After the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago and carted away troves of documents containing government secrets, Donald Trump argued that he had declassified everything found during his time as president.
He doubled down on that argument last night in an interview with Fox News’s conservative commentator Sean Hannity, saying that when he was in the White House, he had the power to declassify something just “by thinking about it.”
The three-judge panel that yesterday overturned a lower court judge’s block and allowed the justice department to continue reviewing the Mar-a-Lago documents didn’t have much time for the president’s argument.
“Plaintiff has not even attempted to show that he has a need to know the information contained in the classified documents. Nor has he established that the current administration has waived that requirement for these documents. And even if he had, that, in and of itself, would not explain why Plaintiff has an individual interest in the classified documents,” the judges wrote.
It gets worse for Trump from there: “Plaintiff suggests that he may have declassified these documents when he was President. But the record contains no evidence that any of these records were declassified,” they wrote. “In any event, at least for these purposes, the declassification argument is a red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal. So even if we assumed that Plaintiff did declassify some or all of the documents, that would not explain why he has a personal interest in them.”
While the justice department’s investigation will continue thanks to this ruling, don’t expect the legal jousting over this case to be over.
Key events
A Republican senator wants to seize on Joe Biden’s recent statement that the “pandemic is over” to pass a resolution ending the national emergency declared to combat Covid-19, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The resolution to be proposed by Roger Marshall of Kansas would end the state of emergency that the administration has used to justify suspending student loans repayments and some procedures at international borders, among other uses.
A previous attempt to end the declaration passed the Senate in March but went nowhere in the House. Both chambers are narrowly led by Democrats, but the White House promised then to veto the measure, if it made it to Biden’s desk.
Back to the polls, Monmouth University has a new one on Georgia’s governorship race that shows Democratic challenger Stacy Abrams with a narrower path to victory but more dedicated support base than the Republican incumbent Brian Kemp as she again challenges him for the job.
The race is among the more high-profile gubernatorial contests to be decided in the 8 November midterms, and could make Abrams Georgia’s first Black and first female governor if elected. Kemp, meanwhile, is known for resisting Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of Joe Biden’s election win there in 2020, though has backed a strict voting law.
According to Monmouth, 34% will definitely and 15% will probably back Kemp, against Abrams’ slightly worse 33% definite support and 12% probable support. Kemp is also viewed more favorably at 54%, versus Abrams’s 48% favorability.
However, Democrats are more fired up for Abrams than Republicans are for Kemp. Monmouth finds that 83% of Democrats will definitely vote for Abrams versus 73% of GOP voters for Kemp – perhaps a consequence of his clashes with Trump.
“Some election conspiracists may still hold a grudge against Kemp for not stepping in to overturn the 2020 result, but it’s unlikely to cost him much support. They may not be enthusiastic, but they’ll still vote for him over Abrams,” Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, said.
The judge who had initially blocked the justice department from reviewing the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago and ordered a special master to weed out privileged materials has revised her ruling, Politico reports.
Federal judge Aileen Cannon’s changes come after an appeals court overturned the part of her opinion that had halted the government’s review of the documents taken from Donald Trump’s resort, hampering the investigation into whether the former president took government secrets with him when he left the White House.
Here’s more from Politico:
On the topic of January 6, the committee investigating the attack has reached an agreement to hear the testimony of Virginia Thomas, the wife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas and a supporter of efforts to keep Joe Biden from taking office despite his election win:
Conservative activist Virginia Thomas, the wife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, has agreed to participate in a voluntary interview with the House panel investigating the January 6 insurrection, her lawyer said Wednesday.
Attorney Mark Paoletta said Thomas is “eager to answer the committee’s questions to clear up any misconceptions about her work relating to the 2020 election”.
The committee has sought an interview with Thomas in an effort to know more about her role in trying to help former president Donald Trump overturn his election defeat. She texted with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and contacted lawmakers in Arizona and Wisconsin in the weeks after the election and before the insurrection.
Bill to thwart another January 6 appears to have support to pass Senate
A Republican senator announced today he would support an effort to change the United States’ electoral law and prevent the sort legal plot attempted on January 6 to stop Joe Biden from taking office, potentially giving the measure enough votes to pass the Senate.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey will vote for the chamber’s version of the legislation amending the 1887 Electoral Count Act, which allies of Donald Trump tried to use loopholes in to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s election win when it convened on 6 January, 2021.
“The poor drafting of the 1887 Electoral Count Act endangered the transition of power from one administration to the next. Unfortunately, in the over 100 intervening years, individual Democratic and Republican members of Congress have occasionally attempted to exploit the ambiguities in this law to cast doubt on the validity of our elections, culminating in the debacle of January 6, 2021,” Toomey said in a statement to the Inquirer.
“It is past time Congress act.”
With the support of Toomey, who will retire from his post at the end of the year, the Inquirer reports that the bill appears to have enough support to pass the Senate and avoid a filibuster. Yesterday, the House passed its own version of the legislation.
Pennsylvania was one of the states where Trump’s allies attempted to orchestrate the overturning of its election results in favor of Biden. In August, Scott Perry, a congressman representing the state who had asked Trump for a preemptive pardon after January 6, had his cellphone seized by the FBI.
Elsewhere in Congress, Republican senator Ted Cruz voted against a spending bill that paid for a new highway, but took credit for it anyway, as Martin Pengelly reports:
The Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz called a new highway project “a great bipartisan victory” that will bring “jobs to Texas and millions of dollars to the state”.
The White House responded: “Senator Cruz voted against this.”
A spokesperson for Cruz said the senator “made it possible” – but did not contest that Cruz voted against the $1.5tn spending package which contained the highway project.
With Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat, Cruz co-sponsored an amendment adding the Ports to Plains highway project to the spending bill earlier this year.
Two new gauges of the national mood ahead of the 8 November midterm elections were released this morning. Let’s take a look at them.
First, there’s NBC News, which crunched the numbers on voter enthusiasm from both this year and midterm and presidential elections past to conclude that Americans are particularly fired up to go to the polls. The network found in their most recent survey that 64% were respondents expressed high enthusiasm for the elections. That’s up from the 58% two months before the 2018 midterms, when Democrats routed Republicans and took the House, or the 53% in 2010, when the GOP did the same to Democrats. Given those numbers, NBC predicts record turnout for this year’s vote.
Meanwhile, CNN has done a poll of polls – an aggregation of the four most recent national polls – to find that Democrats have a three-point edge in the generic congressional ballot: