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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Maanvi Singh (now), and Joan E Greve and Martin Belam (earlier)

Some voter data obtained by foreign powers, says FBI – as it happened

People line up at a polling station as early voting begins in Pinellas county ahead of the election in Largo, Florida, 21 October 2020.
People line up at a polling station as early voting begins in Pinellas county ahead of the election in Largo, Florida, 21 October 2020. Photograph: Octavio Jones/Reuters

Summary

  • The director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, said that Russia and Iran had obtained some voter registration information in a rare evening news conference. The briefing came after Democratic voters in at least four battleground states, including Florida and Pennsylvania, reported threatening emails, falsely claiming to be from the far-right group Proud Boys, that warned “we will come after you” if the recipients didn’t vote for Trump.
  • Ratcliffe said Iran is also distributing video content “to imply that individuals could cast fraudulent ballots, including from overseas”. He warned Americans not to believe the disinformation. “These actions are desperate attempts by desperate adversaries,” he said.
  • Republicans won key victories in their ongoing crusade to restrict voting access. In a Wednesday night decision, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama officials to ban curbside voting. The Iowa Supreme Court also upheld a Republican-backed law that could prevent election officials from sending thousands of mail-in ballots, by making it more difficult for auditors to correct voter applications with omitted information.
  • Donald Trump’s deputy communications director Julia Hahn had connections to white nationalism when she joined the White House as an aide, a new report shows. Leaked emails published Wednesday in a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center show Hahn, who previously worked at right wing propaganda site Breitbart News, was close with Peter Brimelow, founder of the white nationalist hate group VDARE.
  • Barack Obama campaigned for Joe Biden in Philadelphia, as polls show Biden pulling ahead in the key swing state of Pennsylvania. The former president delivered a blistering rebuke of Donald Trump at a drive-in, Covid-safe rally.
  • Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee plan to boycott tomorrow’s vote on Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the supreme court. The Democrats’ boycott will likely please their base, but it will not stop Barrett from being confirmed by the Republican-controlled panel. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell currently plans to hold a chamber-wide confirmation vote on Monday.
  • The justice department has reached an $8 billion settlement with Purdue Pharma, the maker of the drug OxyContin, which has been partly blamed for the opioid epidemic. Despite the massive financial penalty, some lawmakers criticized the agreement, saying the federal government failed to hold company executives accountable.
  • Pope Francis endorsed same-sex civil unions, a move that is likely to attract criticism from the pope’s conservative opponents. In an interview for a new documentary, Francis said, “Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God. What we have to have is a civil union law; that way they are legally covered.”
  • Rudy Giuliani will make an embarrassing appearance in the new “Borat” film. In Sacha Baron Cohen’s movie, the president’s personal lawyer is captured reaching into his pants and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of an actor posing as a TV journalist.

– Guardian staff

Donald Trump’s deputy communications director Julia Hahn had connections to white nationalism when she joined the White House as an aide, a new report shows.

The Guardian’s Kari Paul reports:

Leaked emails published Wednesday in a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center show Hahn, who previously worked at right wing propaganda site Breitbart News, was close with Peter Brimelow, founder of the white nationalist hate group VDARE.

The group promotes the idea of “white genocide”, the conspiracy theory that suggests white people are systematically being replaced by non-white people. VDARE has also published commentary from a chief organizer of white supremacist ‘Unite the Right’ rally, an event in Charlottesville, Virginia that led to the murder of one counter-protestor.

Emails from Hahn revealed additional connections to white supremacist groups and individuals. The communications were leaked by her former colleague Breitbart News editor Katie McHugh. The trove included text messages, Google Chat transcripts, and more than 600 emails taken from Hahn’s private and Breitbart News work emails.

McHugh once espoused right wing views including anti-immigration hate and rubbed shoulders with open white nationalists, but has since renounced far-right extremism and racism.

The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment, but in a statement criticized McHugh and declined to deny the accusations of racism and extremism:

Julia Hahn rejects and condemns racism and hatred in all forms, and, as a Jewish American, finds bigotry of any kind to be truly abhorrent. Every story Julia wrote as a reporter at Breitbart is publicly available and has been since the day she left the publication nearly four years ago. These cherry-picked emails were leaked by a troubled individual who was terminated from Breitbart in disgrace, and SPLC has stooped to a new low by giving her a platform.

Hahn is 29 years old and joined the White House in March, replacing deputy communications director Adam Kennedy.

The Iowa Supreme Court delivered another win for Republicans seeking to restrict voting.

The court upheld a Republican-backed law that could prevent election officials from sending thousands of mail-in ballots to voters who had information omitted from their absentee ballot applications. The law, passed after a record number of voters turned out during the primaries, casting mail-in ballots as the pandemic surged.

Auditors will not be allowed to fix minor errors in the applications for absentee ballots using Iowa’s voter registration system, as they have done in past elections. Instead, the auditors will have to call or email voters one at a time to obtain any missing information – which will be tedious and time-consuming.

Voters applying for absentee ballots in Iowa have to provide their driver’s license number or a voter pin number.

A voting rights group says Trump supporters in New Mexico tried ot intimidate voters at polling places in Albequerque. The intimidation took place in neighborhoods where most residents are people of color.

The AP reports:

Common Cause New Mexico Executive Director Heather Ferguson said Wednesday that the incidents took place early Saturday afternoon on the first day of balloting at voter convenience centers in the South Valley and western reaches of Albuquerque on Central Avenue — areas that are heavily Latino.

She estimated that dozens of potential voters in each location left without voting immediately as a result of the incidents. But she added that a poll judge intervened at the Central Avenue voting center to help ensure access and keep electioneering at a distance.

“I think we got to see that the process is working,” Ferguson said.

The Bernalillo County district attorney’s office is investigating the incidents, agency spokeswoman Brandale Mills-Cox said. She declined further comment.

State Republican Party spokesman Mike Curtis said he has no direct knowledge of the matter. Representatives for the Trump reelection campaign had no immediate comment when contacted.

Supreme Court allows Alabama to ban curbside voting

Meanwhile, in the courts, Republicans have scored another victory in their ongoing crusade to restrict voting rights.

The Supreme Court allowed Alabama officials to ban curbside voting, ruling against the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union and other challengers of the ban said that curbside voting would help the state slow the spread of Covid-19 while allowing those most vulnerable to the disease to vote safely.

The state attorney general argued that curbside voting “comes with a host of logistical, safety and ballot secrecy concerns” even though the system has been used before to assist voters with disabilities.

Alabama Republicans also earlier won a legal challenge to their requirement that voters using absentee ballots attach affidavits signed by two witnesses or a notary, and copy of their photo ID.

The decision came down 5-3, with three liberal justices noting their dissent. In a dissenting statement, justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “The Alabama secretary of state... has prohibited counties from offering curbside voting, even for voters with disabilities for whom COVID– 19 is disproportionately likely to be fatal. If those vulnerable voters wish to vote in person, they must wait inside, for as long as it takes, in a crowd of fellow voters whom Alabama does not require to wear face coverings.”

Note: A previous version incorrectly said the requirement to apply included affidavits signed by two witnesses and a notary.

Updated

Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee took issue with John Ratcliffe’s emphasis that Iran was sowing disinformation to harm Trump, characterizing him as a “partisan hack”.

Ratcliffe is a former Republican congressman – and Democrats have been critical of his choice to selectively declassify documents to help Trump.

Ratcliffe recently declassified a letter outlining the claims about Trump’s 2016 political rival Hillary Clinton that Russian intelligence services.

Before the FBI news conference began, the top members of the senate intelligence committee released a statement warning, “As we enter the last weeks before the election, we urge every American – including members of the media – to be cautious about believing or spreading unverified, sensational claims related to votes and voting.”

The statement came from Marco Rubio, a Republican of Florida, and Mark Waner, a Democrat of Virginia.

“State and local election officials are in regular contact with federal law enforcement and cybersecurity professionals, and they are all working around the clock to ensure that Election 2020 is safe, secure, and free from outside interference,” the said.

“We have already seen Iran sending spoofed emails, designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest and damage President Trump,” John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, said during the press conference. “You may have seen reporting on this in the last 24 hours.”

Earlier Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that officials in Florida and Alaska were investigating emails sent to Democratic voters in several states that appeared to be from the Proud Boys – the far-right group that Donald Trump told to “stand back and stand by” during the first presidential debate – threatening them to vote for Trump or “we will come after you”.

Ratcliffe said Iran is also distributing video content “to imply that individuals could cast fraudulent ballots, including from overseas” – and warned Americans not to believe the disinformation. “These actions are desperate attempts by desperate adversaries,” he said.

Updated

Trump and his advisers have reportedly considered whether to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray, the Washington Post reports:

The conversations among the president and senior aides stem in part from their disappointment that Wray in particular but [attorney general William Barr] as well have not done what Trump had hoped — indicate that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, or other Biden associates are under investigation, these people say. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal discussions.

In the campaign’s closing weeks, the president has intensified public calls for jailing his challenger, much as he did for Hillary Clinton, his opponent in 2016. Trump has called Biden a “criminal” without articulating what laws he believes the former vice president has broken.

