Trump adviser makes unfounded claim that Covid-19 was ‘spawned’ by China – live
“Policing, as imperfect as it is today, it is absolutely ages better than it was 34 years ago, but we’ve still got work to do. We have to look at the court system, we have to look at the prosecutors, we have to look at the prison system, we have to look at probation, parole, at the entire criminal justice system.”
So says Houston police chief Art Acevedo in an interview with Tom Dart. Acevedo has attracted praise for his stance on the need for policing reform, and criticism for what some see as grandstanding while problems in his department remain. Tom’s interview is here:
Atlanta’s Democrat mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, has called Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa on Saturday night “an embarrassment” and a missed opportunity to heal America’s divide.
“That rally was an embarrassment,” she said during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union. “It was absolutely what the nation does not need right now. He did not speak about healing. He did not recognize any of the racial tensions that are happening across our country. Instead, he does what he always does. He continues to try and divide us and really inflames the worst in people. And so I just hope that this is a good sign that the country is moving on from him.”
The president attracted criticism for saying he had asked his “people” to slow down testing for Covid-19. Trump’s allies have said the president was making a tongue-in-cheek comment. However, Bottoms said even if Trump was joking, Covid-19 was not a subject to be joked about.
“This is no time to joke,” she said. “Even if it were a joke, which it was not, it was an inappropriate joke. Do you think the people, the 120,000 families out there who are missing their loved ones thought it was funny?”
Bottoms has been touted as a potential running mate for Joe Biden. She said she was ready to answer the presumptive Democrat candidate’s call if asked but added “I also think that Joe Biden has the right to pick whomever he wants to work alongside him and to serve as his vice president. And I think that he knows better than anyone else in this country what that role should be and who that person should be.”
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro fired back at John Bolton on Sunday, seeking to rubbish a key claim in the former national security adviser’s bombshell new book, that Donald Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping for help in winning re-election.
“I never heard that,” Navarro said, echoing remarks by US trade representative Robert Lighthizer. “I was in the room.”
Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened, is based on notes taken in a series of rooms with the president, during Bolton’s spell as Trump’s third national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019.
A judge in Washington on Saturday declined the administration’s attempt to block publication, but had harsh words for Bolton’s conduct and treatment of sensitive material.
Trump indicated that a civil suit to seize all profits from the book will continue, and hinted at criminal prosecution.
One policy hawk attacking another, Navarro said in a combative appearance on CNN’s State of the Union: “That guy should be turning in his seersucker suit for a jumpsuit.”
Bolton writes that direct quotes from the conversation with Xi were redacted from his book to satisfy its national security review. But Vanity Fair has since reported that during a dinner at a G20 summit in Japan in 2019, Trump told Xi: “Make sure I win. I will probably win anyway, so don’t hurt my farms … Buy a lot of soybeans and wheat and make sure we win.”
Navarro insisted the explosive allegation was “just silly”, given how tough he said Trump has been on China over its unfair trade practices.
Bolton claims Trump’s request was evidence of impeachable conduct well beyond the approaches to Ukraine, for political dirt on Joe Biden, which eventually landed the president in court in the Senate.
Also on CNN, House judiciary chair Jerrold Nadler, who steered the impeachment inquiry, was asked to respond to Bolton’s charge that Democrats failed to build a case sufficient to remove Trump because they kept their focus on Ukraine.
“The fact is,” Nadler said, “the president could’ve been impeached on other grounds too, such as obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation. We chose to try to keep it simple.”
Bolton refused to testify in the House, then said he would in the Senate. Republicans controlling that chamber refused to call witnesses before acquitting the president.
Bolton, Nadler said, “is certainly no one to talk. He refused to testify before the House. And the Senate, of course, was never going to call him, because the Senate Republicans were not interested in any evidence. As I said, they were corrupt in that respect.”
While cases of Covid-19 in badly affected states such as New York and New Jersey are dropping, positive tests in the South are rising. The Associated Press has looked at the subject:
Will Boyd was at the funeral Saturday morning for a relative who had died after contracting the new coronavirus when he got the call with the news. His brother had also passed away from Covid-19.
“The virus is real. It’s real. If they don’t know it’s real, they can come and walk with me to the cemetery,” Boyd said of the skeptics.
