Six green card holders in Texas charged in federal crackdown on illegal voting – as it happened

This concludes out live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments: As part of a $2.8bn package of military aid, the Trump administration plans to send Israel a type of one-ton bombs that were withheld by the Biden administration over concerns that they were being used to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Donald Trump “threw a tantrum” when he heard that Democratic congresswoman Joyce Beatty, a trustee of the Kennedy Center whose lawsuit forced Trump’s name to be removed from the facade of the memorial, had again prevailed in court. A televised Michigan Senate debate in Detroit on Tuesday was distinctly one-sided, because the Democratic nominee, Dr Abdul El-Sayed turned up, while his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, chose not to attend. Todd Blanche, the US attorney general, alerted reporters at the White House to stand by for what he called “a big development” in the federal crackdown on voting by non-citizens to be announced by Ryan Raybould, the US attorney for the Northern District of Texas. When it came, however, Raybould’s announcement, that his office had charged six lawful permanent residents and one undocumented immigrant for voting in federal elections over the past eight years, hardly lived up to the billing. Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and trustee of the Kennedy Center whose lawsuit forced Donald Trump’s name to be removed from the facade of the memorial, told MS NOW on Tuesday that the president had thrown “a tantrum” in a phone call to the board when he learned that she had prevailed in court. “It was the most unprofessional thing that I’ve ever witnessed or been a part of it,” Beatty said. “He went into name calling,” she added, saying that Trump had called her dumb. “He said, ‘I think you’re incompetent,’ and I said, ‘I know you’re incompetent,’” the congresswoman recalled. “He said he was going to hold me responsible if something fell out of the ceiling and killed someone,” she added. “And I told him, I said, ‘You’re already killing people, we’re at war.” “Then he wanted to talk about how great he was with developing and he didn’t know anything about me, but I had never done anything. This was the biggest thing I had done. So I reminded him that he had more bankruptcies than anybody in the room,” Beatty said. A televised Michigan Senate debate in Detroit on Tuesday was distinctly one-sided, because the Democratic nominee, Dr Abdul El-Sayed turned up, while his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, chose not to attend. In his opening statement, standing across from an empty podium reserved for Rogers, which El-Sayed’s campaign clipped and posted on YouTube, the Democrat argued that the absent Republican “took the time to go to Dallas… to give a speech at a convention held in the interest of Donald Trump, but he didn’t have the time to spend an hour with us in Detroit.” After the debate, when a reporter began a question for El-Sayed by saying, “Obviously the elephant in the room tonight or lack thereof,” the candidate cut in to say: “No the elephant was not in the room. The elephant elephant decided that they did not want to be in the room.” “Although the elephants were all in the room in Dallas,” he said, referring to the Republican midterm convention staged by Trump last week that Rogers attended. “It’s wild to me that this guy is more interested in going to speak for what, six minutes and 48 seconds in Dallas than he is to have 60 minutes with Michiganders here in Detroit. But it tells you who he is. He’s a coward.” “If I were him, I wouldn’t debate me either,” El-Sayed added, continuing to hammer his opponent for refusing to debate. “But here he is because Daddy Trump has him stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to Canadian tariff wars or actual wars that we’re all having to pay for. And he doesn’t want to have to answer.” In a social media video released on Tuesday, senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat considering a run for the presidency, called for AI developers to slow down their work until government safeguards can be put in place. “We are hearing extremely clear warnings from the people building frontier AI models about the risks,” Van Hollen said. “The people building this technology are concerned about the loss of human control. We need to pump the brakes until we have rules in place to stop this technology from doing grave harm. And that includes implementing mandatory safeguards and a comprehensive testing regime.” “Make no mistake, putting these federal guard rails in place does not absolve the AI corporations from the harm done by their products,” he continued. “They must be held accountable under our existing civil and criminal laws. That said, the government has a duty to prevent grave harm from happening in the first place.” “We need Congress to act. It’s not enough to leave it to Donald Trump. Yesterday he called into a conference of Silicon Valley bigwigs and said that concerns about AI safety are a hoax,” the senator added. “The Silicon Valley bigwig investors and tech oligarchs that have bankrolled Donald Trump back into the White House didn’t do it because they all became MAGA overnight,” Van Hollen said. “They did it because there was an implicit deal. In return for their support and for funding his vanity projects like his obscene ballroom, they wanted something in return - a free hand on AI policy.” As part of a $2.8bn package of military aid, the Trump administration plans to send Israel a type of one-ton bombs that were withheld by the Biden administration over concerns that they were being used to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The aid package, first reported by the Washington Post, includes 20,000 Mk84s as well as 20,000 BLU-117s, US officials told the Associated Press on Tuesday. Congress has been informally notified about the pending deal, most of which is to be paid for with foreign military financing — in which American taxpayer dollars are given to Israel which in turn uses it to purchase the weapons from US weapons makers. As soon as Trump returned to office in 2025, he lifted a hold on one shipment of MK-84 bombs to Israel imposed by the Biden administration in 2024. In the first months of Israel’s offensive on Gaza, following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack, the Biden administration had sent thousands of the 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. American-made one-ton bombs have been used to hundreds of times in deadly strikes in Gaza and Lebanon. The New York Times reported in late 2023 that Israel had routinely dropped MK-84 bombs in areas of Gaza it had designated as safe for civilians. Trevor Ball, a former explosive-ordnance-disposal technician for the US army who studies open-source images of civilian harm caused by US weapons, told the Post that the Israeli military uses MK-84 bombs to destroy entire buildings in pursuit of suspected militants. “If Hezbollah or whoever is in a building, an MK-84 will bring down the whole building,” Ball said. “I don’t believe the U.S. taxpayer should continue to arm Netanyahu’s government with deadly military equipment,” Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor and a Guardian US columnist, wrote on Bluesky in response to the reported arms sales. “I believe Netanyahu is a war criminal and that his government has committed genocide in Gaza. This doesn’t make me antisemitic.” Congressman Adam Smith, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, expressed outrage on Tuesday at a new estimate by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that Donald Trump’s ongoing war against Iran cost American taxpayers