DoJ bids to regain access to classified documents seized in Trump search – as it happened

That’s it for the US politics live blog today! Here were some of the events we followed:

• The Biden administration announced that it plans to admit up to 125,000 refugees in next fiscal year, the same target for this current period, announced state department spokesperson Ned Price.

• Joe Biden gave a speech about transforming America’s Rustbelt region into “the silicon heartland” while speaking at the groundbreaking of a new Intel semiconductor factory in Ohio.

• Kamala Harris was in Houston and spoke to astronauts aboard the international space station. The vice-president also chaired a meeting of the National Space Council this afternoon.

• Department of Justice lawyers aimed to regain access to highly classified documents that were seized during an FBI search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida mansion. Lawyers called the seized documents “critical” to national security.

Have a great weekend and thank you for reading!

As of August 31st, only 19,919 refugees have been admitted to the US under the Biden administration.

The figure falls fairly short of the 125,000 goal proposed by his administration and doesn’t include refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine who have come more recently.

From CNN reporter Priscilla Alvarez:

The Biden’s administration says it will recommend to Congress a cap on refugee admissions to 125,000 for the fiscal year 2023, the same target for the current period, the state department says.

Department spokesperson Ned Price said in a statement that the figure would “address the growing needs generated by humanitarian crises around the globe, including the more than 100m displaced persons around the world”.

Under the previous administration of Donald Trump, the refugee cap was reduced to 15,000, its lowest ever level, something Joe Biden said during his campaign for the White House he would seek to reverse.

“Over the past fiscal year, we have taken steps to increase the resettlement of members of particularly vulnerable populations including refugees from the Americas, Congolese, Syrians, Ukrainians, populations from Burma, and many other nationalities, as well LGBTQI+ persons, all while providing additional initial resettlement support to more than 80,000 Afghans in communities across the US,” Price said.

“The US is, and will continue to be, a global leader in international humanitarian response, including through refugee resettlement”.

Two extremist Donald Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol during the 6 January riot incited by the former president pleaded guilty Friday on felony charges.

Nicholas Ochs, 36, founder of the Hawaii Proud Boys chapter, and Nicholas DeCarlo, 32, a Fort Worth, Texas, resident, shared a social media channel called Murder the Media and claimed to have been in Washington DC covering the Trump “stop the steal” rally as journalists.

They will be sentenced in December and face up to four years in prison, although the judge has discretion to go beyond the guidelines.

The men admitted to throwing smoke bombs at police trying to keep the mob from the stage set up for Biden’s inauguration, and posed for photos in front of a door in which they scrawled “murder the media”.

According to the Associated Press, more than 870 people have been charged so far in the Capitol riot and almost 400 have pleaded guilty to charges ranging from low-level misdemeanors for illegally entering the building to felony seditious conspiracy.

By all appearances, Steve Bannon likes to think that he represents the soul of the Maga movement. He sees himself as a tireless champion of the common man, fighting their battles against America’s corrupt elites. It’s not for nothing that his radio show is called War Room and carried by the Real America’s Voice network.

But just like everybody else who has worked closely with Donald Trump, Bannon is either delusional or trying to delude. He’s not the everyman – he’s the corrupt elite.

This was driven home once again on Thursday, when Bannon surrendered himself to New York prosecutors to face charges of defrauding donors to We Build the Wall, a non-profit organization that raised more than $25m to build a wall to keep immigrants from crossing America’s southern border.

Although donors to the group were assured that 100% of their money would be used on construction, large sums were siphoned into the pockets of those running the group.

And who as chairman of the board allegedly took the greatest sum of all? None other than Steve Bannon.

Full column:

Elizabeth II, who died yesterday at the age of 96, visited the US as both a princess and queen, meeting more American presidents than any other head of state, according to the White House. Here’s a pictorial look at her visits:

And for further reading, here’s Hadley Freeman’s look at the Queen’s relationship with America and Americans…

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Few countries are as obsessed with celebrity as the US, and royals are the ultimate celebrity, being exotically unattainable and – unlike most other celebrities – intriguingly silent. Even the most arrogant come over all awed in the Queen’s presence. When then president Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, made their 2019 state visit, he might not have understood royal protocol, occasionally walking in front of the Queen during a parade, but he was still uncharacteristically respectful in her presence.

Full story:

Here’s a taste of Joan E Greve’s report on another (and more explicitly political) Biden speech, made in Maryland on Thursday night…

Joe Biden continued his attacks on “extreme Maga Republicans” on Thursday night, as he spoke at the Democratic National Committee summer meeting in Oxon Hill, Maryland.

