Judge concludes hearing on Trump grand jury report without a decision – as it happened

With not one, but three former White House occupants in hot water for having stashes of classified documents that they should not have, some in Washington think it’s time to take a look at how the government manages its secrets.

That includes the Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer, who said he supports a review of the government’s classification system. Here are his brief comments, from CNN:

There has been much reacting on Capitol Hill to news that Mike Pence had classified documents at his home.

Republican lawmakers have generally defended Pence, saying they doubt he did anything wrong. Senator Lindsey Graham is among that group, but he also seemed to indicate that he believed Joe Biden made the same mistake with the secret materials found at his properties:

Meanwhile, the Senate intelligence committee is planning to meet on Wednesday with director of national intelligence Avril Haines, and Republican senator Marco Rubio said the classified document scandal is sure to come up:

Separately, attorney general Merrick Garland was asked about the affair, including whether he would name a special counsel to investigate the documents at Pence’s house, as he did for those found at Biden and Donald Trump’s properties.

His answer was no surprise:

As chair of the House oversight committee, James Comer is a leader of the Republican investigation campaign against the Biden administration – including the president’s possession of classified documents.

He has sent demands to multiple government agencies for more details about the documents found in the president’s residence and former office, and who may have had access to them. But when news broke that Republican former vice president Mike Pence also had classified material in his home, Comer released a statement displaying a softer touch. Here’s what he had to say:

Former Vice President Mike Pence reached out today about classified documents found at his home in Indiana. He has agreed to fully cooperate with congressional oversight and any questions we have about the matter. Former Vice President Pence’s transparency stands in stark contrast to Biden White House staff who continue to withhold information from Congress and the American people.

Just two weeks ago, Mike Pence told CBS news he was “confident” no classified materials were taken when he left the White House in January 2021:

CBS News reports Mike Pence discovered he had classified documents after an aide found the materials “in recent weeks”:

Politico has obtained more details of the classified documents discovered at Mike Pence’s residence in Indiana.

According to a letter from Pence’s attorney Greg Jacobs to the National Archives, the FBI sent agents to the former vice president’s home on the night of 19 January to collect classified documents found in his safe. Pence wasn’t in town at that time – he was in Washington DC for the anti-abortion March for Life.

Jacobs also said he would turn over four boxes containing “copies of Administration papers” to the Archives on 23 January for them to review for secret material:

Back in Georgia, Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis told the court she does not want the special grand jury’s report released.

“We want to make sure that everyone is treated fairly and we think for future defendants to be treated fairly, it is not appropriate at this time to have this report released,” Willis said in arguments before judge Robert McBurney.

Willis is expected to use the report to decide whether to bring charges against Donald Trump’s allies or perhaps the former president himself over the attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s election win in Georgia. She told McBurney that “decisions are imminent.”

Judge Robert McBurney has convened the Fulton county superior court hearing that will decide whether to release the report of the special grand jury that investigated Trump’s election meddling campaign in Georgia.

Follow this blog for the latest, or you can watch the live feed embedded above.

Republican senator Lindsey Graham was one of the witnesses called by the special grand jury investigating the election meddling effort in Georgia.

Georgia’s top election official Brad Raffensperger said that shortly after the 2020 election, the South Carolina lawmaker called him to ask if it was possible to throw out absentee ballots. Graham waged an unsuccessful court battle to avoid testifying before the special grand jury, before finally appearing in November.

CNN reports he does not have much to say about the potential release of the panel’s report:

Live Nation’s chief financial officer apologized for the Taylor Swift ticket fiasco, which he blamed on bots:

Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar meanwhile cited her love for music as the reason she pushed for the hearing on the ticket companies’ business practices:

Free Britney America was formed to raise awareness about pop singer Britney Spears’ battle with her now-ended conservatorship. The group now has a new target: Ticketmaster.

Free Britney America will today be protesting outside the US Capitol as the Senate judiciary committee holds its hearing into Ticketmaster and its parents company Live Nation’s business practices.

“Britney Spears regained her freedom on November 12, 2021, yet the question remained: how could one of the world’s most famous artists be forced to perform for audiences of thousands of fans? Our research into Britney’s conservatorship found that Live Nation was a central player in monetizing her abusive conservatorship. Furthermore, we assert that the inordinate power that Live Nation has across the music industry secures a culture of silence around the abuse of Britney Spears and other artists,” the group said in a statement that announced today’s “Fans Unite to Fight Ticketmaster” protest.

