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President Joe Biden has defended his economic record in an interview with the Associated Press, downplaying the risk of a recession but acknowledging that many Americans are going through hard times.

Biden doesn’t grant very many interviews, and this encounter comes after a slew of grim economic developments. These include worse-than-expected inflation numbers in May that show prices continuing to rise, gasoline at a record high and aggressive Federal Reserve action that’s raised fears the economy could be set for a prolonged contraction.

All of these have been factors in his record-low approval ratings.

Here’s the president’s perspective on the state of the world’s largest economy:

He said a recession is not inevitable and bristled at claims by Republican lawmakers that last year’s COVID-19 aid plan was fully to blame for inflation reaching a 40-year high, calling that argument “bizarre.”

As for the overall American mindset, Biden said, “People are really, really down.”

“They’re really down,” he said. “The need for mental health in America, it has skyrocketed, because people have seen everything upset. Everything they’ve counted on upset. But most of it’s the consequence of what’s happened, what happened as a consequence of the COVID crisis.”

Speaking to the AP in a 30-minute Oval Office interview, Biden addressed the warnings by economists that the United States could be headed for a recession.

“First of all, it’s not inevitable,” he said. “Secondly, we’re in a stronger position than any nation in the world to overcome this inflation.”

The president said he saw reason for optimism with the 3.6% unemployment rate and America’s relative strength in the world.

“Be confident, because I am confident we’re better positioned than any country in the world to own the second quarter of the 21st century,” Biden said. “That’s not hyperbole, that’s a fact.”

The January 6 committee has concluded for the day, but before they finished, they revealed a key piece of information about the conduct of John Eastman, the lawyer who crafted former president Donald Trump’s strategy to overturn the election in 2020.

Eastman sought a pardon from Trump in the closing days of his presidency, writing to Rudy Giuliani, another lawyer for the president, “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardoned list, if that is still in the works.” The committee added that he did not receive one.

Eastman’s actions were covered in detail at today’s hearing, particularly his efforts to convince Mike Pence that his position as vice-president gave him the authority to hand the election to Trump when Congress met to certify on January 6, 2021. Pence declined to do that.

J Michael Luttig, a former US appellate court judge who is considered one of the top conservative legal minds in the United States, has warned the January 6 committee that Donald Trump poses a continuing danger to the country’s democracy.

“Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy,” Luttig said.

“That’s not because of what happened on January 6. It’s because to this very day, the former president and his allies and supporters pledge that in presidential election of 2024, if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican party presidential candidate were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020.”

“That’s what the former president and his allies are telling us,” Luttig said.

John Eastman himself has finally appeared, this time in a frosty videotaped deposition shown by the committee.

“I assert my fifth amendment right against being compelled to be a witness against myself,” Eastman said in the compilation of clips from the encounter, which shows lawyers from the committee asking Eastman a series of questions about his actions around January 6.

“Fifth,” he replies to each one.

Before that aired, former White House attorney Eric Herschmann described a call from Eastman the day after the attack.

“He started to ask me about something dealing with Georgia and preserving something potentially for appeal. And I said to him, are you out of your effing mind?” Herschmann recalls.

“I only want to hear two words coming out of your mouth for now on: orderly transition,” he said he told Eastman. “I don’t want to hear any other effing words coming out of your mouth, no matter what.”

“Eventually, he said ‘orderly transition.’ I said, good, John. Now I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life. Get a great effing criminal defense lawyer, you’re going to need it. And then I hung up on him,” Herschmann said.

Even after the Capitol had been stormed, Trump lawyer John Eastman continued to pressure Pence to try to overturn the election.

“I implore you one last time, can the vice-president please do what we’ve been asking him to do these last two days: suspend the joint session, send it back to the states,” Pence’s counselor Greg Jacob recalls Eastman asking, citing alleged violations of the Electoral Count Act during the joint session of Congress disrupted by the insurrection.

The committee is now dealing with the storming of the Capitol, showing Pence working in what looks like a loading dock after evacuating the Senate chamber as the rioters approached.

“Make no mistake about the fact that the vice-president’s life was in danger,” Representative Pete Aguilar said, pointing to an FBI affidavit from an informant in the Proud Boys militia group.

“They said that anyone they got their hands on they would have killed including Nancy Pelosi,” the informant told the FBI, adding that “members of the Proud Boys said that they would have killed Mike Pence if given a chance.”

As for Trump, Jacob said the president never called Pence to check on him, which the vice-president reacted to “with frustration.”

Pence started January 6 out with a prayer with his staff, followed by what witnesses described to the committee as a nasty phone call from Trump.

“The conversation was pretty heated,” testified Ivanka Trump, who saw the president on the phone.

“I remember hearing the word wimp,” Nicholas Luna, an assistant to Trump, testified. “I don’t remember, he said you are a wimp. You’ll be a wimp. Wimp is the word I remember.”

Gen Keith Kellogg, Pence’s national security advisor at the time, said Trump told the vice-president he was “not tough enough to make the call.”

The January 6 committee has resumed its hearing, after spending most of the past two hours detailing the pressure campaign in the days before the insurrection against vice-president Mike Pence.

“Despite the fact that the vice-president consistently told the president that he did not have and would not want the power to decide the outcome of the presidential election, Donald Trump continued to pressure the vice-president, both publicly and privately,” California Democrat Pete Aguilar said as the hearing resumed.

“You will hear things reached a boiling point on January 6, and the consequences were disastrous.”

The January 6 committee is taking a quick break, but just before they concluded, they aired testimony from Pence’s former chief of staff Marc Short, who said he so feared for the vice-president’s safety as tensions rose with Trump that he warned the Secret Service.

“The concern was for the vice-president’s security and so I wanted to make sure the head of the vice-president’s Secret Service was aware that likely, as these disagreements became more public, that the president would lash out in some way,” Short said.

The New York Times had broken the story of Short’s concerns earlier this month.

At Trump’s request, Pence met with Eastman again on 5 January. According to Jacob, Eastman made a new request as soon as the meeting began: “He said, ‘I’m here to request that you reject the electors.’”

That was the option that just the day before Eastman had said was “less politically palatable,” and Jacob told the committee he “was surprised, because I had viewed it as one of the key concessions that we had secured the night before from Mr Eastman, that he was not recommending that we do that.”

Jacob then recounts how he debated the legality of the approach with Eastman, concluding that if the courts didn’t declare it illegal, it would create a standoff pitting the president against the vice president, Congress, and states nationwide. The “issue might well then have to be decided in the streets. Because if we can’t work it out politically, we’ve already seen how charged up people are about this election, and so it would be a disastrous situation to be in”, Jacob said.

But Eastman wouldn’t give in. “I concluded by saying, John, in light of everything that we’ve discussed, can’t you just both agree that this is a terrible idea?” Jacob recalls telling Eastman, referring to Trump. “And he couldn’t quite bring himself to say yes to that. But he very clearly said, ‘Well, yeah, I see. We’re not going to be able to persuade you to do this.’”

The committee is detailing the pressure campaign against Pence, focusing now on a 4 January 2021 meeting called by Trump to discuss the joint session of Congress two days ahead.

Eastman attended the meeting between the two leaders, and Jacob said the lawyer presented Pence with two options available to him on January 6.

“One of them was that he could reject electoral votes outright,” said Jacob, who was Pence’s counsel at the time and attended the meeting along with Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short and, briefly, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows.

“The other was that he could use his capacity as presiding officer to suspend the proceedings and declare essentially a 10-day recess,” Jacob said.

During that period, “states that he deems to be disputed — there was a list of five to seven states that the exact number changed from conversation to conversation — but that the vice-president could issue a demand to the state legislatures in those states to reexamine the election and declare who had won each of those states,” Jacob said.

Eastman “did not recommend what he called the more aggressive option” of rejecting the electoral votes entirely “because he thought that that would be less politically palatable,” Jacob said.

While he wouldn’t discuss what he heard Trump and Pence speak about, Jacob said the vice-president rejected Eastman’s argument. “The vice-president never budged from the position that I have described as his first instinct, which was that it just made no sense from everything that he knew and had studied about our Constitution, that one person would have that kind of authority.”

With its focus on arcane aspects of the law, this hearing is so far denser than the prior two, but the committee is sticking with its strategy: bringing out testimony from former senior Trump officials who say they never believed in the president when it came to his belief that he could win a second term.

Lawmakers have heard Luttig and Jacob roundly reject the legal theories promoted by Trump attorney Eastman, and the committee has now aired video testimony from a number of former White House officials, including Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, White House attorney Eric Herschmann and Jason Miller, a former senior adviser to Trump.

Miller put the view of Eastman’s theory most concisely with his reply when asked how other senior officials viewed it: “They thought it was crazy.”

The committee is now looking at the actions of John Eastman, the architect of Trump’s theory that he could overturn the election.

Eastman, an attorney who formerly taught law at Chapman University in California, is a recurring character in the January 6 inquiry. Luttig is now taking apart Eastman’s theory, which asserted that rather than certifying slates of electors from swing states that supported Biden, Pence could instead certify alternate electors from those states who would support Trump, handing him a second term.