People familiar with the discussions say that Trump wants official action similar to the announcement made 11 days before the last presidential election by then-FBI Director James B. Comey, who informed Congress he had reopened an investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state after potential new evidence had been discovered.

The FBI director warned against buying into misinformation about election results. “You should be confident your vote counts. Early unverified claims to the contrary should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism,” said director Christopher Wray.

Donald Trump and many of his supporters have been among those spreading misinformation that votes aren’t going to be counted and alleging baselessly that ballots can easily be thrown out.

FBI says Russia, Iran have obtained some voter registration data

Russia and Iran have obtained some voter registration data, the FBI announced in a rare evening news briefing.

“We have already seen Iran sending spoofed emails, designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest and damage President Trump,” said John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence. “This data can be used by foreign actors to attempt to communicate false information to registered voters that they hope will cause confusion so chaos & undermine your confidence in American democracy.”

Updated

Florida’s top election official is facing accusations of voter suppression after two last-minute moves critics say will lead to intimidation and confusion.

Alarm bells went off last week after the office of Florida’s secretary of state, Laurel Lee, abruptly notified election officials the state was beginning to flag voters for potential removal from the voter rolls if they owed money related to a felony conviction. In a second letter, the state offered an extremely restrictive view on how localities needed to operate ballot drop boxes, which voters are increasingly turning to this year amid United States Postal Service delays.

Both notices threaten confusion and chaos in one of the most important swing states in the 2020 election. Mail-in voting started weeks ago and in-person early voting started on Monday. Polls show an extremely tight race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in Florida, a state where elections are routinely decided by just thousands of votes.

Lindsey Graham, the Senate judiciary committee chair, responded to Democrats’ decision to boycott Thursday’s vote on Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the supreme court.

“Judge Barrett deserves to be on the supreme court and she will be confirmed,” he wrote in a statement. “As to my Democratic colleagues’ refusal to attend the markup, that is a choice they are making. I believe it does a disservice to Judge Barrett who deserves a vote, up or down.”

Graham also – very hypocritically – accused Democrats of hypocrisy for changing Senate rules to block Republican filibusters of nominees to lower courts. Graham, who is currently fighting the toughest re-election race of his Senate career in South Carolina, famously said, as he opposed Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia: “I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.”

Barrett, who Trump nominated to her current position as a judge at the US court of appeals for the seventh circuit, was only able to do so because Republicans blocked Obama’s nominee to that seat, Myra Selby.

Selby, who would have been the second Black woman to serve on the seventh circuit, never received a hearing.

Updated

“Let’s go make it happen – I love you Philadelphia!” Obama said. And the car horns at the Covid-safe rally went wild.

The former president famous for bringing a message of hope, tried to bring some of that feeling back after a blistering speech highlighting the dangers of Donald Trump. “I am asking you to remember what this country can be,” Obama said.

Obama hit the campaign trail for Joe Biden today in a bid to drum up support for his former vice president.
Obama hit the campaign trail for Joe Biden today in a bid to drum up support for his former vice president. Photograph: Alex Edelman/AFP/Getty Images

Updated

A Fox News poll released today shows Biden leading by five points in Pennsylvania. But in 2016, polls found Hillary Clinton was leading in some cases by double digits – but Trump won. Pollsters have adjusted their methods since, but the Biden campaign has been cautious – this rally in Pennsylvania is one of the ways they’re hoping to make sure that 5% lead in polls translates to a win post election day.

Updated

Obama asks supporters to imagine Thanksgiving in a post-Trump America: “You’re not going to have to argue every day. It won’t be so exhausting,” he said.

Trump’s tweets, and his nods to QAnon, are not something we’d tolerated from family “except from a crazy uncle,” he said. “There are consequences to these actions. They embolden other people to be cruel and divisive and racist. And It frays the fabric of our society.”

The president’s actions “distract us” from what his administration is doing: dismantling environmental protections, gutting labor protections and eroding the public education system.

Updated

“We literally left this White House a pandemic playbook,” Obama said. “They probably used it to – I prop up a wobbly table somewhere.”

Indeed, the Obama administration created a 70-page document titled, “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.” Developed in 2016, the “playbook” noted that “novel coronaviruses” were among pathogens to watch for, and shared lessons learned during the Ebola and Zika outbreaks.

“Can you imagine if I had a secret Chinese bank account when I was running for re-election?” Obama said, bringing up New York Times reporting that Donald Trump has a bank account in China. “You think Fox News might have been a little concerned about that? They would have called me Beijing Barry.”

The Times reporting also found that Trump paid almost no federal income taxes the year he won the presidency.

Obama continued: “I think I might have paid more taxes” working at a Baskin Robbins when he was 15. “How is that possible?”

Updated

Obama makes his first rally appearance in Pennsylvania

“You guys delivered for me twice, and I am back here tonight to ask you to deliver the White House for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” Obama said.

Obama won Pennsylvania in 2008 and 2012, but Trump narrowly beat Hillary Clinton in the state four years ago.

There are just 13 days “till the most important election of our lifetimes”, Obama said, urging voters to cast their ballots. “What we do these next 13 days will matter for decades to come.”

Updated

Meanwhile, it seems Trump supporters in North Carolina were asked to avoid QAnon clothing.

The president refused to disavow QAnon during an NBC town hall last week. “I don’t know about QAnon,” he insisted.

“What I do hear about it, they are very strongly against pedophilia,” Trump said.

The president has previously described the rightwing conspiracy group as “people who love our country”. Supporters of the baseless, antisemitic theory believe that Trump is waging a secret war against a cabal of “deep state” characters, including Democrats and liberal celebrities, who are engaged in human trafficking.

Trump has retweeted a QAnon Twitter account that claimed, baselessly, that Joe Biden ordered a navy Seal team killed.

Updated

Joe Biden is leading by an average of five points in Pennsylvania – but Trump won the state by less than one point in 2016.

Here’s how the candidates are polling in swing states:


Updated

Obama stopped by a voter mobilization center in Philly to give volunteers a pep talk.

Barack Obama speaks to volunteers at a voter activation center (VAC) in Philadelphia.
Barack Obama speaks to volunteers at a voter activation center (VAC) in Philadelphia. Photograph: Alex Edelman/AFP/Getty Images

Through a bullhorn, Obama told volunteers: “We’re in the midst of a pandemic, and we’ve got to make sure that doing everything safely – which is the only reason I’m not hugging and squeezing this cutie pie,” he said, as a small child scooted toward him.

“For this community to see all of you making the effort, that’s the spirit that’s ultimately going to make a difference in this election in the next 12 days,” he said, thanking everyone for their work.

Updated

Today so far

That’s it from me today. My west coast colleague, Maanvi Singh, will take over the blog for the next few hours.

Here’s where the day stands so far:

  • Barack Obama campaigned for Joe Biden in Philadelphia, as polls show Biden pulling ahead in the key swing state of Pennsylvania. The former president is currently participating in a discussion with black male community leaders, and he will hold a drive-in rally later tonight.
  • Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee plan to boycott tomorrow’s vote on Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the supreme court. The Democrats’ boycott will likely please their base, but it will not stop Barrett from being confirmed by the Republican-controlled panel. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell currently plans to hold a chamber-wide confirmation vote on Monday.
  • The justice department has reached an $8 billion settlement with Purdue Pharma, the maker of the drug OxyContin, which has been partly blamed for the opioid epidemic. Despite the massive financial penalty, some lawmakers criticized the agreement, saying the federal government failed to hold company executives accountable.
  • Pope Francis endorsed same-sex civil unions, a move that is likely to attract criticism from the pope’s conservative opponents. In an interview for a new documentary, Francis said, “Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God. What we have to have is a civil union law; that way they are legally covered.”
  • Rudy Giuliani will make an embarrassing appearance in the new “Borat” film. In Sacha Baron Cohen’s movie, the president’s personal lawyer is captured reaching into his pants and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of an actor posing as a TV journalist.

Maanvi will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

Updated

At his Philadelphia campaign event, Barack Obama emphasized the need for young voters to make it to the polls to ensure a better future for the country.

“The answer for young people, when I talk to them, is not that voting makes everything perfect, it’s that it makes things better,” Obama said at the socially distanced event with local black male leaders in the city.

“I’ll confess, when I was 20 years old I wasn’t all that woke, because I had other stuff that I was interested in. We won’t go into details,” Obama joked.

The former president argued the best way to reach young black male voters was to “advertise it’s the cool thing and the right thing to vote.”

Speaking at a “Shop Talk” discussion with black male leaders in North Philadelphia, Barack Obama emphasized the need for African Americans to vote in this election.

“I’m very proud of my presidency, but I didn’t immediately solve systemic racism by virtue of me being president,” Obama said.

“We didn’t immediately lift everybody out of poverty or fix every school or address every issue and impediment that was going on in a community like this one.”

The former president argued young black voters had to make sure their voices were heard in this election to build upon the progress that has been made.

“Anybody who says things haven’t gotten better is somebody who didn’t live through the ‘50s or the ‘40s or the ‘30s,” Obama said.

The Philadelphia event marks Obama’s first in-person campaign event for his former running mate, Joe Biden.

Senate judiciary committee Democrats plan to boycott Barrett vote - report

Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee reportedly plan to boycott tomorrow’s vote on Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the supreme court.

