Next January 6 hearing to focus on warnings of violence leading up to Capitol attack – live | US politics

The day so far

An inescapable reality of the upcoming elections is that many Americans will be heading to the polls wondering how they will afford their next meal. From Ohio, Matt Krupnick looks deeper at the causes and consequences of America’s hunger crisis:

The cars started lining up at least an hour before the late shift at the Mid-Ohio Food Collective, a converted mattress factory just south of Columbus. Drivers pulled into a white tent where volunteers rolled grocery carts full of produce, meat, cake, detergent and other items toward each vehicle, efficiently loading trunks.

One volunteer, 31-year-old Danyel Barwick, directed traffic with a big orange flag. It wasn’t long ago that Barwick, a Columbus mother of four, was on the other side of the food bank equation.

“It was humiliating,” said Barwick, who lost her job during the pandemic in 2020 and, realizing she had no protein in the house and had used all her fast-food coupons, decided to visit a food pantry at a local church. “I was embarrassed and sad.”

As US voters prepare to decide control of both houses of Congress in November, millions will head to the polls while struggling to feed themselves and their families. In 2021, according to the US Department of Agriculture, more than 13m households had trouble affording enough food. And there are signs, from census data, that food hardship could be getting worse this year.

You know who’s not on the campaign trail? Mitt Romney, and that’s significant.

The Republican senator from Utah has declined to make an endorsement in the race between Mike Lee, the state’s sitting GOP senator, and independent Evan McMullin. While Utah is deeply red, Lee is apparently worried about his polling lead over McMullin. Politico reports that Lee appeared on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and pled for Romney to endorse him.

“Mitt, if you’d like to protect the Republican majority, give us any chance of seizing the Republican majority once again — getting it away from the Democrats who are facilitating this massive spending spree and a massive inflationary binge — please, get on board. Help me win reelection. Help us do that,” Lee said, according to Politico.

Romney considers both Lee and McMullin to be “good friends,” according to Politico, and has not made an endorsement in the race for that reason. It’s also worth keeping in mind that Romney is one of Donald Trump’s most enduring foes in the Senate, while Lee has been a staunch ally of the former president.

A day after announcing she was leaving the Democratic party, Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman from Hawaii and presidential candidate in 2020, is back on the campaign trail.

She’s heading to New Hampshire to appear alongside Don Bolduc, the Republican candidate for Senate there, who has been an on-and-off endorser of baseless conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen, Politico reports.

“We don’t agree on every issue, but I am honored to have the support of Tulsi Gabbard who shares my view that the status quo is broken, and we need a change of direction,” Bolduc said in a statement, according to Politico. “Tulsi is a fellow change agent and independent-minded outsider willing to speak truth to power.”

A former army general, Bolduc is trying to unseat Democratic senator Maggie Hassan, whom polls indicate has the edge in the race.

Democrats Ro Khanna in the House and Richard Blumenthal in the Senate have proposed legislation to ban US arm sales to Saudi Arabia for a year in retaliation for the Opec+ production cut.

Here’s what they had to say about the measure in a press conference held today, according to Defense News:

The measure would be yet another thing for Congress to find agreement on in the little time they have left before the year ends and the new Congress takes their seats.

‘We will take action’ on Saudi Arabia: Biden

The New York Times has some bad news for fans of political polls. So few people are picking up the phone and talking to survey gatherers that telephone polling may soon become obsolete, its chief political analyst writes.

“I want to dwell on just how few people are answering,” Nate Cohn said in a piece discussing how polling works these days. “In the poll we have in the field right now, only 0.4 percent of dials have yielded a completed interview. If you were employed as one of our interviewers at a call center, you would have to dial numbers for two hours to get a single completed interview.”

“No, it wasn’t nearly this bad six, four or even two years ago,” he continues. “You can see for yourself that around 1.6 percent of dials yielded a completed interview in our 2018 polling.”

Political polling still hasn’t completely recovered from Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016, when pollsters generally had his opponent Hillary Clinton in the lead until election day. While the 8 November midterm elections will provide another opportunity to gauge the accuracy of polling, Cohn warns that the firms gathering the data may need to start innovating to stay competitive in future elections.

“The Times has more resources than most organizations, but this is getting pretty close to ‘death of telephone polling’ numbers. You start wondering how much more expensive it would be to try even ridiculous options like old-fashioned door-to-door, face-to-face, in-person interviews,” Cohn writes.

In other Trumpworld news, the trial of an analyst involved in the creation of the infamous “Steele Dossier” is ongoing, with prosecutors claiming Igor Danchenko lied to the FBI, according to the Associated Press:

A Russian analyst who played a major role in the creation of a flawed dossier about Donald Trump fabricated one of his own sources and concealed the identity of another when interviewed by the FBI, prosecutors said Tuesday.

The allegations were aired during opening statements in the trial of Igor Danchenko, who is indicted on five counts of making false statements to the FBI.

The FBI interviewed Danchenko on multiple occasions in 2017 as it tried to corroborate allegations in what became known as the “Steele dossier”.

That dossier, by the British spy Christopher Steele – commissioned by Democrats during the 2016 presidential campaign – included allegations of contact between the Trump campaign and Russian government officials, as well as allegations that the Russians may have held compromising information over Trump in the form of videos showing him engaged in salacious sexual activity in a Moscow hotel.

Democrats aren’t campaigning on Trump alone. The Guardian’s Poppy Noor spoke with congressman Pat Ryan about what Democrats can learn from his come-from-behind victory in an August special election:

When Democrat Pat Ryan got elected to New York’s 19th – a largely rural district in upstate New York that swung for Trump in 2016 and only narrowly elected Biden in 2020 – people were surprised.

His contender in the August special election, Marc Molinaro, was a well-known local politician who entered the political arena when he was just 18, becoming the mayor of Tivoli, which is in the district, at 19. Molinaro was the favorite to win: leading in the polls, by as much as 10 points, right up to the moment Ryan claimed victory.

The special election was watched with bated breath, as a tight race in a swing seat that could be a harbinger in the midterm elections, where Democrats are fighting to keep a slim House majority come November. Now, people are looking at Ryan’s campaign as a political playbook for how to win other tight races across the country.

Many credit Ryan’s win to seizing the political moment around the fierce fight for abortion rights in the US.

With its reliance on Secret Service documents and focus on how Trump acted before the attack and while it was happening, the January 6 committee appears set on Thursday to dig deeper into subjects that have already produced some of the most alarming revelations from their hearings.

The Secret Service has played an increasingly prominent role in the investigation, after it was revealed the agency deleted all of their text messages from around the time of the attack, blaming it on a pre-planned equipment upgrade. The deletion sparked a federal investigation, and the Post reports that the Secret Service has since turned over more than a million pages of documents to the committee.

In a previous hearing, White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that staff in the Trump administration were worried that violence could break out on January 6. In one of the most shocking parts of the hearings, she also recounted a Secret Service official telling her Trump lunged for the steering wheel of his limo in an attempt to get agents to take him to the Capitol as it was being stormed by his supporters.

It’s unclear if the evidence presented at Thursday’s hearing, which begins at 1 pm eastern time, will further corroborate Hutchinson’s testimony. But the Post reports that lawmakers intend to show that Trump was well aware of how violent January 6 could be, and instead of taking steps to cool tensions, sought to rile up his supporters. The committee is expected to later this year release a report into the insurrection.

January 6 hearing to focus on warnings of violence ahead of insurrection