Alabama and much of the deep south are seeing a spike in coronavirus cases as some have stopped heeding warnings of the virus, alarming public health officials and people who have lost loved ones because of Covid-19-19. Over the past two weeks, Alabama had the second highest number of new cases per capita in the nation. South Carolina was fourth. Louisiana and Mississippi were also in the top 10.
“We are extremely concerned about these numbers. We know if they continue, we will see more hospitalizations and more deaths,” Alabama State Health Officer Scott Harris said.
As of Saturday, Alabama had more than 29,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19, with more than a quarter of the cases reported in the last two weeks.
The combination of preexisting health conditions and limited health care access in the region, along with pockets of public skepticism about health officials’ advice on the illness, complicate attempts to manage the virus.
Dr Selwyn Vickers, dean of the UAB School of Medicine, said the South has high rates of diabetes, kidney disease, heart disease and high blood pressure all illnesses that put people at risk for poorer outcomes with Covid-19.
But Vickers said human behavior is the most difficult aspect of fighting the disease
“When you open the doors and you look at the beaches, you look at the restaurants and you look at cities that choose not to do masks, or individuals who don’t, … I would say our behaviors create the biggest challenge for us,” Vickers said.
Vickers said people who won’t wear a mask for their own protection should “think about worrying about infecting someone else.”
Republican senator Tim Scott is on ABC’s This Week. He is first asked about the resignation of Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney for the southern district of New York who has overseen investigations and prosecutions of key Trump allies. Berman resigned after the US attorney general said he would be fired by the president. Scott is asked if he has any concerns about the removal of “somebody who was overseeing an investigation into the president’s personal lawyer”.
Scott denies there is anything nefarious about Berman’s departure. “I think President Trump actually hired Mr Berman and he fired Mr Berman,” says Scott. “Everyone at the DOJ works at the pleasure of the president, number one. Number two, there’s no indication whatever that whatever is being investigated will not continue to move on.”
Scott, the only black Republican senator, is also asked about a bill he is seeking to pass that deals with police brutality. Some have said the bill skirts close to calling for police to be defunded if they continue to kill black people. Scott says he wants more resources available for training police but does not disagree missteps could lead to a withdrawal of funding.
“As an example, we all want to ban chokeholds,” says Scott. “We know the state that – the House knows and the Senate knows that you can’t ban local use of chokeholds or state use of chokeholds except for the compelled behavior by the federal grants that come into play. And by removing those federal grants, you actually position those departments to change their behavior, change their policy in the direction of satisfying what we all know and frankly in South Carolina, very few if any departments still have a chokehold because that we already know is an unnecessary tactic except for saving the life of the officer.
“And so, we do use the resources in an effective way. But we believe that you actually need more resources, not less resources, if you want officers to be trained effectively, you have to give them the tools called training to get there. That requires more resources.”
Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa last night was far from the full house he had predicted, but the fact that thousands of people – many without masks – gathered together at an indoor event has prompted concern among health professionals about the spread of Covid-19.
Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and associate professor of emergency medicine at Brown University, told CNN that attendees could spread the virus back to their home states.
“If there were even a couple of cases in the arena last night, we’re most likely going to see a spread among folks that attended. And then they’re going to go back to their states and it’s going to spread further,” Ranney said.
Donald Trump attacked calls to defund the police in the United States at his rally on Saturday night. Our columnist Robert Reich, a former secretary of labor, explains why he thinks such calls should be heeded.
Social-control societies put substantial resources into police, prisons, surveillance, immigration enforcement and the military. Their purpose is to utilize fear, punishment and violence, to maintain what they consider order.
Social-investment societies put more resources into healthcare, education, affordable housing, jobless benefits and children. Their purpose is to free people from the risks and anxieties of daily life and give everyone a fair shot at making it.
Trump is really the culmination of 40 years of increasing social control in the US and decreasing social investment.
You can read the full column below:
The acting homeland security secretary, Chad Wolf, has appeared on CBS’s Face The Nation. He is asked about Donald Trump’s comment that John Bolton “will have bombs dropped on him” after the publication of his explosive book on the president’s administration. He is asked if such threats are worrying.
“I think what you see here is some frustration on an individual writing a book for profit. And so I think that’s – that’s what I take from those comments,” says Wolf. He adds that the comments came from “a joking standpoint”.
Wolf is then asked about Trump’s comments that he had asked for Covid-19 testing to be slowed down.