“We’re in a serious moment in this nation’s history,” Biden said. “That’s why those who love this country – Democrats, independents and mainstream Republicans – have to be stronger, more determined and more committed to saving American democracy than the Maga Republicans are to literally destroying American politics. You just have to vote.”

Full report:

Joe Biden says it’s time to “bury the label Rust Belt and call it the silicon heartland” as he touts the groundbreaking of a new Intel semiconductor factory in Ohio, and what he says is a new dawn for US technology.

The president is taking a victory tour of the US following the passage of the $52bn bipartisan Chips and Science Act this summer that he hopes will kickstart the stalled production of semiconductors in the US.

That shortfall, he says, has held back the country’s automobile, healthcare, manufacturing and other industries:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The US has to lead the world in producing advanced chips, and this law makes sure that we will.

The act moves us up once again. We’re going to make sure we lead the world in industries of the future, in quantum computing, artificial intelligence, advanced biotechnology… think of the things this kind of investment can deliver, vaccines for cancer, cures for HIV, inventing the next best thing that hasn’t even been imagined yet.

Aware of criticism from some Republicans, and others, that the Chips Act is a corporate giveaway, and threatens national security by sending taxpayer money to companies who do business with global competitors including China, Biden made an attempt at reassurance:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The act is not handing out blank checks to companies. I’ve directed my administration to be laser focused on the guardrails that will protect taxpayers dollars.

We’ll make sure that companies partner with unions, community colleges, technical schools, to offer training and apprenticeships and to work with small minority owned businesses.

We’re going to make sure that companies that take taxpayer dollars don’t turn around and make investments in China to undermine our supply chain and national security. We have the power to take back any federal funding if companies don’t meet these requirements.

The Intel factory, Biden says, is a “field of dreams”:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}It’s fitting to break ground for American infrastructure here in Ohio.

Think about our tradition here. The Wright brothers, Neil Armstrong, John Glenn… they defined American spirit, a sprit of daring innovation.

Intel’s vision builds on that legacy, a brand new $20bn campus, 7,000 construction jobs, 3,000 full-time jobs paying an average of $135,000 a year and not all of them require a college degree.

He’s finished the speech now, which was focused entirely on the Chips Act and did not veer off into any other global events.

Joe Biden is in the intriguingly named Licking county, Ohio, where he’s at the groundbreaking ceremony of a new Intel factory and about to deliver remarks about the Chips Act, which will boost US production of semiconductors.

The White House says this particular groundbreaking is a different occasion from the usual “scripted, backslapping affairs for political dignitaries”.

We’re about to find out, but so far various industry officials and political dignitaries have spent a lot of time lauding each other and talking about the forthcoming factory.

We’ll bring you the best of Biden’s remarks when he delivers them.

Self-confessed “space nerd” Kamala Harris had a problem in Houston this morning as she spoke with astronauts aboard the international space station.

The vice-president is at the Johnson Space Center to chair an afternoon visit of the National Space Council, and took the opportunity to call astronauts Jessica Watkins, Bob Hines and Kjell Lindgren orbiting 250 miles above Earth. It didn’t end well.

Harris and the ISS crew exchanged pleasantries and a conversation about plants being grown on the space station, and the astronauts’ perspective looking down on the planet.

“We look down and we see a world with no borders,” Hines said.

“You realize how fragile it is and how much we have to take care of it as well”.

The trouble came when Harris, who introduced herself to the crew as a “space nerd”, wanted some guidance for young people who might want to become astronauts, or part of the Nasa team supporting their missions. “What’s your advice for our students?” she wondered.

“Well, I think that…” the reply came, followed by the audible equivalent of a black hole.

“Just as the vice-president was asking her question, we passed out a range of our tracking and data relay satellite system,” a Nasa commentator on the ground interjected.

Harris will deliver remarks this afternoon about “advancing space exploration”, six days after Nasa’s most recent attempt to launch its new Artemis 1 moon rocket from Florida was called off for technical problems.

There are developments in the war in Ukraine, with Russian forces being driven out of areas they formerly occupied and the Ukrainian military appearing to be closing in on the city of Kupiansk, a key logistical hub for the invading forces in the Kharkiv region.

The US, with its western allies, continues to provide military and humanitarian support for the Ukrainian defense effort, Joe Biden announcing two weeks ago the largest tranche of aid to date, bringing to $13bn the total the country has supplied or pledged to Kyiv since the president took office.

A reminder that you can follow all the developments in the Ukraine-Russia war in our live blog here:

On the night of the 2018 midterm elections, as a wave of anti-Trump sentiment swept Democrats to take control of the House, top Republican Mitt Romney urged Joe Biden to run for president.

