Steve Bannon vows ‘very vigorous appeal’ to four-month prison sentence – as it happened

We’re closing our live blog now at the end of another tumultuous day, and week, in US politics. Thanks for joining us.

• The House panel investigating Donald Trump’s January 6 insurrection issued a subpoena to the former president for documents and testimony.

• Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, was sentenced to four months in prison for contempt of Congress, and fined, for defying his own subpoena. But he was allowed to remain free pending his appeal.

• The White House dismissed claims by Russia’s ambassador to the US that it had shut down communication with Moscow as the war in Ukraine continues. US defense secretary Lloyd Austin spoke with his Russian counterpart Sergey Shoygu earlier.

• The Washington Post reported that documents seized by the FBI at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida contained secrets about Iran’s missile program, and China.

• Joe Biden touted a “record” reduction of the federal deficit, $1.4tn since last year and the largest one year drop in American history, the president said.

• A Miami judge dismissed one of the 19 voter fraud prosecutions loudly trumpeted by Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis. Former felon Robert Lee Wood, 56, voted after being sent a registration card by the state.

Joe Biden is appealing to younger voters in a speech Friday afternoon touting his student debt relief program. The president is addressing students at the historically black Delaware state university in Dover.

Ahead of his address, the supreme court gave Biden a lift on Thursday by refusing a request by a taxpayers’ group in Wisconsin to block the program, which cancels up to $20,000 in student debt for millions of borrowers.

Biden addressed an enthusiastic crowd:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}You are an example of why I’m so optimistic about the future. You are the most involved, the most educated, the most engaged, least prejudiced generation in American history.

Biden says the debt relief program is changing lives, and urged those qualified to sign up online:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}This is a game changer. We’re hearing from people all over the country. Over 10,000 students have written me letters so far. It’s as easy to sign up as hanging out with your friends or watching a movie.

My commitment when I ran for president was if I was elected I’d make the government work and deliver for the people.

And he attacked congressional Republicans for attempting to block the aid “to their own constituents”:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}As soon as I announced my administration’s plan on student debt they started attacking it and saying all kinds of things. Their outrage is wrong and it’s hypocritical.

But we’re not letting them get away with it. They’ve been fighting us in the courts. But just yesterday, state courts and the supreme court said no, we’re on Biden’s side.

Read more:

The Biden administration’s strategic communications coordinator has dismissed claims by Russia’s ambassador to the US that Washington is blocking conversations with Moscow over the Ukraine war.

Newsweek reported on Thursday the belief of Anatoly Antonov that no direct open lines of communication existed between the countries similar to the Kremlin-White House hotline credited with preventing nuclear war during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

“The attempts of Russian diplomats in Washington to re-establish such contacts have been futile,” he said. “The administration is unwilling to talk with us as equals.”

But in an interview on CNN Friday, John Kirby, the national security council coordinator for strategic communications, said that was not true.

He pointed to defense secretary Lloyd Austin’s conversation with his Russian counterpart Sergey Shoygu earlier today, their first known contact for more than four months, as evidence:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}There’s many channels open with Russia even down to the fairly low operational level. We still have a deconfliction line set up in Europe so that we can properly deconflict operations with respect to Nato’s eastern flank.

You saw today the secretary of defense spoke with with his counterpart. The secretary of state has an open line of communication with foreign minister [Sergey] Lavrov if needed. There are many channels at various levels throughout our government to continue to communicate with Russia.

That’s important, particularly now when when bellicose rhetoric by [Russian president Vladimir] Putin about the potential use of nuclear weapons only could lead to confusion and miscalculation.

Maya Yang reports…

The rightwing TV network Newsmax has said it had no plans to interview Lara Logan again, after the award-winning war correspondent turned rightwing pundit launched a QAnon-tinged tirade on air.

Speaking to host Eric Bolling, Logan said “the open border is Satan’s way of taking control of the world” and claimed world leaders drank children’s blood.

