Robert Kennedy Jr’s youngest sister says Covid remarks ‘fuel hate’; Trump loses bid for new E Jean Carroll trial – live

David Smith

As the son of former attorney general Robert Kennedy, and nephew of former president John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Jr has caused one of America’s most storied political dynasties with his toxic views.

In 2019 three relatives wrote an opinion column for the Politico website condemning his anti-vaccine advocacy, which they held partially responsible for a measles outbreak.

The Congressional Integrity Project contends that Kennedy is a “Republican stooge” who is being embraced by the far right in an attempt to damage Joe Biden. He has become a regular guest on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and other rightwing outlets. Far-right provocateurs Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones and Michael Flynn have praised him.

Now Republicans have invited Kennedy to Congress. On Thursday he is due to address the House of Representatives’ select subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government during a hearing to examine “the federal government’s role in censoring Americans”. The panel is chaired by Trump loyalist Jim Jordan, who has been criticised for launching bogus investigations into Biden.

Kyle Herrig, executive director of Congressional Integrity Project, said:

Giving RFK Jr a platform to spread dangerous conspiracy theories and xenophobic and antisemitic rhetoric is a new low for Jim Jordan – and that says something.

Jim Jordan should stop the charade and disinvite RFK Jr immediately. Allowing this hearing to go forward is shameless and beyond the pale. Maga Republicans desperation is on full display this week, proving once again that they have no credibility to conduct legitimate investigations.

A federal judge has rejected Donald Trump’s request for a new trial in a civil case brought by E Jean Carroll, where a jury found that he sexually abused her and awarded her $5m in damages.

US district judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan ruled on Wednesday that the jury did not reach a “seriously erroneous result” and that the 9 May verdict was not a “miscarriage of justice”.

Carroll’s lawsuit, filed in 2022, said Trump raped her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York in the mid-1990s, and defamed her by denying it happened.

Trump’s lawyers had argued that the jury’s $2m award for the sexual abuse portion of the verdict was “excessive” because the jury had found that Carroll was not raped, and that the conduct Carroll alleged did not cause any diagnosed mental injury.

Hugo Lowell

The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case on Wednesday denied the proposed protective order for discovery materials submitted by prosecutors because both sides had not sufficiently discussed the matter.

The protective order is needed for prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith to start making the classified documents that they intend to use at trial available to Trump’s team in discovery.

Trump was charged last month with retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club, including US unclear secrets. As a result, his trial will take place according to the rules set out in the Classified Information Procedures Act, or Cipa.

The denial by the US district court judge Aileen Cannon of the protective order – required under Section 3 of Cipa – will add another delay to pre-trial proceedings.

The complex procedures in Cipa, which exist to protect against the defense threatening to suddenly reveal classified information at trial, means the pre-trial phase takes longer compared to standard criminal cases.

Legal experts had always expected Trump to object to the protective order because his team wants to delay until after the 2024 election in the hope that the matter becomes moot if he wins re-election, but for the judge to deny the protective order is unusual.

David Smith

For years, the Congressional Integrity Project’s document says, Robert Kennedy Jr has targeted a particularly dangerous form of vaccine denial at Black people. In 2021 at the height of the Covid-19 vaccination campaign, he released Medical Racism, a film that promoted disproven claims about the dangers of vaccines and explicitly warned communities of color to be suspicious of “sinister” vaccination campaigns.

Several doctors and experts who participated in the film later denounced it and said they felt used and misled about the message of the documentary. Richard Allen Williams, founder of the Association of Black Cardiologists, called Children’s Health Defense “absolutely a racist operation” particularly dangerous to the Black community.

In 2017, as a measles outbreak devastated Minnesota’s Somali-American community due to low vaccination rates, Kennedy continued to push his false claims that “science and anecdotal evidence suggest that Africans and African Americans may be particularly vulnerable to vaccine injuries including autism”.

In a 2020 interview, Kennedy asserted without evidence that “People with African blood react differently to vaccines than people with Caucasian blood. They’re much more sensitive.”

The following year, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Kennedy recorded a webinar encouraging Black people to be skeptical of vaccines, claiming: “There has been abundant evidence… beyond any dispute that Blacks are disproportionately harmed by vaccine injury,” adding:

Blacks react completely differently to vaccines … we now know it’s just one huge experiment on Black Americans, and they know what is happening and they are doing nothing.

Read the full story here.

Robert Kennedy Jr’s racist, antisemitic and xenophobic views go back decades, report says

David Smith

Robert Kennedy Jr, an environmental lawyer, is running against Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary and has drawn big and enthusiastic crowds and polled as high as 20%.

But the Congressional Integrity Project’s document argues that Kennedy’s recent comments about Jewish and Chinese people, which were quickly hailed by neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers as “100% correct”, were not an aberration but fitted a long pattern.

Earlier this summer Kennedy touted a meeting with Ice Cube, a rapper who issued bizarre antisemitic tweets, and publicly defended musician Roger Waters, who was embroiled in controversy after donning a costume intended to evoke Nazi attire at a concert in Germany.

The report says Kennedy has also repeatedly promoted and praised fringe online broadcaster James Corbett, a Sandy Hook and 9/11 conspiracy theorist who has claimed that “Hitler and the Nazis were 100% completely and utterly set up”.

Kennedy has often allied himself with National of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who regularly unleashed tirades about alleged Jewish control of media and government. Kennedy met Farrakhan at his Chicago home in 2015, with Farrakhan later tweeting that they discussed “a vaccine that is designed to affect Black males”.

The Project details how Kennedy himself has frequently invoked Nazi Germany when pushing debunked theories about vaccines. He put out a video that showed infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci with a mustache reminiscent of Adolf Hitler and used the word “holocaust” to describe children he believes were hurt by vaccines in 2015.

Last year, at a Washington rally organized by his group Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy complained that people’s rights were being violated by public health measures that had been taken to reduce the number of people sickened and killed by Covid-19. He said:

Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.

He later apologised.

David Smith

Robert Kennedy Jr, a long-shot Democratic candidate for US president, has a long history of racism, antisemitism and xenophobia, and should be denied a national platform, according to a damning report seen by the Guardian.

Kennedy, who provoked anger last week when he was filmed falsely suggesting that the coronavirus could have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, is due to testify at the US Capitol in Washington on Thursday.

The Congressional Integrity Project, a political watchdog, called for Republicans to disinvite Kennedy after releasing a report that details his meetings with and promotion of racists, antisemites and extremist conspiracy theorists.

“Kennedy embraces virtually every conspiracy theory in existence,” the report states.

His horrific antisemitic and xenophobic views are simply beyond the pale, and he has frequently met with and promoted antisemitic conspiracy theorists. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine conspiracies go back decades and have had deadly real world consequences.

Good morning, US politics blog readers. The youngest sister of Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy Jr has joined other members of the Kennedy family in denouncing his claim that Covid-19 was engineered to target some ethnic groups and spare others.

In a video published over the weekend, Kennedy Jr was heard saying the virus was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” while at a recent dinner in New York City. His remarks, also alleging development by China of viruses as a bioweapon, drew accusations of racism and antisemitism and were widely condemned by Kennedy’s relatives and across the Democratic party.

Rory Kennedy, the youngest child of the late Robert F Kennedy and a documentary film-maker, told the Guardian on Thursday:

My feelings about my brother Bobby’s recent statement regarding Covid and ethnic targeting are very much aligned with my brother Joe, sister Kerry, and nephew Joe III – all of whom I admire for speaking out against him.

There is a great deal of hate in the world and remarks like Bobby’s only serve to fuel that hate. Such conspiracy mongering not only creates more divisiveness, it actually puts people’s lives in danger.

Her remarks came after her sister, Kerry Kennedy, described their brother’s comments as “deplorable and untruthful”, adding:

His statements do not represent what I believe or what Robert F Kennedy Human Rights stands for, with our 50+ year track record of protecting rights and standing against racism and all forms of discrimination.

Her rebuke was echoed by the Democratic former Massachusetts congressman Joe Kennedy III, nephew of Robert Kennedy Jr, who said his uncle’s comments were “hurtful and wrong”.

Close Kennedy family members weighing in reflects the growing outrage at the words of the businessman who is challenging Joe Biden for next year’s Democratic presidential nomination.

Here’s what else we’re watching today:

• A federal judge is set to hear a challenge to an asylum rule that is a key part of the Biden administration’s immigration policy.

• Two IRS whistleblowers who claim the justice department improperly interfered with the years-long investigation into Hunter Biden will testify in front of the House oversight committee.

9am: The House will meet before recessing. It will later take up bills condemning the use of schools as migrant shelters and reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

11am: Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, will address Congress.

1pm. White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre will hold a briefing.

3pm: Joe Biden will lead a competition council meeting with an announcement of new administration actions to bolster economic competition.

4pm: Senator Lindsey Graham will hold a news conference on “supreme court integrity”.

6pm: The Bidens will host the White House congressional picnic on the South Lawn, with the vice-president, Kamala Harris, attending.