approximately $38 billion in just the first five months, through 1 August. “The CBO’s findings underscore two important points,” Smith said in a statement. “First, Trump’s disastrous war against Iran has exacted a staggering toll in terms of lives lost and wounded in action, as well as in the waste of hard-earned taxpayer dollars; and second, there is an overwhelming lack of transparency and level of incompetence that have together been the hallmarks of this administration. This report is based on the information the CBO has been able to analyze. Yet even the CBO has not had access to the full accounting of losses and damage to equipment and infrastructure, munitions stockpiles, materiel, and force posture.” “The CBO analysis also highlights the impact of Trump’s failed policy on the domestic and global economies, including increased inflation,” the congressman from the state of Washington added. “Again, the Trump Administration has refused to provide all relevant information needed to make a full assessment, information that Congress and the American public need and deserve, meaning that this cost is likely even higher.” A bill co-authored by Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who died earlier this year, that would give Donald Trump broad authority to tariff Russia and its trading partners will be put forward for a vote this week in a high-stakes legislative battle that could provide new sanctioning authority to the US president at a crucial moment in Russia’s war against Ukraine. The bill is facing considerable pushback not only from Ukraine-sceptic Republicans, however, but also from prominent Democrats who say that the bill will give undue tariff power to the US president that could then be abused and turned against US allies. Congressional staffers have described frenzied last-minute lobbying in the halls of Congress as the vote approached for what one Democratic staffer called the “one opportunity that we have to help Ukraine before they enter the slow winter”. The bill passed a vote in the House rules committee on Monday, and is due for a rule vote on the House floor on Tuesday afternoon, then a general vote on Wednesday. The Lindsey O Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026 would target Russia’s energy and defense industries, as well as the country’s “shadow fleet” of tankers skirting existing oil sanctions, and would give Trump new authority to slap 100% tariffs on top purchasers of Russian oil, including China and India. But Trump’s use of tariffs against US partners such as Canada and Mexico have made expanding his powers a controversial aim – even for senior Democrats who have been stalwart backers of Ukraine. They are led by the representative Gregory Meeks; the top Democrats on the House foreign affairs committee; the representative Don Beyer of Congress’s joint economic committee; and Richard Neal, the ranking Democrat on the House ways and means committee. In a statement, they said the legislation would do “more harm than good”. “This bill would dramatically expand presidential tariff authorities while failing to mandate sanctions on Russia, both of which are unacceptable,” they said. “These flaws would raise Americans’ prices while undermining support for Ukraine in the long term.” Earlier on Tuesday, Todd Blanche, the US attorney general, alerted reporters at the White House to stand by for what he called “a big development” in the federal crackdown on voting by non-citizens to be announced by Ryan Raybould, the US attorney for the Northern District of Texas. When it came, however, Raybould’s announcement, that his office had charged six lawful permanent residents and one undocumented immigrant for voting in federal elections over the past eight years, hardly lived up to the billing. While six of those charged cast ballots in the 2024 general election, the impact of their votes was almost immeasurably small, given that two of them cast provisional ballots that were not counted, and 11,388,670 other Texans voted in that election. Donald Trump, whose false claim that voting by non-citizens is rampant inspired the investigation, won the state by a margin of 1,558,347 votes over his nearest rival, Kamala Harris. Of the four illegal votes that were apparently counted in error, three were cast by green card holders from Nigeria, India and Mexico, who might have wrongly thought they were eligible to vote, and just one by an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. Lawful permanent residents are not allowed to vote in federal elections, but they are permitted to vote in local elections in the District of Columbia and in some jurisdictions of three US states: California, Maryland and Vermont. Still, the administration framed the criminal charges against the handful of ineligible voters in Texas as significant and even invited a Fox News crew to film the arrest of one of the green-card holders: a 27-year-old from Nigeria who allegedly voted in 2018, two years after becoming a lawful permanent resident. The video was broadcast multiple times on the president’s favorite network on Tuesday. “I was reliably told this never happens,” the Fox host Will Cain said with sarcasm after a report on the arrest. “We know now at least it’s happened seven times.” The House of Representatives shot down an attempt to impeach Donald Trump on Tuesday, though many Democrats supported keeping the effort alive. By a 232-147 vote, with 47 lawmakers voting “present”, the chamber tabled the impeachment effort proposed by Democratic congressman Al Green, a fierce Trump critic who was censured by the House for disrupting a speech the president gave shortly after returning to the White House, and recently lost his primary. Green had proposed impeaching Trump over the killings of US citizens by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) during his second term, and accused the president of trying to create an “authoritarian regime”. “President Trump has used ICE and CBP to suppress the First Amendment rights to free speech and a free press; violate the Fourth Amendment right to privacy and protections against unlawful searches and excessive force; and defy the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of due process and equal protection by allowing and encouraging racially targeted arrests, unjustified detentions, and unjustified killings,” his resolution read. The House impeached Trump twice during his first term, but the Senate acquitted him both times, and the question of whether to impeach him again is a sensitive one for Democrats as they eye a return to the majority in Congress in the November midterm elections. In advance of the vote, the party’s House leaders released a statement saying they would vote “present” on Green’s effort, effectively abstaining, saying that none of the investigative work necessary to successfully impeach the president has been done. They vowed to “continue our fight to make life more affordable for everyday Americans, while committing to holding the crooks accountable using every tool available to us beginning on day one.” The motion to table Green’s resolution was supported by 213 Republican-aligned lawmakers and 18 Democrats, while 147 Democrats were opposed. The “present” votes included 46 Democrats and one Republican. Donald Trump is taking the ruling on Tuesday by a federal judge that his name can not be added, in any form, to the exterior of the Kennedy Center, which is a memorial to the late president, about as well as you might expect. Writing on his social media platform, Trump said that adding his name to the memorial for the assassinated 35th US president was a non-negotiable demand and the performing arts center would be closed immediately and not renovated at all if the US supreme court did not intervene to overturn the order against that issued by district court judge Christopher Cooper. After Cooper reiterated his previous ruling “that Congress named the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for President John F. Kennedy alone”, Trump wrote that the center would be closed immediately and what he described as “a very large and complex” renovation “cannot begin until such time as” Cooper’s ruling on the name is overturned by an appeals court. “If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Trump wrote, in his usual idiosyncratic style, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.” The ruling by Cooper, who was nominated by former president Barack Obama, made it plain that he sees no scope for reconsidering his decision that adding Trump’s name would simply be illegal. Four months ago, this Court declared that Congress named the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for President John F. Kennedy alone. It came to this conclusion for a simple reason: The federal law that created the Kennedy Center permitted no other result. In 1983, Congress amended that law to guarantee “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” 20 U.S.C. § 76j(b)(1). The Court ruled that the decision by the Kennedy Center’s Board of Trustees to rename the institution in honor of President Trump violated that congressional prohibition and others. And the Court ordered the permanent removal of the President’s name from the front portico of the main building, as well as any other physical or digital signage or official materials. “Yet the drama at the Kennedy Center continues,” Cooper added, before barring the Trump-appointed board from enacting a resolution to add Trump’s name to the center’s facade, calling it the Trump Kennedy Center and also naming the plaza outside the center for Trump. “Defendants are hereby enjoined from inscribing ‘renovated and restored by Donald J. Trump’ on the main building or renaming the campus the ‘President Donald J. Trump Plaza.’ Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Cooper wrote. Donald Trump today blasted the supreme court’s ruling which blocked his long-sought executive order which curbs mail-in voting. The president called mail-in voting – which he has used on several occasions to cast a ballot – “a laughing stock” across the world. He has routinely claimed, without evidence, that the voting method is prone to fraud. “The Supreme Court has really let our Country down! Certain Justices are petrified of these crazed and depraved Democrats, and are totally unable to show the courage necessary to save our America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. The president suggested that the justices he nominated for the bench – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – are not “the people I interviewed to serve” but “merely a shell of their original selves”. Todd Blanche, the attorney general, defended the president’s earlier criticism of the justices on the bench who ruled to block his order. “He [Trump] is very frustrated,” Blanche said at a White House press conference. “He has every right, and indeed he should communicate his concerns with the supreme court whenever he has them. This isn’t the first time that he’s done it, and it won’t be the last.” Blanche also dismissed calls to investigate the contributions of a Russian oligarch, who is close to Putin, and who helped pay for Donald Trump Jr’s wedding in May. “The president doesn’t know who this person is. I think other members of the family don’t know who this person is. The president’s son has said that he’s a very close friend,” the attorney general told reporters. “When you say, ‘am I investigating?’ Am I investigating what? And when you say this person is a friend of Putin, I don’t even know if that’s true or not.” However, Democrats on the House oversight committee have started to investigate possible ties between the Trump administration and Kremlev. Congressman Robert Garcia, the panel’s top Democrat, has asked Susie Wiles – the White House chief of staff, to provide documents, records and communications between the White House and Trump Jr about Kremlev, among other requests. More here Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, said that Congress has “been asleep at the wheel” when it comes to AI regulation. Sanders decried the speed of the technology’s evolution at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington today. The senator has proposed bicameral legislation with congressman Greg Casar to permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence, and said that the pledges this week from leading AI company CEOs for the industry to “slow down” are encouraging but ultimately not enough. “When the future of humanity is at stake, we need binding international safety rules, not voluntary standards from the industry,” Sanders added. A federal judge has ruled that Donald Trump’s name must stay off the facade of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, blocking an effort by the center’s Trump-appointed board to restore his name to the building. The judge also said the board cannot proceed with plans to rename the campus where it sits the “President Donald J. Trump ‌Plaza”. Earlier, the board voted to immediately close the institution citing safety and financial concerns. And on Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats blocked a major cryptocurrency regulation bill, saying it did not contain enough constraints on Donald Trump and other government officials’ ability to profit from digital assets. A vote to advance the measure, known as the CLARITY act, failed by a 49-50 margin, with all Democrats and three Republicans opposed. The product of months of negotiation, the bill would created the first ever regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies, and included provisions intended to stop Trump and other elected officials from profiting from the assets while in office. More here Earlier, FBI director Kash Patel clashed with lawmakers in a Senate judiciary committee hearing over … bestiality (among other issues). Senators from both parties questioned Patel about his department lowering hiring standards for FBI applicants with certain background histories. This includes those who have had sexual encounters with sex workers, theft from an employer or engaging in acts of bestiality. On the last one, the FBI director claimed this only includes people who were “trafficked” into having sex with an animal. More here Senate Democrats just blocked a major cryptocurrency regulation bill, saying it did not contain enough constraints on Donald Trump and other government officials’ ability to profit from digital assets. A vote to advance the measure, known as the CLARITY act, failed by a 49-50 margin, with all Democrats and three Republicans opposed. The product of months of negotiation, the bill would created the first ever regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies, and included provisions intended to stop Trump and other elected officials from profiting from the assets while in office. Financial disclosures released over the summer showed the president had made $1bn from crypto, even as his administration adopted policies favored by the industry. Though the measure’s Republican backed argued the guardrails represented a major concession, they weren’t enough for Democrats, who declined to provide the votes needed to overcome the Senate filibuster. “All President Trump wants is for the Senate to give him time to crime, and I won’t support any piece of legislation that enables him,” Democratic senator Ruben Gallego said after the vote, which he said Republican leaders forced even as negotiations to address his party’s concerns with the bill were ongoing. “This legislation failed squarely because Republicans