“He was incorrect,” Luttig said, going on to say, “There was no basis in the constitution or laws of the United States at all for it, the theory espoused by Mr Eastman, at all. None.”

Thompson has sweared in the day’s two witnesses: Greg Jacob, who was Pence’s counsel during his time in office and with him on the day of the insurrection, and J Michael Luttig, a retired judge and informal Pence adviser.

Jacob has given a lawerly assessment of the origins of the theory that Pence had the power to stop Joe Biden from assuming office.

“What you have is a sentence in the constitution that is inartfully drafted,” Jacob said.

“But the vice-president’s first instinct when he heard this theory was that there was no way that our framers, who abhorred concentrated power, who had broken away from the tyranny of George III, would ever have put one person, particularly not a person who had a direct interest in the outcome, because they were on the ticket for the election, in a role to have decisive impact on the outcome of the election.”

“And frankly, just common sense, all confirmed the vice-president’s first instinct on that point. There is no justifiable basis to conclude that the vice-president has that kind of authority,” Jacob concluded.

Luttig, whom committee chair Bennie Thompson described as “one of the leading conservative legal thinkers in the country” reiterated his belief that if Pence had done as Trump asked, it would have been an unprecedented blow to American governance.

“That declaration of Donald Trump as the next president would have plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis,” Luttig said.

The committee just aired a video intended to show the threats to the vice-president on January 6, beginning with Trump’s speech to supporters who went on to attack the Capitol: “Mike Pence is gonna have to come through for us and if he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country.”

The video then shows the crowd breaching the building while chanting “hang Mike Pence!” It ends with the image of a makeshift gallows with a hangman’s noose in front of the Capitol.

“How did we get to the point where President Trump’s most radical supporters with a violent attack on the Capitol and threatened to hang President Trump’s own vice president?” asked California Democrat Pete Aguilar, who showed the video.

Answering that question is the goal of today’s hearing.

The January 6 committee has begun its third hearing, which will be focused on efforts to pressure vice-president Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election.

“We are fortunate for Mr. Pence’s courage. On January 6, our democracy came dangerously close to catastrophe. That courage put him in tremendous danger. When Mike Pence made it clear that he wouldn’t give in to Donald Trump’s scheme, Donald Trump turned the mob on him,” the committee chair Bennie Thompson said in his opening remarks.

As with the prior two hearings, today will include in-person testimony from witnesses along with video clips of interviews with former Trump administration officials and others.

Joanna Walters

The White House media briefing is taking place now, with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre presiding – squeezing it in before the next January 6 committee hearing, which is just moments away.

She said that the Biden administration is “working very hard to learn more” of the fate of two US citizens who are missing in Ukraine.

There are concerns they have been captured by the invading Russian forces.

Alexander Drueke, 39, of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Andy Huynh, 27, of Hartselle, Alabama, went to Ukraine as volunteer fighters to assist the Ukrainian forces’ efforts to push the Russians back.

The men’s families have not heard from them since June 8, Reuters reports, and they did not return from a mission around the Kharkiv region of eastern Ukraine, where there is fierce combat as Russia advances.

“When it comes to wrongfully holding Americans and using them as bargaining chips … the US opposes that everywhere,” Jean-Pierrre said.

She said she could not confirm whether the two men are being held.

Real estate firm must comply with New York AG’s Trump investigation – court

Joanna Walters

Real estate company Cushman & Wakefield plc must comply with subpoenas from New York state attorney general Letitia James as part of her civil investigation into Donald Trump, an appeals court has ruled, Reuters reports.

James’ investigation is examining whether Trump and his family company, the Trump Organization, misled banks and tax authorities about the value of its assets to get financial benefits like favorable loans and tax breaks.

In April, James won a court order to force Cushman to comply with subpoenas for records that would help determine whether appraisals it conducted for several Trump properties, such as the Seven Springs estate in New York’s Westchester county and 40 Wall Street in Manhattan, were fraudulent or misleading.

Cushman appealed the ruling, calling James’ probe “overly intrusive.”

The appellate division of New York state’s main trial court on Thursday denied Cushman’s appeal, and ended a temporary stay on the enforcement of the subpoena.

Spokespeople for Cushman and James’ office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Cushman previously said it stood by its work and that suggestions the company was not cooperating in good faith with James were “untrue.”

The ruling adds to a string of recent victories for James in the face of Trump’s efforts to derail the investigation. New York state’s top court on Tuesday ruled that Trump and two of his adult children, Donald Trump Jr and Ivanka Trump, must testify under oath beginning July 15.