The U.S. military is considering putting armed personnel on commercial ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz, in what would be an unprecedented action aimed at stopping Iran from seizing and harassing civilian vessels, four American officials told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The U.S. didn’t even take the step during the so-called “Tanker War,” which culminated with the U.S. Navy and Iran fighting a one-day naval battle in 1988 that was the Navy’s largest since World War II. 

While officials offered few details of the plan, it comes as thousands of Marines and sailors on both the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan and the USS Carter Hall, a landing ship, are on their way to the Persian Gulf. Those Marines and sailors could provide the backbone for any armed guard mission in the strait, through which 20% of all the world’s crude oil passes. 

Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the AP about the U.S. proposal. 

Four U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the proposal, acknowledged its broad details. The officials stressed no final decision had been made and that discussions continue between U.S. military officials and America’s Gulf Arab allies in the region. 

Officials said the Marines and Navy sailors would provide the security only at the request of the ships involved. 

The Bataan and Carter Hall left Norfolk, Virginia, on July 10 on a mission the Pentagon described as being “in response to recent attempts by Iran to threaten the free flow of commerce in the Strait of Hormuz and its surrounding waters.” The Bataan passed through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea last week on its way to the Mideast. 

 

Already, the U.S. has sent A-10 Thunderbolt II warplanes, F-16 and F-35 fighters, as well as the destroyer USS Thomas Hudner, to the region over Iran’s actions at sea. 

The deployment has captured Iran’s attention, with its chief diplomat telling neighboring nations that the region doesn’t need “foreigners” providing security. On Wednesday, Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard launched a surprise military drill on disputed islands in the Persian Gulf, with swarms of fast-attack boats, paratroopers and missile units taking part. 

 

The renewed hostilities come as Iran now enriches uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels after the collapse of its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. 

The U.S. also has pursued ships across the world believed to be carrying sanctioned Iranian oil. A ship allegedly carrying Iranian oil is stranded off Texas with no company willing to unload it.
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called out Russia at the United Nations on Thursday for the impact its “unjustified, unconscionable” war in Ukraine is having on global hunger and called for the war to end.

“Every member of this council, every member of the United Nations should tell Moscow, enough. Enough using the Black Sea as blackmail,” Blinken said of Russia’s recent withdrawal from the year-old deal that saw nearly 33 million tons of Ukrainian grain exported to the world. “Enough treating the world’s most vulnerable people as leverage. Enough of this unjustified, unconscionable war.”    

Speaking at a U.N. Security Council meeting he chaired on global food insecurity as part of the United States’ August presidency of the 15-nation council, Blinken emphasized the link between conflict and hunger in crises around the world.  

“Scarce resources, heightened tensions between communities and nations, warring parties weaponizing food to subjugate populations,” he said. “Indeed, conflict is the largest driver of food insecurity, with violence and unrest pushing 117 million people into extreme deprivation last year.” 

The council unanimously agreed on a four-page-long presidential statement calling for respect of international humanitarian law and unimpeded access to aid for civilians in need. The council also emphasized the need to “break the vicious cycle between armed conflict and food insecurity.”  

 

Separately, Secretary Blinken said almost 90 countries, many of them in the global south, had signed onto a U.S.-authored joint communique committing to end the use of famine, starvation, and food as weapons of war.  

“Hunger must not be weaponized,” he said. 

He also announced $362 million in new funding to tackle drivers of food insecurity and enhance resilience in 11 African countries and Haiti.   

Since January 2021, Washington has provided more than $17.5 billion to address famine and food insecurity, including more than $7.2 billion to the World Food Program – nearly half its entire budget.  

Russia’s envoy dismissed Western interest in the issue of food insecurity, saying it is only driven by a desire to “demonize Russia.” 

“How can we talk about any desire on your countries’ part to address international food security issues; all that drives you is the desire to punish Russia in your pipe dreams of dealing it a strategic defeat,” Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Dmitry Polyanskiy, said. “You do not care the slightest bit about the interests of the countries of the global south, but we do.” 

He said Russia is prepared to return to the Black Sea Grain Initiative if all its demands are met. He pointed to Moscow’s announcement that it would send 25,000 to 50,000 tons of free grain to six African countries in the coming months as proof of its goodwill.

