US supreme court won’t stop Trump sentencing from going ahead – live

The Guardian’s George Chidi was at the Trump rally in Georgia this weekend, where the former president picked a fight with the state’s popular Republican governor. Here’s his analysis from the campaign trail:

All Donald Trump had to do on Saturday in Georgia is show up, bring the tent together and not pick a fight with other Republicans. It might have been money in the bag.

Instead, Trump attacked Governor Brian Kemp, who is substantially more popular in Georgia than he is. Early in his comments, Trump pointed to a few recent high-profile murders in Atlanta, saying: “Atlanta is like a killing field, and your governor should get off his ass and do something about it.”

Maga is not a majority in Georgia, if anywhere. Republicans cannot win this state when conventional conservatives abandon the party, as Herschel Walker’s Trump-inflected US Senate challenge against Raphael Warnock demonstrated two years ago.

Georgia’s split-ticket-voting conservatives love Kemp and are indifferent at best to Trump. And Trump gave them no love on Saturday.

“If it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t be your governor. I think everybody knows that,” Trump bloviated, describing them as disloyal.

Then Trump went after Kemp’s wife, who told people she wrote her husband’s name in for president in the Republican presidential primary this year.

On and on …

On Saturday, Trump handed his opponents soundbites about what he thinks about Georgia, its popular governor, and how he expects the state election board to overturn an election he may lose, that will be replayed on YouTube ads on every iPhone between the Fox Theater and the Lake Lanier for the next 91 days.

And Republican political professionals know it.

Earlier this morning, the Guardian reported that five secretaries of state were preparing to send Elon Musk a letter urging changes to X’s AI search assistant, Grok.

As the Guardian’s Lauren Aratani reported, Grok told users that the ballots were “locked and loaded” and that “the ballot deadline has passed for several states” in nine states where the ballot deadline had not, in fact, passed.

It seems the secretaries of state have gone ahead and sent the letter. Scripps News obtained a copy.

“We urge X to immediately adopt a policy of directing Grok users to CanIVote.org when asked about elections in the US,” the officials from Minnesota, Michigan, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington wrote.

Here’s more from Lauren:

For those watching the veepstakes …

Kamala Harris’s team is tamping down rumors and reporting that she has chosen a running mate. Here’s a Harris spokesperson, emphasizing that she has “made no decision on a running mate yet”:

Harris is expected to announce her running mate tomorrow before a rally in Philadelphia. Reuters reported today that the search had narrowed to two governors: Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Tim Walz of Minnesota.

Read more about it here:

Donald Trump’s campaign attorney Jenna Ellis will cooperate with Arizona prosecutors in a fake electors case, the state attorney general’s office announced.

Arizona’s attorney general Kris Mayes has agreed to drop nine felony charges against Ellis in exchange for her cooperation in an investigation into Republicans’ plan in 2020 to deliver the state’s 11 electoral votes to Trump rather than the rightful winner, Joe Biden.

“Her insights are invaluable and will greatly aid the state in proving its case in court,” Mayes said. “As I stated when the initial charges were announced, I will not allow American democracy to be undermined – it is far too important. Today’s announcement is a win for the rule of law.”

Ellis worked closely with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who has pleaded not guilty to felony charges. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, has also pleaded not guilty for his role in trying to submit a document to Congress falsely declaring Trump as the winner.

The White House has responded to the latest revelations that there is more free travel that the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas did not declare publicly, supplied by the conservative billionaire Harlan Crow.

Press spokesperson Andrew Bates said: “As president Biden said at the LBJ Library last week, the supreme court is ‘mired in a crisis of ethics’ and today’s news strengthens the case he made for common-sense reforms that are backed by constitutional experts across the political spectrum – as well as the vast majority of the American people.”

Bates added: “Congress should pass an enforceable code of conduct for the supreme court, in line with the requirements that every other federal judge already follows. The most powerful court in the United States shouldn’t be subject to the lowest ethical standards, and conflicts of interest on the supreme court cannot go unchecked.”

In her interview broadcast by Fox News this morning – a friendly interview with Fox and Friends – Usha Vance discussed her husband’s swiftly infamous attacks on “childless cat ladies” among his Democratic foes, claiming the controversial remark was merely a “quip”.

You can read more on those remarks here.

But Usha Vance also addressed controversy over other past remarks that have come back to haunt JD Vance as the Ohio senator attempts to establish himself as an effective running mate for Donald Trump.

In remarks to a former friend, reported last week, Vance said: “I hate the police.”

