Donald Trump reportedly sues former lawyer Michael Cohen for $500m – as it happened

Less than a week after Republicans booted them from the Tennessee state house of representatives, Black Democratic lawmakers Justin Jones and Justin Pearson have been reappointed back to their old seats, with the latter’s return confirmed this afternoon by local authorities in Memphis. The episode, which began when the duo joined with a white colleague (who was not expelled) to demonstrate for stricter gun control on the House floor, appears far from over. In Washington, two Democratic senators have called for attorney general Merrick Garland to investigate their expulsion, arguing it appears to have violated free speech and anti-discrimination laws. But if the statements of two Kentucky lawmakers following Monday’s mass shooting in Louisville are any indication, the partisan divide over gun rights remains as wide as ever.

Here’s a look back at what else happened today:

• Donald Trump said he’ll “never drop out” of the 2024 presidential race, even if convicted of a crime.

• Rupert Murdoch could be on the witness stand as soon as Monday, as Dominion Voting System’s defamation complaint against Fox News heads to trial.

• Republican senator Tim Scott inched closer to an all-out presidential run by announcing an exploratory committee.

• The new Secret Service director downplayed concerns about politicization of the agency raised by the January 6 investigation in a rare interview.

• Trump is suing his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen for $500mn, alleging he unjustly enriched himself and breached attorney-client privilege. You may remember Cohen as being the vehicle for the former president’s hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, which is at the center of the indictment filed by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg against him.

There’s news of a link-up between a certain likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, Ron DeSantis, and Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán. Flora Garamvolgyi writes for the Guardian:

Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, one of Donald Trump’s biggest international supporters, has made overtures in recent weeks to Ron DeSantis and one of the Florida governor’s key billionaire backers.

Orbán has repeatedly voiced strong support for Trump’s policies and political style, even long after he left the White House. But meetings between a key Orbán ally and the DeSantis camp suggest the Hungarian leader is hedging his bets amid uncertainty over Trump’s electoral prospects.

Katalin Novák, the Hungarian president, met DeSantis last month. She also met DeSantis’s wife, Casey, and Republican mega-donor Thomas Péterffy, who has announced he would not be backing Trump’s 2024 presidential candidacy. The Hungarian-born billionaire has called DeSantis his “favorite man” and donated $570,000 to his campaign in 2022, according to the campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets.

The first female president of Hungary and a close ally of Orbán, Novak previously served as minister for family affairs. Like DeSantis, she has ultra-conservative views regarding family policies, LGBTQ+ rights and abortion. She has been a key part of Orbán’s efforts to make Budapest a hub for discussions between rightwing and far-right forces from around the world, including the US right.

“For the Orbán government, bilateral relations have a strong party-politics angle. They have been contemplating whether it was worth putting all their cards on Trump. The indictment against the former president only confirmed that,” said Daniel Hegedus, a Central Europe fellow at the German Marshall Fund.

Separately to the DeSantis meetings, Hungarian government officials have started to contact other Republican figures, according to a former Hungarian diplomat.

“These outreaches have increased for the past nine months, and more government officials have visited the US than before,” said the diplomat.

Read the full story:

Fox News chairman Rupert Murdoch could as soon as Monday appear on the witness stand when the trial of Dominion Voting Systems’s defamation case against the conservative media network begins, Bloomberg News reports.

The trial, in which the election systems company is asking for $1.6bn in compensation from Fox for allegedly harming its reputation in the aftermath of the 2020 election, begins in Delaware on Thursday. Opening arguments are set to start on Monday, and Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, say Murdoch could appear on that day or Tuesday as the second witness called.

Following Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, his supporters accused Dominion of rigging the vote in favor of Joe Biden though its voting equipment, which is used by municipalities nationwide. Dominion says Fox amplified these claims repeatedly, even though they knew the network’s employees knew were false. Here’s the latest on the case:

Pumping his fist in the air with a vow of “let’s get back to work”, Justin Pearson and his supporters were jubilant after local authorities in Memphis reappointed him to his seat in the statehouse.

Here’s clip of his remarks following the Shelby county commission vote, which was unanimous:

Justin Pearson, who was one of two Black Democratic lawmakers ejected from the Tennessee house of representatives by its Republican supermajority last week, has been reappointed to his position, the Associated Press reports.

The Shelby county board of commissioners voted to send Pearson back to his seat representing Memphis. On Monday, the Nashville metropolitan council had done the same for Justin Jones, the other Democrat expelled after staging a noisy protest on the House floor in favor of stricter gun laws following a mass shooting in Nashville. Both men will need to win a forthcoming special election to remain in their seats.

In Memphis, protesters have gathered while the Shelby county commission reviews the reappointment of Democratic representative Justin Pearson.