refuse to say no to the president. It takes 60 votes to pass a bill, and instead of spending their time twisting themselves into knots to appease President Trump, Republicans should have worked more closely with Senate Democrats to craft a bill that could pass with strong ethics provisions.” Fellow Senate Democrat Adam Schiff said: “After more than a year of intensive negotiations with my Senate Democratic colleagues, Republican counterparts and the White House, the administration has made clear it is not willing to reach a deal that would put an end to the president’s profiteering through digital assets.” He didn’t shut the door on cryptocurrency regulation entirely, saying “I remain open to continuing to work to get an ethics deal that will be acceptable to the American people and crack down on corruption by any and all public officials.” Steve Bannon spoke immediately after Bernie Sanders at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington earlier today, though the populist pair did not share the stage. Bannon, host of the War Room podcast, called for an aggressive economic and technological “quarantine” of China, demanding the immediate expulsion of Chinese nationals from US research laboratories, an end to the training of Chinese engineers and technologists and the total severance of capital flows. “Did our fathers and grandfathers, did they underwrite the Soviet Union?” Bannon asked. “Did they train Soviet Union scientists? Did they take Russian kids over here to college to let them go to the best universities and get the best degree? Did they have Wall Street slobbering to do their deals? Did they have every bank there to lend them money quicker than to lend anyone in this audience? “The answer is they did not. They stood up to the Soviet Union and the first thing to stand up to them was to choke them off and that’s what we have to do today to the Chinese Communist Party. No deals, no agreements, you’re out of the AI business because we’re going to shut your ecosystem down.” Demanding immediate executive action to isolate Beijing’s tech sector, Bannon said: “No chips, no black marketing chips, no free ride off American technology, no steal on American tech… To hell with the Chinese Communist Party.” Only then, Bannon argued, can the US have the time necessary to consider the proper regulation of the AI sector. He delivered a scathing verdict on major technology corporations and executives, accusing them of gambling with public safety for private profit. Bannon accused Silicon Valley of seeking to “socialise all the risk with the American people including potential bailouts” while keeping all financial upside. “The American people are not going to be supplicants to these tech oligarchs,” Bannon said, praising grassroots campaigns that previously defeated federal pre-emption bills aimed at blocking state-level AI regulations. Bannon has long praised Trump as a historic figure and endorsed his lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. But on Tuesday, while claiming that executive action is required rather than legislation by Congress, he made only a glancing reference to the president who has dismissed AI concerns as a “hoax” and “sick conspiracy”. Todd Blanche dismissed calls to investigate the contributions of a Russian oligarch who is close to Putin and who helped pay for Donald Trump Jr’s wedding in May. A reminder that a ProPublica report revealed that Umar Kremlev spent hundreds of thousands of dollars bankrolling the multi-day event in the Bahamas. Trump Jr and his wife, Bettina, later confirmed Kremlev’s contributions to the celebrations and characterized them as “an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend”. Blanche, today, was resolute that there would be no follow-up. “The president doesn’t know who this person is. I think other members of the family don’t know who this person is. The president’s son has said that he’s a very close friend,” the attorney general told reporters at the White House today. “When you say, ‘am I investigating?’ Am I investigating what? And when you say this person is a friend of Putin, I don’t even know if that’s true or not.” Blanche added: “It’s fun to talk about this issue and the rhetoric around it. But I think all the relevant people involved, the president and his kids, have already addressed it. I don’t have any information. I don’t know this person either, so I don’t have any information about it beyond that.” A reminder that Democrats on the House oversight committee have started to investigate possible ties between the administration and Kremlev. Robert Garcia, the panel’s top Democrat, has asked Susie Wiles – the White House chief of staff, to provide documents, records and communications between the White House and Trump Jr about Kremlev, among other requests. Blanche also said today that he doesn’t anticipate any extra work from the justice department to help educate voters about mail-in voting, given the confusion around the practice as litigation ricocheted through the courts. “I haven’t seen any suggestion or any information or heard from secretaries of state that that that’s an issue,” the attorney general claimed. “Ballots are confusing in every election. The way they’re distributed, the way they’re talked about, that’s something that the state and locals handle very well every single election cycle for one reason or another. So no, that doesn’t concern me.” Todd Blanche voiced his support for Pete Hegseth, after Republican congressman Thomas Massie on Tuesday proposed impeaching the defense secretary, saying that he had repeatedly violated the constitution through his handling of war with Iran and the deaths of civilians in conflicts worldwide. “Secretary Hegseth is doing a phenomenal job … he follows the law, and so the DoJ plays a role in that, and we play an active role in making sure the laws are complied with,” the attorney general said. When it comes to the ongoing discussion about the need for further guardrails on AI development, Blanche said that it was not the job of the justice department to “regulate”. “We’re prosecutors, not regulators, so we’re not going to try to regulate AI,” he told reporters in the Rose Garden, adding that the call for checks has “conveniently” become a “flashpoint this week”. The attorney general said that he agrees with Trump’s assessment in response to the calls to decelerate AI development. A reminder that the president has deemed these warnings from lawmakers and AI executives alike, as hoaxes. “Every Democrat senator suddenly races to a microphone to talk about AI after being eerily silent for months and months and months,” Blanche added. “To talk about the timing of this as being nothing but an effort to influence the midterms, I shouldn’t have to say that out loud. Of course, that’s what it is.” Speaking to reporters today, Todd Blanche said that the supreme court’s ruling yesterday that blocks Donald Trump’s executive order to implement restricts on mail-in voting, will not affect “ongoing criminal investigations into illegal voting”. He added that the “efforts to make sure that we have free and fair elections are not going to stop just in November or after or thereafter”. The attorney general went on to defend the president’s earlier criticism of the justices on the bench who ruled to block his order. “He [Trump] is very frustrated,” Blanche said. “He has every right, and indeed he should communicate his concerns with the supreme court whenever he has them. This isn’t the first time that he’s done it, and it won’t be the last … The idea that President Trump shouldn’t be allowed to communicate to the American people his frustration, I … I don’t share that.” The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the nonpartisan agency that provides financial estimates