QAnon is a pro-Trump conspiracy theory which holds that leading liberal figures in US and world politics are, among other things, secretly murderous pedophiles.

Logan told Bolling: “God believes in sovereignty and national identity and the sanctity of family, and all the things that we’ve lived with from the beginning of time.

“And he knows that the open [southern US] border is Satan’s way of taking control of the world through all of these people who are his stooges and his servants.

“And they may think that they’re going to become gods. That’s what they tell us … You know, the ones who want us eating insects, cockroaches and that while they dine on the blood of children? Those are the people, right? They’re not going to win. They’re not going to win.”

Newsmax said in a statement it “condemns in the strongest terms the reprehensible statements made by Lara Logan” and had “no plans to interview her again”.

Full story:

The White House won’t comment specifically on the subpoena issued to Donald Trump by the January 6 House panel this afternoon. But it has thoughts on the direction of the inquiry.

Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is addressing reporters aboard Air Force One as the Joe Biden makes his way to Delaware to speak on his student loan forgiveness program.

Asked if she believed Trump would comply, Jean-Pierre said:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}I’m going to speak broadly, as we do not comment on any ongoing investigation, the department of justice is independent, but the president has spoken to this many times, it is important to get to the bottom of January 6.

January 6 was one of the darkest days in our nation, and it’s important for the American people to know exactly what happened, so that it doesn’t happen again, so we don’t repeat that very dark day in our nation.

The subpoena issued by the January 6 House panel this afternoon demands that Donald Trump provide documents and testimony under oath.

It requires documents to be submitted to the committee by 4 November, and for Trump to appear for deposition testimony beginning on or about 14 November.

“As demonstrated in our hearings, we have assembled overwhelming evidence, including from dozens of your former appointees and staff, that you personally orchestrated and oversaw a multi-part effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and to obstruct the peaceful transition of power”, a four-page letter accompanying the subpoena said.

It was signed by panel chair Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, and vice-chair Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican.

In a tweet, the panel says the vote to issue the subpoena was approved by a unanimous vote. The nine-member committee includes two Republican House members, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Cheney.

Shortly before news broke that Donald Trump has been issued a subpoena by the House panel investigating his 6 January insurrection, the former president was lashing out over another episode.

The Washington Post drew Trump’s ire for its story that classified papers seized by the FBI at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida allegedly included documents containing secrets about Iran and China.

Predictably, in a statement, Trump claims it’s a hoax:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The FBI and the department of ‘justice,’ which paid a man $200,000 to spy on me, and offered a $1 million ‘bounty’ to try and prove a totally made up and fake ‘dossier’ about me (they went down in flames!), are now leaking nonstop on the Document Hoax to the Fake News.

Who could ever trust corrupt, weaponized agencies, and that includes Nara [the US national archives and records administration] who disrespects our constitution and Bill of Rights, to keep and safeguard any records, especially since they’ve lost millions and millions of pages of information from previous Presidents.

Also, who knows what NARA and the FBI plant into documents, or subtract from documents – we will never know, will we?

It’s safe to say Trump will have other things on his mind as the afternoon wears on.

The House January 6 select committee has issued a subpoena to Donald Trump, compelling the former president to provide an accounting under oath about his potential foreknowledge of the Capitol attack and his broader efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The subpoena of constitutional and investigative consequence made sweeping requests for testimony about some of the most key moments before January 6, as well as documents and communications about his role in multi-pronged schemes to return himself to office.

It comes on the same day as Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, was sentenced to four months in prison for refusing to comply with his own subpoena.

We’ll have more details soon …

Our Washington bureau chief, David Smith, has filed a terrific interview with Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, the crack reporter and “Trump whisperer” whose new book seeks to explain the rise and fall and rise (and rise and fall and rise, ad infinitum) of the 45th president. It’s certainly worth your time this lunchtime. Here’s a taster, with a link at the bottom to follow:

“He’s become something of a Charles Foster Kane-like character down in Mar-a-Lago these days,” observes Maggie Haberman, a Pulitzer-winning reporter for the New York Times, political analyst for CNN and author of Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, which has a black-and-white photo of Trump on its cover.

