Trump sought strike on top Iran military figure for political reasons – Esper book

Robert O’Brien told top general shortly before 2020 election that Trump wanted to kill unnamed official, according to Esper memoir

Shortly before the 2020 election, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, “stunned” the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff by saying the president wanted to kill a senior Iranian military officer operating outside the Islamic Republic.

“This was a really bad idea with very big consequences,” Mark Esper, Trump’s second and last secretary of defense, writes in his new memoir, adding that Gen Mark Milley suspected O’Brien saw the strike purely in terms of Trump’s political interests.

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Esper book details Trump rage at Pence and proposal to hit Mexico with missiles

Memoir from ex-defense chief Mark Esper details extraordinary outbursts he says he helped to defuse

In the heated summer of 2020, thwarted in his desire for a violent crackdown on protesters for racial justice, Donald Trump included his vice-president in a complaint that senior advisers were “losers”.

Trump’s second defense secretary, Mark Esper, details the Oval Office outburst in a new book. A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Defense Secretary in Extraordinary Times, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

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Schumer announces Senate abortion rights vote: ‘America will be watching’ – as it happened

Numbers are growing and tempers are fraying outside the supreme court. My colleague David Smith has just sent this video of protestors on both sides of the abortion rights debate facing off:

Celebrities are sharing their abortion stories as the backlash to the supreme court’s draft ruling removing women’s rights to the procedure grows. My colleague Lizzy Davies has this report:

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Donald Trump Jr testifies before the committee on the events of January 6

House panel also released text messages in which Donald Trump’s son begged the White House to get his father to condemn the riot

Donald Trump’s oldest son has met with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The interview Tuesday with Donald Trump Jr comes as the bipartisan House committee moves closer to the former president’s inner circle of family members and political advisers.

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Militia group leader tried to ask Trump to authorize them to stop the transfer of power

The justice department has alleged that Oath Keepers leadership called the president’s confidant to allow them to use force

Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers militia group leader charged with seditious conspiracy over the January 6 attack on the Capitol, asked an intermediary to get Donald Trump to allow his group to forcibly stop the transfer of power, the justice department has alleged in court papers.

The previously unknown phone call with the unidentified individual appears to indicate the Oath Keepers had contacts with at least one person close enough to Trump that Rhodes believed the individual would be a good person to consult with his request.

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Biden warns LGBTQ+ children could be next target of Republican ‘Maga crowd’

President warns of new attacks by Trump-dominated political party after supreme court ruling draft leak on abortion

Joe Biden has warned of new attacks on civil rights as the supreme court prepares to strike down the right to abortion, telling reporters at the White House that LGBTQ+ children could be the next targets of a Trump-dominated Republican party he called “this Maga crowd” and “the most extreme political organisation … in recent American history”.

“What happens,” the president asked, if “a state changes the law saying that children who are LGBTQ can’t be in classrooms with other children? Is that legit under the way the decision is written?”

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Biden condemns efforts of extremist ‘Maga crowd’ to overturn Roe v Wade abortion protections – as it happened

The judge overseeing the federal civil rights cases of four former Minneapolis police officers in the killing of George Floyd said Wednesday that he has accepted the terms of Derek Chauvin’s plea agreement and will sentence him to 20 to 25 years in prison.

When the white former office is sentenced he will serve the term concurrently with the state criminal sentence he is currently serving (and appealing), of 22.5 years, following his conviction last spring for the May 2020 murder of Floyd, a Black father who had moved from Houston to Minneapolis to start a new chapter after being released from prison.

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Biden ‘not prepared’ to support ending Senate filibuster to pass abortion rights law – live

Notre Dame Law School professor Richard W Garnett, a supreme court expert who clerked for the late chief justice William Rehnquist during the 1996-97 term, says the leaking of the draft document represents a “gross betrayal of trust”.

In a statement to the Guardian, Garnett said:

Most court-watchers have been expecting that, in the pending Dobbs case, a majority of the justices will vote to uphold Mississippi’s abortion regulation and to squarely overrule the earlier Roe and Casey decisions. And, it is unlikely that any observers or commentators familiar with the case are actually surprised by the possibility that Justice Alito has drafted a majority opinion stating that those decisions were ‘egregiously wrong’.

In any event, however, for an employee or member of the Court to intentionally leak a draft opinion would be a gross betrayal of trust, particularly if the leak were an effort to advance partisan aims or to undermine the Court’s work and legitimacy.

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‘It will be chaos’: 26 states in US will ban abortion if supreme court ruling stands

Regulation would be returned to states where lawmakers in south and midwest have enacted bans in anticipation of court’s decision

More than half of US states will outlaw abortion immediately or as soon as practicable, if a leaked draft decision from five supreme court justices remains substantially unchanged.

The result would send hundreds of thousands of people in 26 states hostile to abortion elsewhere to terminate a pregnancy – either by traveling hundreds of miles to an abortion clinic or seeking to self-manage abortion through medication from grassroots or illicit groups.

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US shaken to its core by supreme court draft that would overturn Roe v Wade

Biden condemns abortion opinion that, if handed down, would mean ‘fundamental shift’ in law and imperil many other rights

US politics – live coverage

Joe Biden has warned that a leaked draft supreme court ruling overturning Roe v Wade, the 1973 case which guaranteed the right to abortion, would represent a huge change in America law and could imperil a wide range of other civil rights.

