Psaki dismisses criticism of Biden’s voting rights remarks, calls it ‘hilarious’
The White House is planning a Wednesday press conference for Joe Biden to promote his administration’s efforts to combat the Omicron surge and the greater availability of home testing kits.
The president will also announce a plan to distribute hundreds of millions of N95 masks for free to Americans, according to Politico.
The masks will reportedly come from the federal government’s stockpile of 737 million N95 masks in the Strategic National Stockpile, which have been sourced from 12 domestic manufacturers.
Last week Mr Biden acknowledged that for some Americans getting hold of high-quality masks was “not always affordable or convenient.”
“I know we all wish that we could finally be done with wearing masks,” he said during a speech announcing military support for hospitals as the latest Covid-19 wave continues to sweep the country.
“I get it. But they’re a really important tool to stop the spread, especially of a highly transmittable Omicron variant.”
tout the administration’s efforts to tamp down the Omicron surge and make Covid-19 tests and masks more widely available.
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What time is President Joe Biden’s press conference?
Scheduled for 4pm ET on Wednesday, this is Mr Biden’s first press conference of 2022 and will occur on the eve of the anniversary of his inauguration.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki made the announcement on Friday, saying: “The president looks forward to speaking directly to the American people.”
Graeme Massie19 January 2022 03:01
Trump-DeSantis feud continues as Florida governor scorches ex-president on Covid
Florida Gov Ron DeSantis returned fire in his ongoing feud with ex-President Donald Trump in a podcast interview recorded last week and released over the weekend.
Speaking with the Ruthless podcast, Mr DeSantis hit Mr Trump on the issue of Covid-19 lockdowns in response to Mr Trump’s criticism of politicians who refuse to support vaccinations and do not share their own vaccine status.
“I was probably the first governor in January of 2020 to call for travel restrictions from China. I supported President Trump when he did that,” Mr DeSantis said. “But we have to take a step back and acknowledge that those travel restrictions just didn’t work.”
Mr Trump touted that travel restriction as recently as Saturday during a rally with supporters in Arizona, where he did not mention the Florida governor.
The two men are considered to be among the most likely contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
John Bowden19 January 2022 02:00
Candidate running for governor in New York begs for leniency for rioter
A New York state sheriff who is running for the Republican Party’s nomination in the state’s 2022 gubernatorial race is asking for leniency from a judge set to sentence his friend for his role in the attack on the US Capitol.
According to prosecutors, William Tryon was told explicitly by officers as the attack unfolded that entry into the Capitol was not allowed, only to enter the building when law enforcement was overwhelmed.
Sheriff Michael Carpinelli wrote to a judge before 71-year-old Mr Tryon was sentenced last week to 50 days in jail, asking for leniency for his “good friend”, who he said had good intentions clouded by poor judgement. The letter came in on official letterhead from the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office according to CBS News.
John Bowden19 January 2022 01:30
Wife of Supreme Court justice claims rioters did ‘nothing wrong’ on January 6
Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote in a shocking letter signed last month that those jailed for storming the Capitol in a riot where Trump supporters were heard threatening the lives of members of Congress did “nothing wrong”, and were being persecuted.
The bizarre claim came in the form of a group letter to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy urging him to remove two Republicans serving on the January 6 investigative committee to be removed from the GOP conference.
“The actions of Reps [Liz] Cheney and [Adam] Kinzinger on behalf of House Democrats have given supposedly bipartisan justification to an overtly partisan political persecution that brings disrespect to our country’s rule of law, legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong, and which demeans the standing of the House,” wrote the letter signed by Ms Thomas.
A conservative activist, Ms Thomas has long been a controversial figure and supported “Stop the Steal” efforts before the riot at the US Capitol that lead to the deaths of several police and rioters.
John Bowden19 January 2022 01:00
Poll shows more than 2 in 3 Republicans want Trump to run in 2024
As the nation passes the one-year anniversary of the attack on the US Capitol, Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP remains strong.