“What you heard from the president was frustration, frustration in the sense of that we are testing, I believe we’ve tested over 25 million Americans,” he says. “We’ve tested more than any other country in this world. Instead, the press and others, all they want to focus on is an increasing case count … So I think what you heard there from the president was frustration.”
Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, is on CNN. He is asked about comments from Trump last night in which the president told a rally in Tulsa that: “I said to my people slow down the [Covid-19] testing”. Navarro replies: “It was tongue-in-cheek, please … it was a light moment”.
Navarro then makes the extraordinary, unfounded claim that Covid-19 “was a product of the Chinese Communist party and until we get some information about what happened in those labs or what happened in that wet market we know that virus was spawned in China.”
Navarro adds it is “an open question” whether China created Covid-19 on purpose. “What I said was the virus came out of China, the Chinese Communist party is responsible for it and as far as I’m concerned,” Navarro says, before adding China is “guilty until proven innocent.” Navarro does not offer any evidence for his claims.
The Democratic house judiciary committee chairman Jerry Nadler is on CNN’s State of the Union. He says calls to impeach William Barr after he announced the firing of the US attorney behind inquiries into Trump allies are pointless as Republicans in Senate are “corrupt against interests of country”. He personally thinks Barr “deserves” impeachment but says it’s a waste of time because the Republican senators wouldn’t pursue it.
“They are a waste of time at this point, because we do know that we have a corrupt Republican majority in the Senate which will not consider an impeachment, no matter what the evidence and no matter what the facts,” says Nadler. “So, we’re going to – we’re instead going to do what we have to do without that, and including barring $50m from his own personal budget.”
Nadler is then asked about former national security adviser John Bolton’s new book. In the new release, Bolton accuses Democrats of committing impeachment malpractice by failing to to include other high crimes involving the president and his relationship with China and Turkey
“The fact is that Trump could have been impeached under other grounds, such as obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation,” says Nadler. “We chose to keep it simple. Bolton is not one to talk … he refused to testify before the House.”
Nadler is then asked if he is planning on calling Bolton to testify about new information in his book. “No, we’re not interested in Bolton’s testimony,” says Nadler.
Did K-pop stump Trump?
Following Saturday’s abysmal turn out for his campaign rally in Tulsa, Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale went on a Twitter rant attempting to blame Black Lives Matter for the low crowds.
Brad Parscale (@parscale)
The outdoor stage for @realDonaldTrump’s Rally in Tulsa being built.
This will be the 1st time that POTUS speaks to BOTH crowds in person – inside & outside.
If you come to the rally and don’t get into the BOK Center before it’s full, you can still see the President in person! pic.twitter.com/7hoLFgzvLA
But as others pointed out, the president’s dismal showing Saturday may have, in fact, been part of a coordinated effort by young TikTok users to disrupt the rally by purchasing online tickets.
“He was played by young people and K-pop fans who ordered tickets with no intention of going,” MSNBC’s Joy Reid quipped on-air following Trump’s speech.
Acyn Torabi (@Acyn)
Joy: Everyone is shocked.. This was an easy setup for Brad Parscale… They completely messed it up. Brad Parscale is now furiously trying to tweet excuses… There’s a lot of twitter traffic that says he was played by young people and K-pop fans who ordered tickets… pic.twitter.com/nFeA93LTX9
The Trump campaign bragged that more than 1m tickets were requested online, but on the social platform, young people often shared screenshots of themselves using Tulsa-area zip codes to reserve seats, with no intention of ever showing up.
Fans of the popular music genre Korean pop, known as K-pop for short, appeared to also get in on the action. The well-known social media faction has often used Twitter to thwart conservative campaigning by far-right accounts. In recent weeks, hashtags supporting Blue Lives Matter were co-opted by K-pop fans tweeting memes of famous blue characters like the Smurfs and Captain Planet.
New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took a shot at Parscale’s explanation, and thanked Korean fans for their diligent trolling. “Actually you just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign w/ fake ticket reservations & tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic enough to pack an arena during COVID,” she wrote.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC)
KPop allies, we see and appreciate your contributions in the fight for justice too 😌
Lloyd Green has been a busy boy, both reviewing John Bolton’s book, here, and writing for us on Donald Trump and William Barr’s removal of US attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman. In short, their Friday night move against the head of the influential SDNY – which has prosecuted Trump allies including Michael Cohen and is investigating Rudy Giuliani – did not proceed smoothly at all:
Instead of replacing Berman in the near term with a Trump loyalist, the US attorney for New Jersey, and in the long haul with Jay Clayton, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Audrey Strauss, a career prosecutor, will lead the “sovereign” district until a Trump nominee clears the Senate.