Donald Trump’s foe today – and potentially for many months to come – is an Atlanta prosecutor with a history of taking on organized crime, the Guardian’s Carlisa N. Johnson reports:

An Atlanta prosecutor appears ready to use the same Georgia statute to prosecute Donald Trump that she used last year to charge dozens of gang members and well-known rappers who allegedly conspired to commit violent crime.

Fani Willis was elected Fulton county district attorney just days before the conclusion of the 2020 presidential election. But as she celebrated her promotion, Trump and his allies set in motion a flurry of unfounded claims of voter fraud in Georgia, the state long hailed as a Republican stronghold for local and national elections.

Willis assumed office on 1 January 2021, becoming the first Black woman in the position. The next day, according to reports, Trump called rad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, urging him to “find” the nearly 12,000 votes he needed to secure a victory and overturn the election results.

The following month, Willis launched an investigation into Trump’s interference in the state’s general election. Now, in a hearing on Tuesday, the special purpose grand jury and the presiding judge will decide whether to release to the public the final report and findings of the grand jury that was seated to investigate Trump and his allies.

Today may be a big day for Donald Trump, and not in a good way, the Guardian’s Chris McGreal reports:

A judge in Atlanta will hear legal arguments today to determine if he should make public a Georgia grand jury’s report into whether former president Donald Trump committed criminal offences when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state.

Before the special purpose grand jury was dissolved two weeks ago after months of hearings, its members recommended releasing its findings while the Fulton county district attorney who launched the investigation, Fani Willis, decides whether to press charges against Trump.

Legal scholars have said they believe Trump is “at substantial risk of prosecution” in Georgia over his attempts to strong-arm officials into fixing the election in his favour when it looked as if the state might decide the outcome of the presidential election. At least 18 other people have been told they also potentially face prosecution, including Trump’s close ally and lawyer, the former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

The Fulton county superior court judge who oversaw the grand jury, Robert McBurney, will hear from Willis but not lawyers for Trump, who said on Monday that they will not participate in the hearing. They said that Willis had not sought to interview the former president for the investigation.

“Therefore, we can assume that the grand jury did their job and looked at the facts and the law, as we have, and concluded there were no violations of the law by President Trump,” the lawyers said in a statement.

While mass shootings such as those that occurred over the past days in California may generate headlines and calls for action, the Guardian’s Oliver Holmes reports gun violence is distressingly common in the United States:

Two horrific killings separated by just a few days have shaken California, but such nightmarish mass shootings cannot be considered abnormal in the US. With a week still left in January, this year there have already been 39 mass shootings across the country, five of them in California.

Reports from the Gun Violence Archive, a not-for-profit research group, show the predictability of American mass shootings. Nearly 70 people have been shot dead in them so far in 2023, according to their data – which classifies a mass shooting as any armed attack in which at least four people are injured or killed, not including the perpetrator.

Broadened out to include all deaths from gun violence, not including suicides, 1,214 people have been killed before the end of the first month of this year, including 120 children. That is likely to increase to tens of thousands by the end of 2023 – the figure for 2022 is 20,200.

In comparison, the latest data from the UK showed that in the course of an entire year ending in March 2022, 31 people were killed by firearms. The UK’s population is 67 million to the US’s 333 million.

A familiar cycle occurs after American mass shootings, and by all appearances, it’s happening again after the twin massacres in California.

It goes something like this: multiple people are killed by a gunman, as happened in California’s Monterey Park on Saturday and Half Moon Bay on Monday. Joe Biden calls for new restrictions on gun ownership, arguing they could have prevented the killer from getting their hands on a weapon. He’s backed by most, if not all Democrats in Congress, but rejected by most, if not all, Republicans. The demand goes nowhere.

The one exception to that came after last year’s shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, when Democrats managed to win enough Republican votes to get a package of modest gun control measures through Congress. But the legislation was not the ban on assault weapons Biden called on Congress pass, a demand he repeated in the months since, as mass shootings continued. With Republicans now controlling the House of Representatives, it seems even less likely such a measure will get approved.