on legislation and policies for lawmakers, has said that the war in Iran has cost the Pentagon approximately $38 billion as of 1 August 2026. The CBO says the amount reflects the costs of “replacing expended munitions and equipment lost in battle, increased flying hours, other operations, and increased fuel costs”. The estimate does not include other costs incurred by the war, such as the increased cost of fuel used by the Postal Service. It also doesn’t include costs already accounted for in the federal budget, such as the basic operating costs of the military forces involved in the conflict. In a short while Todd Blanche, the attorney general, will hold a White House press briefing for reporters. A reminder that Donald Trump has yet to announce a permanent replacement for Karoline Leavitt, the former press secretary who resigned last month. Sanders capped off his speech by noting that we are at “a dangerous and unprecedented moment in world history”, and it is “imperative” to stand up to AI industry leaders, but also to a “a government of both political parties, which have not been as aggressive in any way, shape, or form as they should be”. While the senator said that AI has the potential to do “some extraordinarily good things” when it comes to healthcare and prescription drug development, but he stressed the need to make sure that AI “works for all of the people and does not simply end up making a handful of the richest people on Earth even richer”. Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, has decried the advancement of artificial intelligence the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington today. The leading progressive lawmaker has emerged as a leading voice in warning against the rapidity of the technology’s evolution. “If AI surpasses human intelligence, as many scientists believe could happen, this technology will escape human control with potentially catastrophic consequences,” Sanders said in Washington today. “AI is advancing exponentially, exponentially every single day. In other words, what you are looking at right now is the least capable version of AI that we will ever have – the least capable, the dumbest version. The speed and scope of AI development in just the last four years has been almost beyond human comprehension.” Sanders added that Congress, under both Republican and Democratic control, has been “been asleep at the wheel”. “We now have a president whose ignorance regarding this issue is truly embarrassing,” he said, referring to Donald Trump’s insistence that the calls for AI guardrails are a “hoax” that would put the US on the back foot in the ongoing technological arms race with China. Sanders, who we reported earlier, has proposed bicameral legislation with congressman Greg Casar to permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence, said that the pledges from leading AI company CEOs for the industry to “slow down” are encouraging but ultimately not enough. “When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal. You hit the brakes,” Sanders added. “When the future of humanity is at stake, we need binding international safety rules, not voluntary standards from the industry.” Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, defended Donald Trump’s $5,000 so-called “dividend” that he promised to every adult US citizen if Republicans win the House and the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections. “I think it’s a good idea for the American people to keep more of their money,” Bessent said in response to a question from Democratic congressman Juan Vargas at a financial services committee hearing today. “Does that hurt the deficit or the debt? Does that increase the deficit or does it increase the debt?” Vargas asked the treasury secretary. “I believe that there are ways to do it without increasing the debt or deficit,” Bessent said. “I’m not ready to discuss it at present, but at Treasury, we’ve been working on it for quite a while.” This comes as US debt reached $40tn for the first time last month. The milestone marks years of government spending that grew under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. In a post on Truth Social this morning, Donald Trump reiterated claims that the Kennedy Center “is in a virtual state of collapse, and has been for many years”, before claiming that “a large piece of concrete and steel” had fallen from the ceiling in one of the hallways, arguing this posed a risk to the public and meant a security guard had narrowly escaped death. This was supposedly to add to his argument that the institution should close for renovations, which the board is voting on today. He blamed the “very hostile and conflicted judge” for previously halting the closure, “in which case, unfortunately, the Building is destined to doom.” Here’s the full post: The Kennedy Center is in a virtual state of collapse, and has been for many years. A large piece of concrete and steel just dropped down, in a thud, from the ceiling of a heavily trafficked main hallway. If the Building were open, innocent people would have been killed. A security guard had just passed the area, one minute prior to this ceiling collapse. He was, therefore, 60 seconds away from certain death. The Judge has made us keep it open even though there are no performances, and no people that would have the Courage to even go in. The Board of The Kennedy Center has strongly voted to save it, and they know I’m the only one who can do so, because I have the ability to raise the money, and the ability to construct — that few others have. I also have the strength and power of the Presidency, which will be needed do what must be done, and give it a strong shot at Greatness again! Remember, The Kennedy Center was losing Hundreds of Millions of Dollars when I took over. It was failing badly! It had nothing to do with me, I am only there to help. I just got there to reveal the facts, but especially those concerning Building Safety. A very hostile and conflicted Judge (What else is new?) seems like he won’t let that happen, in which case, unfortunately, the Building is destined to doom. Isn’t that too bad? We have already wasted more than 6 months “playing around” in Court. Time is our Enemy! The Board, comprised of some of the most prominent and respected people in our Nation, is meeting again today. It will be interesting to see what happens! A federal judge has ruled that Donald Trump’s name must stay off the facade of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, blocking an effort by the center’s (Trump-appointed) board to restore his name to the building. The judge also said the board cannot proceed with plans to rename the campus where it sits the “President Donald J. Trump ‌Plaza”. “Simply put, defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington wrote in the order. “The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.” Per my colleague Joseph Gedeon, Cooper ordered Trump’s name removed from the building in May, ruling that only Congress has authority to rename it, and the lettering came down in June. The board voted in August to reinstate an inscription and proceed with a closure for renovations, the latter of which a vote is expected to formalize today. And yesterday, the Washington Post (paywall) reported that the Trump-installed leaders of the center claimed the institution was on the brink of bankruptcy, and argued that putting the president’s name on its facade may be the only way ⁠to avoid imminent and “certain fiscal collapse”. The documents obtained by the Post were prepared in advance of today’s meeting. Here’s Joseph’s story on the vote: Congressman Greg Casar has called for the United States to lead the world in artificial intelligence diplomacy, saying it must end the AI arms race instead of trying to win