Since Moscow unilaterally left the grain deal last month, it has repeatedly targeted several Ukrainian ports, destroying critical infrastructure, facilities, and more than 180,000 tons of grain. Moscow has also warned that it will consider any ships in the Black Sea as carrying military cargo and, therefore, legitimate targets. 

Food prices 

The World Bank said Monday that food price inflation remains high worldwide. The most-affected countries are in Africa, North America, Latin America, South Asia, Europe and Central Asia.    

The Food and Agriculture Organization said in its annual state of food security report released last month that the world is still recovering from economic setbacks from the COVID-19 pandemic and coping with the fallout of the war in Ukraine on food and energy markets.   

The FAO estimates that between 691 million and 783 million people in the world faced hunger in 2022, significantly higher than in 2019 before the pandemic. Much of that hunger was at the regional level, with Africa, the Caribbean, and Western Asia all seeing rising hunger levels.

U.N. famine prevention and response coordinator Reena Ghelani told the council that the number of people suffering from acute food insecurity reached a record 250 million last year. She said 376,000 of them were facing famine-like conditions in seven countries. Another 35 million were on the brink of famine.  

“Every one of the seven countries where people faced famine-like conditions last year was affected by armed conflict or extreme levels of violence,” she said.  

Hunger and famine continue to threaten millions, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. In Sudan, the U.N. said this week that more than 6 million people– about 13% of the population – are now one step away from famine. Across Sudan, more than 20 million people face high levels of acute food insecurity, due to a combination of conflict, economic decline and mass displacement.    

In Somalia, the risk of famine still lingers among communities of displaced people in parts of the country, despite the scale-up of humanitarian assistance and better-than-forecast rains, which have brought some relief from a devastating drought.     

Funding shortfalls are hurting the ability of humanitarian groups to assist the most vulnerable in several at-risk countries.  
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Mexican officials met Tuesday with U.S. and Canadian officials in Mexico to talk about combating the trafficking of the synthetic opioid fentanyl. To get a better understanding of the problem, VOA visited addicts and a counselor from a harm reduction center in Washington. Júlia Riera has the story.
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U.S. President Joe Biden called Thursday for the immediate release of Nigerien President Mohamed Bazoum, who was ousted last week in a military coup.

Biden said in a statement that Niger is “facing a grave challenge to its democracy.”

“The Nigerien people have the right to choose their leaders. They have expressed their will through free and fair elections—and that must be respected,” Biden said.

Defense chiefs from the Economic Community of West African States were due to complete a second day of talks in neighboring Nigeria about the situation.

Days after the coup, ECOWAS enacted sanctions against the coup leaders and set a Sunday deadline for Bazoum to be reinstated with the potential of using military force if he is not.

General Abdourahamane Tchiani, who declared himself the new head of state, said in a televised address Wednesday that the junta “rejects these sanctions altogether and refuses to give into any threats, wherever they come from. We refuse any interference in the internal affairs of Niger.” 

Abdel-Fatau Musah, ECOWAS commissioner for political affairs, peace and security, told reporters Wednesday in Abuja that the military option was a “last resort” for the West African bloc.  But Musah said preparations had to be made for that possibility.

“There is a need to demonstrate that we cannot only bark but can bite,” he said.

ECOWAS also sent a delegation on Wednesday to Niger’s capital, Niamey, for talks with junta members.

Britain said Thursday it was temporarily reducing its embassy staff in Naimey due to security concerns.

On Wednesday, the United States said it was ordering the “temporary departure of non-emergency U.S. government personnel and eligible family members from the U.S. Embassy in Niamey.” It also raised its travel advisory to Level 4 – Do Not Travel – for Niger.

France’s military and foreign ministry continued Wednesday to evacuate people from Niger. The foreign ministry said about 1,000 people left Niger on four flights. The evacuees included French nationals along with others from Niger, Portugal, Belgium, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Germany, Canada, India, Austria and the United States.

Italy also carried out its own evacuation flight.

Military leaders put Bazoum under house arrest on July 26 and named Tchiani, commander of the presidential guard, as their new leader on Monday. Coup leaders said they were acting in response to what they described as a worsening security situation and the government’s lack of action against jihadis.

The coup has been condemned by Western countries, including the U.S., which says it stands with Nigeriens, ECOWAS and the African Union as it continues to work to roll back the coup, U.S. officials say.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke by telephone Wednesday with Bazoum to discuss the situation in Niger, the State Department said.

Spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a statement about the call that the United States “remains committed to the restoration of the democratically-elected government” in Niger.

“We reiterate that the safety and security of President Bazoum and his family are paramount,” Miller said.  “The United States is dedicated to finding a peaceful resolution that ensures that Niger remains a strong partner in security and development in the region.”

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.  
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Aided by rain, firefighters fought to contain a massive blaze that swept through the California desert into Nevada and threatens the region’s famous spiky Joshua trees. 

The York Fire that erupted last Friday is California’s largest wildfire this year. As of early Wednesday it had burned through more than 333 square kilometers of land and was 30% contained, fire officials said. 

Humid monsoonal weather conditions Tuesday afternoon brought brief but heavy rain, especially on the south end of the fire, and kept its spread to a minimum, fire officials said. Similar conditions were expected on Wednesday, with drier weather poised to return on Thursday. 

“Right now, the monsoonal influence is still over the fire,” said Marc Peebles, a spokesperson for California’s incident management team for the York Fire. “There’s always the possibility of showers that will help the effort.” 

Firefighting amid fragility

The 400 or so firefighters battling the blaze have had to balance their efforts with concerns about disrupting the fragile ecosystem in California’s Mojave National Preserve. 

Crews used a “light hand on the land,” clearing and carving fire lines without the use of bulldozers in order to reduce the impact in the ecologically-sensitive region, which is home to some 200 rare plants. 

 

“You bring a bunch of bulldozers in there, you may or may not stop the fire, but you’ll put a scar on the landscape that’ll last generations,” said Tim Chavez, an assistant chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. 

Fire crossed state line

The blaze ignited near the remote Caruthers Canyon area of the vast wildland preserve, crossed the state line into Nevada on Sunday and sent smoke further east into the Las Vegas Valley. 

The fire started on private lands within the preserve, but the cause remains under investigation. Less than 3% of the land in the 6,475-square kilometer preserve is privately owned. 

While it’s one of the largest national parks outside of Alaska and Hawaii, the vast majority of the Mojave National Preserve’s 880,000 visitors last year were just passing through on their way between Southern California and Las Vegas. 

The desert landscape is varied — from mountains and canyons to sand dunes and mesas, to Joshua tree forests and volcanic cinder cones — and features about 10,000 threatened desert tortoises within its boundaries. 

Some of the preserve’s plants can take centuries to recover from destruction. The pinyon-juniper woodlands alone could take roughly 200 to 300 years to return, while the blackbrush scrub and Joshua trees — which grow only in the Mojave Desert — are unlikely to regrow after this catastrophic blaze, said Ileene Anderson, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. 

The 2020 Dome Fire in a different part of the national preserve destroyed an estimated 1 million Joshua trees. 

But fire itself isn’t the only worry. On federal lands, with few people and little property at risk, firefighters sometimes forgo certain equipment like bulldozers, chainsaws and aircraft. 

“You don’t disturb any more soil than you absolutely have to; you don’t cut trees unless they absolutely have to come down,” said Chavez, speaking about the tactics in general. 

When there are ecological and cultural sensitivities at stake, firefighters negotiate with federal officials to determine what equipment can and cannot be used. 

“It’s not just going out there and throwing everything we’ve got at it,” Chavez said. 

In Nevada, the fire has entered the state’s newest national monument, Avi Kwa Ame, said Lee Beyer, a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service. But Beyer said the number of acres burned within the boundaries of the vast monument in southern Nevada wasn’t yet known. 

President Joe Biden established the monument in March, permanently protecting the desert mountain region considered sacred by some tribes. The area stretches more than 202,300 hectares and includes Spirit Mountain, a peak northwest of Laughlin called Avi Kwa Ame (ah-VEE’ kwa-meh) by the Fort Mojave Tribe and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. 

On Wednesday, firefighters continued to make progress on the Bonny Fire, a 9 square kilometer wildfire that broke out nearly a week ago in California’s Riverside County and is now 60% contained. Evacuation orders remain in place for residents near the fire, but some evacuation warnings were lifted late Tuesday, fire officials said. 
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The historic indictment charging former President Donald Trump with conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election alleges, among other things, that Trump and his advisers orchestrated an elaborate plot to undermine the workings of the Electoral College, one of the least understood elements of the U.S. election system.

The indictment, released Tuesday, charges that Trump sought to create confusion surrounding the outcome of the election, which he lost to President Joe Biden, by causing individuals in seven states to send fake election results, known as electoral votes, to Congress.

