Donald Trump: judge rejects efforts to dismiss election subversion case against ex-president

The ruling is the first substantive order after a landmark supreme court opinion last month that conferred broad immunity for former presidents

A federal judge presiding over the election subversion case against Donald Trump has rejected efforts from his legal team to dismiss the indictment on grounds that the former president was prosecuted for vindictive and political purposes.

The ruling from US district judge Tanya Chutkan is the first substantive order since the case was returned to her on Friday, following a landmark supreme court opinion last month that conferred broad immunity for former presidents and narrowed special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump.

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Name-calling and hyperbole: Trump continues fear-mongering fest at Georgia rally

Ex-president touched upon a range of topics from crime to immigration in his speech with mostly made-up statistics

Donald Trump addressed a fully-packed venue in downtown Atlanta on Saturday, with thousands of people waiting in the Georgia heat outside to enter, or to protest his appearance in a city he has condemned repeatedly.

His remarks were consistent with the tenor and comportment of restraint and probity Atlantans are used to hearing at this point.

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Democratic politicians’ husbands rake in record haul during New York event

Doug Emhoff and Chasten Buttigieg’s success spurred talk about transportation secretary’s veepstakes chances

While Kamala Harris cleared her campaign diary this weekend to finalize her choice of running mate ahead of a swing-state presidential campaign blitz next week, political spouses were hard at work.

The vice-president’s husband, Doug Emhoff, and Chasten Buttigieg, husband of the US transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg – a potential running mate for Harris at the top of November’s Democratic ticket whose candidacy has been strengthening in recent days – were on New York’s Fire Island on Friday for a sold-out event that raised $321,000.

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Trump says he would debate on Fox News – but Harris insists on ABC

Ex-president says he will only debate on Republican-friendly channel on 4 September, while Harris demands he stick to original network

Donald Trump says he would be willing to debate Kamala Harris on the friendly environs of Fox News in September – but the vice-president has not signed on to what would be a switch-up.

Trump had previously agreed to appear on ABC News and debate Joe Biden a second time this year before the president ended his re-election campaign.

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US-Israeli soldier posted videos showing detonation of Gaza homes and mosque

IDF soldiers have shared scores of videos of their conduct in Gaza. The American-Israeli soldier says his videos were ‘taken out of context’

An American-Israeli man deployed in Gaza with a combat engineering unit of Israel’s armed forces posted videos online that show indiscriminate fire at a destroyed building and the detonation of homes and a mosque.

One video posted by the man, Bram Settenbrino, and filmed from the shooter’s viewpoint, shows dozens of rounds being fired into the ruins of a building. Another video shows what appears to be an armored vehicle’s fire-control system trained on a mosque before it is razed to the ground. Others depict the detonation of several homes as soldiers cheer.

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Assassination again shows Netanyahu’s disregard for US-Israel relations

Hamas killing is further snub to Biden administration, which does not share methods or objectives of Israeli leader

Standing alongside Donald Trump in Florida a week ago, Benjamin Netanyahu was vague on the latest prospect of a ceasefire in the war in Gaza.

“I hope we are going to have a deal. Time will tell,” the Israeli prime minister said, two days after his controversial address to a joint session of the US Congress.

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Plea deal for accused 9/11 plotters revoked by Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin

US secretary of defense pulls rank and withdraws agreements for trio accused of involvement in 2001 terror attacks

The US secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, has revoked a plea deal for the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and two other defendants, reinstating them as death-penalty cases, according to a memo sent to Susan Escallier, who is overseeing the war court proceedings.

The short-lived deal came 16 years after prosecution of the three men began.

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Report reveals secret US inquiry into alleged 2016 Egyptian $10m gift to Trump

A Washington Post report details that an Egypt-linked group withdrew funds days before Trump’s inauguration

A spokesperson for Donald Trump blamed “Deep State Trump-haters and bad faith actors” for a bombshell report on Friday about a secret criminal investigation into whether Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, the authoritarian ruler of Egypt, sought to give the former president $10m during his victorious 2016 White House run.

“The investigation referenced found no wrongdoing and was closed,” Steven Cheung told the Washington Post, which published the report on Friday.

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Kamala Harris ‘honored’ after earning enough votes to become Democratic nominee – as it happened

This blog has now closed. Read more on the Harris delegate story here

Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, is widely speculated to be among Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential finalists.

Martin Pengelly explores Shapiro’s background for the Guardian:

July was the best grassroots fundraising month in presidential history.

Team Harris raised more across grassroots channels in the four days following President Biden’s endorsement of Vice-President Harris than Trump’s big donor-reliant operation raised in the entire month.

More than 3 million donors made over 4.2m contributions – with more than 2 million donors making their first donation this cycle.

This month, 94% of all our donations were under $200, and teachers and nurses continue to be among the most common donor occupations.

Compared with June, we saw more than 10 times the number of gen Z donors, and more than eight times the number of millennial donors.

Sixty per cent of all donors in July were women.

Coalition groups that organized calls since launch – like Black Women for Harris, Latinas for Harris, and White Dudes for Harris – raised more than $20m for Team Harris.

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Kamala Harris effectively clinches Democratic nomination for president

Vice-president ‘honored’ to be nominee after securing delegate votes – but nomination not official until Monday

Kamala Harris said on Friday she was “honored” to have secured enough votes from delegates to become the Democratic presidential nominee, making her the first Black woman and person of south Asian heritage to lead a major party ticket.

Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, announced that the vice-president had earned the majority of delegates’ votes to become the party’s nominee to challenge Donald Trump in November, though her nomination would not be official until Monday, the end of the virtual roll-call vote.

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Secret Service accepts ‘full responsibility’ for Trump shooting security failures

Acting director Ronald Rowe says ‘this was a failure’ and admits errors in communications and surveillance

The US Secret Service takes “full responsibility” for the events that led up to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last month, the acting director of the agency said on Friday.

In a press conference in Washington, Ronald Rowe, who replaced Kimberly Cheatle after she stood down from her position as director of the service after Trump was shot, said: “This was a failure.”

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Kamala Harris campaign raises $310m in July as presidential race is transformed

Vice-president’s fundraising haul dwarfed Trump’s $138.7m with polls indicating a tight contest in battleground states

Kamala Harris’s campaign said on Friday it raised $310m in July, the latest dramatic illustration of a US presidential race polls show has transformed from an apparent romp to victory by Donald Trump into a neck-and-neck race in battleground states, though Trump retains a narrow lead.

Harris doubled Trump’s July fundraising haul of $138.7m, which in any normal year would be an impressive result, boosted by the assassination attempt he survived in Pennsylvania and by the Republican convention in Milwaukee.

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Is this the end of Project 2025? – podcast

This week, Paul Dans, the leader of the controversial Project 2025, resigned and signalled in a company email that work on it was ‘winding down’. The project had become a manifesto of rightwing policies that would serve as a guide for the next Republican president. However, there is a significant stumbling block: Donald Trump wants nothing to do with it.

Joan E Greve and Rachel Leingang discuss whether this marks the beginning of the end of Project 2025

Archive: CNN, PBS Newshour, CSPAN, Tik Tok: heathergtv

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‘Day of great joy’: Wall Street Journal’s crusade to free Gershkovich succeeds

Newspaper mounted a high-profile campaign to stress reporter’s innocence and ensure he was not forgotten

The reporter Evan Gershkovich’s release from a Russian prison on Thursday was celebrated across US and global media but perhaps most happily by journalists at his own paper, the Wall Street Journal in New York.

In an email to staff after news of Gershkovich’s release as part of a large-scale prisoner swap, Emma Tucker, the Journal editor-in-chief, said: “A few moments ago, Evan walked free from a Russian plane. He will shortly be on a flight back to the US.

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Trump holds first Pennsylvania rally since assassination attempt hours after heated interview with Black journalists – live

Ex-president says he will travel back to Butler where assassination attempt took place; White House condemns Trump after he questions Harris’s racial identity at NABJ event

Journalists at the annual conference of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) began trickling in to the Hilton hotel in downtown Chicago this morning for a 12pm CT/1pm ET panel – featuring Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

He will be quizzed by the prominent political reporters Kadia Goba of Semafor, Rachel Scott of ABC News and Harris Faulkner of Fox News.

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US pauses $95m in aid to Georgia after passage of ‘foreign agents’ law

Secretary of state says suspension is due to ‘anti-democratic’ actions from the Georgian government

The US has suspended $95m in assistance to Georgia after its parliament adopted legislation related to foreign agents that critics say was inspired by a Russian law used to crack down on political dissent and that sparked weeks of mass protests.

Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said on Wednesday that he had decided to pause the Georgian aid, which would directly benefit the government, in response to “anti-democratic” actions the government has taken.

The US has also already imposed visa bans on a number of Georgian politicians and law enforcement officials for suppressing free speech, particularly voices in favor of Georgia’s integration with the west.

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Trump favorite Kari Lake wins Arizona’s Republican Senate primary

Far-right firebrand to face off against Democrat Ruben Gallego for US Senate seat vacated by Kyrsten Sinema

Kari Lake, the far-right firebrand and favorite of Donald Trump, has won Arizona’s Republican Senate primary.

The Associated Press projected the race at 8.44pm Arizona time on Tuesday night. Lake rose to prominence as a gubernatorial candidate in 2022, when she refused to concede the race to her Democratic challenger Katie Hobbs.

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‘Cat ladies’ come together to show support for Kamala Harris

Zoom call – with pets included – organized as riposte to comments made by JD Vance about ‘childless cat ladies’

A group of pet lovers and self-described “cat ladies” came together for the latest in a series of Zoom calls in support of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. The Tuesday evening call was hosted by Christine Pelosi, a political consultant and the daughter of Nancy Pelosi, and Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party.

The call was not organized around racial and ethnic identity, but as a rebuff to comments made in 2021 by JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, who told the then Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the US was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too”.

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Atlanta rally: Harris tells Trump to ‘say it to my face’ and challenges him to debate

VP touts prosecution record to cheering crowd after state leaders including Stacey Abrams take stage to show support

Three weeks ago, the political commentariat was writing off Georgia and talking of narrow pathways for Joe Biden to hold the White House. Georgia was a desert. Tuesday evening, an Atlanta crowd greeted Kamala Harris like she backed up a truck full of sweet tea to that desert.

It’s probably too early – nine days since the president’s withdrawal and the vice-president’s ascension – to know if sentiment in Georgia had shifted enough to justify jubilation. But the crowd in Atlanta treated the new presumptive presidential nominee as a reason to celebrate after months of her quieter campaigning in the city as the vice-presidential nominee.

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Republican Arizona mayor John Giles endorses Harris for President

Mesa mayor crosses party line to back vice-president and rebuke Trump’s ‘political extremism’ in op-ed

John Giles, the Republican mayor of Arizona’s third largest city and a previous thorn in the side of his party for endorsing Democrats, has thrown his support behind Kamala Harris for president.

Giles, who since 2014 has been mayor of Mesa near Phoenix, also rebuked Donald Trump in an opinion piece for the Arizona Republic published Monday.

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