Joe Biden vows ‘there will be no default’ after latest round of debt ceiling talks with Republicans – as it happened

After weeks of uncertainty and tension, reports indicate that Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy is nearing a deal with Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for cutting some government spending. But both the GOP-controlled House and Democratic-led Senate have to approve whatever compromise emerges in order to prevent a US government default that could happen as soon 1 June. At the Treasury, they’re not taking any chances – the Wall Street Journal reports that officials have dusted off a plan in case the limit is not lifted in time.

Here’s what else happened today:

• Ron DeSantis is trying to make the most of yesterday’s campaign announcement on Twitter, which was marred by the site’s prevalent technical glitches.

• The supreme court’s conservatives weakened environmental protections concerning waterways in a case brought over a couple’s attempt to build a lakeside house in Idaho.

• Donald Trump had classified materials lying around at Mar-a-Lago and sometimes showed them to people, the Washington Post reported.

• Centrist Democrats are annoyed that McCarthy has allowed House lawmakers to head home for the Memorial Day weekend without resolving the debt standoff first.

• Kamala Harris paid tribute to rock’n’roll star Tina Turner, who died yesterday, aged 83.

Earlier today, most of the supreme court’s conservative justices banded together to weaken environmental protections on America’s waterways in a case stemming from a couple’s attempt to build a lakeside house in Idaho, the Guardian’s Oliver Milman reports:

The scope of a landmark law to protect America’s waterways has been shrunk by the US supreme court, which has sided with an Idaho couple who have waged a long-running legal battle to build a house on wetlands near one of the state’s largest lakes.

In a ruling passed down on Thursday, the conservative-dominated court decided that the federal government was wrong to use the Clean Water Act, a key 50-year-old piece of legislation to prevent pollution seeping into rivers, streams and lakes, to prevent the couple building over the wetland beside Priest Lake in Idaho.

The justice’ decision in effect overhauls the definition of whether wetlands are considered “navigable waters” under the act and are therefore federally protected.

Michael Regan, the administrator of the EPA, said he was disappointed by a ruling that “erodes longstanding clean water protections”, adding that the agency would consider its next steps in protecting American waterways.

Donald Trump used Twitter to great effect during his 2016 campaign and for most of his presidency.

And while he has not tweeted since the platform banned him shortly after the January 6 insurrection in 2021 (even though owner Elon Musk let him back on last year, after he bought the company) Twitter has this afternoon become host to the latest flare-up in the feud between Trump’s surrogates and Ron DeSantis’s allies.

The opening volley from Trump’s team:

And the retort from top DeSantis aide Christina Pushaw:

To which the former president’s people said:

And on and on. Follow the tweets if you want more.

The Washington Post reports new details of how Donald Trump handled classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida, including that they were visibly displayed and shown off by the former president to visitors, and that staff moved boxes of papers the day before federal agents searched the property last year.

Trump’s possession of government secrets from his time as president that he was not authorized to keep is one of three major issues being investigated by Jack Smith, the justice department’s special counsel. The Post reports that grand jury activity slowed down this month, and Trump’s attorneys have taken steps that indicate a decision over whether to bring charges against the former president could happen soon.

Here’s more from the Post’s report:

Two of Donald Trump’s employees moved boxes of papers the day before FBI agents and a prosecutor visited the former president’s Florida home to retrieve classified documents in response to a subpoena — timing that investigators have come to view as suspicious and an indication of possible obstruction, according to people familiar with the matter.

Trump and his aides also allegedly carried out a “dress rehearsal” for moving sensitive papers even before his office received the May 2022 subpoena, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive ongoing investigation.

Prosecutors in addition have gathered evidence indicating that Trump at times kept classified documents in his office in a place where they were visible and sometimes showed them to others, these people said.

Taken together, the new details of the classified-documents investigation suggest a greater breadth and specificity to the instances of possible obstruction found by the FBI and Justice Department than has been previously reported. It also broadens the timeline of possible obstruction episodes that investigators are examining — a period stretching from events at Mar-a-Lago before the subpoena to the period after the FBI raid there on Aug. 8.

That timeline may prove crucial as prosecutors seek to determine Trump’s intent in keeping hundreds of classified documents after he left the White House, a key factor in deciding whether to file charges of obstruction of justice or of mishandling national security secrets. The Washington Post has previously reported that the boxes were moved out of the storage area after Trump’s office received a subpoena. But the precise timing of that activity is a significant element in the investigation, the people familiar with the matter said.

Grand jury activity in the case has slowed in recent weeks, and Trump’s attorneys have taken steps — including outlining his potential defense to members of Congress and seeking a meeting with the attorney general — that suggest they believe a charging decision is getting closer. The grand jury working on the investigation apparently has not met since May 5, after months of frenetic activity at the federal courthouse in Washington. That is the panel’s longest hiatus since December, shortly after Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as special counsel to lead the probe and coinciding with the year-end holidays.

Sam Levine has a fascinating report today on the plight of Robert Zeidman, a cyber forensics expert who took up a challenge from the Trump ally and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell…

Robert Zeidman was not planning on making the trek to Sioux Falls, South Dakota in August 2021 for a “cyber symposium” hosted by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who was pledging to unveil hard data that showed China interfered with the 2020 election.

Zeidman, a 63-year-old consultant cyber forensics expert, voted twice for Trump because he did not like the alternative candidates. He thinks there was some fraud in the 2020 election, though not enough to overturn the result. And he believed it was possible Lindell could have discovered evidence voting machines were hacked. He was curious to see Lindell’s evidence, and a bit skeptical, so he thought he would follow along online.

But Lindell – one of the most prolific spreaders of election misinformation – was pledging $5m to anyone who could prove the information was not valid data from the 2020 election, and Zeidman’s friends encouraged him to go.

Zeidman hopped on a plane from his home in Las Vegas, figuring he would meet a lot of interesting people and witness a historic moment.

“I still had my doubts about whether they had the data,” he said in an interview on Monday. “But I thought it would be a question of experts disagreeing or maybe agreeing about what the data meant.

“I didn’t think it would be blatantly bogus data, which is what I found.”

More:

The top US general has issued a stark warning about how a debt default would affect the military, Reuters reports, with chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley saying it would undercut its readiness and capabilities, as well as US national security as a whole.

“I think it would be very, very significant without a doubt in that absolutely clear, unambiguous implications on national security,” Milley told a press conference.

“I think there’s no doubt whatsoever that there would be a very significant negative impact on the readiness, morale and capabilities of the United States military if we defaulted and didn’t reach a debt ceiling [agreement].”

Over at the Capitol, Politico reports that consternation is growing among House Democrats, who want Joe Biden to take a more aggressive stance against the GOP’s demands for spending cuts to raise the debt ceiling:

Joe Biden said he has had “several productive conversations” with Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy, and despite outstanding differences over raising the debt ceiling, “there will be no default”.

“The only way to move forward is with a bipartisan agreement, and I believe we’ll come to an agreement that allows us to move forward and that protects the hardworking Americans in this country,” the president said at the White House during an event to introduce Charles Q Brown Jr, his nominee for chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

He spoke positively of his negotiations with McCarthy, and said, “our staffs continue to meet, as we speak as a matter of fact, and they’re making progress. I made clear, time and again, that defaulting on our national debt is not an option … congressional leaders understand that and they’ve all agreed there will be no default.”

He then went on to criticize the GOP’s negotiating platform, saying “speaker McCarthy and I have a very different view of who should bear the burden of additional efforts to get our fiscal house in order. I don’t believe the whole burden should fall on the backs of the middle-class and working-class Americans, my House Republican friends disagree.”

Politico reports from Sioux City, Iowa on how Republican voters in the state that will vote first in the GOP primary next year didn’t think too much about Ron DeSantis’s Twitter Spaces disaster on Wednesday night – if they thought about it at all.

The site spoke to attendees at a town hall event hosted by Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator who is competing with DeSantis for the Republican presidential nomination.

Asked about DeSantis’s glitch-filled launch, Clinton Vos, 63, said: “I knew that it was going to happen today on Twitter but I’m not a Twitter follower.”

Curtis Kull, 30, was asked if he’d heard about DeSantis and Elon Musk’s difficulties.

“I did not,” he said.

Scott Bowman, 65, said he could yet choose to back DeSantis, though he thought the Twitter fumble meant the Florida governor was “going to get a lot of heat, and I just don’t know if DeSantis can hold up to the questions. It’s a fumble by his campaign”.

Gwen Sturrock, “a teacher in her 50s”, said she had heard about the Twitter Spaces event “stalling or whatever”.