In a historic moment that shook the US to the core and highlighted jagged social and political divisions, the court confirmed the draft was authentic but said it did not “represent a decision by the court or the final position of any member on the issues in the case”.

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Trump or no Trump: Asa Hutchinson mulls run for president in 2024

Republican Arkansas governor says he would not be deterred by former president in party in wrong over January 6 insurrection

The Arkansas governor, Asa Hutchinson, is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 and would not be deterred if Donald Trump made an expected bid to return to the White House.

“No, it won’t [deter me],” Hutchinson told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.

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January 6 committee set to subpoena Trump allies, Republican Kinzinger says

Members of Congress involved in attempt to overturn election have refused to testify voluntarily before June public hearings

The House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol will decide “in the next week or two” whether to issue subpoenas trying to force Republican lawmakers to testify about Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, one of two Republicans on the panel said on Sunday.

“If that takes a subpoena, it takes a subpoena,” Adam Kinzinger said.

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Biden’s top border official not worried about Republican impeachment threats

Homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas forging ahead with plans to ease Covid-related immigration restrictions

Joe Biden’s top border official said on Sunday he was unconcerned by threats from the top House Republican that the GOP could impeach him if it regains the majority after the midterm elections, as the Biden administration forges ahead with plans to ease a coronavirus-related immigration restriction.

Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, addressed the remarks from the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy.

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Republican: Biden’s $33bn Ukraine aid request likely to get swift approval

Michael McCaul’s comments come while Nancy Pelosi leads a congressional delegation to Kyiv to meet Ukrainian president

Joe Biden’s $33bn request to Congress for more aid for Ukraine is likely to receive swift approval from lawmakers, a senior Republican said on Sunday, as the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, made a surprise visit to the war-riven country.

The president on Thursday had asked for the money for military and humanitarian support for Ukraine as it fights to repulse the Russian invasion now in its third month.

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Ukraine hopes to evacuate more civilians from besieged Mariupol steelworks

Zelenskiy said about 100 civilians evacuated after weeks sheltering in the Azovstal complex would arrive in Zaporizhzhia on Monday

Ukrainian authorities are planning to evacuate more civilians from Mariupol on Monday, after dozens were finally brought to safety following weeks trapped under heavy fire in the strategic port city’s Azovstal steel complex.

The civilians had been sheltering in bunkers beneath the steelworks that is the last redoubt for Ukrainian forces in Mariupol.

Two explosions were reported in the early hours of Monday in Belgorod, the southern Russian region bordering Ukraine. Vyacheslav Gladkov, the region’s governor, said in a social media post there were no casualties or damage. On Sunday Gladkov had said one person was injured in a fire at a Russian defence ministry facility in Belgorod, while seven homes had been damaged.

Russia’s top uniformed officer, General Valery Gerasimov, visited dangerous frontline positions in eastern Ukraine last week in a bid to reinvigorate the Russian offensive there, the New York Times has reported citing Ukrainian and US officials. The Guardian could not immediately confirm the report.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said that the county is working to prevent nuclear war, Reuters reported. In an interview with Italian TV, Lavrov said: “Western media misrepresent Russian threats. Russia has never interrupted efforts to reach agreements that guarantee that a nuclear war never develops”.

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Rand Paul promises Covid review if Republicans retake Senate in midterms

Kentucky senator who has clashed publicly with Dr Anthony Fauci champions lab leak theory in remarks at rally

The Kentucky senator Rand Paul promised on Saturday to wage a vigorous review into the origins of the coronavirus if Republicans retake the Senate and he lands a committee chairmanship.

Speaking to supporters at a campaign rally, the senator denounced what he sees as government overreach in response to Covid-19. He applauded a recent judge’s order that voided the federal mask mandate on planes and trains and in travel hubs.

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Democratic senator Joe Manchin cuts ad for West Virginia Republican

Manchin cites Biden Build Back Better spending plan he sank in ad for David McKinley, challenger to Trump-backed incumbent

Joe Manchin has recorded an ad for a Republican in a West Virginia US House election, in which the Democratic senator trumpets his opposition to Joe Biden’s Build Back Better domestic spending plan.

“David McKinley has always opposed reckless spending because it doesn’t make sense for West Virginia,” Manchin said.

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Mark Meadows claims US Capitol attack panel leaked texts to ‘vilify’ him

Argument made in federal court filing in Washington, where Trump’s chief of staff sued to invalidate subpoenas

Donald Trump’s last White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has accused the congressional committee investigating the US Capitol attack of leaking all the text messages he provided in what he says is an effort to vilify him publicly.

The argument was made in a filing on Friday in federal court in Washington, where Meadows sued in December to invalidate subpoenas issued for his testimony and to Verizon for his cellphone records.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene accused of lying in hearing in Capitol attack case

Lawyers for groups challenging Republican say text Greene sent to Meadows, released by House panel, shows she lied in testimony

Lawyers for voters seeking to bar the far-right Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene from Congress over her support for the January 6 insurrection have accused her of lying in a hearing in the case.

In a filing Friday, lawyers for groups challenging Greene said a text from the Georgia congresswoman to then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, released by the House committee investigating January 6, shows she lied in testimony.

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Trump claims he doesn’t have documents New York attorney general is seeking – as it happened

Nancy Pelosi says the House will vote to pass Joe Biden’s $33bn request for aid for Ukraine “as soon as possible.”

Speaking at her weekly press briefing on Friday morning, the House speaker framed the administration’s request as one of a number of “emergencies” Congress needed to address urgently.

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