HuffPost reports:

The plan hasn’t been finalized yet, according to a Democratic aide, but Democrats are preparing to fill their empty seats with poster-sized photos of people who would be hurt by Barrett potentially casting a deciding vote against the Affordable Care Act. These would be the same pictures of people Democrats had on display during Barrett’s confirmation hearing last week.

Democrats also intend to hold two press conferences to push back on Barrett’s confirmation ― one on the Capitol steps and one on the Supreme Court steps. It’s not clear if one of those would be happening at the same time as Barrett’s committee vote. ...

A boycott will delight progressives, who have been clamoring for a big fight by Democrats over Barrett’s confirmation. It won’t stop Republicans from advancing Barrett’s nomination, though.

Asked Wednesday what would happen if Democrats don’t show up to Barrett’s hearing, chairman Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) said, ‘We’ll vote the nominee out.’

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has said he plans to hold a chamber-wide vote on Barrett’s nomination on Monday.

Barack Obama is making his first campaign stop in Philadelphia, participating in a “Shop Talk” conversation with black male leaders in the city.

The conversation is hosted by congressman Dwight Evans and local elected officials and is being held in North Philadelphia, the Biden campaign said.

Obama arrives in Philadelphia to campaign for Biden

Barack Obama has arrived in Philadelphia, where the former president will hold a drive-in rally on behalf of Joe Biden later today.

Obama’s trip to Pennsylvania marks his first in-person campaign event this election cycle, although he has participated in virtual fundraisers for Biden in recent months.

More than 40 million ballots have already been cast in the 2020 election, according to the US Elections Project.

As of today, 41,524,072 Americans have already voted in the election. Of those 41,524,072 Americans, 29,676,104 have voted by mail and 11,891,168 have voted early in person.

For perspective, the number of ballots that have already been turned in represents 30% of the total number of votes cast in the 2016 election.

In Texas alone, 5,315,655 ballots have been returned, representing nearly 60% of the state’s total 2016 turnout.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expanding the definition of a “close contact” of someone with coronavirus.

The Washington Post reports:

The change by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is likely to have its biggest impact in schools, workplaces and other group settings where people are in contact with others for long periods of time. It also underscores the importance of mask-wearing to prevent spread of the virus.

The CDC had previously defined a ‘close contact’ as someone who spent at least 15 consecutive minutes within six feet of a confirmed coronavirus case. The updated guidance, which health departments rely on to conduct contact tracing, now defines a close contact as someone who was within six feet of an infected individual for a total of 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period, according to a CDC statement Wednesday.

It’s worth noting that Mike Pence, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris all recently chose not to quarantine after being around people who tested positive for coronavirus because they did not meet the qualifications for being a “close contact.”

Polls show Biden ahead in Pennsylvania and a tie in Texas

A new pair of polls from Quinnipiac University show Joe Biden pulling ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania while the two are tied in Texas.

According to the new Quinnipiac polls, Biden has built an 8-point advantage over the president among likely voters in Pennsylvania, which Trump won by less than 1 point in 2016.

Barack Obama is scheduled to campaign for Biden in Philadelphia later today, as the Democratic nominee tries to solidify his polling advantage.

Meanwhile, Biden and Trump are tied among likely voters in the traditionally Republican state of Texas, 47%-47&. Trump won the state by 9 points in 2016.

It’s worth noting that Quinnipiac has been producing very favorable polls for Democrats this election cycle, and the FiveThirtyEight polling averages of the two states paint a slightly different picture.

According to the FiveThirtyEight average of Pennsylvania polls, Biden has a 6.2-point lead in the state. The FiveThirtyEight average of Texas polls show Trump with a 1.1-point lead there.

Quinnipiac also polled the Texas Senate race and found Republican incumbent John Cornyn to have a 6-point lead over Democrat MJ Hegar among likely voters, 49%-43%.

Updated

Romney says he did not vote for Trump

Senator Mitt Romney said he did not vote for Trump, but the former Republican presidential nominee would not say whether he voted for Joe Biden.

Romney told a CNN reporter on Capitol Hill that he had already cast his ballot in the election and said, “I did not vote for President Trump.”

Romney has frequently criticized the president, and the Utah senator previously said he voted for his wife, Ann, for president in 2016, writing in her name on his ballot.

Trump has returned Romney’s criticism by personally attacking him, especially after Romney became the only Senate Republican to vote to convict the president in his impeachment trial earlier this year.

Trump is starting to release photos from his “60 Minutes” interview, which he reportedly cut short after correspondent Leslie Stahl started asking him questions about the coronavirus pandemic.

One of the photos showed press secretary Kayleigh McEnany presenting Stahl with a binder summarizing “some of the many things we’ve done for Healthcare,” as Trump said.

But a closer look at one of the photos of the binder appeared to show a blank piece of paper:

The president has threatened to preemptively share clips of the “60 Minutes” interview, which CBS plans to air on Sunday.

As expected, Mitch McConnell’s targeted coronavirus relief bill failed to advance in the Senate, as the White House continues negotiations with House speaker Nancy Pelosi over a broader relief package.

Fifty-one senators voted to advance McConnell’s bill, and 44 Democratic senators voted to block the legislation. McConnell needed 60 votes for the bill to advance.

McConnell used the result of the vote to accuse Democrats of failing Americans who are financially suffering because of the coronavirus pandemic:

According to reports, McConnell has urged the White House not to push for a vote on a coronavirus relief package before Election Day, out of fear that it could complicate the timing of Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the supreme court.

The Guardian’s Stephanie Kirchgaessner reports:

Ron Johnson, the senator from Wisconsin who has led the Republican campaign in the Senate of making unfounded claims about Joe Biden’s son Hunter, is facing a host of questions about his own ethics, including whether he personally benefited from a change in tax law that he sought in 2017.

A letter sent by Johnson to the Senate ethics committee in May has revealed the senator began the process of selling a company he partly owned in February 2018, just months after he insisted the Trump administration change a portion of the tax law in a way that ultimately benefited the sale.

The issue has become a focus of the Congressional Integrity Project, a Democratic watchdog group that is seeking to expose allegations of corruption within the Republican ranks.

At the center of claims made by the watchdog group are allegations that Johnson may have sought out a change in the Trump administration’s 2017 tax bill to enrich himself personally.

Another new Iowa poll shows close presidential and Senate races in the state, echoing results that Monmouth University released earlier today.

According to the New York Times/Siena College poll, Joe Biden has a 3-point advantage over Trump among likely Iowa voters, 46%-43%, which falls within the poll’s 4-point margin of error.

The Monmouth poll similarly found Biden to have a 3-point lead over Trump among likely Iowa voters if voter turnout is high, 50%-47%.

In the Iowa Senate race, the NYT/Siena poll shows Republican incumbent Joni Ernst 1 point ahead of Democrat Theresa Greenfield, 45%-44%, representing a virtual tie.

Monmouth also found the Senate race to be a virtual tie, although the university’s results found Greenfield to be slightly ahead of Ernst.

Reminder: we are just 13 days away from Election Day.

Trump promised to deliver jobs to Youngstown, Ohio, after winning the 2016 presidential election, in part thanks to white working-class voters in cities like Youngstown.

Four years later, some of the voters who supported Trump are turning away from him, accusing the president of breaking his promises to Americans like them.

The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone traveled to Youngstown to talk to voters about who they’re supporting this year:

Today so far

Here’s where the day stands so far:

  • The justice department has reached an $8 billion settlement with Purdue Pharma, the maker of the drug OxyContin, which has been partly blamed for the opioid epidemic. Despite the massive financial penalty, some lawmakers criticized the agreement, saying the federal government failed to hold company executives accountable.
  • Pope Francis endorsed same-sex civil unions, a move that is likely to attract criticism from the pope’s conservative opponents. In an interview for a new documentary, Francis said, “Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God. What we have to have is a civil union law; that way they are legally covered.”
  • Rudy Giuliani will make an embarrassing appearance in the new “Borat” film. In Sacha Baron Cohen’s movie, the president’s personal lawyer is captured reaching into his pants and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of an actor posing as a TV journalist.

The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

Giuliani makes embarrassing appearance in new 'Borat' film

The reputation of Rudy Giuliani could be set for a further blow with the release of highly embarrassing footage in Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up to Borat.

In the film, released on Friday, the former New York mayor and current personal attorney to Donald Trump is seen reaching into his trousers and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of the actor playing Borat’s daughter, who is posing as a TV journalist.

Following an obsequious interview for a fake conservative news programme, the pair retreat at her suggestion for a drink to the bedroom of a hotel suite, which is rigged with concealed cameras.

After she removes his microphone, Giuliani, 76, can be seen lying back on the bed, fiddling with his untucked shirt and reaching into his trousers. They are then interrupted by Borat who runs in and says: “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”

Representatives for Giuliani have not replied to the Guardian’s requests for comment.

Word of the incident first emerged on 7 July, when Giuliani called New York police to report the intrusion of an unusually-dressed man.

“This guy comes running in, wearing a crazy, what I would say was a pink transgender outfit,” Giuliani told the New York Post. “It was a pink bikini, with lace, underneath a translucent mesh top, it looked absurd. He had the beard, bare legs, and wasn’t what I would call distractingly attractive.

“This person comes in yelling and screaming, and I thought this must be a scam or a shakedown, so I reported it to the police. He then ran away,” Giuliani said. The police found no crime had been committed.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi said she is “pretty happy” with the state of negotiations over the coronavirus relief bill, noting she will speak again to treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin today at 2:30 pm ET.

“I’m pretty happy,” Pelosi told MSNBC. “I think we have a prospect for an agreement.”

The Democratic speaker voiced confidence that a final bill will come out of the negotiations, but questions remain about the timing of its potential passage.

“I‘m optimistic,” Pelosi said. “There will be a bill. The question is, is it in time to pay the November rent?”

Pelosi acknowledged reports that Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has urged the White House not to pursue a vote on the bill until after the election, but the speaker pledged to continue working on a deal, even if it meant passing the legislation after the election.

Pope Francis backs same-sex civil unions

In world news, Pope Francis has backed same-sex civil unions in a move that is likely to further enrage his conservative opponents in the Catholic church.

His endorsement came in an interview in a documentary film, Francesco, which premiered at the Rome film festival on Wednesday.

He said: “Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God. What we have to have is a civil union law; that way they are legally covered.”

The feature-length film, directed by Evgeny Afineevsky, tells the story of Francis’s papacy over the past seven and a half years, covering many of the trips he made before the Covid-19 pandemic and his handling of the sexual abuse scandals that have engulfed the church.

It also focuses on issues that Francis has made the hallmarks of his papacy, including the environment, poverty, migration, and inequality.

As pope, Francis has never previously publicly backed civil unions for same-sex couples, although as he endorsed such legal arrangements when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires.

“This is the first time as pope he’s making such a clear statement,” Father James Martin, a prominent Jesuit who has argued that the church should be more welcoming to LGBT people, told the Washington Post.

“I think it’s a big step forward. In the past, even civil unions were frowned upon in many quarters of the church. He is putting his weight behind legal recognition of same-sex civil unions.”

Justice department reaches settlement with Purdue Pharma over OxyContin

The justice department has reached an $8 billion settlement with Purdue Pharma, the company that makes OxyContin, which has been blamed for helping create the opioid epidemic.

The AP reports:

The company will plead guilty to three counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and violating federal anti-kickback laws, [justice department] officials said. ...

The deal does not release any of the company’s executives or owners — members of the wealthy Sackler family — from criminal liability, and a criminal investigation is ongoing. But one state attorney general said the agreement fails to hold the Sacklers accountable. ...

Purdue will make a direct payment to the government of $225 million, which is part of a larger $2 billion criminal forfeiture. In addition to that forfeiture, Purdue also faces a $3.54 billion criminal fine, though that money probably will not be fully collected because it will be taken through a bankruptcy, which includes a large number of other creditors. Purdue will also agree to $2.8 billion in damages to resolve its civil liability.

But some lawmakers are already criticizing the settlement, accusing the federal government of failing to hold the Sacklers accountable.

From the Massachusetts attorney general:

Alyssa Farah, the White House communications director, said she was cautiously optimistic about the state of negotiations over a coronavirus relief bill.

“We are committed to getting a stimulus package. I think this is the best we’ve felt about it,” Farah told reporters at the White House, expressing hope that there will be “some movement in the next 48 hours.”

“The president’s position is, we’re willing to go up on the number for PPP loans and the direct payments,” Farah said. “Some of the issues still surround state and local [funding] and some of the other issues, but we’re at the table. Conversations are happening. I think it’s kind of the best place we’ve been in.”

House speaker Nancy Pelosi said yesterday that she and treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin were still at odds over state and local funding, as well as language over liability.

Farah was also asked about the ACLU’s new court filing asserting that 545 migrant children remain separated from their parents after being split up by immigration officials as part of Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy.

“I’m not aware of this specific case,” Farah said. “It’s probably a question for Homeland Security, but I’d be happy to look into it.”

A new poll shows close presidential and Senate races in Iowa, a state that Trump won by 9 points in 2016.

According to the Monmouth University survey, Joe Biden has a 3-point lead over Trump among likely Iowa voters if voter turnout is high, 50%-47%.

If voter turnout is low, Biden’s advantage among likely Iowa voters increases to 5 points, 51%-46%. Given the poll’s 4.4-point margin of error, that result falls just outside the margin of error.

Monmouth explains that Biden’s increased advantage in the lower turnout model is due to the number of ballots already cast in Iowa.

According to the poll, 37% of registered Iowa voters say they have already returned their ballots, and 71% of those votes went to Biden. So if overall turnout is low, it will be because Republican-leaning voters don’t turn out on Election Day.

Meanwhile, in the Senate race, Democrat Theresa Greenfield and Republican incumbent Joni Ernst remain locked in a close race.

In Monmouth’s high-turnout model, Greenfield leads Ernst by 2 points among likely voters, 49%-47%, which is within the poll’s margin of error.

If turnout is low, Greenfield’s advantage increases to 6 points, 51%-45%.

The poll underscores that Republicans’ fortunes will largely depend upon turning out their voters on Election Day itself. According to the US Elections Project, 570,909 Iowa voters have already cast their ballots.

Liberals condemn Barrett's 'anti-democratic' nomination

Democrats and leaders of liberal organizations denounced Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination as “anti-democratic” and said the rush by Republicans to confirm her represented a “nadir of American politics.”

Speaking on a press call Tuesday morning, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Cory Booker, a Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned that Barrett would dismantle the Affordable Care Act and undermine civil rights.

“It is stunning. It is antidemocratic and it is an affront to what I believe are a lot of our shared values and ideas,” said Booker, who will vote against her nomination during Wednesday’s committee vote.

They were joined by the leaders of liberal organizations opposed to Barrett’s nomination.

Leslie Dach, chair of Protect Our Care, said there was no question that Barrett would be decisive in overturning Obamacare.

“Every senator who takes that vote will have blood on their hands,” he said.

Republicans have the votes on the committee to approve her nomination and send it to the floor for a full Senate vote. Under pressure from Trump, who said he wants his appointee on the court in case of a legal dispute stemming from the results of the November presidential election, Republicans have rushed to confirm Barrett by the end of the month.

Joe Biden has called a lid for in-person events today, as the Democratic nominee continues to prepare for tomorrow’s presidential debate.

Biden has received criticism from Trump for calling early lids, and the Biden team “made a point of passing along details for events happening elsewhere on behalf of his campaign today,” pool reporter Ruby Cramer of BuzzFeed News said.

Most notably, Barack Obama will be in Philadelphia today campaigning on Biden’s behalf, marking Obama’s first in-person event this election cycle.

Obama will hold a drive-in rally in Pennsylvania, a state he carried in 2008 and 2012 before Trump narrowly won it in 2016.

A woman who lost her husband to coronavirus said she spoke to Joe Biden last night, after her op-ed pleading with Americans to vote Trump out went viral.

In a CNN interview this morning, Alice Roberts said she spoke to the Democratic nominee for about 20 minutes last night.

“It was incredible. He called me, and he told me about his tragedies in his life,” Roberts said. “It was honestly just like talking to a friend.”

She added, “There’s not a lot of highlights in my days recently, and that was definitely a highlight. He’s a kind, caring guy, and that’s to me a huge piece of what we need right now in the White House.”

In her op-ed for the Newark-based Star-Ledger newspaper, Roberts described losing her 45-year-old husband, Rob, to coronavirus in May:

After catching COVID-19 that required a brief stay in the hospital, President Trump blithely said, ‘Don’t let it take over your lives.’

It’s much too late for that, of course. For my family and me, it took over our lives when it took my husband, Rob.

Rob was a beloved police officer and likely contracted COVID-19 while working an overtime shift, like he often did, to help support our family of three kids, two geckos, a dog, a cat and two hamsters. Many shifts were open in his department because his colleagues were becoming sick with the virus. By April, eight of them tested positive out of a department of about 24 people. ...

It’s too late to prevent this virus from taking over our lives at this moment. But we still have time to make sure it doesn’t define our future if we stand together in this election and vote out President Trump.

Speaking to Fox Business, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows took issue with reports that Trump walked out of his “60 Minutes” interview yesterday.

“Well, he didn’t walk out. I mean, the characterization of that -- he spent over 45 minutes with Lesley Stahl,” Meadows said of the president’s conversation with the veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent.

“I’ve looked at every single minute of the interview, and then some. We have tape of every single minute,” Meadows added.

The president has threatened to release the interview on his own before CBS airs it on Sunday. According to reports, Trump stormed out of the interview and refused to return for a planned walk and talk with the vice president.

“Listen, when you have a ‘60 Minutes’ reporter, they should be a reporter, not an opinion journalist,” Meadows said. “And she came across more like an opinion journalist than a real reporter. Journalism should have standards, and we need to get to the bottom of it, so I think the American people will be able to see it.”

When asked if the interview would be released before Sunday, Meadows replied, “There’s a high probability. More to come.”

Joe Biden also sat down for a “60 Minutes” interview this week, and both interviews are expected to air on Sunday.

Meadows expresses confidence about Senate passing a relief bill

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said he believed the Senate would be able to pass a coronavirus relief bill if House speaker Nancy Pelosi and treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin can reach an agreement.

