and you’re attacking two of them

Democrat congressman Dean Phillips weighs primary run against Biden

Dean Phillips, a moderate Democrat congressman representing Minnesota, is considering a potential 2024 primary challenge against Joe Biden, according to multiple reports.

Phillips will meet with Democrat donors next week in New York about a potential long-shot primary challenge. The news was first reported by Politico, then Phillips confirmed his meeting to CNN.

Phillips has said publicly he does not believe Biden should run for reelection. In an interview last year, he said the country “would be well served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats to step up”.

Politico writes:

Phillips, who’s in his third term representing suburban Minneapolis, has drawn attention from contributors by both denouncing the “No Labels” attempt to field a third-party ticket and calling for a contested Democratic primary next year. A former executive, he’s also the sort of pro-business social moderate with private sector experience who corporate leaders usually pine for in a presidential candidate.

Phillips, 54, is highly unlikely to mount a primary challenge unless Biden’s health worsens or his political standing drops precipitously, I’m told, and does not want to further weaken the president.

Congress has a lot on its plate when it gets back to work in September.

Among its most important tasks is agreeing on a number of funding bills, ahead of a 30 September deadline after which the US government could shut down if the legislation is not passed.

But Republicans are also openly mulling whether to impeach Joe Biden over allegations of corruption. It’s possible the effort would succeed in the House, where the GOP has a majority, but there is almost no chance at this point of the Democratic-controlled Senate voting to convict the president.

Biden appears to be taking the threat in stride. In a speech earlier today, he turned the impeachment push into a laugh line:

Updated at 16.20 EDT

Congress is on recess for the next few weeks, which is likely a relief for the Senate pages who recently got screamed at by a House Republican. The Associated Press has the story:

A freshman Republican congressman from Wisconsin yelled and cursed at high school-aged Senate pages during a late-night tour of the Capitol this week, eliciting a bipartisan rebuke from Senate leaders.

Derrick Van Orden, who represents western Wisconsin’s third district, used a profanity to describe the young pages as lazy and another to order them off the floor of the Capitol Rotunda on Wednesday night, according to PunchBowl News. The pages were lying down to take photos, according to the publication.

In a statement responding to the report, Van Orden doubled down.

“I have long said our nation’s Capitol is a symbol of the sacrifice our servicemen and women have made for this country and should never be treated like a frat house common room,” Van Orden said.