Her analogy raises the question: what is Trump’s Rosebud, the childhood sled that symbolised Kane’s lost innocence? “His father is Rosebud, and I don’t think it’s one particular moment,” Haberman replies. “There’s no single childhood memory that is the key. It’s a series of moments that interlock and they point back to his father.”

Fred Trump was a property mogul who had been disappointed by his eldest son Fred Jr’s lack of commitment to the family business. Donald Trump, by contrast, impressed his father by cultivating a brash “killer” persona and became heir apparent. Decades later, in the first weeks of his presidency, Trump had one photo on the credenza behind him in the Oval Office: his father, still watching.

Speaking by phone from her car in midtown Manhattan, Haberman reflects: “His father basically created this endless competition between Trump and his older brother Freddie, and pitted them against each other. Donald Trump spent a lot of time seeking his father’s approval and that became a style of dealing with people, which was certainly better suited for a business than for a household.”

“But it became one that Trump recreated in all aspects of his life. It became how he dealt with his own children. It became how he dealt with people who worked for him and then, in the White House, you read a number of stories about these battles that his aides would have. A lot of it was predetermined by lessons from his father.”

But if Trump is Kane, who is Haberman?

The Biden administration is taking steps to protect residents of nursing homes, promising what it calls “aggressive action… to keep American seniors safe”.

A White House fact sheet released Friday lays out measures including financial penalties for failing nursing homes, improved safety standards and more and better technical support for homes in need.

The labor department is providing $80m in grants for nursing training and development, while the department of health and human services providing a further $13m for education and training initiatives.

“Covid-19 laid bare the challenges in America’s nursing homes,” Biden’s domestic policy adviser Susan Rice said in a tweet.

“Today, we’re announcing new steps to improve nursing home quality and accountability”.

Joe Biden may have coined a phrase earlier, or tried to coin one at this late stage in the midterms race, when he said Republican economic policy amounted to “Maga-mega trickle down”.

Trickle down economics is the idea that slashed taxes on the wealthy mean benefits for all those below them. Liz Truss was a devotee. She was also British prime minister for all of 45 days before announcing her resignation yesterday, after crashing the markets and cratering the UK economy.

Biden may have been seeking to remind any Americans even vaguely aware of events across the pond when he told reporters: “If Republicans get their way, the deficit is going to soar, the burden is going to fall on the middle-class … They’re not going to stop there. “It’s Maga-mega trickle down.”

For the avoidance of doubt, here’s how Larry Elliott, the Guardian’s economics editor, defines “trickle down”:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The theory is simple. Governments should cut taxes for the better off and for corporations because that is the key to securing faster growth. Entrepreneurs are more likely to start and expand businesses, companies are more inclined to invest and banks will tend to increase lending if they are paying less in tax.

Initially, the beneficiaries are the rich, but gradually everyone gains because as the economy gets bigger well-paid jobs are created for working people. Governments should stop focusing on how the economic pie is distributed and focus on growing the pie instead.

Supporters of trickle down often cite the work of the US economist Arthur Laffer as proof that the theory works. Laffer said tax cuts for the wealthy had a powerful multiplier effect and any revenues lost by governments from reducing tax rates would be more than compensated for by the fruits of higher growth.

For the further avoidance of doubt, Maga, written like that here because of Guardian style rules on acronyms, stands for “Make America great again”, aka Donald Trump’s campaign slogan in 2016.

Biden was speaking at the White House, about the US deficit and efforts to reduce it. He said: “The federal deficit went up every year in the Trump administration – every single year he was president. On my watch, things have been different. The deficit has come down both years I’ve been in office, and I’ve just signed legislation that will reduce it even more in the decades to come.”

Republicans will counter that Biden has passed a lot of legislation increasing government spending. And so the dance toward election day goes on.