“We’re down now to looking at some of the language in some of the provisions to make sure that there are not poison pills there. And if we can get that right, then hopefully the numbers will get right,” Meadows said of the negotiations.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows speaks to the media at the White House.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows speaks to the media at the White House. Photograph: Chris Kleponis/EPA

The chief of staff also pushed back against reports that Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has urged the White House not to move forward with a relief package before Election Day because it could complicate the timing of Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the supreme court.

Meadows insisted Senate Republicans and the White House have “the same priority” when it comes to getting more relief funds to the American people.

“If there’s a bipartisan deal, I believe there would be enough votes there to make sure that we get that across the finish line and to the president’s desk,” Meadows said.

Meadows also told reporters that the administration was moving forward with plans to send prescription drug discount cards to seniors, as Trump mentioned last month.

But the cards will not arrive before the November 3 presidential election, after some of the president’s critics accused him of trying to gain a political advantage by giving money to senior voters.

“I don’t anticipate that anything gets there before Election Day,” Meadows said, predicting the cards would be in seniors’ mailboxes sometime in late November or December.

Kamala Harris will travel to Georgia on Friday, as polls show Trump and Biden running neck and neck in the traditionally Republican state.

The Biden campaign just announced that Harris would travel to Atlanta on Friday, thrilling at least one Democratic state legislator in Georgia.

Trump won Georgia by 5 points, but the FiveThirtyEights average of Georgia polls currently gives Biden a 0.8-point advantage in the state.

It’s also important to remember that Georgia is considered a must-win state for Trump, while Biden can still win the presidency even if he does not carry that state.

This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam.

Republican senators are coming to the defense of Dianne Feinstein, as some progressive groups call for the California Democrat to lose her senior position on the Senate judiciary committee.

“Democrats calling for Senator Feinstein to step down from Judiciary Ranking Member should think twice abt their sexist & ageist motivations against an outstanding legislator & icon in her own right Attacks on Senator Feinstein are totally unjustified,” Republican Chuck Grassley said in a new tweet.

The Republican chairman of the committee, Lindsey Graham, similarly defended Feinstein yesterday.

Progressive groups have called for the 87-year-old Feinstein to step aside after she applauded Graham’s handling of Amy Coney Barret’s nomination hearings.

Here’s Harry Enten for CNN explaining why North Carolina is the state to watch out for on election night:

There are a number of states that could prove to be pivotal in the presidential election. Likewise, there are a number of states that could prove to be pivotal in the fight for Senate control. There are, however, few states that could be informative of the ultimate outcome for both.

North Carolina has become a key battleground and features a close presidential matchup between Trump and Biden. It also has a tight Senate race between Republican Sen. Thom Tillis and Democrat Cal Cunningham.

No party has won the state by more than 4 points over the last three cycles. Barack Obama won it by less than a point in 2008. Mitt Romney took it by 2 points in 2012. And Trump won it by a little less than 4 points in 2016, making it one of only six states Trump won by less than 5 points in 2016.

But unlike a lot of other important swing states, North Carolina has a history of voters casting a lot of ballots early. The state allows those early votes to be processed before election day, so it shouldn’t take days to count much of the vote.

The state does allow votes postmarked by election day to be counted, even if they arrive after polls close. Those votes, however, are likely to make up less than 10% of the total pool of voters. In other words, unless the race is really close (which it could be), North Carolina should give us a fairly good insight into both the presidential and Senate landscapes on election night.

There’s more here: CNN – Want to see how the landscape is shaping up on election night? Look to North Carolina

And that’s a wrap from me in London. I’m handing over across the Atlantic to Joan E Greve now. See you tomorrow…

There’s been quite some comment on a section of Trump’s rally speech in Erie, Pennsylvania yesterday, where he appeared to denigrate the city and imply that he wouldn’t have bothered visiting if it wasn’t for coronavirus impacting his re-election chances.

Pennsylvania’s Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman has somewhat taken exception to that, and this morning defended the city on social media.

Just a quick note on coronavirus relief bill progress – of which there gradually appears to be some. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has told Fox Business Network that the biggest sticking point remains funding for state and local governments, but added that progress has been made toward a deal.

“The negotiations have entered a new phase which is more on the technical side of trying to get the language right if we can agree upon the numbers. We’re still apart. Still a number of issues to work on, but the last 24 hours have moved the ball down the field,” he said in an interview.

Thursday’s presidential debate will be held under slightly different rules to the first one, which was widely criticised for the amount of interrupting. Tomorrow, each candidate will be granted two minutes to deliver uninterrupted remarks on each of the six topics.

None of those scheduled topics is Hunter Biden, but having been the renewed focus of Republican attacks on Biden’s candidacy in the last few days, his name is sure to crop up. Natasha Korecki writes on how Democratic nominee Joe Biden is preparing:

Donald Trump has made clear he’s coming after Hunter Biden at Thursday’s debate for allegedly profiting off his father’s position. And Joe Biden would seem to have an easy comeback: Look at what your own kids have done since you became president.

So far, though, Biden has refused to go there. And he’s likely to maintain that posture during the debate, according to advisers and allies, despite a vow by Trump’s campaign that “there will be no escape” for Biden from questions about his son’s business dealings.

Biden’s advisers say that any time spent on issues besides the coronavirus or the economy is lost time. As much as possible, Biden should keep the focus on the president’s biggest liabilities, they say.

Trump has sought to make Hunter Biden the face of the Democratic ticket in the closing weeks of the campaign. The president, his family members, Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani are all portraying Hunter Biden — and, by extension Joe Biden — as beholden to the “Chinese Communist Party” because of the son’s past business dealings.

Some allies have been pressing the Biden camp to go harder against Trump’s children considering how aggressively the president is attacking his. When it comes to kids and alleged conflicts of interest, they say, look no further than Ivanka Trump. While serving as a White House official, she won three new trademarks in China on the same day she met China’s president, Xi Jinping.

Read more here: Politico – Biden braces for Trump’s attacks on Hunter at debate

Oh, and one note of caution about the new mic rule as well. It will prevent the audience hearing what a candidate is saying while their opponent has the floor. It does nothing to actually prevent them heckling, heard only by the moderator and the other candidate.

Trump has just accused California of consistently rigging elections against Republicans.

He’s also returned to trolling CBS over the “60 Minutes” debacle by praising Eric Bolling for an interview he conducted after the CBS taping had abruptly concluded with the president apparently failing to take part in a planned joint sequence with VP Mike Pence.

Nearly a quarter of Republican supporters say Donald Trump’s campaign messages are ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ based in fact. That compares to one in ten Democratic voters who would say the same about Biden.

Those figures come from a new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Opinion Research and USAFacts survey about political information. More than 8 in 10 rated the spread of misinformation about government a “major problem” in the US today.

The deluge in political misinformation and conspiracy theories has fueled distrust in institutions and threatens to undermine confidence in elections, democracy and the nation itself, according to Cindy Otis, a former CIA officer, author and disinformation expert.

“We are living today in the biggest period of false information in history, and we Americans are largely doing it to ourselves,” Otis said last week during a hearing focused on election-related misinformation.

“Americans are losing trust in what they read and see online. We are desperate for information, but certain groups feel they cannot trust the traditional institutions upon which they used to rely.”

The poll found the candidates and their campaigns are themselves seen as not credible by many Americans, with less than a third of Americans saying campaign messages from either Biden or Trump are often or always based on facts.

“The misinformation, it’s just blossomed to the point where it’s unmanageable,” nurse Liana Price, 34, of Tampa Bay, Florida, told the AP’s David Klepper. “You try to explain and provide facts and actual research, but people don’t believe it.”

While partisan disagreement is nothing new, the battles used to be more about policies or ideas rather than disagreements about fundamental facts or whether the other side is even telling the truth.

“I’ve voted for 40 years, and I’ve never seen it like this,” said 60-year-old Kevin Wollersheim, of St. Paul, Minnesota, who supports Biden for president. “There are no alternative facts. There’s the truth, and the truth is important.”

“I think somewhere between 95 and 98% of the press are what I would call deep state liars,” said 75-year-old Trump supporter Colleen McDonald, of San Diego. “They make stuff up. I wouldn’t believe anything that they said.”

The good news in the survey? On the whole voters say it’s pretty easy to find accurate information about the voting process itself. Not, perhaps, that Colleen is going to believe me on that.

The president is awake and tweeting, and apparently reading through the Breitbart site. In a sign of the times, the Daily Beast’s Sam Stein has stepped in with a quote retweet to point out that something the president has said about his November opponent is in fact true.

You might see a lot more of this sort of thing in the next two weeks, as Twitter is temporarily changing the way that retweeting works ahead of the US election. It is, they say, an attempt to add some friction into the process by encouraging people to comment on the thing they are about to retweet.

“President Donald Trump’s campaign burned through almost half of its cash in September, as his re-election effort cut back on advertising in some key battleground states and he lags in the polls behind his much better-funded Democratic adversary, Joe Biden.”

Bill Allison reports for Bloomberg on the financial chaos that is beginning to engulf the Trump campaign with less than two weeks to go before the election.

