MAY 2022 - POLITICAL TRENDING NEWS

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Mo Brooks was left for dead by former President Donald Trump. Now, the Republican congressman running for Senate in Alabama is surging. Two months after Trump torpedoed Brooks’ campaign by rescinding his endorsement — a move that dropped the MAGA stalwart to a distant third place in the GOP primary — Brooks could very well advance to a runoff after Tuesday’s election.

Donald Trump has been lying about voter fraud for so long that his impugning of yet another election seemed almost inevitable. What was more revealing was that, for the first time, Republicans appeared not to be listening.  

Mehmet Oz, the Trump-backed Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, did not prematurely declare victory last week, as Trump said he should. David McCormick, who is running narrowly behind Oz, has not claimed the election is unfair.“No one’s paying any attention to it,” said Christopher Nicholas, a longtime Republican consultant based in Harrisburg.

A Manhattan and Brooklyn Congressional district with no incumbent is turning into a campaign free-for-all.Hours after former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on MSNBC that he would compete for the newly-created 10th Congressional District spanning Brownstone Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, potential challengers piled up.

New York Republicans spent years being rejected by Harry Wilson, a corporate consulting executive who repeatedly demurred a run for governor to focus on his family and career. In February, he finally changed his mind. Now the state GOP is the one rejecting him. 

After their two-hour meeting in Kyiv on Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy handed Mitch McConnell a profanity-laden gift. It was a camo-green hat, emblazoned in bright yellow letters with the iconic phrase that has come to define Ukraine’s response to Russia’s invasion.

John Eastman, the attorney who architected Donald Trump’s last-ditch legal strategy to overturn the 2020 election, revealed Friday that he routinely communicated with Trump either directly or via “six conduits” during the chaotic weeks that preceded the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In a late-night court filing urging a federal judge to maintain the confidentiality of his work for Trump, Eastman provided the clearest insight yet into the blizzard of communications between Trump, his top aides, his campaign lawyers and the army of outside attorneys who were working to help reverse the outcome in a handful of states won by Joe Biden.

A federal judge on Friday blocked the Biden administration’s move to lift Title 42, a Trump-era policy used to expel more than one million migrants at the southern border. The pandemic-related health order, which was implemented in March 2020 to control the spread of Covid, was set to expire on Monday. The measure gave the U.S. the authority to immediately expel asylum seekers without a legal process, and Friday’s ruling means an even longer waiting time for migrants seeking refuge in the United States.

The manager of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid, Robby Mook, testified Friday that the campaign did not instruct or authorize a lawyer to go to the FBI with claims of a potential data link between then-candidate Donald Trump and a Russian bank owned by allies of Russian President Vladimir Putin.  

That lawyer — former Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann — is on trial in federal court in Washington on a felony false-statement charge brought by special counsel John Durham, who claims Sussmann lied to the FBI when he said he was not acting on behalf of any client in relaying indications and internet data stream between a Trump-related server and one for Moscow-based Alfa Bank.

Progressives outraged over the use of the Supreme Court’s emergency “shadow docket” to resolve legal fights over issues like abortion and immigration got some company this week from an unexpected group — conservative skeptics of the tech industry.The tech platforms’ foes on the right are fuming about a crush of pro-Silicon Valley lawyering that has hit the high court in the past seven days, as the industry’s allies urge Justice Samuel Alito to block a Texas law that forbids social media companies from “censoring” their users. Legal briefs from groups supporting the industry have outnumbered pro-Texas briefs by 4 to 1, leaving Republicans to complain that tech is again using its wealth and muscle to overwhelm its critics.

Senate Democrats are contemplating just how hard to go after their White Whale: A Senate seat in North Carolina. The last time Democrats notched a Senate victory in the Tar Heel State was 2008, when former Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) easily beat former GOP Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.). Now, after nominating former state Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley, Democrats are balancing a defense of a 50-50 Senate with a half-dozen other competitive states alongside chasing a long-elusive win.

On Sunday afternoon, Vice President Kamala Harris led an American delegation to the United Arab Emirates to express condolences after the death of the federation’s president. By Monday morning, she was on her way home.

The need for the 36-hour-turnaround reflects one of the critical dual roles Harris has been forced to play in office. She is both the second most high-profile member of the administration and the 101st senator, the latter of which requires her to be in Washington in case she needs to cast a tie-breaking vote.

After the deadly mass shooting left 10 dead in Buffalo this weekend, the White House is significantly stepping up its push for the Senate to confirm Joe Biden’s top gun regulator.  

Administration officials had already been highlighting the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ central role in fighting hate crimes, domestic terrorism and gun violence ahead the shooting in Buffalo, in which an 18-year-old racist targeted a Black neighborhood grocery store. But with Biden set to visit the city on Tuesday, they’re trying to refocus attention on Steve Dettelbach’s nomination to head the agency by spotlighting his record overseeing prosecutions in cases involving racially-motivated violence.