it. In remarks at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington today, the Texas Democrat, a leading progressive voice calling for pausing the development of super-advanced AI, warned, “I believe we are closer than ever to breaking the dam on serious AI protections.” He outlined three major threats to human existence that loom with the rise of advanced AI: Controlled by big business, superpowerful AI could put countless Americans out of work. Controlled by an out of control government, superpowerful AI would allow constant monitoring of citizens’ every move. And controlled by the wrong humans – or controlled by no human – superpowerful AI could threaten countless lives. Evoking the cold war, where humanity was pulled back from the brink of nuclear annihilation, he went on: Far too many people seem to be trying to win a race where millions if not billions of lives could be lost at the finish line … No one can win the AI arms race. It’s up to us to end the AI arms race. Casar referenced his bill with Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, which proposes to create “a cabinet-level federal agency to protect the public from dangerous AI … requires monitoring of frontier AI systems at all stages of development. And it bans the development of AI superintelligence”. The bill would also “direct the United States to pursue international agreements to prevent superintelligence from being developed anywhere in the world”, Casar said. “But while we pass safety rules here at home, AI diplomacy may be the most important thing we can do,” he said. Donald Trump has alleged that the FBI under Joe Biden “didn’t do what they should have” investigating the assassination on the now-president’s life at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024. “By the time I got into Office, on January 20th, most of the information was missing, altered, corrupted, or gone. New info was just found! Why wasn’t it seen long ago?” Trump wrote on Truth Social, claiming – without evidence – that this was “all a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election, that failed”. The president continued to blast former FBI director Christopher Wray, who he called a “dirty cop” and “should pay a price for the way he handled this assassination attempt”. The FBI director sparred intensely with Democratic Senator Peter Welch, of Vermont, after the lawmaker questioned Patel over his defamation lawsuit against a journalist at the Atlantic, who wrote earlier this year about Patel’s alleged excessive drinking and unexplained absences on the job. The FBI director has sued the magazine, and the author of a story it published, filing a defamation lawsuit in US district court for the District of Columbia that seeks $250m in damages. “I have every right to claim the truth,” Patel said, accusing Sarah Fitzpatrick, the reporter, of printing “false material”. The FBI director added that he was acting as a “personal private citizen” in the lawsuit. “I am allowed to participate in my own defense, especially when there’s a smear campaign, one which you are participating and continuing the falsehoods and lies that have been directed at me,” he told Welch. Patel also said that he did not direct the FBI to investigate Fitzpatrick for her reporting. Welch also questioned Patel about after a video surfaced earlier this year, which shows the FBI director chugging a bottle and spraying beer in a locker room with the men’s USA hockey team in Milan, following their gold medal victory against Canada at the Winter Olympics. “What you’ll never understand is the players who are my friends invited me into the locker room. What you’ll never understand is that during that trip, where 300,000 Americans went to Italy to participate in the games and watch them, not a single security incident occurred,” Patel said. During Kash Patel’s hearing before senators on the judiciary committee, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, also probed the FBI director about Kremlev’s involvement in Donald Trump Jr’s wedding. “I would like to know from you whether you have begun an investigation of potential intelligence compromises,” Blumenthal asked Patel. However, the FBI director said that he didn't “track” the reporting from ProPublica. “Public reporting generally is inaccurate, and so what the men and women of the FBI will do, as we do in every case, is we will look at whatever information comes our way and analyze it,” Patel said. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, is investigating potential ties between the White House and a Russian oligarch who paid for a portion of Donald Trump Jr’s wedding. In a letter sent to Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, on Monday, Garcia expressed concern about “any possible foreign entanglement” between the president’s son and the oligarch, Umar Kremlev. Garcia asked Wiles to provide documents, records and communications between the White House and Trump Jr about Kremlev, among other requests. “As the son of President Donald Trump and the part-owner and major investor of multiple companies with extensive Department of Defense contracts, any apparent ties to members of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle raises serious questions about pay-to-play schemes and foreign intelligence infiltration of the President’s family,” Garcia wrote in the letter. In a separate letter addressed to Trump Jr, Garcia expressed similar worries and asked the president’s son to provide more details about his wedding events bankrolled by Kremlev, including: all dates of communication between Trump Jr and Kremlev, any communications Trump Jr may have had with the White House about Kremlev, financial records of purchases made by foreign nationals and a complete list of wedding gifts from foreign nationals. It came just hours after ProPublica revealed that the Kremlev spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on wedding celebrations for Trump Jr and his wife, Bettina, earlier this year. The couple also confirmed Kremlev’s financial involvement on Monday. The US president, however, downplayed the oligarch’s involvement: “I have no idea who Umar is, never heard of him, and he didn’t pay for Don and Bettina’s wedding, which took place at a totally different location, and on a different day from the wedding. It was an ‘afterparty’ given in their honor. Not a big deal! I was not present at the party.” Kash Patel did not commit to keeping FBI agents away from polls during the November midterm elections. While responding to Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal, the FBI director said that his department has an election counselor coordinator in every field office where they “quarterback these election activities”. When Blumenthal pushed Patel on whether he would confirm that agents wouldn’t be physically present at ballot sites, Patel said: “The FBI will follow the law if there’s a reason to go there because there’s been a violation of law”. The FBI director noted that the priority to “monitor elections” rests with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). “I don’t know that we can’t legally do it. I’m telling you, we’re going to house our agents and intel analysts in our field offices for election security,” Patel told Blumenthal. Maria ‌Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has told Reuters that artificial intelligence will take away our agency unless we legislate now to limit it. Ressa, a Filipino and American journalist and CEO of Rappler, jointly won the 2021 award in part for her work documenting the power of large tech companies. She also serves as co-chair of the UN’s international scientific panel on artificial intelligence, tasked with assessing how AI is transforming lives worldwide. “It is not a freedom of speech issue