The latest filing with the Federal Election Commission showed that Trump entered the final 34 days of the presidential election with $63.1 million in the bank, down from $121.1 million at the end of August, when his campaign began to scale back some television spending and even abandoned advertising in the key states of Pennsylvania and Michigan for a period.

Trump’s campaign committee raised $83.1 million in September while spending $139.3 million, the filings showed.

The September haul further puts Trump at a disadvantage with Biden and the Democratic National Committee, which raised $383 million in the month and say they have $432 million in the bank.

Read more here: Bloomberg – Trump campaign burned through almost half its cash in September

The former chairman of Michigan’s Republicans is openly supporting a Democrat for Congress this year, telling Jim Saska at Roll Call: “I’m not interested in supporting Republicans who are going to perpetuate Trumpism because that’s not conservatism. It’s not Republicanism, and it’s not American.”

Jeff Timmer has a sign on his front-lawn supporting Hillary Scholten, who is attempting to become the first Democrat in more than 40 years to represent Grand Rapids.

Scholten said “I have seen this community shift, like I have, from a deeply conservative, traditionally Republican, faith-based community to one that still holds very dearly to its faith but is realizing that our morals — our values — have a different political home.

“I hear from voters every single day about how they feel politically homeless and they didn’t leave the Republican Party — the Republican Party left them.”

Steve Mitchell, a Republican campaign consultant thinks — and most Democrats agree — that the race will come down to how voters, particularly young college graduates who’ve settled in and around Grand Rapids, feel about the president.

“You have very affluent, highly educated voters in suburbs … traditionally Republican voters who are turned off by Donald Trump and his tweets and his demeanor,” Mitchell said. “That’s what makes this race more competitive, because of the top of the ticket.”

Read more here: Roll Call – In Michigan district, Trump factor could turn seat over to Democrats

Early in-person voting has been brisk in Florida. And it is a big prize on election night with 29 electoral college votes up for grabs - that’s more than a tenth of the 270 needed to get you into the White House.

If you feel like having your own go at tallying up where you think states’ votes will go and who will ultimately end up as the next president of the United States, our ‘build your own election’ interactive will help you do just that.

Florida’s top election official is facing accusations of voter suppression after two last-minute moves critics say will lead to intimidation and confusion.

Alarm bells went off last week after the office of Florida’s secretary of state, Laurel Lee, abruptly notified election officials the state was beginning to flag voters for potential removal from the voter rolls if they owed money related to a felony conviction. In a second letter, the state offered an extremely restrictive view on how localities needed to operate ballot drop boxes, which voters are increasingly turning to this year amid United States Postal Service delays.

Both notices threaten confusion and chaos in one of the most important swing states in the 2020 election. Mail-in voting started weeks ago and in-person early voting started on Monday. Polls show an extremely tight race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in Florida, a state where elections are routinely decided by just thousands of votes.

Sam Levine has more here: Florida accused of sowing confusion with last-minute voting changes

It’s a busy day on the campaign trail today as we move closer and closer to the election. The president will be leaving the White House at 4.45pm, to head to a Donald Trump ‘Make America Great Again’ rally in Gastonia, North Carolina at 7pm. He returns to White House at 10.30pm.

Former president Barack Obama joins the fray today in person, holding drive-in car rally for Joe Biden in Philadelphia at 5.45pm.

The vice president Mike Pence will be speaking at two Make America Great Again events – one in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and and another in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris will be speaking in both Asheville and Charlotte in North Carolina. Later she joins virtual Biden for President finance events – although there’s no sign that she’ll be playing video games in those like AOC.

Also coming up today, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, Senator Cory Booker and civil rights groups are holding a press call at 10am ahead of the Senate judiciary committee’s vote to advance the supreme court nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

Updated

“Once a generation, it seems, federal regulators decide to take on a dominant tech company. Two decades ago, Microsoft was the target; two decades before that, IBM.”

That’s according to Scott Rosenberg, Ashley Gold and Kyle Daly at Axios this morning who have been trying to put some context around the Department of Justice decisions to file an antitrust case against Google. They write:

Antitrust cases can take years to resolve if the government and the accused company can’t agree on a settlement, and many uncertainties hang over the case.

Courts move slowly and tech moves fast. That means antitrust enforcement actions often lag the marketplace — and by the time cases conclude, they barely seem relevant.

For all that, in almost any timeline you can imagine 5 or 10 years hence, Google Search will still be a foundation stone of the digital world — and that, in itself, may give this lawsuit some extra gravity.

Read more here: Axios – US vs Google, the siege begins

Diane Taylor brings us this today – about a study which shows that the Trump administration alters and downplays human rights abuses in its reports:

The Trump administration has omitted or altered vital information about human rights – including torture, reproductive rights and persecution based on sexuality – from its annual assessments of human rights, a new report reveals.

The state department’s annual reports have long been relied upon by governments, judges and lawyers – as well as the United Nations – as a “gold standard” of objective information about the human rights situation in countries around the world. The US began compiling these reports in 1976.

The Asylum Research Centre conducted a line-by-line analysis and comparison between US state department human rights reports in the last year of the Obama administration and the first three years of the Trump administration.

The ARC focused on five countries with serious human rights abuses – Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Sudan – to conduct its analysis.

It found that sections of the US reports were not consistent with the situation on the ground as documented by other reliable sources of information and had the effect of downplaying the seriousness of the human rights situations in these countries. The principal changes related to women’s rights, civil and political rights, and issues relating to LGBTQ+ people.

Read more here: Trump administration alters and downplays human rights abuses in reports

Here’s a murky one from the Washington Post this morning. It seems that people using the name of the Proud Boys – the far-right group that Donald Trump told to “stand back and stand by” during the first presidential debate – are sending intimidating emails to Democratic voters in multiple states. But it isn’t at all clear what the origins of the emails actually are. Isaac Stanley-Becker and Craig Timberg report:

Authorities in Florida and Alaska on Tuesday were investigating threatening emails sent to Democratic voters that claimed to be from the Proud Boys, but appeared instead to be a deceptive campaign making use of a vulnerability in the organization’s online network.

The emails, which appeared to target Democrats using data from digital databases known as “voter files,” told recipients the group was “in possession of all your information” and instructed voters to change their party registration and cast their ballots for Trump.

“You will vote for Trump on election day or we will come after you,” warned the emails, which by Tuesday night were said to have reached voters in four states, three of them hotly contested swing states in the coming presidential election.

The emails were reported in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida and Alaska. Only Alaska is not a major focus of the presidential campaign, but it does have a closely watched race for the US Senate. Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the Proud Boys and the Florida state director of Latinos for Trump, denied involvement.

Read more here: Washington Post – Threatening emails reportedly sent to Democratic voters in three swing states, sparking investigations

The latest video in our Anywhere But Washington series is out today. After winning the 2016 election, Donald Trump promised to deliver new jobs and economic prosperity to Youngstown, Ohio, a city suffering from decades of decline. But four years on those promises never manifested.

Oliver Laughland and Tom Silverstone meet residents who lost their jobs and had their families split by economic necessity, and witness how the demise of the city’s only newspaper made it harder to hold politicians accountable for their failures.

Kaitlan Collins and Khalil Abdallah at CNN have a little more behind-the-scenes detail on that abruptly halted interview session involving Donald Trump. They report:

President Donald Trump abruptly ended a solo interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” Tuesday and did not return for an appearance he was supposed to tape with Vice President Mike Pence.

After camera crews set up at the White House on Monday, Trump sat down with host Lesley Stahl for about 45 minutes on Tuesday before he abruptly ended the interview and told the network he believed they had enough material to use, according to two sources.

Trump walked out of the interview because he was frustrated with Stahl’s line of questioning, one source said. Another person said the bulk of the interview was focused on coronavirus.

CBS News did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment. When reached for comment, the White House did not dispute CNN’s reporting.

There’s also some more on the clip that Trump tweeted out showing host Stahl without a mask inside the White House.

The President later accused Stahl of not wearing a mask and tweeted out a brief clip of her without one while at the White House.

A person familiar with the situation told CNN that the image from the tweet shows Stahl with her producers immediately after Trump ended the interview. Stahl had not yet gone back to get her personal belongings to put her mask back on. She had a mask on from the time she entered the White House and just before the interview began.

There’s more here: CNN – Trump abruptly ends ‘60 Minutes’ interview before planned taping of joint appearance with Pence

Chi Ossé, who is running to represent New York City’s 36th district, writes for us today that it’s not enough for Black Lives Matter to protest – we must run for office too:

Black Lives Matter, the second civil rights movement, was born seven years ago in the wake of the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. It has now come of age. After numerous waves of protest, the 2020 surge marked the largest protest movement in the history of the country. In June, I co-founded Warriors in the Garden, one of New York’s leading protest collectives, and spent nearly every day for months in the streets. This mass mobilization sprang to life following the killings of two more Black Americans, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, at the hands of the police. But the catalyst was not the fuel. Slavery came to our shores in 1619, and has for 400 years defined both the Black experience and the United States. The nation is a powder keg; 2020 lit the fuse.

The ensuing explosion has been bright and chaotic, like the final burst of fireworks on the Fourth of July. But powerful explosions, when coalesced, organized and pointed in the same direction, go by another name: a rocket. The protests are not the end but the engine. We are asked where we go from here. We answer that the sky is not the limit, but the direction.

There exists a call in the movement to dismantle and deconstruct. Not just racism, but our strongest institutions as well. If for hundreds of years these institutions have served the powerful in quests of oppression, it is argued, then they must be replaced. I choose a more strategic approach, rooted in pride and optimism.

The protests are working. Societal opinions of Black Lives Matter have flipped to majority-positive for the first time. As this is still a democracy, we must convert our popularity into political power.

Read more here: Chi Ossé – It’s not enough for Black Lives Matter to protest. We must run for office too

The Trump campaign have been pushing again on their line that Joe Biden would be China’s preferred choice of US president.

The attack line is somewhat blunted by the revelations in the New York Times reporting yesterday that China is one of only three foreign nations — the others are Britain and Ireland — where the president maintains a bank account. Republicans have previously sought to use the fact that Hunter Biden opened a bank account in China against him.

Lily Kuo in Beijing rounds up Trump’s Chinese business and tax connections for us:

Tax records reviewed by the New York Times showed a previously unreported bank account in China controlled by Trump International Hotels Management. The account paid $188,561 in taxes in China between 2013 and 2015 in connection to potential licensing deals, according the newspaper.

Earlier reporting by the Times showed he paid just $750 in US taxes in 2016 and 2017.

The recent tax records also showed Trump invested at least $192,000 in five companies charged with pursuing business deals in China. Those companies claimed $97,400 in business expenses, including payments as recently as 2018, the Times reported.

The disclosures also come after Trump accused his opponent, Joe Biden, of being “weak on China” and described the Biden family as “selling out our country” to China. The Trump campaign has run attack ads against Biden’s son for having “inked a billion-dollar deal” with the government-owned Bank of China, allegations that have been not been substantiated.

Read more here: Donald Trump paid nearly $200,000 in taxes to China, report claims

Vivian Ho in San Francisco has been looking for us at how California is currently faring better than the US as a whole in tackling coronavirus, but warns that experts and public health officials expect a fall surge.

“Many states across the nation, and frankly nations across the globe, are facing new waves of cases,” Dr Mark Ghaly, California’s secretary of health and human services, said at his Tuesday briefing. “We’re seeing testing impacts, hospitalizations and challenges in some of the hospitals around the nation, things that during that summer that we certainly faced here in California, but because of our working together, came down nicely. So far, we have not been facing those increases.”

California was the first state to order residents to shelter in place when the pandemic emerged in the country in early spring. The state avoided a surge in cases like the one New York experienced, and its death rate remained relatively low. Its government, led by Gavin Newsom, was touted across the country for its forceful leadership.

But restrictions started easing in May, and as the weather warmed, residents in some counties flooded back to beaches, bars, restaurants, fitness rooms and salons. By 4 July, the state registered an average of about 6,000 to 7,000 new cases each day.

“We made a terrible mistake like so many other places in the United States did when we opened up too quickly in May and continued to let them be open in June and that led to the horrific time we had in July and August,” said John Swartzberg, a professor emeritus of infectious diseases at the University of California, Berkeley. “I think California learned from that mistake.”

Read more here: California appears to be winning fight against Covid-19. How long will it last?

Officer involved in fatal raid says that killing of Breonna Taylor had 'nothing to do with race'

The Louisville based Courier-Journal has published this morning a piece about its joint ABC News exclusive interview with Jonathan Mattingly, an officer who was involved in the raid which led to the killing of Breonna Taylor, which sparked so much hurt and unrest in the community and across the nation.

In it Mattingly says that the killing had “nothing to do with race.”

Darcy Costello and Tessa Duvall report:

In the wide-ranging interview that lasted roughly four hours, Mattingly slammed city and police leadership for not more swiftly moving to correct the “false narratives” that surrounded Taylor’s death.

He said misinformation — such as that police were at the wrong apartment, that Taylor wasn’t listed on the search warrant and that she was asleep in her bed when she was shot — has stirred public anger, protests and vitriol and cast he and other officers as murderers.

“Because this is not relatable to George Floyd. This is nothing like that,” Mattingly said. “It’s not Ahmaud Arbery. It’s nothing like it. These are two totally different types of incidences. It’s not a race thing like people wanna try to make it to be. It’s not.

“This is not us going, hunting somebody down. This is not kneeling on a neck. It’s nothing like that.”

Mattingly said in the interview that he no longer expects to return to the Louisville Metro Police Department. A married father of four, Mattingly said he and his family have been victims too.

He specifically criticised civil rights attorney Ben Crump, saying that he came to Louisville “stirring up all this stuff. He simply comes in, causes problems, throws out all these either direct lies, or these innuendos, and leaves people hanging, and then he disappears.”

None of the officers involved faces criminal charges for Breonna Taylor’s death.

Read more here: Courier–Journal: Breonna Taylor shooting ‘had nothing to do with race,’ officer says in exclusive interview

Updated

Our diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour writes for us today that even if Biden wins the US election, time is running out to save Iran nuclear deal:

Iran’s weakened government may only have a few months to negotiate a revived nuclear deal before facing its own electoral challenge by hardliners who oppose any engagement with the west.

The narrow window has prompted calls for Biden to offer a phased approach to rejoining the Iran nuclear deal abandoned by Donald Trump in 2018, in order to show progress before the Iranian presidential election.

Iran’s reformists and centrists remain severely damaged by the failure of the original agreement to deliver economic benefits to ordinary Iranians.

Once Trump left the deal, he imposed maximum economic pressure on Tehran, blocking Iran’s oil exports, and leaving advocates of engagement with the US struggling to defend their strategy. In a recent interview in Kar Va Kargar the foreign minister Javad Zarif insisted the foreign ministry had not been naive to negotiate with the Americans, but said Trump had “blown up the entire negotiating room”.

Iran’s current president, Hassan Rouhani, was also an advocate of the deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, but is standing down after two four-year terms. A range of conservatives, including members of the powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, are preparing to stand, advocating either closer ties with China or a stronger self-reliant economic policy.

Read more here: Even if Biden wins US election, time is running out to save Iran nuclear deal

We are less than two weeks away from the US election, and we are still seeing legal wrangling over the procedures in multiple states.

Jonathan Drew and Bryan Anderson have been looking at the process in North Carolina for Associated Press, and found that time is dwindling for thousands of voters to fix absentee voting errors.

Court battles had halted the processing of ballots mailed back with deficiencies from 4 October until the state issued new guidance Monday. State and federal judges temporarily froze key parts of the process amid lawsuits over what to do with ballots that lacked a witness signature and other information.

State and county officials, many working late into the night, said it would take several days to inform at least 10,000 voters who cast problem ballots.

An uneven landscape emerged in the day after the new rules were announced: Some counties said they had all but cleared the backlog, but some voters elsewhere said they hadn’t yet been contacted.

In Durham, 24-year-old unaffiliated voter Stephane Prieto was surprised Tuesday afternoon when a reporter told her that her ballot had been marked as having incomplete witness information. The state database didn’t make clear exactly what was missing, but if her ballot lacks a witness signature, she’ll have to cast another one.

“It’s kind of worrisome,” she said of the prospect of obtaining and casting a new ballot this close to the election.

Prieto, a part-time home health aide who voted for Joe Biden, said her mother witnessed her ballot, and she mailed it 6 October.

“She was right next to me,” Prieto said of filling out her ballot. “She signed it and, you know, we filled everything out. It should have been OK.”
Durham County’s elections director didn’t respond to an AP email seeking comment.

The North Carolina State Board of Elections said that as of Monday approximately 10,000 ballots statewide had various deficiencies. But that number could be higher because counties were instructed not to enter ballots with errors into a statewide database during the freeze on handling deficient ballots. During the two-week freeze, voters weren’t contacted about ballot errors.

Board Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell said it would take several days for counties to enter the backlog of deficient ballots into the system to provide a complete picture of how many there are statewide. Still, Bell said she hopes that by early next week, “those voters should have their materials in hand and able to return those to us.”

Through Tuesday afternoon, more than 2 million early votes had been cast in North Carolina, including over 600,000 by mail.

State law requires absentee voters to have another adult witness the ballot and sign and print their name on the outer envelope. A federal judge ruled last week that absentee ballots lacking a witness signature require the voter to restart the process and have it witnessed again.

Redone absentee ballots can be mailed back or returned by hand to county election boards or early voting sites. Or those people can also cast a ballot in person, instead.

Meanwhile, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday night that North Carolina can accept absentee ballots that are postmarked by election day for more than a week afterward. The ruling on the Nov. 12 deadline for the ballots to arrive at county boards stemmed from the same legal fight over the witness requirement.

North Carolina was won by Donald Trump in 2016 by 3.66%, and will be one of the battleground states that Joe Biden is aiming to win on 3 November.

Ex-members of Amy Coney Barrett faith group tell of trauma and sexual abuse

Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the supreme court has prompted former members of her secretive faith group, the People of Praise, to come forward and share stories about emotional trauma and – in at least one case – sexual abuse they claim to have suffered at the hands of members of the Christian group.

In the wake of the allegations, the Guardian has learned that the charismatic Christian organization, which is based in Indiana, has hired the law firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to conduct an “independent investigation” into sexual abuse claims on behalf of People of Praise.

The historic sexual abuse allegations and claims of emotional trauma do not pertain specifically to Barrett, who has been a lifelong member of the charismatic group, or her family.

But some former members who spoke to the Guardian said they were deeply concerned that too little was understood about the “community” of People of Praise ahead of Barrett’s expected confirmation by the Senate next week, after which she will hold the seat formerly held by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Two people familiar with the matter say that more than two dozen former members of the faith group, many of whom say they felt “triggered” by Barrett’s nomination, are participating in a support group to discuss how the faith group affected their lives.

“The basic premise of everything at the People of Praise was that the devil controlled everything outside of the community, and you were ‘walking out from under the umbrella of protection’ if you ever left,” said one former member who called herself Esther, who had to join the group as a child but then left the organization. “I was OK with it being in a tiny little corner of Indiana, because a lot of weird stuff happens in tiny little corners in this country. But it’s just unfathomable to me – I can’t even explain just how unfathomable it is – that you would have a supreme court justice who is a card-carrying member of this community.”

Barrett was not asked about her involvement in People of Praise during her confirmation hearings last week, and has never included her involvement with the group in Senate disclosure forms.

Read Stephanie Kirchgaessner’s report in full here: Revealed – ex-members of Amy Coney Barrett faith group tell of trauma and sexual abuse

By the way, if like a lot of us, you only really think about how the US electoral college works once every four years, then we have this useful explainer for you. It lays out how Trump won the White House despite Hillary Clinton gaining 3 million more votes than he did – and reminds us of what Joe Biden needs to do if he is to reverse that in two weeks time.

Read more here: Electoral college explained

Economist gives Joe Biden 93% chance of outright electoral college victory

The Economist this morning have updated their latest projections for how the Electoral College might pan out after the votes are counted. They currently give Joe Biden a 93% chance of winning the college. The states that they have down as uncertain toss-ups – Iowa, Ohio and Georgia – come way after Biden has already amassed the vital 270 votes in their model.

Of the ten states they identify as the potential ‘tipping points’ on election night, they assess Biden having a healthy lead in seven of them, with only Texas leaning to Trump:

  • New Hampshire, Biden 8pts
  • Minnesota, Biden 8pts
  • Michigan, Biden 7pts
  • Wisconsin, Biden 7pts
  • Nevada, Biden 6pts
  • Pennsylvania, Biden 6pts
  • Florida, Biden 4pts
  • Arizona, Biden 3pts
  • North Carolina, Biden 2pts
  • Texas, Trump 2pts

Read more here: The Economist – Forecasting the US elections: our model thinks Joe Biden is very likely to beat Donald Trump in the electoral college

Elliot Spagat from Associated Press has more on the story that the Trump administration has lost track of the parents of 545 children who were separated at the US border with Mexico.

The children were separated between July 1, 2017, and June 26, 2018, when a federal judge in San Diego ordered that children in government custody be reunited with their parents.

Children from that period are difficult to find because the government had inadequate tracking systems. Volunteers have searched for them and their parents by going door-to-door in Guatemala and Honduras.

More than 2,700 children were separated from their parents in June 2018 when District Judge Dana Sabraw ordered an end to the practice under a “zero-tolerance” policy to criminally prosecute every adult who entered the country illegally from Mexico. The administration sparked an international outcry when parents couldn’t find their children.

While those families were reunited under court order, authorities later discovered that up to 1,556 children were separated under the policy going back to the summer of 2017, including hundreds during an initial run at family separation in El Paso, Texas, from July to November 2017 that was not publicly disclosed at the time.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which sued over the practice, said a court-appointed steering committee located parents of 485 children, up 47 from August. That leaves 545 still unaccounted for among the 1,030 children for whom the steering committee had telephone numbers from US authorities.

About two-thirds of parents of those 545 children are believed to be in their countries of origin, the ACLU said.

Volunteers have “engaged in time-consuming and arduous on-the-ground searches for parents in their respective countries of origin,” the ACLU said in a court filing. Those searches were suspended after the coronavirus outbreak but have resumed in a limited way.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar found a new potential fund-raising tactic last night, as they played video game Among Us online together, and streamed it live to Twitch.

If not many of those words meant anything to you, Twitch is a web service where people can stream video online so people can watch them playing games, and we’ve previously described smash hit Among Us as ‘the ultimate party game of the paranoid Covid era’.

In the game there are 10 crew members trapped on a spacecraft, carrying out menial tasks to maintain vital systems, but at least one of them is an imposter who wants to sabotage their work and if possible, murder them. You either play as the imposter and have to disguise that from your friends, or you play as a hapless crew member trying to spot the imposters.

You are very welcome to come up with your own metaphor about US politics at this point.

Updated

David Smith in Washington looks for us today at how Donald Trump Jr has became his father’s unlikely political heir apparent.

“They pander,” he said of the Democratic party, according to the Arizona Daily Sun newspaper. “They tell you everything you want to hear and do exactly the opposite. They lie to you for years – you guys understand that better than everyone.”

It was one of numerous campaign stops for Trump’s eldest son, seen by many as the heir apparent to the “Make America Great Again” movement. Like his father, Don Jr delivers fiery populist speeches, tweets conspiracy theories and, above all, relishes goading, shocking and outraging liberals on air and online. Like his father, he has come to personify modern Republicanism.

And as Trump continues to trail his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, in the polls, attention has turned to who may take up his mantle after November.

“Trumpism replaced conservatism as the ideological underpinning of the Republican party and, because of that, they don’t really fight about issues any more,” said Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican strategist co-founder of the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project.

“They fight about affect and whether or not they’re winning these ephemeral social media battles and, in that world, the highest order goal is the ‘owning of the libs’. It is a throwaway phrase substituting the validity or strength of an argument with a sort of self-satisfaction that you have been transgressive in some way towards liberals or progressives. Donald Trump Jr is a master of that. He is a post-Republican Republican.

Read more here: ‘Owning the libs’: how Trump Jr became his father’s unlikely political heir apparent

Here’s some clips of Donald Trump’s rally yesterday. The president said he is ‘crushing’ Covid-19, even as the country surpasses 220,000 deaths from the virus.

Speaking in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump told voters ‘If you want depression, doom and despair. Vote for sleepy Joe Biden. And boredom’. Trump blamed former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton when his microphone cut out during the rally and also claimed that if the virus had not struck he would not have needed to campaign very hard to win re-election.

Here’s the latest case count for coronavirus in the US.

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NBC News have a couple of quotes about what happened during the interview taping session in their report:

“You have to watch what we do to 60 Minutes,” Trump said early at rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday night. “You’ll get such a kick out of it, you’re going to get a kick out of it. Lesley Stahl is not going to be happy.”

One source told NBC News that the president and Stahl spoke on-camera for more than 40 minutes. The president, during what the source called a “natural breaking point in the conversation,” told Stahl: “I think you have what you need.”

The interview was described by the source as “testy at times.”

“He gave them more than 45 minutes for a show that’s one hour and will also feature an interview with Pence, Harris, and Biden. They went way over, so he wrapped and didn’t do the walk-and-talk,” another source told NBC News.

The show will be broadcast on Sunday.

Read more here: NBC News – Trump abruptly ends ‘60 Minutes’ interview, taunts CBS’ Lesley Stahl

Here’s what the president was tweeting last night after the drama of the recoding of his pre-election CBS News 60 Minutes interview. First off he criticised host Lesley Stahl for not wearing a mask in the White House.

Describing doing a TV interview in the run-up to a presidential election as a ‘terrible intrusion’, Donald Trump went on to tweet:

Both the major candidates for president will appear on 60 Minutes before the election. Joe Biden taped his segment on Monday.

Hello! It’s Wednesday’s edition of our US politics live blog. Here’s a quick catch-up to get us up and running for the day…

  • Donald Trump reportedly cut short the taping of a pre-election CBS News 60 minutes interview yesterday, then angrily tweeted about it. He also criticised host Lesley Stahl for not wearing a mask in the White House, and threatened to release footage of their exchanges before it airs.
  • Nancy Pelosi and Steven Mnuchin had a call about a coronavirus relief bill. Pelosi said she is “closer” to reaching a deal with the White House, but acknowledged that a relief bill may not be passed until after the election.
  • The US has seen nearly 300,000 excess deaths since late January, according to a new report from the CDC.
  • The justice department filed its antitrust lawsuit against Google, accusing the search engine giant of unfairly stifling competition.
  • USA Today gave its first-ever presidential endorsement to Joe Biden.
  • Trump’s financial documents revealed that the president has a bank account and paid taxes in China. Trump often derides his opponent as a China sympathizer, pointing to Hunter Biden’s dealings in China as evidence.
  • The president yesterday asked attorney general William Barr to “act fast” and investigate a series of dubious claims against Joe and Hunter Biden.
  • Trump’s denial of E Jean Carroll rape allegation was an ‘official response’, justice department says. It seeks to substitute itself as the defendant in her defamation case.
  • Lawyers said they were unable to reach the parents of 545 children separated at the border by the Trump administration.
  • Trump will be attending a rally in Gastonia, North Carolina later today.
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