“You have to run,” said Romney, the Republican presidential nominee Biden and Barack Obama defeated in 2012, speaking to the former vice-president by phone.

The same night, Romney was elected a US senator from Utah, a post from which he would twice vote to convict Donald Trump in impeachment trials.

Romney’s exhortation to a man then seen as a likely challenger to Trump in 2020 will probably further enrage the former president, his supporters and the Republican party they dominate.

The Biden-Romney call is described in The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama, a book by Gabriel Debenedetti that will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Describing how Biden spent 6 November 2018, Debenedetti writes: “Biden spent election night glued to his phone as usual … He talked to most of the candidates he’d campaigned for, and plenty he didn’t, either to congratulate or console them, or just to catch up.

“This time felt better than 2016” – when Trump beat Hillary Clinton for the presidency – “in part because Democrats were winning big, at least in local races and in the House.

“But it was also because of a refrain [Biden] kept hearing, and not always from the most expected sources.

“At one point he connected with Mitt Romney, who’d been easily elected to the Senate that night as a rare Trump-opposing Republican. They were warm as Biden cheered Romney’s win.

“Then Obama’s old rival got to the point: You have to run, Romney said.”

Read more:

A federal judge in Florida has dismissed Donald Trump’s lawsuit against 2016 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and former top FBI officials, rejecting the former president’s claims that they and others acted in concert to concoct the Russia investigation that shadowed much of his administration.

According to the Associated Press, US district judge Donald Middlebrooks said in a sharply worded ruling that Trump’s lawsuit, filed in March, contained “glaring structural deficiencies” and that many of the “characterizations of events are implausible.”

He dismissed the idea that Trump had sued to correct an actual legal harm, saying that “instead, he is seeking to flaunt a 200-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him, and this court is not the appropriate forum.”

The lawsuit named as defendants Clinton and some of her top advisers, as well as former FBI director James Comey and other FBI officials involved in the investigation into whether Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign had coordinated with Russia to sway the outcome of the election.

A 2019 justice department inspector general report identified flaws by the FBI during the Russia investigation, but did not find evidence that the bureau’s leaders were motivated by political bias.

Ginni Thomas, the self-styled “culture warrior” and extreme rightwing activist, has links to more than half of the anti-abortion groups and individuals who lobbied her husband Clarence Thomas and his fellow US supreme court justices ahead of their historic decision to eradicate a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.

A new analysis of the written legal arguments, or “amicus briefs”, used to lobby the justices as they deliberated over abortion underlines the extent to which Clarence Thomas’s wife was intertwined with this vast pressure campaign.

The survey found that 51% of the parties who filed amicus briefs calling for an end to a federal abortion right have political connections to Ginni Thomas, raising concerns about a possible conflict of interest at the highest levels of the US judiciary.

The six-to-three rightwing majority of the court, supercharged by Donald Trump’s three appointed conservative justices, in June overthrew the constitutional right to an abortion. Clarence Thomas was among the six who voted for the hotly contested ruling, Dobbs v Jackson.

The ruling was one of the most consequential in the supreme court’s 233-year history. It has triggered the lightning spread of partial or total abortion bans across Republican-controlled states, affecting almost one in three women aged 15 to 44.

The Dobbs case, brought by Mississippi which sought to ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, attracted an almost unprecedented 130 amicus briefs from both sides of the legal argument. Of those, 74 were filed in favour of overturning the right to an abortion, enshrined in 1973 in Roe v Wade.

In turn, the new analysis shows that 38 of the 74 anti-abortion amicus briefs – 51% – were produced by entities and individuals with links to Ginni Thomas. They included rightwing groups, religious interests, prominent conservative individuals and lawyers.

“The Thomases are normalizing the prospect of too close an association between the supreme court and those who litigate before it,” said Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University and co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast. “This isn’t the first time that Mrs Thomas has had dealings with those who come before the court and seek her husband’s vote.”

Read the full story:

The Washington Post’s White House reporter Matt Viser has taken a fascinating look at some of the similarities between Joe Biden and King Charles III.

The White House said Friday that Biden would join other world leaders in attending the state funeral in London of Charles’s mother, Queen Elizabeth II, on a date yet to be confirmed, but likely to be Monday 19 September.

Viser notes that Biden was the 13th US president to meet the Queen, and will likely become the first to meet with King Charles after his accession.

“Both are men who late in life assumed a role they had spent decades positioning themselves for, and who took their positions with a deep well of experience after having served as an understudy. They also arguably capture less of the public’s fascination than their predecessors,” he writes.

You can read the article here.

