The white Atlanta police officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooks was charged with murder. Another officer who was involved in the killing faces three charges, including aggravated assault and violation of oath.
Former national security adviser John Bolton alleges that Trump tried to halt criminal investigations as “personal favors” to dictators and asked China for re-election help in his upcoming book. Democrats have sized the revelations as more evidence to support Trump’s impeachment but have also criticized Bolton for declining to testify during the impeachment inquiry.
Joe Biden accused Donald Trump of surrendering the fight against coronavirus said that the president “sold out” the US in allegedly asking China for re-election help. Biden said Trump had violated a “sacred duty” to the American people.
Officials in Tulsa, Oklahoma, worried that the president’s plan to hold a huge political indoor rally in the city on Saturday will inflame racial tensions and put people at risk of catching coronavirus. Some have urged Trump to postpone the event. The city’s Republican mayor said that it was an “honor” to host the president, but said he would not be attending the rally.
A CDC report found that nearly 70% of 220 patients hospitalized in Atlanta were Black. With cases rising in some parts of the nation as cities reopen bars, restaurants, and other public venues, the pandemic continues to expose deeply entrenched inequalities.
Joe Biden, in response to the allegation that Trump asked China for help getting re-elected, said that the president “sold out the American people to protect his political future”.
Here’s more from Biden:
Today, we learned from John Bolton, the President’s former national security advisor, that President Trump sold out the American people to protect his political future. He reportedly directly asked Xi Jinping, China’s leader, to help him get re-elected. He was willing to trade away our most cherished democratic values for the empty promise of a flimsy trade deal that bailed him out of his disastrous tariff war that did so much damage to our farmers, manufacturers, and consumers.
If these accounts are true, it’s not only morally repugnant, it’s a violation of Donald Trump’s sacred duty to the American people to protect America’s interests and defend our values.
Democrats have seized on allegations that Trump requested political help from China, emphasizing evidence to support having impeached Trump.
Here’s Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer:
Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer)
It was clear then and could not be any clearer now: the vote to convict and remove Donald Trump from office was absolutely the right vote.
The revelations in Bolton’s book make Senate Republicans’ craven actions on impeachment look even worse—and history will judge them for it.
But as Elizabeth Warren pointed out, any revelations in Bolton’s book have come too late. Bolton declined to testify during the impeachment inquiry last year.
Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren)
It shouldn’t take a book deal for members of this administration to come clean about impeachable offenses they witnessed from Trump.
There's a reason he thinks he’s above the law. Those around him—from his cabinet to Republicans in Congress—have failed to hold him accountable.
In Boston, demonstrators organized a law enforcement “appreciation rally” and faced off against Black Lives Matter protesters.
Here’s a view of the scene, from WGBH reporter Tori Bedford.
Tori Bedford (@Tori_Bedford)
there are clear sides to each protest, and the middle of the rotary is a meeting point where people are getting in little fights. pic.twitter.com/kQGIt4Od7M
The pro-police protesters were carrying “Thin Blue Line” American flags, which defenders have said represent a solemn tribute to fallen officers. But the flag has also been criticized as a symbol of white supremacy, appearing next to the confederate flag at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
Per witnesses at the rally in Boston today, someone carrying the Thin Blue Line flag spat at a passing car with a Black driver, and police escorted the driver away.
Officers were instructed not to use body cameras during the raid of journalist Bryan Carmody’s home, in a San Francisco police department memo obtained by the nonprofit Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
In the memo, lieutenant Pilar Torres said officers conducting the raid should “lieutenant Pilar Torres states that he told law enforcement officers conducting the raid “not to utilize our department issued BWC’s [body worn cameras] for this operation” to avoid compromising the “confidential investigation”.
San Francisco has reached a $369,000 settlement with Carmody. Officers raided the freelance journalist’s home in 2019 and seized notebooks and other materials after he refused to disclose the source who shared a confidential police report on the death of a San Francisco public defender.
The case is receiving renewed interest amid the new revelations and amid increased scrutiny over the police’s treatment of journalists covering the recent protests against police brutality.
CDC report: in Atlanta, Black coronavirus patients were much more likely to be hospitalized than white patients
In March and April, out of 220 coronavirus patients who were hospitalized, 79% were Black. Older Black men made up 52% of those hospitalized. By comparison, 13% of hospitalized patients were white, per the report published Wednesday.
The unequal toll of the coronavirus pandemic on Black and minority communities has now been well documented throughout the country. A previous CDC report found that more than 80% of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 in Georgia were Black.
As the state has loosened restrictions and increased testing, the number of cases reported has increased in four of the past five weeks.
The Republican mayor of Tulsa has said he won’t be attending Trump’s rally on Saturday.
At a press conference, mayor GT Bynum said it will be a “tremendous honor” to host Trump in Tulsa, but that he won’t attend the event. “I’m not positive that everything is safe,” he said, and encouraged attendees to wear masks.
Officials, residents and civil rights activists have called on Nynum to cancel the rally at the BOK Center in Tulsa, which as a 19,000-seat capacity — warning the event could not only cause the coronavirus to spread, but also inflame racial tensions.
Bynum said that the company managing the venue has “sole discretion” over hosting the event. “The president chose this city, and so it falls on us,” Bynum said. “And it is an honor.”
Several nooses were found hanging on trees in Oakland, California, the latest in a spate of racist, anti-black related crimes under investigation across the state.
Police are investigating the nooses as a hate crime. They were found in the Lake Merritt area, a popular outdoor space and neighborhood.
“Symbols of racial violence have no place in Oakland and will not be tolerated,” Oakland’s mayor, Libby Schaaf, said in a statement. “We are all responsible for knowing the history and present day reality of lynchings, hate crimes and racial violence. Objects that invoke such terror will not be tolerated in Oakland’s public spaces.”
Schaaf noted that there were some reports that the nooses might have been hung as part of exercise equipment, but that does not “remove nor excuse their torturous and terrorizing effects”.
The discovery of the nooses comes on the heels of investigations into the hanging deaths of two black men in southern California.
Robert Fuller, 24, was found dead hanging from a tree near Palmdale city hall in the early hours of 10 June. The county medical examiner initially labeled the preliminary cause of death as suicide pending a full autopsy, noting the lack of evidence of foul play. But following widespread outcry, the coroner deferred the decision and the Los Angeles county sheriff announced that the FBI and the state attorney general’s office will be monitoring the investigation.
Ten days earlier, 38-year-old Malcolm Harsch was found dead hanging from a tree in front of the Victorville public library in San Bernardino county, about 50 miles away from where Fuller was found dead.
Today is the fifth anniversary of the Charleston massacre when white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine people at Emanuel AME church.
Despite a South Carolina law protecting monuments, officials in Charleston announced that they will remove a statute of John C Calhoun, a former vice-president and advocate for slavery.
Mayor John Tecklenburg announced that he will send a resolution to the city council to have the statue taken down. To do so is “not to erase our long and often tragic history but to begin to write a new and more equitable future”, he said.
philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_)
5 years ago on this date, these 9 people were killed by a white supremacist at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC. #Emanuel9pic.twitter.com/Jl9AEvfIwZ
Reverend Nelson Rivers said Calhoun “represents Dylann Roof to us”.
“The time has come to not just acknowledge your racist evil wicked past. The time has come to take down the monuments that honor the evil that was done in the name of Charleston, in the name of South Carolina,” Rivers said on Tuesday.
Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Atlanta mayor, told The View that though she’s “encouraged” by Donald Trump’s executive order on police reform, “it’s hard to take him seriously in this moment.”
Bottoms, who has found herself on a shortlist of contenders to be Joe Biden’s running mate, said he was disappointed that the president’s executive order didn’t address racial bias in policing.
“We don’t have another minute to spare. We convened an advisory task force in Atlanta to look at our use of force policies, and not three days later, then Rayshard Brooks was killed in Atlanta,” she said. “We don’t have time for the theatrics. We’ve gotta have action right now and we needed it yesterday.”
It’s been a very busy afternoon in US politics and there will be more to come when Maanvi Singh takes over from the west coast for the next few hours.
Here’s what happened this afternoon:
Joe BidenaccusedDonald Trump of surrendering the fight against coronavirus in the US, with the nation rushing to reopen as the president encourages it, despite cases rising in news hotspots across several states.
The white Atlanta police officer who shot Rayshard Brooks, who is black,was charged with murder this afternoon in the man’s killing.
In his upcoming book, former national security adviser John Bolton reportedly arguesTrump should have been impeached for more than just the Ukraine controversy, claiming the president tried to halt criminal investigations as “personal favors” to dictators.