“JD certainly does not hate the police,” his wife said in the interview broadcast by Fox on Monday, though she added: “He maybe had a negative interaction once or twice and made a remark like that, I don’t know.”

The Yale law school friend to whom Vance made the remark about the police, Sofia Nelson, now a public defender in Detroit, is transgender.

Last year, Vance introduced the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, a law to stop minors accessing puberty blockers, hormone therapy and other transition-related care.

Nelson attended Yale with JD and Usha Vance and attended their wedding in 2014 – a time when Usha Vance was a registered Democrat.

Nelson recently gave correspondence with JD to the New York Times, which added it to mounting evidence of his former distrust and dislike for Trump.

“He achieved great success and became very rich by being a Never Trumper who explained the white working class to the liberal elite,” Nelson told the Times, referring to Vance’s authorship of Hillbilly Elegy, a 2016 bestseller about his Appalachian youth.

“Now he’s amassing even more power by expressing the exact opposite.”

Usha Vance told Fox: “It is hard to know that sometimes politics comes in the way of friendships.”

More:

There is a little more explanation of the supreme court ruling today that Donald Trump’s criminal sentencing next month won’t be pushed back beyond the presidential election as a result of a legal challenge.

The Missouri attorney general went to the highest court with the unusual request to sue the state of New York after the supreme court justices in the last big decision of their term granted Trump broad immunity from prosecution – in a separate case brought in Washington, DC relating to federal charges over interference in the 2020 election, the Associated Press reports.

The news agency described Missouri’s legal challenge as “a long shot” in Trump’s long-running legal saga.

Andrew Bailey, the AG in question, argued the New York case’s gag order, which Missouri wanted stayed until after the election, wrongly limited what Trump can say on the campaign trail, and that Trump’s eventual sentence could affect his ability to travel.

New York, meanwhile, said the limited gag order does allow Trump to talk about the issues important to voters, and the sentence may not affect his movement at all. The Democratic New York attorney general, Letitia James, argued that appeals are moving through state courts and there’s no state-on-state conflict that would allow the supreme court to weigh in at this point.

The decision by the supreme court today not to delay sentencing following Donald Trump’s criminal conviction came in response to a lawsuit by the state of Missouri claiming that the case against Trump infringed on the right of voters under the US constitution to hear from the Republican presidential nominee as he seeks to regain the White House in this November’s election.

The supreme court’s order was unsigned. Conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito indicated they would have heard Missouri’s case, Reuters reports.

Trump was found guilty in May of falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence before the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she has said she had with Trump in the past, which he denies. Prosecutors have said the payment was designed to boost his presidential campaign in 2016, when he defeated the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.

Missouri’s Republican state attorney general, Andrew Bailey, filed a 3 July lawsuit against New York state asking the supreme court to pause Trump’s impending sentencing and the gag order placed on him by New York state judge Juan Merchan, who presided in the case.

The US supreme court has declined to halt Donald Trump’s upcoming sentencing for his conviction in state court in New York on felony charges involving hush money paid to an adult film star, Stormy Daniels, and a related gag order until after the 5 November election.

The decision by the justices came in response to a lawsuit by the state of Missouri claiming that the case against Trump infringed on the right of voters under the US constitution to hear from the Republican presidential nominee as he seeks to regain the White House, Reuters reports.

Trump is set to be sentenced on 18 September in Manhattan. He was found guilty in May of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in a criminal hush-money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.

He is the Republican party nominee for president in the election in November, facing Kamala Harris for the Democrats.

Donald Trump is taking good political advantage of the falling financial markets today by blaming his rival for the presidency this November and calling the dive the “Great Kamala crash of 2024”.

Shares on Wall Street and in London have fallen heavily amid a global stock market rout triggered by fears of a recession in the US, kicked off by something close to a panic sale on the Nikkei in Tokyo earlier today.

Trump, the Republican nominee for president, hopped onto his platforms, Truth Social and his campaign communications machine, and blamed his rival in this November’s election, Kamala Harris.

“Of course there is a massive market downturn. Kamala is even worse than Crooked Joe,” Trump posted online, referring to Joe Biden, the US president. There were a couple of other posts, and his election campaign put out an email. Then he went off in all caps.

“VOTERS HAVE A CHOICE – TRUMP PROSPERITY, OR THE KAMALA CRASH & GREAT DEPRESSION OF 2024, NOT TO MENTION THE PROBABILITY OF WORLD WAR lll IF THESE VERY STUPID PEOPLE REMAIN IN OFFICE. REMEMBER, TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!!!” he posted.

Kamala Harris is poised to secure the Democratic presidential nomination this evening.