When the far-right firebrand Steve Bannon was hit with fresh fraud charges for an alleged border wall fundraising scheme, he joined the ranks of several close Donald Trump cronies recently prosecuted by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

In 2019, then district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr brought mortgage fraud charges against Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman. And in 2021, the current district attorney, Alvin Bragg, charged the former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg with fraud, and Ken Kurson with felony cyberstalking, in separate cases.

Put together the cases suggest that the actions of some top Trump allies can still generate legal headaches long after Trump left the White House and also despite being issued pardons.

Charges do not necessarily lead to convictions, of course, let alone hard prison time, as evidenced by the outcome of these past cases. Manafort, who was convicted in federal court before the New York case unfolded, ultimately didn’t face state charges on double-jeopardy grounds. Manafort was pardoned by Trump about two months before the decision came down that he couldn’t be tried in state court due to double jeopardy.

Kurson – who was first charged in Brooklyn federal court for cyberstalking, but pardoned by Trump before he left office – pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors and was ordered to do community service in his state case. Weisselberg, meanwhile, is expected to serve just 100 days in local jail under his plea deal.

On the surface, some might wonder whether Bannon’s state-level case has the same legal weakness as Manafort’s did. Bannon was charged federally in August 2020 for allegedly siphoning more than $1m from the “We Build the Wall” online fundraising campaign. Trump also pardoned Bannon before his case went to trial.

But longtime attorneys told the Guardian that Bragg’s Bannon case was different from Vance’s Manafort prosecution because when Bannon was pardoned, state-level charges for the same alleged misconduct do not carry the same double-jeopardy risks, they said.

Read the full story:

The justice department’s legal filing is expected sometime today expanding its arguments why district court judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, must reverse her decision appointing a “special master” in the case of the former president’s hoarding of classified materials at his Florida residence.

In a strongly-worded notice of intent to appeal submitted on Thursday, department lawyers let Cannon know in no uncertain terms that her decision was impeding the progress of an investigation critical to national security.

The lawyers made clear it needed access back immediately to classified documents seized last month at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion by FBI agents, while Trump’s attorneys are claiming he is entitled to have sent back to him everything that was taken away.

The inquiry took on added poignancy this week when it was reported that another country’s nuclear secrets were among the stash of highly classified documents Trump is said to have hidden from federal agents.

The department will make its own arguments, but we couldn’t explain things any better than Politico Playbook likening Trump to a jewel thief demanding the return of his ill-gotten gains:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Imagine that someone allegedly stole a sack of diamonds from a jewelry shop and then stashed the gems in junk drawers around their house. The cops raid the place, take away everything in the drawers where they find stolen diamonds, and spend two weeks separating them from the junk.

Then a judge comes along and says that the big issue in the case isn’t the stolen diamonds but that the cops still have some of the alleged thief’s personal belongings. She halts the heist investigation until an outside expert can sort the gems from the junk.

The government thinks the judge’s decision is absurd – no other suspect has received this special treatment – but they offer the judge a compromise: let us keep all of the diamonds, and we’ll return all of the alleged thief’s junk, even a few cheap watches that they think he might have swiped from the store.

Also today, the justice department and Trump’s legal team were due to jointly file a list of possible candidates to serve as the “special master” to review the records seized by the FBI.

We’ll bring you news on both fronts as we get it.

Read more:

Good morning, it’s Friday, and welcome to our US politics blog.

An unusually busy week has plenty more to offer, including the justice department spelling out today in a legal filing its arguments for regaining access to highly classified documents seized in an FBI search of Donald Trump’s Florida mansion.

Department lawyers on Thursday said they would appeal the ruling by district judge Aileen Cannon to appoint a “special master” in its investigation of the former president’s improper hoarding of confidential materials – including another nation’s nuclear secrets – at his residence, arguing her decision was blocking an inquiry critical to national security.

They’ll flesh out their arguments in today’s expected legal filing, and Trump’s lawyers will have until Monday to respond. But it’s already evident the justice department is playing hardball. We’ll have more analysis coming up.

The White House, meanwhile, announced that Joe Biden would join other world leaders at the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in London, expected to be on Monday 19 September.

Here’s what else we’re watching today:

• Joe Biden is heading for Ohio and the groundbreaking for a new Intel factory, where he’ll deliver remarks on the Chips Act at 12.15pm.

• There’s no scheduled White House media briefing, but press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will hold a “gaggle” for reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Ohio.

• Vice-president Kamala Harris is in Houston to talk to astronauts aboard the international space station, and chair a meeting of the National Space Council this afternoon.

• It’s a day off and a long weekend for both the US House and Senate, so we’re not expecting big news out of Congress.