Trump mixes up Biden and Obama ahead of Super Tuesday: Live

Joe Biden may have won the Democratic Michigan primary handily yesterday, but anger over his unconditional support for Israel’s war in Gaza led to a significant protest vote that may threaten his chances of winning the state, and the presidency, later this year.

More than 100,000 Democratic presidential primary voters cast their ballots as “uncommitted” on Tuesday following a campaign by activists and lawmakers in the state to impose a political cost on Mr Biden for providing political and financial support for Israel’s war.

In some areas of Dearborn, home to the largest Arab American community in the US, around three-quarters of voters chose to cast their ballots as uncommitted.

In a crucial swing state, which Mr Biden only won by 154,000 votes in 2020, those margins could prove to be decisive.

“One hundred thousand uncommitted votes sends a powerful message to the president that he’s got to change course or risk losing to Trump in November,” Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, which was part of the uncommitted campaign, told The Independent.

Mr Geevarghese noted said the campaign to convince voters to cast their ballots for “uncommitted” only began three weeks ago, and that those 100,000 votes may not account for the real number of Democratic voters who may stay home in November.

“Just based on our internal organising there were a lot of people who have given up or don’t think that their voice matters, so I think a lot of people did sit out,” Mr Geevarghese said.

“The White House should interpret that number as 100,000 people speaking for other friends and neighbours who did not vote for whatever reason,” he added.

The Supreme Court has indicated that they will share their rulings on Mr Trump’s eligibility to appear on the Colorado ballot on Monday.

An historic two-hour hearing at the nation’s highest court on Thursday heard oral arguments in a case that could determine whether the leading candidate for the Republican Party’s nomination for president can remain on ballots in primary elections.

Last year, justices on Colorado’s Supreme Court disqualified Mr Trump under the scope of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which holds that “no person” can hold any office, “civil or military, under the United States”, if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same”.

But both conservative and liberal justices on the nine-member US Supreme Court on Thursday appeared to cast doubt on the ability of individual states to disqualify federal candidates without permission from Congress.

Was the attack on the US Capitol on January 6 – mounted by a mob by the former president’s supporters, fuelled by his ongoing election lies and his call to “fight like hell” on his behalf – an act of insurrection, and was then-president Trump responsible?

The former president has flatly rejected the word and downplayed the attack as he paints himself as a victim of political persecution. In front of the Supreme Court, one of his lawyers rejected the term. But he called it “criminal”.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment holds that “no person” who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution can hold any office, “civil or military, under the United States,” if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same”.

Last year, a Colorado judge determined that Mr Trump not only “engaged” with insurrection, he also “acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification”.

Colorado’s Supreme Court later affirmed that his actions “constituted overt, voluntary, and direct participation in the insurrection,” rendering him ineligible for office under the scope of the 14th Amendment.

On Thursday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pressed the former president’s attorney for his “position” on the events of that day.

January 6 was a “riot,” according to attorney Jonathan Mitchell. An insurrection, he said, “needs to be an organised, concerted effort” to overthrow the government.

“A chaotic effort to overthrow the government is not an insurrection?” Justice Jackson fired back.

“We didn’t concede that it’s an effort to overthrow the government, either,” Mr Mitchell said. “This was a riot. It was not an insurrection. The events were shameful, criminal, violent – all of those things. But it did not qualify as insurrection.”

An admission from one of Mr Trump’s attorneys that the Capitol attack constituted “criminal” actions – in front of the nation’s highest court – follows the former president’s own attempts to evade liability from criminal charges connected to his attempts to overturn 2020 election results.

The Missouri caucuses were called by the AP for Mr Trump at 12.40pm ET on Saturday. After Mr Trump won all the delegates at the Michigan convention caucuses, the news agency called the Idaho race at 6.58pm ET.

Both Idaho and Missouri cancelled the Republican primary to hold caucuses instead, handing control of the state nomination to a small number of party members.

Idaho last held caucuses in 2012, when only 45,000 people participated – about 20 per cent of all registered Republicans in the state. On Saturday, fewer than 40,000 votes were cast.

The timing could also have been a problem for some, with Idaho, which is in both the Mountain and Pacific time zones, holding its caucuses at 12.30pm or 1.30pm, while Missouri, which is in the Central time zone, held its caucuses at 10am local time.

All three of the contests on Saturday were caucuses, which are more time-consuming and require more voter engagement, possibly benefitting Mr Trump as he has many fervent followers.

Caucuses usually have lower turnout than primaries since voters have to arrive at a specific time and stick around for a while to take part in the more labour-intensive process compared to pulling a lever in a primary.

“Caucuses are designed for things to happen in the room on caucus night — there’s a moment in time where a representative from each campaign stands up and makes their pitch — they get a couple of minutes to do it,” she said, noting the importance of “person-to-person politicking at the last possible moment”.

“If you don’t know how to get the votes, [how to] get your name written on a piece of paper, you can lose that way,” she added at the time.

But the Trump campaign appears to have learned from its previous experiences, handily winning all the contests so far, caucuses and primaries alike.

Super Tuesday, the biggest day of the US presidential primary season, arrives early next month and promises to have a decisive if perhaps somewhat anticlimactic impact on the respective Republican and Democratic races.

All but one of his challengers have fallen away, leaving only the well-funded but under-performing ex-UN ambassador Nikki Haley still swinging.

But even she may not make it to Super Tuesday (although she has promised she will), as the next Republican primary takes place in her home state of South Carolina and current polling indicates the Palmetto State’s former governor could be in for another trouncing on her home turf, a further humiliation after she scored fewer votes than the “none of these candidates” box on Nevada ballot papers.

“Is there any way we can call the election for next Tuesday?” a cocky Mr Trump gloated on stage in Las Vegas after that result.

“That’s all I want. I want to call the election for next Tuesday.”

However, if Ms Haley can somehow conjure a surprise victory in either South Carolina on 24 February or Michigan on 27 February, it will be game on for Super Tuesday and we could find ourselves with a very interesting evening indeed.

The Democratic contest is looking equally one-sided, with President Joe Biden seemingly nailed-on to be his party’s candidate again as he seeks a second term in the White House, despite concerns about his advanced age and consistently poor polling.

Alexander Smirnov was cast by Republicans as one of the FBI’s most trusted informants, offering a “highly credible” account of brazen public corruption by Joe Biden that formed a pillar of the House impeachment investigation of the Democratic president.

Then, last month, the script changed dramatically.

Smirnov, 43, finds himself charged with lying to the FBI, accused of fabricating a tale of bribery and espionage involving then-Vice President Biden and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and he has told officials he has Russian intelligence contacts.

It’s muddied the GOP inquiry plenty.

Interviews and a review of public records by The Associated Press suggest this was not likely Smirnov’s first turn in what the government says is a cycle as a fabulist.

They offer a portrait of a businessman who operated a string of murky shell companies, ran with others who have been accused of fraud, and boasted of his own ties to the FBI. The episode highlights not only the perils of the Republicans’ reliance on unverified information in their quest to confront Biden but also the risks inherent in the FBI’s use of sometimes-unreliable informants who may have ulterior motives.

“How come in all of the universe nobody in America figured out for years that this guy is a fraud and a liar? How did this (expletive) make its way to Congress?” said Yossi Attia, a Los Angeles businessman who has interacted with Smirnov and once ran a penny stock company in which Smirnov held a substantial stake.

Mr Trump has won every state in the Republican primaries so far. Ms Haley is his last challenger after Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy dropped out in January after the Iowa caucuses.

The former president remains the favourite of Republican voters and is leading President Joe Biden in some swing states, according to some recent polling.

However, other polls suggest that a sizeable number of Republicans, and America’s unaffiliated voters, won’t vote for Mr Trump in November.

Saturday’s contests were the last before Super Tuesday where Nikki Haley is desperate to pick off a single state to make her case for hanging on in the primaries and providing an alternative to voters.

The unspoken implication appears to be that some, apparently including Ms Haley, believe that Mr Trump, who is facing 91 felony charges, may yet exit the race.

On 5 March, voters will head to the polls in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia. The voting wave accounts for more than a third of delegates ahead of the Republican National Convention in July.

For Ms Haley, this Tuesday is an opportunity to breathe life into her campaign. For Mr Trump, it is the time to put the race away in a decisive manner. Polls do not show Ms Haley leading anywhere, however, her campaign is optimistic about states with high suburban populations.

“Vermont, Utah, Virginia. I think there are states that, if you look at demographically, she has a chance to win,” a source close to the leadership of Ms Haley’s super PAC told reporters last week, after her defeat in South Carolina.

Alex Woodward watched proceedings on Friday and filed this report:

Lawyers for Donald Trump and his co-defendants in a sprawling election interference case in Georgia have been accused of relying on salacious rumours, gossip and innuendo to “embarass and harass” the prosecutor overseeing the case against them.

Closing arguments concluded on Friday in a high-stakes series of hearings to determine whether Fani Willis should be disqualified from criminally prosecuting the former president and his allies for their scheme to overturn Georgia’s election results in 2020.