Harris’s nomination will become official after a five-day round of online balloting by Democratic national convention delegates ends on Monday night and the party announces the results. The party had long contemplated the early virtual roll call to ensure Biden would appear on the ballot in every state, the Associated Press reports.

Already Harris has telegraphed that she doesn’t plan to veer much from the themes and policies that framed Biden’s candidacy, such as democracy, gun violence prevention and abortion rights. But her delivery can be far fierier, particularly when she invokes her prosecutorial background to lambast Trump and his 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records in connection with a hush money scheme.

Given that unique voice of a new generation, of a prosecutor and a woman when fundamental rights, especially reproductive rights, are on the line, it’s almost as if the stars have aligned for her at this moment in history,” said Democratic senator Alex Padilla of California, who was tapped to succeed Harris in the Senate when she became vice-president.

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

Hello again, US politics blog readers, the state of the blog this hour can be summed up with the phrase bated breath.

Everyone is waiting for Kamala Harris to announce the name of her running mate. It could come today or tomorrow and one report has the shortlist down to two. Elsewhere, Donald Trump is calling the stock market dive the “Kamala crash” and Joe Biden is about to meet with his national security team in the situation room at the White House, with Harris also attending, as tensions rise again in the Middle East.

Stick with Guardian US live blogs for the news as it happens. Our west coast colleagues will take the blog on later today.

Meanwhile, here’s where things stand:

• Top Democratic US senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, has written to a lawyer about his client’s providing yet more travel on his private jet for US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas which has not been declared to the public. The client? Harlan Crow.

• Kamala Harris has narrowed her search for a vice-presidential running mate to two finalists, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Reuters reports, citing unnamed sources familiar.

• A Virginia man was charged with making violent online threats against US vice-president Kamala Harris days after she began her US presidential campaign last month. The man was charged in federal court after saying online that he could resort to burning the US vice-president alive. FBI agents seized a rifle and a handgun from his home.

• Harris has crept just ahead of her Republican rival, Donald Trump, in the 2024 presidential election, according to some influential new polls. The race is neck and neck, but Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, now leads Trump by 1.4 points in a national polling average presented yesterday by Nate Silver in his Silver Bulletin newsletter.

• Harris is very close to naming her choice of vice-presidential candidate to join her on the Democratic ticket to fight the 2024 election against Donald Trump this November. She has been talking to final contenders over the weekend and she needs to announce her choice before tomorrow evening, when Harris and her running mate are due to appear together at a rally in Philadelphia to raise the curtain on their campaign together.

There’s some more news on Robert F Kennedy Jr.

The independent presidential candidate arrived at a New York court today to fight a lawsuit alleging he falsely claimed to live in New York as he sought to get on the ballot in the state.

Kennedy appeared and sat at his attorneys’ table during legal arguments on Monday morning, ahead of a civil trial expected to start later in the day in the state capital of Albany. Under state election law, a judge is set to decide the case without a jury, the Associated Press reports.

The lawsuit alleges that Kennedy’s nominating petition falsely said his residence was in New York’s northern suburbs while he actually has lived in Los Angeles since 2014, when he married actor Cheryl Hines, known for Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The suit seeks to invalidate his petition. The case was brought by Clear Choice Pac, a Super Pac led by supporters of Joe Biden. Kennedy has the potential to do better than any independent presidential candidate in decades, having gained traction with a famous name and a loyal base. Strategists from both major parties worry that he could win enough votes to tip the election.

A senior Democratic US senator has written to a lawyer about his client’s providing yet more travel on his private jet for US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas which has not been declared to the public.

Thomas failed to disclose publicly that he had taken a flight provided by the conservative donor Harlan Crow that fell outside what he had belatedly revealed to the public about freebie luxury travel and gifts, the New York Times reports.

The letter is dated today and was sent by the Democratic US senator for Oregon Ron Wyden to Michael Bopp, a lawyer who represents Crow. It says that Thomas and his wife, Virginia, flew on a return trip between Hawaii and New Zealand in 2010 on Crow’s private jet, but that journey was not listed in financial disclosure forms justices fill our annually.

This is the latest in a series of revelations about Thomas over the last year, and some other justices, mainly Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch on the supreme court, about gifts and favors, as well as alleged political bias. Thomas relatively recently said he didn’t need to disclose free travel and hospitality from “friends” such as Crow, unless individuals had business directly before the supreme court.

He later amended disclosures, but more details are trickling out about other perks that he has not declared.