Officials in Tulsa, Oklahoma, worry that the president’s plan to hold a huge political indoor rally in the city on Saturday will inflame racial tensions and put people at risk of catching coronavirus. Some have urged Trump to postpone the event.
Biden accuses Trump of "surrendering" nation to coronavirus
Lauren Gambino
Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, on Wednesday laced into Donald Trump over his handling of the coronavirus, accusing him of “surrendering the fight” against the Covid-19 outbreak as more than a dozen US states experience sharp rises in reported cases.
“He’s waived a white flag, and has retreated,” Biden said.
Joe Biden arrives at Carlette’s Hideaway, a soul food restaurant, in Yeadon, Pennsylvania, earlier today to speak with small business owners. Photograph: Matt Slocum/AP
He accused the administration of “engaging in self-congratulations” when the number of deaths each month still exceeds the number of war dead in World War II.
“Just like he couldn’t wish Covid-19 away in March, just like he couldn’t tweet it away in April, he can’t ignore it away in June,” Biden said. “Mr President, wake up. Get to work,” he said in closing. “There’s so much more to be done.” Biden began his remarks by marking the fifth anniversary of the Charleston massacre, when a white supremecist murdered nine black parishioners as they prayed.
Biden, who was vice president at the time, said he continues to marvel at their “amazing grace” and capacity to forgive the perpetrator of what he called a “poisonous expression of white supremacy that still infects our nation and many of our institutions.”
But, acknowledging the ongoing protests against racism and police brutality, he said “grace alone is not enough.”
The New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio, announced that the city is launching an online database that will let New Yorkers track disciplinary cases against police officers accused of excessive force and other violations and view their administrative records.
The New York police department will also adopt tighter deadlines to speed up the disciplinary process, the mayor said, according to the latest from the Associated Press.
NYPD police officers watch demonstrators in New York City’s Times Square during a “Black Lives Matter” protest earlier this month. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images
The reforms are meant to bring more transparency to a system long criticized for being too secretive and plagued by lengthy delays in holding police officers accountable for misconduct.
“We have to know that if something’s done right, it will be recognized and when something’s done wrong, it will be acted on,” De Blasio said. “When people know that, that’s what helps them have greater faith.”
He added: “I want everything we have to be put on online.”
The move drew a swift rebuke from the head of the Police Benevolent Association, the city’s largest police union, who said it undermines privacy protections.
Lynch also labeled the measures to expedite cases “arbitrary” and vulnerable to predetermined outcomes driven by politics.
The announcement from De Blasio, who ran for the Democratic nomination for president in the 2020 election, but did not prevail, follows decisions in recent days to make officers’ body-camera footage more widely available and to disband a plainclothes anti-crime unit that critics said was too aggressive.
Last week, state governor Andrew Cuomo also signed legislation barring the NYPD and other police departments in the state from keeping the public in the dark about disciplinary records.
Donald Trump set out a plan on Wednesday aimed at helping to prevent suicides by US military veterans, which he described as a “tremendous problem”.
“Ending the tragedy of veteran suicide demands bold action at every level of society,” the president said in the east room of the White House. “Twenty veterans and service members take their own lives every single day. The loss of our heroes breaks our hearts and pains our souls.”
Trump announced 10 recommendations, including providing suicide prevention training and enhancing research, and a public health awareness campaign led by Second Lady Karen Pence, who said: “We’re all dealing with anxiety. We’re all dealing with stress right now so, if I can do anything as lead ambassador, it’s my goal to help take away the stigma of mental health.”
The initiative is called The President’s Roadmap to Empower Veterans and End a National Tragedy of Suicide, or PREVENTS, and had been delayed for three months by the coronavirus pandemic.
Although Trump stayed mostly on-script, he could not resist a swipe at his predecessor, Barack Obama, and his 2020 election rival, Joe Biden. “After years of shameful scandal and neglect under the Obama-Biden administration, and scandal and neglect it was, we have fundamentally reorganised the VA [Department of Veterans Affairs] from top to bottom,” he said.
The remarks occurred at the same time as a speech by Biden in Pennsylvania. All three major cable news networks – CNN, Fox News and MSNBC – gave live coverage to the former vice president instead of Trump.
The president’s relationship with the military has been strained by his aggressive reaction to the protests against racial injustice in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