He was one of two young Black Democrats removed from the Tennessee house of representatives along with Justin Jones, who was reappointed on Monday.

We’re expecting a decision from Memphis shortly.

Donald Trump slapped his former lawyer Michael Cohen with a $500m lawsuit on Wednesday, according to Fox News.

Cohen is, of course, Trump’s one-time fixer, notorious for making the $130,000 pay-off to adult movie star Stormy Daniels that led to the ex-president’s appearance in a Manhattan courtroom on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

According to Fox, Trump’s legal team filed a 30-page federal lawsuit in the US southern district court in Florida earlier today, claiming that Cohen breached of his attorney-client relationship and unjustly enriched himself, among other allegations.

“This is an action arising from [Cohen’s] multiple breaches of fiduciary duty, unjust enrichment, conversion and breaches of contract by virtue of [Cohen’s] past service as [Trump’s] employee and attorney,” the lawsuit states, per the Fox report.

The lawsuit, the network said, details Cohen’s “myriad of public statements, including the publication of two books, a podcast series, and innumerable mainstream media appearances,” while ignoring “cease and desist” orders.

It claims Cohen has, in recent months, “increased the frequency and hostility of the illicit acts” and “appears to have become emboldened and repeatedly continues to make wrongful and false statements” about Trump through various platforms.

Cohen has become one of Trump’s sharpest critics since being released from a prison term in 2020 for crimes including tax evasion, lying to Congress and facilitating illegal payments to silence both Daniels and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model.

He wrote a memoir, entitled Disloyal, later that year chronicling his time as Trump’s henchman, and has become a regular analyst on cable TV channels on the former president’s legal perils.

Trump has always denied the affairs, or making payments to the women.

Democratic Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin says she’s running for a third term, news greeted enthusiastically by the chair of the state party.

Ben Wikler says Republicans are “hiding under a rug” because none so far have announced they are challenging for Baldwin’s seat in the key swing state, according to the Associated Press.

Baldwin, in a statement, said she intends to continue fighting for the working class and families struggling with inflation, as well as opposing Wisconsin’s ban on elective abortions.

She became the state’s first female member of congress in 1998, and was elected to the Senate in 2012, handing Republican former governor Tommy Thompson his first defeat in a statewide race.

Here’s the letter we told you about earlier from Chuck Schumer, Raphael Warnock and other senior Democrats calling for the justice department to investigate the expulsion by Republicans in Tennessee of two young Black state representatives for taking part in a gun reform protest.

In it, Schumer, the Senate majority leader, and Warnock, of Georgia, join fellow Democrats Chris Murphy (Connecticut), Alejandro Padilla (California) and Brian Schatz (Hawaii), in asking attorney general Merrick Garland to look into whether citizens’ rights of representation were breached when the lawmakers were removed.

A press release from Schumer’s office announcing the letter reads in part:

On March 30, three Tennessee lawmakers peacefully protested in the well of the state’s House of Representatives following the state legislature’s inaction on gun violence prevention after the slaughter of three nine-year-olds and three adults at Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.

The next week, two of the three lawmakers, representatives Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, were expelled, while their colleague, representative Gloria Johnson, was spared by one vote.

The senators asked the DOJ to investigate whether actions by the Tennessee state legislature violated any constitutional rights of Tennessee citizens to be represented by the legislators of their choice, or violated any of representatives Jones’ and Pearson’s 14th amendment or first amendment rights.

We cannot allow states to cite minor procedural violations as pretextual excuses to remove democratically-elected representatives, especially when these expulsions may have been at least partially on the basis of race. Allowing such behavior sets a dangerous, and undemocratic, precedent.

We’ll find out this afternoon if commissioners in Memphis have voted to restore Pearson to his seat. Nashville city leaders voted unanimously on Monday to send Jones back to the state house until a special election can be held.

Read more:

Special counsel Jack Smith’s investigators are trying to determine whether Donald Trump personally reviewed classified materials in his possession after the government asked last year that it be returned, and are asking witnesses whether he showed off a map containing sensitive information, the New York Times reports.

Smith has been tasked by attorney general Merrick Garland to investigate the classified materials the FBI found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last August, as well as his involvement in the January 6 insurrection and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. According to the Times, who cited four people with knowledge of the matter, Smith’s investigators have asked witnesses whether he displayed a map after leaving office. The details of the map are unknown, but it is said to contain secret information.

They have also asked whether Trump requested to personally review boxes of sensitive material at his Mar-a-Lago resort after receiving a subpoena last May to hand over all classified documents in his possession. A lawyer for the former president later signed a document asserting Trump had handed over all the material in his possession, which turned out not to be true.

Here’s more from the Times’s report:

The question of whether Mr. Trump was displaying sensitive material in his possession after he lost the presidency and left office is crucial as investigators try to reconstruct what Mr. Trump was doing with boxes of documents that went with him to his Florida residence and private club, Mar-a-Lago.

Among the topics investigators have been focused on is precisely when Mr. Trump was at the club last year. In particular, they were interested in whether he remained at Mar-a-Lago to look at boxes of material that were still stored there before Justice Department counterintelligence officials seeking their return came to visit in early June, according to two people familiar with the questions.

Mr. Trump typically leaves Florida for his club in Bedminster, N.J., earlier than he did last year, when he was still at Mar-a-Lago for the visit from the Justice Department officials, on June 3. Investigators have been gathering evidence about whether Mr. Trump had aides bring him boxes to sift through after a grand jury subpoena was issued in May for any government documents Mr. Trump still had in his possession, the people said.

After the June 3 visit, when Justice Department officials were handed a batch of documents with classified markings that had been found at Mar-a-Lago, a lawyer for Mr. Trump signed a certification saying a “diligent search” had been conducted and all government material had been returned. That statement proved untrue two months later when the F.B.I. found hundreds of pages of additional classified documents during a court-authorized search.

The second of two Democratic lawmakers expelled last week from Tennessee’s house of representatives may get his seat back today, after a meeting of local commissioners in Memphis. In Washington, two Democratic senators have called for attorney general Merrick Garland to investigate the episode, arguing the Black lawmakers’ banishment appears to have violated free speech and anti-discrimination rights. The whole affair started with a protest in favor of stricter gun control – an issue over which partisan divisions are as wide as ever, if the statements of two Kentucky lawmakers are any indication.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

• Donald Trump says he’ll “never drop out” of the 2024 presidential race, even if convicted of a crime.

• Republican senator Tim Scott inched closer to an all-out presidential run by announcing an exploratory committee.

• The new Secret Service director downplayed concerns about politicization of the agency raised by the January 6 investigation in a rare interview.

A group of pharmaceutical firms and executives have filed a brief encouraging a federal appeals court to half a judge’s ruling that last week decertified mifepristone, one of the drugs used in medication abortion.

“The district court’s approach would have ripple effects across FDA’s programs for drugs intended to treat serious and life-threatening diseases and conditions —programs that are essential to facilitating and expediting the development and review of critical medicines,” the group of dozens of organizations and individuals writes in their amicus brief.

“It would narrow eligibility for these programs, delay patient access to life-saving medications, and discourage development in the first instance. Without sufficient flexibility, sponsors would lose considerable efficiency in bringing new drugs to market — and in updating and innovating on existing approved applications. And patients would lose access to potentially lifesaving and life-improving treatments.”

The justice department is asking for a stay on the ruling from the fifth circuit court of appeals – which is considered the most conservative federal appellate body in the country.

Abortion advocates are scrambling ahead of a Friday deadline after which a drug used in medication abortion could be deauthorized, thanks to a conservative federal court judge. Here’s the Guardian’s Mary Tuma with a look at the effort to get a higher court to intervene:

FDA authorization for a key abortion drug could be nullified after Friday, unless an appeals court acts on a Biden administration request to block last week’s ruling suspending approval of the drug.

The drug, mifepristone, is used in more than half of all the abortions in the US. The ruling, issued by a federal judge in Texas, applies across the country.

Writing that the ruling would “inflict grave harm on women, the medical system, and the public” if it went into effect, the Department of Justice on Monday requested the fifth US circuit court of appeals temporarily block Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling while the appeals process plays out.

The issue may ultimately fall into the hands of the US supreme court and its conservative supermajority, which eradicated abortion rights last year by overturning Roe v Wade.

A coalition of media organizations has filed a lawsuit asking for the release of surveillance footage from the January 6 insurrection that House speaker Kevin McCarthy provided to Fox News but no other outlet, CNN reports.

The suit filed against the justice department under its public records law argues that because the Republican speaker provided the footage to Fox, it should be made available to the public at large.

“That denial of access is a stark change of pace for these Plaintiffs, as over the past two years they have diligently, cooperatively, and successfully pursued and obtained access to thousands of videos of the Capitol riot that have been used as evidence or otherwise become judicial records in more than a hundred cases in this District against those charged with organizing or participating in the riot,” reads the suit, which was filed by CNN, Advance Publications, the Associated Press, CBS News, EW Scripps, Gannett, Politico, ProPublica and the New York Times.

McCarthy in February handed the footage to conservative Fox commentator Tucker Carlson, then promised to “slowly roll out” footage to other outlets – which he has not done. Carlson used the footage in segments that attempted to downplay the severity of attack on lawmakers as they were certifying the results of the 2020 election. The release also sparked concerns that it could compromise security arrangements in the Capitol.