Last month, Joe Biden called for sweeping reforms of the supreme court. He said the recent decision granting some immunity to presidents from criminal prosecution makes them a king before the law. And he said the scandals involving justices and free travel etc had caused public opinion to question the court’s fairness and independence and impeded its mission. Biden called for a binding code of conduct for the supreme court and term limits for justices.

Nearing his 100th birthday and in hospice care in his hometown in Georgia since February 2023, former US president Jimmy Carter reportedly has one goal: voting for Kamala Harris against Donald Trump.

“I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris,” Carter told his son Chip this week, as his grandson Jason Carter recounted to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Harris, Carter’s fellow Democrat, will face the Republican Trump for the presidency on 5 November. Carter’s 100th birthday will fall on 1 October.

A Democrat who was in the White House from 1977 to 1981, Carter is the oldest living president. In ill health for several years, his family announced that he entered hospice care on 18 February 2023.

Carter is due to turn 100 on October 1. The presidential election is on November 5. As the Journal-Constitution noted, early voting in Georgia begins on 15 October. Full report here.

The person who emerges as Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential choice for the Democratic ticket in this election will be informed of her decision tonight or in the morning, Reuters reports, citing three unnamed sources with knowledge of goings-on.

The news agency reported moments ago that the competition has narrowed to two names, the governors of Pennsylvania and Minnesota, respectively, Josh Shapiro and Tim Walz.

The Harris campaign plans an announcement via social media, featuring the nominee and her running mate, campaign officials familiar with the arrangements told Reuters.

Over the weekend, Harris met with her vetting team, including former attorney general Eric Holder, whose law firm Covington & Burling LLP scrutinized the finances and background of potential running mates. Holder and his office made in-depth presentations on each of the finalists, according to multiple sources familiar with the process.

Harris is weighing the decision with her husband, Doug Emhoff, brother-in-law Tony West and a small circle of aides and advisers, the sources said.

Kamala Harris has spent the last few days interviewing contenders to be her running mate on the Democratic ticket this election and may have whittled her list from six to just two in recent hours, if a report via anonymous sources from Reuters comes true.

The news wire says it’s down to Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, and Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz.

Guardian US has not verified this report. At the top of the day there apparently were still six guys in the race, although some outlets appeared to be homing in on Shapiro, Walz and the US senator from Arizona Mark Kelly as the top three.

Harris and her No 2 will debut as the presumptive Democratic ticket at a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania tomorrow evening. So if it’s not Shapiro that would be hard for him to swallow.

If it’s really down to two, here are our thumbnails on them.

Shapiro, a congressional aide turned state representative and state attorney general, the 51-year-old father of four was elected governor in 2022. Close to two years later, he maintains historically high approval ratings. What are regarded as pros and cons of choosing him? Report here.

Walz has captured the internet’s attention and swayed Democrats’ messaging recently by succinctly summing up how he views Republicans: they’re weird. Before he took up politics, Walz, 60, was born and raised in small-town Nebraska and became a teacher, first in China, then Nebraska, finally Minnesota. Report here.

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has narrowed her search for a vice-presidential running mate to two finalists, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and Minnesota governor Tim Walz, three sources with knowledge of the matter said today.

Harris, the US vice-president, is expected to announce her selection by Tuesday, ahead of her first scheduled public appearance with her running mate in the evening at Temple University in Philadelphia, Reuters reports.

It was unclear if a final decision has been made, the sources told the news wire. The rally will kick off a five-day, seven-city tour of the battleground states likely to decide the 5 November election.

Speculation had focused on six men in all – four governors, a senator and a cabinet secretary in the Biden administration.

The independent US presidential candidate, Robert F Kennedy Jr, called Donald Trump “a terrible human being”, the “worse [sic] president ever” and “barely human”.

“He is probably a sociopath,” Kennedy said in texts to an unnamed person, the New Yorker reported on Monday.

Kennedy has been linked to a job in any second Trump administration, not least after Kennedy’s son posted footage of such a move appearing to be discussed. Kennedy attended the Republican convention in Milwaukee in July.

On Monday, a spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Kennedy’s reported remarks.

They were included in an in-depth New Yorker profile otherwise remarkable for containing the story of how Kennedy came to dump a dead bear in the city’s Central Park 10 years ago.

Last month it was reported that Kennedy held recent talks with Trump about endorsing his campaign for a second presidency and – if successful – taking a job in his administration. The election is on 5 November.

Read Martin Pengelly’s report in full here.

In the realm of how many flip-flop emojis you can garner, however, RFK Jr is running behind Trump’s veep pick, his underperforming and apparently lowly valued running mate JD Vance, a Republican Ohio senator and Maga convert.

Meanwhile, here’s an interesting image from the campaign trail: