Author: News Polite

Three Indian nationals have been arrested and charged in the killing of a Sikh leader in British Columbia in June, Canadian authorities announced on Friday. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had accused India of orchestrating the brazen killing, setting off angry back-and-forth denunciations between the two countries.

The case widened a rift between Canada and India and set off a political dispute between the two already apprehensive nations.

Here is what we know:

Who was Hardeep Singh Nijjar, and what happened to him?

Hardeep Singh Nijjar, 45, was born in the North Indian state of Punjab. After several unsuccessful attempts to gain entry to Canada, he moved there in the mid-1990s, according to Indian news reports, just after a period of Indian crackdowns on a Sikh separatist movement.

In Canada, Mr. Nijjar worked as a plumber, married and had two sons. He obtained Canadian citizenship in 2015, Canada’s immigration minister, Marc Miller, said on social media. In 2020, Mr. Nijjar became the president of a Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia, the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara.

Mr. Nijjar was a self-proclaimed “Sikh nationalist who believes in and supports Sikhs’ right to self-determination and independence of Indian-occupied Punjab through a future referendum,” according to an open letter he wrote to the Canadian government in 2016. He was a key figure in British Columbia in rallying votes for a referendum in Canada supporting the establishment of a nation called Khalistan that includes the northern state of Punjab.

The Indian government declared Mr. Nijjar a terrorist in 2020, decades after he left India. It accused him of plotting a violent attack in India and of leading a terrorist group called the Khalistan Tiger Force. In Punjab, however, politicians and journalists asserted that despite the charges, many locals had never heard of him or his movement.

Mr. Nijjar was shot in June near the Sikh temple that he led. While investigators from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police later said he had been ambushed by masked men, they did not disclose if the attack had been politically motivated.

What is known about the arrests?

The three men in custody are in their 20s and were arrested on Friday in Edmonton, Alberta. They were charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The police identified them as Karan Brar, Kamalpreet Singh and Karanpreeet Singh.

The men had been living in Canada for three to five years and were not permanent residents, the authorities said.

Several other investigations are ongoing and include exploring the possible involvement of the Indian government, said David Teboul, assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He added that the relationship with Indian investigative partners had been a challenge.

In announcing the arrests, Canadian authorities cited the help of people in the Sikh community but did not provide specifics.

What did Canada say?

In September, the Canadian prime minister told lawmakers that “agents of the government of India” had been linked to Mr. Nijjar’s killing on Canadian soil.

Evidence of the ambush was based on intelligence gathered by the Canadian government, according to Mr. Trudeau, who added that he had raised the issue directly with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India “in no uncertain terms” at a Group of 20 summit in New Delhi.

“Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty,” Mr. Trudeau said in September, adding that Canada would pressure India to cooperate with investigations into Mr. Nijjar’s death.

Canada’s foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, also announced that it had expelled an Indian diplomat, whom she described as the de facto head of India’s intelligence agency in Canada.

How did India respond?

The Indian government vehemently denied the allegations by Mr. Trudeau. Mr. Modi “completely rejected” them, according to India’s foreign ministry.

In a statement, the ministry office also spurned “any attempts to connect the government of India” to Mr. Nijjar’s killing and called the accusations “absurd.”

On Labor Day in 2022, John Fetterman found himself in a room in Pittsburgh with President Biden.

Fetterman, a Democrat who was then the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania and in the middle of his successful run for the U.S. Senate, had a simple message he wanted to share: Go big on legal weed.

And how did the president respond? “He was just, like, ‘Yeah, absolutely,’” Fetterman told me yesterday.

The Justice Department on Tuesday said it had recommended that federal restrictions on marijuana become a whole lot chiller. And while it is not clear that lobbying from Democrats like Fetterman has played any role, the move was the latest step by the Biden administration to liberalize the nation’s cannabis policy — something his allies believe comes with an obvious political upside when more than two-thirds of Americans support legalization of the drug.

“High reward, zero risk,” said the perpetually sweatshirted Fetterman, joking that he advises Biden only on matters of fashion and weed policy.

Biden, a suit-wearing president who is more statesman than stoner, has become something of the pot president. It could elevate his standing specifically with young voters, who support rescheduling, or reclassifying, marijuana as a less serious drug, as well as with supporters of changes to criminal justice laws.

One of the president’s allies just wishes he would talk about it more.

“He has pardoned people, he initiated this rescheduling, but he has not embraced it. It’s not too late,” said Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, the 75-year-old Democrat who has been pushing for looser cannabis policy for half a century. “The public needs to know that this is the single most significant step that has been taken by the federal government in the more-than-50-year-old war on drugs.”

A careful embrace of cannabis reform

For much of his career, Biden pushed for tough-on-crime policies. And as a presidential candidate in 2019, he got made fun of by Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, for saying he opposed federally legalizing marijuana — although he also said during that campaign that no one should be in jail for smoking it.

As president, Biden has sought to make good on that promise, pardoning thousands of people convicted of marijuana possession under federal law. In directing his cabinet to review marijuana’s classification as a Schedule I drug, he opened the door to a major federal change that would subject the drug to fewer restrictions on production and research — and make it easier for people who use it or build businesses around it to access lifelines like public housing, banking and tax breaks.

Biden promoted those actions at events including his State of the Union address in March, though when the White House held a round table on cannabis reform about a week later, it was hosted by Vice President Kamala Harris, not Biden himself. He has been quiet about the rescheduling of marijuana this week. When asked about it, his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said she did not want to get ahead of the complex process underway at the Justice Department.

Blumenauer warns that Biden is leaving a political opportunity on the table. Fetterman helped his party keep its hold on the Senate with a campaign that pushed for legalizing marijuana.

“In terms of energizing young people, in terms of being on the side of reform, being on the right side of history, I think this is something that Joe Biden and his administration should embrace,” Blumenauer said. “This is not low-hanging fruit. This is picking the fruit up off the ground.”

It is not clear, however, that marijuana policy is as important an issue to younger voters as issues like abortion rights or the economy.

In some ways, Biden has handled the issue of marijuana similarly to how he handled another progressive priority: student loans. Progressives spent months urging him to cancel $50,000 in student debt for those who had it in one fell swoop. His administration proceeded more cautiously, carefully reviewing its legal options before rolling out a more moderate approach.

Mild objections signal a broader shift

The administration’s move comes as 38 states and the nation’s capital have already legalized marijuana for medical reasons. Twenty-four states and Washington, D.C., have legalized it for recreational use.

And, perhaps for that reason, some Republicans sought to minimize the impact of Biden’s action on policy as well as on the political landscape.

“It’s an election year. A lot was said in 2020, but not much has been done,” said Representative Dave Joyce of Ohio, a Republican and a former prosecutor who has worked with Blumenauer on cannabis reform. Biden’s move won’t prompt immediate change, he said.

Gov. Chris Sununu, Republican of New Hampshire, said marijuana policy was essentially a nonpartisan issue. He has come to the conclusion that legalization is inevitable in New Hampshire, so he is open to it as long as it is carefully regulated.

“I don’t think politically it’s some great win,” Sununu said. “I think people understand it’s a gateway drug.”

The lack of fiery Republican attacks on Biden for his marijuana policy, however, seems to say something about how deeply marijuana has shifted in the American political psyche.

“It’s a no-brainer,” Fetterman said, before referring to a name given to those who are still deeply opposed to the drug. “The reefer madness caucus is probably smaller than the ‘I like to shoot my dog’ caucus.”

The search for Christine O’Donnell

My colleague Reid Epstein recently went looking for every living Republican who ever ran against Biden during his decades representing Delaware in the Senate. One was a little harder to find than the others. I asked him to tell us more.

To hear Christine O’Donnell tell it, first they stole her election, and then they stole her political identity.

Last week, I went in search of O’Donnell, forever infamous for her “I’m not a witch” declaration in 2010, to speak with her about her experience as the last Republican to run against Joe Biden for the Senate, in 2008. She had not given an interview in eight years.

O’Donnell was one of the first Republicans to adopt the sort of novice political populism that Trump would use to ride to the White House. She went on to claim in a 2011 book that her 29-percentage-point loss to Biden was marred by voter fraud. There is no evidence for this.

These days, she believes — wrongly — that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. I asked her if her campaigns for office simply came too soon, before voters were ready to get behind somebody who questioned the infrastructure of American democracy.

“Humility wants me to answer that, like, ‘Oh, no,’” O’Donnell replied. “But by me taking the hit, it opened up the political process for other people.”

After Trump went to the White House, O’Donnell moved to Florida and enrolled at the Ave Maria School of Law in Naples. She has been living a largely anonymous existence. Yet her past has never been too far away.

“I put on the television during a study break, and I heard someone on CNN who said, ‘You know who we have to blame for Donald Trump? Christine O’Donnell.’ I was, like, ‘Turn off the TV.’”

—Reid J. Epstein

Her voice low, her posture tense, the woman who spent years steering Donald J. Trump through strife and scandal stepped to the witness stand on Friday carrying a different burden. She was there under the fluorescent lights of a dreary Manhattan courtroom, seated 15 feet from the former president she once fiercely defended, to testify at his criminal trial.

“I’m really nervous,” Hope Hicks, the onetime Trump spokeswoman, messaging maestro and all-around adviser, acknowledged to the prosecutor questioning her, declaring what was already obvious to the riveted courtroom.

Ms. Hicks’s unease came to a head hours later as Mr. Trump’s lawyer began to cross-examine her — and she began to cry. Mr. Trump locked his eyes on her.

The question that initially unnerved Ms. Hicks was about her time at the Trump Organization, the family’s business, where she had fond memories of working. Ms. Hicks left the stand, and the trial paused so that she could compose herself. She returned minutes later to continue her testimony, occasionally dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

The striking show of emotion reflected Ms. Hicks’s discomfort with testifying against a man who launched her career and entrusted her with his reputation. Each time the questioning conjured up another memory of working for Mr. Trump — at his company, on his campaign, and finally in his White House — Ms. Hicks appeared to fight back tears.

Ms. Hicks, who fell out of favor with Mr. Trump once it emerged that she had privately voiced anger at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by his supporters, said in her morning testimony that they had not spoken in nearly two years. And when she took the stand, Mr. Trump, who faces 34 felony charges of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal involving a porn star, was initially glued to her anxious testimony.

The prosecution summoned Ms. Hicks — against her will — to highlight Mr. Trump’s outsize role in the suppression of this scandal and others. But she could be remembered as a key witness for both sides.

She helped the Manhattan district attorney’s office’s reinforce its story about why Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, was desperate to pay hush money to the porn star, Stormy Daniels, in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign. And she provided the defense grist to argue that Mr. Trump was a family man, and that his motive for suppressing damning stories may not have been to win the election but to protect his relationship with his family and his wife.

Ms. Hicks delivered several hours of testimony to a jury of 12 transfixed New Yorkers before being excused in the late afternoon.

She transported the jurors back to the 2016 presidential campaign, guiding them through the 25th floor of Trump Tower, bringing them 30,000 feet in the air aboard the plane nicknamed Trump Force One and placing them inside the campaign car on the way to a rally. It was in these moments, which Ms. Hicks painted in vivid detail, that she and Mr. Trump managed one scandal after another.

The first crisis arose when The Washington Post contacted Ms. Hicks about a recording it obtained in which Mr. Trump had boasted on the set of a television show about grabbing women by the genitals. The tape, from the set of “Access Hollywood,” sent the campaign into a frenzy, as a cadre of advisers huddled inside Trump Tower.

Ms. Hicks said she was “a little stunned,” but had a “good sense that this was going to be a massive story and sort of dominate the news cycle for the next several days at least.”

Mr. Trump was upset as well, she said, but one of his early reactions was to tell her that his comments about assaulting women “didn’t sound like something he would say.”

The fallout from the tape soon spread, prompting Ms. Daniels to seize the opportunity to sell her story of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen raced to buy her silence, striking the $130,000 hush-money deal at the heart of the case against the former president. After he made the deal, that crisis, for the time being, was contained.

But in the campaign’s waning days, The Wall Street Journal contacted Ms. Hicks with more damaging news. The newspaper was prepared to report that The National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid that had close ties to Mr. Trump, had bought and buried the story of a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump years earlier.

Ms. Hicks first tried to work the campaign’s connections to Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who owned The Journal, so she could “buy a little extra time to deal with this,” she said. When that failed, she called Mr. Cohen, who had a relationship with the tabloid’s publisher, David Pecker.

Mr. Trump, she testified, told her that the affair story was not true, but Ms. Hicks said she did not remember whether he “verbatim” stated that he had no knowledge of that hush-money deal.

The Journal also planned to write about Ms. Daniels, but Ms. Hicks again denied “unequivocally” to a reporter that Mr. Trump had a relationship with the porn star.

Shortly after the story about the Playboy model ran, five days before the election, Ms. Hicks and Mr. Cohen exchanged a series of text messages wishing that it would go away.

“I don’t see it getting much play,” she said, adding that “the media is the worst.”

When Mr. Cohen mentioned how little coverage the story was getting, Ms. Hicks replied: “Keep praying!! It’s working!” (In the courtroom, testifying in a criminal case that sprang in part from that story, Ms. Hicks acknowledged the irony of that particular message.)

Mr. Trump was elected, but The Journal was not done digging. In early 2018, it published a story exposing Mr. Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Ms. Daniels. When asked about that, Ms. Hicks became fuzzy, saying she could not recall the period. She grew considerably more tense, clenching her jaw and stumbling a bit in her speech.

Ms. Hicks said she did not have knowledge of the records Mr. Trump is accused of falsifying. Those records, prosecutors say, disguised Mr. Trump’s repayment of Mr. Cohen for the hush money.

Still, Ms. Hicks managed to make some memorable moments for the prosecution’s case, including when she recalled a potentially crucial conversation: “I believe I heard Mr. Trump speaking to Mr. Cohen shortly after the story was published,” she said, which prosecutors might use to argue that Mr. Trump was involved in the machinations.

And she delivered a memorable observation that bolstered the prosecution’s argument that Mr. Trump directed Mr. Cohen’s payment. She scoffed at a prosecution question prompting her to consider whether Mr. Cohen “would have made a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels out of the kindness of his heart.”

That sort of altruistic move, she said, “would be out of character for Michael.”

The testimony marked a stunning spectacle: a former president’s confidante turned against him.

An accomplished lacrosse player and former model, Ms. Hicks started working in her mid-20s for Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and the Trump Organization, before unexpectedly being elevated to campaign press secretary. Between two stints working at the White House, including the lofty role of communications director, she worked for Fox News, and now is a communications consultant.

Ms. Hicks, now 35, was cautious and self-deprecating on the stand, but sprinkled her detailed recounting with the words “I don’t recall.”

Her emotional testimony helped and harmed her old boss in the same breath. She remarked that the Trump Organization was big and successful but run “like a small family business,” and that because of that, “Everybody that works there, in some sense, reports to Mr. Trump.”

That plays into the prosecution’s portrait of Mr. Trump as a micromanager who must have known about the false records and the sex scandal they obscured.

“He knew what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it, and we were all just following his lead,” Ms. Hicks said.