to ask for regulation,” Ressa told Reuters. “It’s a public safety issue.” She added that if AI regulation doesn’t happen, it will “be beyond our control ⁠if we don’t step in now”. Ressa also dismissed Donald Trump’s argument that any guardrails could allow China to gain ground in developing AI and outpacing the US. “China actually puts more safeguards in place for its citizens than Silicon Valley does for the rest of the world. If you’re on TikTok, the version of TikTok that ‌is in ⁠China has age restrictions,” she said. Ressa’s interview with Reuters happened before leading AI company CEOs called for further checks and to slow down the development of the technology. During his hearing with Senate judiciary lawmakers, both parties have questioned FBI director Kash Patel about his department lowering hiring standards for applicants with certain background histories. This includes those who have had sexual encounters with sex workers, theft from an employer or engaging in acts of bestiality. On the last act, Patel claimed this only includes people who were “trafficked” into having sex with an animal. Republican senator John Kennedy however, sought further clarity. “If Joe participated in beastiality, not as the animal but as the human, don’t you think he ought to be disqualified?” he asked the FBI director, while asking how it was possible to “involuntarily” commit bestiality. “In a lot of these cases, when human traffickers, who are some of the worst individuals on planet Earth, they don’t just traffic you for prostitution; they traffic you for degrading acts of all kind, and they force you into that type of conduct. And some of these individuals would go on to be law enforcement officers, who qualified to be law enforcement officers and later applied to the FBI,” Patel insisted. “I’m trying to understand why you did this,” Kennedy told Patel. “We’re having a tough time attracting agents, good quality agents we all can trust … why would you even get into bestiality?” Donald Trump has blasted the supreme court’s ruling which blocks his long-sought executive order which curbs mail-in voting. The president called mail-in voting – which he has used on several occasions to cast a ballot – “a laughing stock” across the world. He has routinely claimed, without evidence, that the voting method is prone to fraud. “The Supreme Court has really let our Country down! Certain Justices are petrified of these crazed and depraved Democrats, and are totally unable to show the courage necessary to save our America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. A reminder, only two of nine justices – Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – sided with the administration. Trump called both of the conservative members of the bench “legends” in their dissent. “This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years,” the president added, while chiding the court’s decision at the end of its last term which also rejected Trump’s executive order which attempted to limit birthright citizenship and the earlier ruling which found a number of the administration’s tariffs unlawful. The president suggested that the justices he nominated for the bench – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – are not “the people I interviewed to serve” but “merely a shell of their original selves”. “The damage done to America is incalculable, and they know this, just as everyone else does – It is an irreparable and unrecoverable harm! The Court’s inability and unwillingness to do the right thing for our Country will go down, in a very negative way, in the annals of History,” Trump wrote. “It is not easy for me to write this criticism of the United States Supreme Court – it will likely cost me dearly for years to come – but I feel it my obligation and duty, as President, to do so for the America we love!” Against the backdrop of Patel’s hearing is the FBI’s latest report outlining the national crime statistics. The new data shows that between 2024 and 2025 there was the largest year-to-year decline in violent crime rates since FBI estimations began in 1936. Kash Patel, the FBI director, is now testifying before lawmakers on the Senate judiciary committee. A reminder that the last time he appeared before Congress was in May, when he sparred with senators on the appropriations committee and denied – under oath – allegations of excessive drinking and unexplained absences on the job, dismissing them as “baseless” during a fiery congressional hearing. Today’s hearing is also expected to be full of heated exchanges. “Mr Patel is the least qualified and most partisan FBI director in our nation’s history,” said Senator Dick Durbin, the judiciary committee’s top Democrat. “The bureau has been reshaped as a political weapon against President Trump’s political enemies and a shield to protect the president and his MAGA loyalists, not the American people.” Durbin accused Patel of “diverting FBI resources to inane, debunked conspiracy theories” that the “deep state” has been targeting Donald Trump since 2016. The ranking member also questioned why the judiciary committee has still not called on former special counsel Jack Smith to testify after routinely denigrating his January 6 investigations and alleging that he targeted Republican lawmakers. Donald Trump’s nominee for US surgeon general reported more than $200,000 in business income from a company she owns that sells dietary supplements, a loosely regulated industry that health and consumer advocates say raises concerns about her record and which some critics allege are akin to “snake oil”. Dr Nicole Saphier, who specializes in breast cancer as a radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New Jersey and was formerly a Fox News contributor, is facing a Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday. She filed a financial disclosure and ethics agreement last week. In them, Saphier also reported extensive investments in other industries that have a bearing on Americans’ health, including tobacco. US surgeons general have warned repeatedly about the dangers of tobacco in dozens of reports since the 1960s. Saphier also listed investments in pharmaceutical and healthcare companies, technology, fossil fuel and food companies including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and McDonald’s. The filings show Saphier made substantial income from her company Empower MD, LLC, which owns her supplement line, Drop RX. She reported that she received $270,605 in business income from Empower MD and placed the company’s value in a range of $100,001 – $250,000. She said she would sell the company before assuming the duties of surgeon general. The Guardian previously reported that Saphier’s company had sold at least nine formulations under the brand name Drop RX since at least 2024 and promoted the products multiple times on her Instagram account. The company sold several of the 2-ounce liquid formulations on Amazon, packaged in glass bottles with a dropper. While most are no longer available for sale this week, at least one – a blend that includes turmeric and ginger root and marketed under the name “Soothe” – was being sold for $24.99 as of Monday. Read the full report here: Meanwhile, Trump spent much of the day yesterday posting to Truth Social to make his feelings about calls to slow down the development of advanced artificial intelligence known. He called the fear about AI’s ability and the lack of guardrails a “hoax” that is being perpetrated by the “Radical Left Dumocrats” and is reminiscent of their “Global Warming Scam of not so long ago, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat”. However, much of the concern that has emerged in recent days has been bipartisan, and even included CEOs of leading AI companies – who have suggested deceleration and greater checks on the technology’s development. Donald Trump is in Washington today. He’ll spend the day in meetings, but take part in an Ambassador Credentialing Ceremony at 2.30pm ET. None of his events will be open to the press, but we’ll let you know if that changes. We’ll also hear from attorney general Todd Blanche, who will hold a White House press briefing in the Rose Garden at 2pm ET. We’ll bring you the latest lines as that gets under way. Senator Bernie Sanders and conservative ⁠podcaster Steve Bannon will together on Tuesday call for restrictions on AI systems, uniting two political adversaries around concerns that the technology will ⁠harm humans. Both are due to speak ⁠at the same Washington gathering on Tuesday. Public alarm about the potential danger ⁠posed by AI is growing, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned, in part because the “people building AI earnestly believe that ⁠it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” AI-related stocks fell worldwide on Monday after leaders of some of ‌the industry’s largest companies ‌called for slowing the pace of the technology’s development. Bannon, a longtime ally of president ‌Donald Trump, has criticized Trump’s approach to overseeing AI, placing the blame for the president’s unwillingness to regulate the technology squarely on tech companies. On his Monday podcast, Bannon said Congress should not pass laws that prohibit states from enforcing their own rules for the technology. “The American people are not going to be supplicants to these tech oligarchs,” ‌Bannon said. The Kremlin on Tuesday welcomed what it called US president Donald Trump’s “good idea” for a truce between Russia and Ukraine on striking energy targets, without saying whether Moscow had agreed to such a proposal. Trump announced a truce between the warring sides on Monday, but neither Moscow or Kyiv has confirmed it was in force. “We have seen president Trump’s post. We consider it a good idea, a good initiative. We are in contact with the Americans,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. FBI director Kash Patel is set to return to Capitol Hill on Tuesday for an oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Republican-led panel is likely to try to keep the focus on Patel’s efforts to combat violent crime, counter drug trafficking and pursue the Trump administration’s agenda from his perch at the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency. But Democrats will almost certainly seize on the tumult inside the bureau over the last year, including sweeping firings of agents who participated in investigations into president Donald Trump, efforts by the bureau to investigate Trump’s perceived political adversaries and Patel’s travel schedule that has blended private leisure with professional responsibilities. Patel has made multiple appearances before Congress while serving as director, including to testify about the FBI’s budget, but this will be his first time since last September before the Senate committee that has principal oversight jurisdiction over the bureau. The board of Washington’s John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is due to vote on Tuesday on whether it will continue to operate, with directors largely installed by president Donald Trump arguing that its future hinges ⁠on having his name on ⁠the complex. Trump’s name has been added to and then removed from one of the nation’s top performing arts venues once already this year after federal judges ruled that only Congress could legally change the name of what it designated to be a “living memorial” to ⁠Kennedy, the 35th US president, who was assassinated in 1963. “The Board understands that without such appropriate recognition it is unlikely that president Trump will provide the fundamental oversight of the renovation of the main building and lead the fiscal rescue of the Center,” the draft resolution says. The draft resolution says the center’s finances are dire and it will be unable to honor its payroll obligations or routine maintenance contracts “within a matter of weeks”. Donald Trump is facing a rare backlash from the US Congress as Democrats and some Republicans push for guardrails on the world’s most powerful AI companies. Concerns over the dangerous potential of AI reached fever pitch this week after tech leaders sounded the alarm over the rapid advancement of the technology and its potential threat to humanity. Trump dismissed the anxieties on Monday, describing them as a “HOAX” and “conspiracy” and insisting on social media: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” But the 80-year-old president, who has sidelined Congress on numerous issues during his second term, looks increasingly isolated as members of both major parties acknowledged the risks and expressed a desire to act before it was too late. Don Beyer, a Democratic congressman from Virginia, said: “History will look very poorly on that tweet. He’s not paying attention – or he’s paying attention to the wrong people. He’s being really foolish: not the first time he’s been really foolish but perhaps catastrophically foolish in this case.” Recent surveys by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation found 85% of Democrats and 79% of Republicans want a new federal agency to monitor and regulate AI; and 82% of Democrats and 78% of Republicans favour government safety tests for AI making critical decisions. Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. Lawmakers have given their support to the supreme court’s rejection of Donald Trump’s bid to restrict mail ballots for the midterm elections. The decision capped a flurry of last-minute legal action with voting already underway, with states allowed to continue sending out mail ballots under the same processes used for years. Election officials have said there was simply no way to carry out a complete overhaul in the weeks before the midterms. Alabama, North Carolina and Wisconsin began sending mail ballots to voters over the past week while the new system was still not active. Washington’s secretary of state Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, said the decision means work “to carry out a safe, secure, and accurate election” can continue ‘without having to upend our election processes to meet unrealistic ballot mail requirements.” In Arizona, another largely vote-by-mail state, Democratic secretary of state Adrian Fontes said “it is crucial for us to continue rejecting the notion that access and security are mutually exclusive when it comes to running strong elections.” Utah Lt Gov Deidre Henderson, a Republican serving as the state’s chief election officer, said on social media that the supreme court’s decision means “Utahns can have confidence that the 2026 election will proceed as normal.” In other developments: Mitch McConnell, the 84-year-old former Senate majority leader from Kentucky, was seen in Washington for the first time in months on Monday, minutes before his office released a statement saying that he was back at work. With a slip of the tongue reminiscent of Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, told CNN that he would not run for president in 2028 if his fellow Californian, former vice-president Kamala Harris, decides to run again, since “I know what that means: I know her base of supporters, I know her friends, the zen diagram on that is just pure crossover.” Donald Trump claimed there is a “SICK conspiracy” against artificial intelligence and data centers in response to the growing calls for greater checks on AI development. In a statement posted on social media, Barack Obama, the former US president, called for the pace of AI development to be slowed to allow time for the federal government to develop regulations to address “serious safety concerns”.