For Trump and his attorney general, replacing Berman with Strauss is like jumping from frying pan to fire. If the dynamic duo had a difficult time taming Berman, a Trump contributor and a former partner of Rudy Giuliani, reining in Strauss will prove even tougher.
It’s been widely reported, too, that Strauss has often made donations to Democrats. Trump is going to love that. Here’s Lloyd’s column in full:
In Golden Gate park in San Francisco on Friday night, protesters pulled down statues of Ulysses S Grant, Junipero Serra and Francis Scott Key.
Grant may have defeated the slave-owning Confederacy in the civil war and, as the 18th president, taken on and smashed the Ku Klux Klan. But he married into a slave-owning family in Missouri and at one point before the war owned – and freed – a slave. Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner but he also owned slaves.
Many came to Grant’s defence. In San Francisco, Archbishop Salvadore Cordileone came to Serra’s, asking: “What is happening to our society? A renewed national movement to heal memories and correct the injustices of racism and police brutality in our country has been hijacked by some into a movement of violence, looting and vandalism.”
As the AP puts it, “Serra was an 18th-century Roman Catholic priest who founded nine of California’s 21 Spanish missions and is credited with bringing Roman Catholicism to the Western US.
“Serra forced Native Americans to stay at those missions after they were converted or face brutal punishment. His statues have been defaced in California for several years by people who said he destroyed tribes and their culture.”
In Tulsa, meanwhile, Trump framed the pulling down of statues to figures from the racist and oppressive past, which continues around the country, in terms of mob rule.
“The choice in 2020 is very simple,” Trump said. “Do you want to bow before the left-wing mob or do you want to stand up tall and proud as Americans?’
“Biden remains silent in his basement in the face of this brutal assault on our nation and the values of our nation. Joe Biden has surrendered to his party and to the leftwing mob.”
…and welcome to another day of coverage of US politics, protests, the coronavirus outbreak and anything in between.
So Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa was … not the huge event its host promised. The campaign got punked by a Pete Buttigieg organiser and a bunch of kids on TikTok (me neither but that’s what it says here), lots of people obtaining tickets but not showing up.
The president promised a million or more fans would attend. An outside stage was built for overflow from the BOK Center. It wasn’t needed. Nor did many protesters turn up, as the president and his supporters (some of whom spoke to Oliver Laughland) seemed to hope they would.
Onstage, the president proved he could drink a glass of water with one hand and re-enacted his walk down a West Point ramp – at length. David Smith’s report is here, and Richard Wolffe’s op-ed-evisceration is here:
Of course, there were things in Trump’s speech to take seriously: he spoke in racist terms about the coronavirus and said testing for Covid-19 was a “double-edged sword”, because it led to the identification of more cases. No, really.
The US had now tested 25m people, far more than other countries, Trump said, adding: “When you do testing to that extent, you’re gonna find more people, you’re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down.” No, really.
Trump calls coronavirus ‘kung flu’ and says he slowed testing – video
The US has recorded 2.25m cases of Covid-19 and nearly 120,000 deaths. In many Republican-led states which are trying to reopen, Oklahoma among them, cases are spiking. Six Trump staffers who set up the rally tested positive. No, really.
There is of course much more going on around the US. In New York, the US attorney for the southern district, Geoffrey Berman, agreed to step down after a near-24 hour standoff with Attorney General William Barr. Only Trump has the authority to fire Berman, but he said he didn’t. Then he said he did, sort of. The SDNY has investigated and prosecuted, and continues to investigate and prosecute, close Trump allies.
There is also John Bolton’s book, of course. On Saturday, a judge declined to block it, but also slammed the former national security adviser for his attitude to national security. Trump tried to claim a win, and hinted strongly that the government would go after Bolton’s earnings from his book. The Room Where Is Happened is out Tuesday, anyway, the Guardian review is in. Lloyd Green calls it “the best opposition reach dump ever”.
All this and continuing protests around the US, against police brutality and racism in the wake of the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and other African Americans. More to come.