It’s a busy Friday again…

In a bombshell scoop launched just as Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former campaign chair and White House adviser, was handed a four-month jail sentence for contempt of Congress, the Washington Post reports that some of the classified documents recovered from Trump’s Florida home in August included “highly sensitive intelligence regarding Iran and China”.

The Post cites anonymous sources who said that “if shared with others … such information” as found by the Department of Justice at Mar-a-Lago “could expose intelligence-gathering methods that the United States wants to keep hidden from the world”. Exposure of such information, the paper reports, could endanger people aiding US intelligence efforts or invite retaliation from the powers concerned.

The Post also says at least one document described Iran’s missile programme while others described “highly sensitive intelligence work aimed at China”.

Trump or his spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment, the paper said.

The FBI search of Mar-a-Lago on 8 August set off a monumental tussle between the former president and the Department of Justice. The contest has gone back and forth in the courts ever since, lawyers for Trump fighting a delaying action, a watching nation wondering if Trump might yet be indicted.

Trump claims to have done nothing wrong by taking records from the White House after he was beaten by Joe Biden in 2020. Most observers say otherwise.

More:

Joe Biden is speaking at the White House about the achievements of his economic plans, and what he says is a “record” reduction of the federal deficit.

“This year the deficit fell by $1.4tn, the largest one year drop in American history,” the president said.

“We’re rebuilding the economy in a responsible way.”

In an earlier treasury department statement, the Biden administration said the annual deficit plummeted from $2.8tn in 2021 to about $1.4tn this year, the Washington Post reported.

Biden is touting a “historic” Covid-19 vaccination effort for saving lives and helping the economy recover from the pandemic, and hailing successes in passing bipartisan bills such as the inflation reduction act, the Chips act boosting semiconductor production, and last year’s infrastructure act.

Today’s speech is, however, a thinly disguised party political broadcast on behalf of the Democrats barely two and a half weeks before midterm elections in which they are expected to cede control of at least one chamber of congress.

Warming to that theme, Biden said:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Congressional Republicans love to call Democrats big spenders. And they always claim to be for less federal spending. Let’s look at the facts. The federal deficit went up every single year in the Trump administration, every single year he was president, and went up before the pandemic, and went up during the pandemic.

In three years before Covid hit, the deficit ballooned by another $400bn. One big reason for that is the Republicans voted for a $2tn Trump tax cut, which overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and the biggest corporations. That racked up the deficit significantly.

On my watch, things have been different. The deficit has come down in both years that I’ve been in office.

Here’s Hugo Lowell’s report on the Steve Bannon sentencing hearing this morning:

Donald Trump’s top former strategist Steve Bannon was sentenced Friday to four months in federal prison and $6,500 in fines after he was convicted with criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to comply last year with a subpoena issued by the House January 6 select committee.

The punishment – suspended pending appeal – makes Bannon the first person to be incarcerated for contempt of Congress in more than half a century and sets a stringent standard for future contempt cases referred to the justice department by the select committee investigating the Capitol attack.

The sentence handed down by the US district court judge Carl Nichols in Washington was lighter than recommended by prosecutors, who sought six months in jail and the maximum $200,000 in fines because Bannon refused to cooperate with court officials’ pre-sentencing inquiries.

Bannon, 68, had asked the court for leniency and requested in court filings for his sentence to either be halted pending the appeal his lawyers filed briefs with the DC circuit court on Thursday or otherwise have the jail term reduced to home-confinement.

But Nichols denied Bannon’s requests, saying he agreed with the justice department about the seriousness of his offense and noting that he had failed to show any remorse and was yet to demonstrate that he had any intention to comply with the subpoena.

The far-right provocateur now faces a battle to overturn the conviction on appeal, which, the Guardian first reported, will contend the precedent that prevented his lawyers from disputing the definition of “wilful default” of a subpoena, and arguing he had acted on the advice of his lawyers, was inapplicable.

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