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Biden Tackles ‘Soul of the Nation’ in Prime-Time Speech

US President Joe Biden used the word “democracy” dozens of times in an impassioned speech on what he sees as the dangerous junction the US faces because of Trump-backed Republicans who he says pose a threat to American democracy. And Biden made clear who he sees as responsible. VOA’s Anita Powell reports from Washington.
Video Editor: Barry Unger
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Biden Calls Out Threat to Democracy, Urges Americans to ‘Stand Up for It’

The United States is at a dangerous junction in its battle to maintain democracy, President Joe Biden believes — and in a rousing speech from Philadelphia on Thursday night, he laid the blame at the feet of one man.

“There’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan, Make America Great Again. “And that is a threat to this country.”

Biden drew a dark picture of his opponents’ vision for America as he spoke in front of the hall where the nation’s founders wrote and debated both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, nearly 250 years ago.

He spoke for 25 minutes, and in that time, said one word no fewer than 25 times: democracy.

He used the word as a cudgel against Trump-aligned Republicans who echo Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen; who work to suppress voter turnout in key states; and who participated in the violent insurrection attempt at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“History tells us that blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy,” he said “For a long time, we’ve told ourselves that American democracy is guaranteed. But it’s not. We have to defend it. Protect it. Stand up for it.”

In a refutation delivered ahead of the speech, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy accused Biden of divisiveness and blamed Democrats for rising inflation, crime and government spending.

“In the past two years, Joe Biden has launched an assault on the soul of America, on its people, on its laws, on its most sacred values,” he said. “He has launched an assault on our democracy. His policies have severely wounded America’s soul, diminished America’s spirit and betrayed America’s trust.”

Biden’s condemnation earned him hecklers, who shouted obscenities in his direction as he spoke. Going momentarily off-script, he responded.

“Those folks over there, they’re entitled to be outrageous,” he said. “This is a democracy.”

But he also used the word to reflect what he believes is a better future, led by his party, whose recent legislative gains he touted as proof. Since taking office, Biden has shepherded through major legislation that his administration says will bring about economic recovery, massive infrastructure improvements, gun safety, affordable health care, clean energy and climate change reduction.

“Together, together, we can choose a different path,” he said. “We can choose a better path forward to the future. A future of possibility, a future to build a dream and hope – and we’re on that path moving ahead.”

This is Biden’s second visit to the Keystone State this week. Pennsylvania is a competitive state in what is shaping up as a battleground between Biden’s Democrats and Trump’s Republicans in midterm elections later this year.

Earlier in the day, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stressed that this was not intended as a stump speech.

“This is so much broader, so much bigger than any one party, than any one person,” she said. “And it’s an optimistic speech, again, about where we are as a nation and where we can go. And it’s about the fundamental struggle around the globe between autocracy and democracy and how democracy is a critical foundation for this country to move forward.”

Analysts question that, as Biden’s recent legislative victories and priorities don’t overlap much with the themes of his speech.

“We’re beginning to see what issues that Democrats see as being advantageous: guns are one, democracy is another,” said William Howell, a professor of American politics at the University of Chicago. ”And it’s interesting, too, that he didn’t do much legislatively on either of those domains. And yet those are the ones he’s talking about, but not with an eye towards passing policy now but with an eye towards reshaping the composition of Congress.”

Historians who study presidential rhetoric say Biden’s tone has shifted noticeably as the November polls have gotten closer.

“I believe the sharper rhetoric from the president and other Democrats is working,” said Jeremi Suri, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “There’s evidence that many independent voters – not Trump voters, many independent voters – particularly women, even in conservative states, like Texas and Kansas, are fed up with Republican obstructionism. And quite frankly, they’re fed up with the news of law-breaking by the former president. The more Trump is in the news, the better the Democrats look.”

After the speech, Suri noted that Biden’s words may now put his opponents on a back foot.

“Biden’s speech forces Republicans like [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell and McCarthy to either defend or renounce MAGA Republicans — no way to avoid the issue when commenting on this speech,” he said.

But on this night in Philadelphia — as the president urged Americans to “vote, vote, vote” — he closed with a picture of the country he sees.

“We are the United States of America, the United States of America,” he said, stressing the word “united.” “And may God protect our nation. And may God protect all those who stand watch over our democracy. God bless you all. Democracy. Thank you.”
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US Judge Defers Ruling on Appointing Special Master for Trump Records

A federal judge on Thursday deferred a ruling on former President Donald Trump’s request for an independent review of records seized from his Florida home by the FBI during a search last month.   

Trump’s lawyers last week asked U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida to appoint a special master to determine if the documents contain any privileged material that should be returned to the former president.    

The Justice Department opposed the request, saying it has conducted its own review of the materials and that appointing a special master would impede its investigation into Trump’s handling of classified records. A special master is an independent third party who is appointed by a court in sensitive cases to review materials potentially covered by attorney-client or other privilege to ensure investigators do not improperly view them. 

Cannon indicated last weekend that she was inclined to grant Trump’s request, but after hearing arguments by Trump lawyers and government prosecutors, she said she would issue a ruling “in due course.”  

At issue is the status of more than 100 classified documents found during the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate as part of a federal investigation into how government documents ended up there.   

Under the Presidential Records Act, Trump was required to hand over his White House records to the National Archives at the end of his term in office in January 2021.   

The FBI is investigating potential crimes in connection with Trump’s retention of the documents, including violations of a part of the Espionage Act that makes it a crime to gather, transmit or lose national defense information.  

The investigation began after Trump’s representatives sent 15 boxes of materials to the National Archives in January 2022, almost a year after he left office, and the government records agency alerted the Justice Department that they had identified more than 100 classified documents.  

Seeking to prevent the FBI from examining the trove of documents found at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s lawyers last week asked Cannon to appoint a special master, claiming the documents may be subject to attorney-client privilege or executive privilege. 

The Justice Department opposed the request in a 36-page court filing on Tuesday, saying its privilege review team had identified a small number of documents subject to that attorney-client privilege.  

On Thursday, DOJ lawyers said in court that the team had found 64 sets of potentially privileged materials that amounted to more than 500 pages.  

The Justice Department has said the records kept at Mar-a-Lago included documents classified as top secret and special access program.  

The U.S. intelligence community is conducting a damage assessment of Trump’s retention of the documents, and the Justice Department says appointing a special master would “significantly harm important governmental interests, including national security interests.”  

Rejecting Trump’s claim of executive privilege over the documents, the Justice Department said the documents belong to the government, and as a former president, he has no right to keep them. 

Any independent review of the documents, the Justice Department said, should be limited to attorney-client privilege and completed by September 30.   

In its Tuesday filing, the Justice Department said that it obtained a search warrant for Trump’s residence after learning that government records “were likely concealed and removed” from a storage area at Mar-a-Lago and that “efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.”  

Trump’s legal team pushed back on Wednesday.   

Calling the search “unprecedented, unnecessary and legally unsupported,” the Trump lawyers accused the Justice Department of mounting “an all-encompassing challenge to any judicial consideration, presently or in the future, of any aspect of its unprecedented behavior in this investigation.”  

The government, they said, “has filed an extraordinary document with this Court, suggesting that the DOJ, and the DOJ alone, should be entrusted with the responsibility of evaluating its unjustified pursuit of criminalizing a former President’s possession of personal and Presidential records in a secure setting.”  

What the FBI found during the search, they wrote, “was to be fully anticipated.”   

“Simply put, the notion that Presidential records would contain sensitive information should have never been cause for alarm,” the Trump legal filing said. 

In the weeks since the August 8 search of his residence, Trump has taken to his social media platform, Truth Social, to claim that the action was politically motivated. 

 
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House Committee Reaches Deal to Obtain Trump Financial Records

A House committee seeking financial records from former President Donald Trump has reached an agreement that ends litigation on the matter and requires an accounting firm to turn over some of the material, the panel’s leader announced Thursday. 

The long-running case began in April 2019, when the House Committee on Oversight and Reform subpoenaed a wealth of records from Trump’s then-accounting firm, Mazars USA. The committee cited testimony from Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, that it said had raised questions about the president’s representation of his financial affairs when it came to seeking loans and paying taxes. 

Under the agreement, Trump has agreed to end his legal challenges to the subpoena and Mazars USA has agreed to produce responsive documents to the committee as expeditiously as possible, said Representative Carolyn Maloney, the New York Democrat who heads the committee. 

“After numerous court victories, I am pleased that my committee has now reached an agreement to obtain key financial documents that former President Trump fought for years to hide from Congress,” Maloney said. 

Several investigations

Trump is facing investigations on several fronts, including the storage of top-secret government information discovered at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and whether the former president’s team criminally obstructed the inquiry. In Georgia, prosecutors are investigating whether he and allies illegally tried to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. Meanwhile, congressional committees are following through on investigations that began when he was president. 

The settlement over Mazars followed a July decision by a federal appeals court in Washington that narrowed what records Congress is entitled to obtain. The court said the committee should be given records pertinent to financial ties between foreign countries and Trump or any of his businesses for 2017-18. 

The appeals court also ordered Mazars to turn over documents between November 2016 and 2018 relating to the Trump company that held the lease granted by the federal government for the former Trump International Hotel, located between the White House and the Capitol. 

In the decision, the court said Trump’s financial records would “advance the committee’s consideration of ethics reform legislation across all three of its investigative tracks,” including on presidential ethics and conflicts of interest, presidential financial disclosures, and presidential adherence to constitutional safeguards against foreign interference and undue influence. 

The House investigation dates to February 2019, when Trump’s former personal attorney, Cohen, testified to the committee that Trump had a history of misrepresenting the value of assets to gain favorable loan terms and tax benefits. 

Cohen served time in federal prison after pleading guilty in 2018 of tax crimes, lying to Congress and campaign finance violations, some of which involved his role in orchestrating payments to two women to keep them from talking about alleged affairs with Trump. 

But his testimony prompted the committee to seek key financial documents from Mazars, and in April 2019, the committee issued its subpoena to Mazars seeking four targeted categories of documents. 

The following month, Trump sued to prevent Mazars from complying with the subpoena. The case has been winding its way through the court system since. 

Mazars cuts ties

Mazars earlier this year said it had cut ties with Trump and warned that financial statements the firm had prepared for Trump “should no longer be relied upon” by anyone doing business with him. 

Another House panel, the Ways and Means Committee, has been seeking Trump’s tax returns and waging its own litigation. In that case, a three-judge appellate court panel agreed last month with a lower court’s decision that the Treasury Department should provide the tax returns to the committee. 

The Justice Department, under the Trump administration, had defended a decision by then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to withhold the tax returns from Congress. Mnuchin argued that he could withhold the documents because he concluded they were being sought by Democrats for partisan reasons. A lawsuit ensued. 

After Joe Biden took office as president, the committee renewed the request, seeking Trump’s tax returns and additional information from 2015 to 2020. The White House took the position that the request was a valid one and that the Treasury Department had no choice but to comply. Trump then attempted to halt the handover in court.
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Peltola Beats Palin, Wins Alaska House Special Election

Democrat Mary Peltola won the special election for Alaska’s only U.S. House seat on Wednesday, besting a field that included Republican Sarah Palin, who was seeking a political comeback in the state where she was once governor.

Peltola, who is Yup’ik and turned 49 on Wednesday, will become the first Alaska Native to serve in the House and the first woman to hold the seat. She will serve the remaining months of the late Republican U.S. Rep. Don Young’s term. Young held the seat for 49 years before his death in March.

Peltola’s victory, coming in Alaska’s first statewide ranked choice voting election, is a boon for Democrats, particularly coming off better-than-expected performances in special elections around the country this year following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. She will be the first Democrat to hold the seat since the late U.S. Rep. Nick Begich, who was seeking reelection in 1972 when his plane disappeared. Begich was later declared dead and Young in 1973 was elected to the seat.

Peltola ran as a coalition builder while her two Republican opponents — Palin and Begich’s grandson, also named Nick Begich — at times went after each other. Palin also railed against the ranked voting system, which was instituted by Alaska voters.

The results came 15 days after the Aug. 16 election, in line with the deadline for state elections officials to receive absentee ballots mailed from outside the U.S. Ranked choice tabulations took place Wednesday after no candidate won more than 50% of the first-choice votes. Peltola was in the lead heading into the tabulation rounds.

Wednesday’s results were a disappointment for Palin, who was looking to make a political comeback 14 years after she was vaulted onto the national stage when John McCain selected her to be his running mate in the 2008 presidential election. In her run for the House seat, she had widespread name recognition and won the endorsement of former President Donald Trump.

But critics questioned her commitment to Alaska, citing her decision to resign as governor in July 2009, partway through her term. Palin went on to become a conservative commentator on TV and appeared in reality television programs, among other pursuits.

Palin’s defeat in the special election doesn’t necessarily mean she has lost her shot for the U.S. House seat. Along with Peltola and Begich, she is among the candidates vying for a full two-year term that will be decided in the November general election.

Palin has insisted her commitment to Alaska never wavered and said ahead of the special election that she had “signed up for the long haul.”

Peltola, a former state lawmaker who most recently worked for a commission whose goal is to rebuild salmon resources on the Kuskokwim River, cast herself as a regular Alaskan. “I’m not a millionaire. I’m not an international celebrity,” she said.

Peltola has said she was hopeful that the new system would allow more moderate candidates to be elected.

During the campaign, she emphasized her support of abortion rights and said she wanted to elevate issues of ocean productivity and food security. Peltola said she got a boost after the June special primary when she won endorsements from Democrats and independents who had been in the race. She said she believed her positive messaging also resonated with voters.

Alaska voters in 2020 approved an elections process that replaced party primaries with open primaries. Under the new system, ranked voting is used in general elections.

Under ranked voting, ballots are counted in rounds. A candidate can win outright with more than 50% of the vote in the first round. If no one hits that threshold, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Voters who chose that candidate as their top pick have their votes count for their next choice. Rounds continue until two candidates remain, and whoever has the most votes wins.
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