Amid anger over Gaza, rift seen between Biden, Muslims
WASHINGTON — Last year, President Biden hadn’t even spoken a word at the White House celebration of Ramadan before someone shouted out “we love you.” Hundreds of Muslims were there to mark the end of the holy month that requires fasting from sunrise to sunset.
There are no such joyous scenes during this Ramadan. With many Muslim Americans outraged over Biden’s support for Israel’s siege of Gaza, the White House chose to hold a smaller iftar dinner on Tuesday evening. The only attendees will be people who work for his administration.
“We’re just in a different world,” said Wa’el Alzayat, who leads Emgage, a Muslim advocacy organization. “It’s completely surreal. And it’s sad.”
Alzayat attended last year’s event, but he declined an invitation to break his fast with Biden this year, saying, “It’s inappropriate to do such a celebration while there’s a famine going on in Gaza.”
After rejections from Alzayat and others, he said the White House adjusted its plans on Monday, telling community leaders that it wanted to host a meeting focusing on administration policy. Alzayat still said no, believing that one day was not enough time to prepare for an opportunity to sway Biden’s mind on the conflict.
“I don’t think the format will lend itself to a serious policy discussion,” he said Tuesday afternoon.
The refusal to break bread — or even share a room — with the president is fresh evidence of how fractured the relationship between Biden and the Muslim community has become six months after Israel and Hamas began their current war.
When the Democratic president took office three years ago, many Muslim leaders were eager to turn the page on Donald Trump’s bigotry, including his campaign pledge to implement a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
But now Democrats fear that Biden’s loss of support among Muslims could help clear a path for his Republican predecessor to return to the White House. This year’s election will likely hinge on a handful of battleground states, including Michigan with its significant Muslim population.
“There are real differences between the two,” Alzayat said. “But emotionally, there may be no differences for some folks. And that’s the danger.”
He added, “It’s not good enough to tell people Donald Trump is going to be worse.” ASSOCIATED PRESS
Judge rejects bid to drop case against Hunter Biden
A federal judge rejected more than a half-dozen requests from Hunter Biden’s attorneys arguing that the nine-count criminal tax case against him should be dismissed.
The ruling was issued less than a week after US District Judge Mark Scarsi held a threehour hearing in his Los Angeles courtroom delving into the legal issues around the dismissal motions.
The rejections mean that the president’s son will probably head to trial in Los Angeles unless he strikes a deal with prosecutors on the three felony and six misdemeanor tax charges. Scarsi has already scheduled the trial to start in June, right in the middle of President Biden’s reelection campaign. Hunter Biden is also scheduled to go to trial that same month in a separate federal case in Delaware on gun charges.
One of Hunter Biden’s motions to dismiss the case alleged that prosecutors’ decision to bring the charges was wrongly influenced by political pressure. Another says the top prosecutor who brought the charges — David Weiss, the US attorney in Delaware — was not properly appointed as a special counsel. And another said that all the charges should not have been filed in California because Biden was not living in the state for the entirety of the allegations in the indictment.
Scarsi, who seemed skeptical of the requests at the hearing, rejected them, with a particularly biting rebuke to the motion claiming that the charges were politically motivated. WASHINGTON POST
Trump doubles down on harsh words for migrants
GREEN BAY, Wis. — Former president Donald Trump again cast President Biden’s immigration record in violent and ominous terms on Tuesday, accusing him of creating a “border blood bath” and once more using dehumanizing language to describe some migrants entering the country illegally.
In a speech in Grand Rapids, Mich., Trump, flanked by law enforcement officers, reiterated his baseless claim that other countries were sending “prisoners, murderers, drug dealers, mental patients, and terrorists, the worst they have” to the United States. Immigration officials have said that most of those crossing the border are members of vulnerable families escaping poverty and violence.
Trump also used his speech, which lasted roughly 45 minutes, to defend his use of dehumanizing language to refer to immigrants accused of crimes. “Democrats said please don’t call them ‘animals,’” Trump said. “I said no, they’re not humans, they’re animals.”
Trump drew attention last month when, while discussing the US auto industry, he predicted a “blood bath for the country” should he lose in November. After critics accused him of stoking violence, Trump and his allies pointed back to Biden, insisting he was responsible for a “blood bath” because of his immigration policies.
The former president has repeatedly criticized Biden, accusing him of maintaining lax border security that he blames for violent crime, though available data does not support the idea that migrants are contributing to increases in crime.
Trump’s use of “blood bath” comes as his campaign appears to be trying to turn it into a catchphrase.
On Tuesday, the Republican National Committee, which the Trump campaign now effectively controls, launched a website, BidenBloodbath.com, that mirrors Trump’s argument that Biden is responsible for an “invasion” at the United States’ border with Mexico. The site highlights a number of violent crimes in which immigrants in the country illegally have been
Judge says N.M. must release voter rolls
SANTA FE — New Mexico election officials violated public disclosure provisions of the National Voter Registration Act by refusing to provide voter rolls to a conservative group and its public online database, a federal judge has ruled.
The opinion and order Friday from Albuquerque-based US District Court Judge James Browning mostly sided with the Voter Reference Foundation and its efforts to expand a free database of registered voters so that groups and individuals can take it upon themselves to try to find potential irregularities or fraud.
Election officials in several states and privacy advocates have raised alarms about a push by several conservative groups to gain access to state voter rolls, saying the lists could find their way into the hands of malicious actors and that voters could be disenfranchised through intimidation, possibly by canceling their registrations to avoid public disclosure of their home addresses and party affiliation.
New Mexico election law bans the publication of voter registration data. It restricts the use of the data to government purposes. But Browning ruled that system “severely burdens the circulation of voter data among the public” and violates federal disclosure requirements.
“The data sharing ban largely deprives individuals and entities of the ability to engage with disclosed records in such a way that facilitates identification of voter registration-related irregularities,” Browning wrote.
His ruling builds on a federal appeals court ruling in February that Maine must release its voter list to another conservativebacked group, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, that’s conducting independent audits by comparing voter rolls in one state against those in another. ASSOCIATED PRESS