In a Quinnipiac poll published last week, the former president saw support from 69 percent of Republican voters who said they would like to see him run again.
But among Americans overall, his numbers remain much less favourable: Just 33 per cent of the whole population wanted to see the former president launch a third bid for the White House.
John Bowden19 January 2022 00:30
WaPo’s Carl Bernstein rips ‘seditious’ Trump and GOP that supports him
Legendary Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein, one half of the pair of reporters who broke Watergate and took down former President Richard Nixon, unloaded on former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in an interview about his new autobiography.
Speaking about Mr Trump and the Republican Party, he said: “[W]hat you have [today] is a Republican Party that has now thrown itself wholly into the agenda of an authoritarian criminal president of the United States, a seditious president of the United States, such as we’ve never had in our history.”
His reporting partner Bob Woodward famously broke numerous stories about the Trump administration in a series of books about the former president’s White House term, including Mr Trump’s private admission that Covid-19 was much more serious than he was letting on to his fans.
John Bowden19 January 2022 00:00
Jan 6 defendant accepts plea deal with federal prosecutors
Matthew Miller, one of hundreds accused of entering the Capitol grounds illegally during January 6, has accepted a plea deal offered by the US government.
HuffPost first reported the deal on Sunday. Mr Miller originally rejected a plea deal in November after being hit with multiple charges related to the riot in the days immediately following the attack. He is accused of using a police barricade to scale a wall outside of the building, and also was accused of using a fire extinguisher spray against police.
Mr Miller’s attorney said last year that his client “got caught up in the moment and acted against his better instincts,” but did not enter the building itself. His plea agreement hearing is set for early next month.
John Bowden18 January 2022 23:30
Member of new anti-Trump effort disses Lincoln Project
An unnamed individual who was part of a new group of former Trump administration officials who met last week to consider strategies for combatting Donald Trump’s efforts to install loyalists in state governments around the country told CNN that the call’s participants expressed a desire to not end up as a reboot of the Lincoln Project, a conservative anti-Trump group celebrated by some liberals by pilloried widely for a series of controversies.
“[T]his cannot just be a professional trolling operation, putting out ads like the Lincoln group,” said the unnamed former Trump official.
John Bowden18 January 2022 23:00
Jan 6 panel subpoenas members of Trump legal team
The January 6 committee moved on Tuesday afternoon to issue another round of subpoenas as part of its investigation into the Capitol riot and attempts by Donald Trump’s team to overturn the 2020 election.
To that end, the panel targeted much of Mr Trump’s former legal team, including Rudy Giuliani, Boris Ephsteyn, and Jenna Ellis. The subpoenas also targeted Sidney Powell, who was cut from the president’s inner circle in late 2020 as she began to support increasingly wild conspiracies about the election.
She was famous for attempting to link supposed efforts to defeat Mr Trump at the ballot box during a press conference to Hugo Chavez, the former Venezuelan socialist leader who died in 2013.
John Bowden18 January 2022 22:28
Activists arrested in the Senate as voting rights fight escalates
Activists including a former CEO of the NAACP and two founding board members of the Women’s March were arrested at the US Senate on Tuesday as protests and backlash escalate in response to the growing unlikelihood that Democrats will pass voter rights legislation.
A press release indicated that the arrests included members of activist groups leading hunger strikes that began in the home state of Sen Kyrsten Sinema, one of two Democratic holdouts to changes to the filibuster that would allow the legislation to pass.
“We are coming together to honor the tradition of John Lewis and engage in good trouble to redeem the soul of this nation and protect our democracy,” said Rev Stephen Green, one of those arrested. “Now is the time for the Senate to go on record and vote to determine whether or not this country will choose fascism or choose democracy.”
Others arrested included two co-founders of Black Voters Matter, an advocacy group that focuses on voter registration efforts in Black communities.
John Bowden18 January 2022 22:00