The hope, according to prosecutors, was that the appearance of the false results alongside officially verified results would give Trump’s allies in Congress justification to claim that the results of the election were unclear and to delay the certification of Biden’s victory.

At minimum, the delay would have provided Trump’s team with more time to contest the result. If the fake results were ultimately accepted — a result that most experts say would have been illegal — the shift in votes across the seven targeted states would have made Trump the winner.

In the end, Congress ignored the fake electoral votes and certified Biden’s victory, but only after a mob of thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, forcing the evacuation of Congress, injuring many police officers and contributing to several deaths.

Trump responds

Trump, who is the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, released a statement angrily denouncing the decision to charge him as “election interference” and decrying the charges against him as “fake.”

“The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes,” it read. “President Trump has always followed the law and the Constitution, with advice from many highly accomplished attorneys.”

 

Tuesday’s indictment was filed in federal court in Washington. Trump is also facing a federal indictment in Florida over his retention of classified national security documents after leaving office, and state-level charges in New York for orchestrating an illegal scheme to pay hush money to a former adult film actress during the 2016 presidential election. It is also widely expected that Trump will soon face state charges in Georgia related to his effort to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in that state.

The Electoral College

The indictment accuses Trump and several unnamed associates of persuading people in seven targeted states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — to pose as legitimately selected electors. Electors are individuals who play a key role in U.S. presidential elections.

The United States elects presidents through a complex system that involves an entity called the Electoral College, which exists for the sole purpose of choosing the next president every four years.

The Electoral College is made up of 538 individual electors, apportioned to the states and the District of Columbia. Before Election Day, the parties of each candidate name a slate of electors, who pledge to cast a vote for that party’s candidate in the Electoral College if their candidate wins the election in their state. Pledged electors whose candidate loses have no authority to cast electoral votes.

On Election Day, the 50 states and the District of Columbia all hold elections according to local election laws. When Americans cast their votes for president, they are technically not voting for a specific candidate. Rather, they are voting for the slate of electors who have pledged to vote for their preferred candidate when the Electoral College convenes.

Federal requirements

According to federal law, presidential elections are held on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. After the election, federal law further requires officials in each state to ascertain the identities of the electors who were chosen by the voters.

This ascertainment is the practical equivalent of declaring one candidate the winner of a state’s election, and that is how the process is typically characterized in the news media. In all but two states, electoral votes are awarded on a winner-take-all basis. In Maine and Nebraska, it is possible for each candidate to receive a partial share of the state’s votes.

Then, on a date also specified by federal law, all the electors in each state and the District of Columbia assemble to formally cast their votes for the president. Those votes are counted and certified by the state executive — typically the governor — and are sent to Congress.

On the sixth day of January following the election, members of both houses of Congress meet in a joint session, at which the sitting vice president oversees the formal counting of the electoral votes. To win the presidency, a candidate must receive a majority of the 538 electoral votes, meaning 270 or more.

 

In a typical U.S. election, every part of this process after the ascertaining of electors is considered a formality. Once the results in each state are declared, it is a simple matter to determine which candidate will receive the most votes when the Electoral College convenes, and that person is considered the president-elect.

However, there was nothing typical about the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.

Claims of fraud

The indictment alleges that Trump and his associates attempted to subvert the Electoral College in the aftermath of the election on November 3, 2020.

Immediately after it became apparent that he had lost the election, Trump and his allies began spreading claims that the results in many of the states that Biden won had been fraudulent. Those claims were untrue and were eventually proved false in dozens of lawsuits.

However, while holding out hope that they might be able to persuade some state officials to change their results, Trump’s associates began contacting individuals who had been the former president’s pledged electors in several targeted states.

According to the indictment, Trump and his associates persuaded these individuals to agree to meet on the same day as the certified electors and to hold an election in which they would declare that Trump had received their electoral votes, even though they had no legal authority to cast electoral votes.

Shifting plans

At first, the effort was characterized as an attempt to “preserve” an alternate slate of electors in each of these states in case efforts to get officials to overturn state election results were successful. Some of the individuals who participated in the scheme did so in the belief that their votes would not be sent to Congress unless their states officially declared Trump the winner.

However, according to prosecutors, the plan changed in the weeks following the election. The indictment presents evidence that Trump and his associates ultimately decided that they would cause the false vote counts to be sent to Congress regardless of the outcome of their efforts to change election results in the individual states.

The indictment alleges that an attorney working on Trump’s behalf provided detailed instructions for the creation of fraudulent votes to be sent to Congress. In the end, seven slates of fake electors sent results to Washington before the January 6 joint session of Congress.

State-level prosecutions

While the fake electoral votes were not accepted by Congress, many of the individuals who signed the false certifications have either been charged with crimes under state laws or remain under investigation.

In Michigan, the state attorney general has charged 16 people with forgery and conspiracy to commit forgery for claiming to be duly chosen electors for Trump and submitting fake votes to Congress.

In Georgia, an investigation into the submission of fake electoral votes is ongoing, but at least eight of the 16 people have accepted plea deals with prosecutors that will allow them to avoid prosecution. The remainder may still face charges.

Prosecutors in Arizona, New Mexico and Wisconsin are conducting investigations.

In Pennsylvania, the fake electors demanded that the document they signed include language specifying that they were only claiming to be duly chosen electors if state officials changed the election results to declare Trump the winner. They are, therefore, expected to avoid criminal prosecution.

In Nevada, prosecutors have announced they will not pursue a case against that state’s fake electors, saying that state laws did not support any charges.
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Refusing to recognize the Taliban as legitimate rulers of Afghanistan and maintaining sanctions on the group’s leaders, the United States continues to reject calls by some former Afghan allies to help topple the extremist regime. 

Last week, Abdul Rashid Dostum, the former vice president of Afghanistan who backed U.S. Special Forces in ousting the Taliban in 2001, claimed he would be able to amass enough forces to overthrow the Taliban again, if only the United States supported him. 

At least two other former Afghan generals — Sami Sadat and Khoshal Sadat — have spent several months in the U.S. seeking support from veterans, lawmakers and other groups for a potential war against the Taliban. 

But the U.S. government response has been unequivocal.

“The United States does not want to see a return to violence in Afghanistan, and we do not support armed opposition to the Taliban,” said a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State, who spoke on background. 

The denial of support comes with a piece of advice to Afghan groups that want to defeat the Taliban militarily. 

“We call on all sides to exercise restraint and to engage. This is the only way that Afghanistan can confront its many challenges,” the spokesperson told VOA.  

U.S. officials say they are aware of former Afghan officials visiting the United States and advocating for armed resistance to the Taliban, but they cannot stop them because the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of expression for everyone inside the country. 

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 left no military support for former allies in the country and disappointed those that oppose the Taliban. 

“We feel betrayed. We feel left alone. … We are empty-handed,” Ahmad Massoud, leader of an anti-Taliban group, told an Aspen Security Forum last week from an undisclosed location via a video call. 

Since seizing power two years ago, the Taliban have controlled all of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces largely uncontested, except for periodic attacks by Islamic State-Khorasan Province.

The Taliban and IS Khorasan each have declared religious war against each other.

The U.S. government has designated leaders of the Taliban and IS-Khorasan as terrorists. However, the Taliban have made counterterrorism commitments to the U.S. under the 2020 Doha Agreement.  

“The Taliban have shown themselves to be an active, and at times, effective actor against the Islamic State,” said Jonathan Schroden, director of the Countering Threats and Challenges Program at the Center for Naval Analyses, a nonprofit military research group.

However, the Taliban have taken no serious actions against other groups such as al-Qaida and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, which “is troubling to the U.S. and its Western allies, as well as to China, Russia and other regional countries,” Schroden said. 

Last week, an IS-Khorasan propaganda wing reportedly issued pamphlets calling on anti-Taliban groups to join arms in their war against the Taliban.   

Nearly all Afghan anti-Taliban leaders reside outside of Afghanistan, making it practically impossible for them to openly align with IS-Khorasan, a globally condemned terrorist group. 

The U.S. policy of not supporting anti-Taliban factions is premised on the notion that giving such aid would escalate the conflict and allow for the expansion of terrorist actors, Schroden said.

Taliban engagement

After suspending direct engagement with the Taliban for months, U.S. diplomats resumed face-to-face talks with Taliban officials in Doha, Qatar, this week. The talks revolved around some of the most contentious issues, including the Taliban’s ban on women’s work and education, which has drawn universal condemnation.

Both sides have reported progress and a desire to continue the engagement policy. 

“The Taliban will not go away by ignoring them,” said Obaidullah Baheer, an Afghan analyst and adjunct lecturer at The New School in New York. 

Baheer said U.S. engagement with the Taliban should not solely depend on contentious human rights conditions but include expectations for the establishment of a new constitutional order in Afghanistan and curbing the god-like powers of the Taliban’s unseen supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada. 

For the U.S., a primary objective in engaging the Taliban has been counterterrorism.

During the two-day meetings in Doha, “U.S. officials took note of the Taliban’s continuing commitment to not allow the territory of Afghanistan to be used by anyone to threaten the United States and its allies, and the two sides discussed Taliban efforts to fulfill security commitments,” according to a statement from the U.S. State Department.

Speaking at an online forum on Tuesday, Mohammad Mohaqiq, an ethnic Hazara warlord and a former Afghan minister, said the many anti-Taliban factions also lack support from Afghanistan’s neighboring countries for a number of reasons, including fears of an expanded armed conflict in the region. 

“We must wait,” Mohaqiq said. 
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Former U.S. President Donald Trump will be facing two vastly different pools of possible jurors and judges with divergent views when he goes on trial in Washington, accused of illegally orchestrating an attempt to upend his 2020 election loss, and in Florida for allegedly trying to hoard classified national security documents.

Trump was indicted by Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith on Tuesday in the Washington case, and Trump is set to make his first court appearance on Thursday afternoon.

A federal court grand jury handed up a four-count indictment alleging that Trump conspired to defraud the United States to stay in power even though he knew he had lost his reelection bid to Democrat Joe Biden and then helped foment the January 6, 2021, riot of Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to block lawmakers from certifying the election outcome.

Jurors do not necessarily decide criminal cases the way they voted in elections, but when the case goes to trial — and that could be months from now — Trump will face a pool of would-be jurors, all residents of Washington, the national capital, who voted against him 92% to 5% in the 2020 election.

In the southern state of Florida, where Trump lives at his oceanside Mar-a-Lago estate in the winter months, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has indicated she is likely to hold the classified documents case Smith filed against Trump at the courthouse where she normally presides, in Fort Pierce, about 200 kilometers (124 miles) north of the resort city of Miami.

If the trial is in Fort Pierce, jurors would be chosen from a list of voters in five counties, four of which handed Trump more than 60% of their votes in the 2020 election, while he eked out a slim majority in the fifth county.

The two federal judges overseeing the cases have already issued rulings for and against Trump.

Cannon, a Trump appointee to the federal bench in the waning days of his presidency, was randomly picked to oversee the classified documents case. Last year, she appointed a special master Trump sought, over the protests of Smith’s prosecutors, to review documents seized from Mar-a-Lago, which at the time delayed the government’s investigation.

The government appealed her decision and an appellate court rebuked Cannon, ruling that she had no right to name the special master.

More recently, when Smith sought to start the classified documents trial in December and Trump’s lawyers wanted to push it past the 2024 election, Cannon pretty much split the difference, ordering the trial to start in May 2024.

In Washington, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, nominated to the federal bench by former Democratic President Barack Obama, was randomly selected to oversee the case accusing Trump of election interference to stay in power.

Smith alleged that Trump knew he had lost but continued to make false claims that he had been cheated out of another four-year term in the White House and then tried to keep Congress from certifying that Biden had won, resulting in the mayhem at the Capitol on January 6 two years ago.

A specially appointed committee in the House of Representatives examined the riot at length in public hearings last year, and Chutkan played a role in the committee’s evidence gathering.

Trump sought to block release of documents sought by the committee by asserting executive privilege over the material, even though he was no longer president and Biden had cleared the way for the National Archives to turn over the papers. Chutkan ruled that Trump could not claim that his privilege “exists in perpetuity.”

Chutkan notably wrote, “Presidents are not kings, and plaintiff is not president.”

Chutkan is one of two dozen federal judges in Washington who have overseen the cases of rioters charged with offenses for their roles in the January 6 rampage at the Capitol building.

She has sentenced all 38 defendants convicted in her court to prison terms, ranging from 10 days to more than five years. In four of the cases, prosecutors weren’t seeking any jail time at all.

“It has to be made clear that trying to violently overthrow the government, trying to stop the peaceful transition of power and assaulting law enforcement officers in that effort is going to be met with absolutely certain punishment,” she said at one sentencing.
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