In a perhaps unconscious nod in the direction of Oscar Wilde – who in The Picture of Dorian Gray wrote “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about” – and perhaps giving comfort to any DeSantis aides still seeking plausible spin, Sturrock pointed to one possible upside of the Twitter fiasco.

It “might mean that a lot of people were very interested” in the DeSantis campaign, Sturrock said.

Here’s some further reading on the DeSantis-Musk mess, from Dan Milmo, our global technology editor:

Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers group, has been sentenced to 18 years in prison after being convicted of seditious conspiracy over his role in the January 6 attack on Congress.

Prosecutors had sought a 25-year sentence for the first person convicted of seditious conspiracy in relation to the Capitol attack, which was mounted by supporters of Donald Trump in an attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

Lawyers for Rhodes said he should be sentenced to time already served since his arrest in January last year.

Here’s more from court in Washington today, from the Associated Press:

At Thursday’s hearing, in a first for a January 6 case, US district judge Amit Mehta agreed with prosecutors to apply enhanced penalties for ‘terrorism’, under the argument that the Oath Keepers sought to influence the government through ‘intimidation or coercion’.

Judges in previous sentencings had shot down the justice department request for the so-called “terrorism enhancement” – which can lead to a longer prison term – but Mehta said it fitted Rhodes’ case.

“Mr Rhodes directed his co-conspirators to come to the Capitol and they abided,” the judge said.

A defense lawyer, Phillip Linder, denied that Rhodes gave any orders for Oath Keepers to enter the Capitol on January 6. Linder told the judge Rhodes could have had many more Oath Keepers come to the Capitol “if he really wanted” to disrupt Congress’ certification of the electoral college vote.

Some lighter lunchtime reading, courtesy of House Democrats and after a demand for decorum in the chamber from the far-right Georgia Republican and noted decorum-free controversialist Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Of the Wednesday demand, which met with gales of laughter, Jared Huffman, from California, said: “Irony died today on the House Floor, but comedy triumphed as the GOP chose MTG as their keeper of ‘decorum’.”

Another Californian, Jimmy Gomez, tried a couple of jokes.

Greene calling for decorum, Gomez said, is “like Leonardo DiCaprio telling people to date people their own age” or, in reference to another controversial Republican, “like George Santos telling people not to lie”.

Here’s the moment in question:

And here’s our story:

After weeks of uncertainty and tension, reports indicate that Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy is nearing a deal with Joe Biden on raising the debt ceiling in exchange for cutting some government spending. But nothing is done until it is passed, and both the House and Senate have to approve whatever compromise emerges in order to prevent a US government default that could happen as soon 1 June. At the Treasury, they’re not taking any chances – the Wall Street Journal reports that officials have dusted off a plan in case the limit is not lifted in time.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

• Ron DeSantis is trying to make the most of yesterday’s campaign announcement on Twitter, which was marred by the site’s prevalent technical glitches.

• Centrist Democrats are annoyed that McCarthy has allowed House lawmakers to head home for the Memorial Day weekend without resolving the debt standoff first.

• Kamala Harris paid tribute to rock’n’roll star Tina Turner, who died yesterday, aged 83.

The Treasury is preparing for the possibility that Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling on time, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Officials have turned to a plan drawn up in 2011 during a previous debt limit standoff between Democrats and Republicans that resulted in a major credit agency downgrading America’s rating for the first time ever.

Twelve years later, the Journal reports that the goal is much the same now as it was then: prevent as much damage to the country’s financial reputation as possible if Washington’s leaders can’t reach an agreement by early June, the approximate deadline when the US will exhaust its cash on hand.

Here’s more from their story:

Under the backup plan created for a debt-limit breach, federal agencies would submit payments to the Treasury no sooner than the day before they are due, the people familiar with the talks said. That would represent a change from the current system, in which agencies may submit payment files well before their due dates. The Treasury processes them on a rolling basis, often ahead of the deadlines. Some payments are already sent to the Treasury one day early, one person said.

If the Treasury can’t make a full day’s worth of payments, it would likely delay payments until it has enough cash to pay the full day’s worth of bills, the people familiar with the matter said. The plan has been discussed across the government, but the Treasury hasn’t instructed agencies to change how they pay bills.

The centrist New Democrat Coalition has condemned Kevin McCarthy and the House Republicans for adjourning the chamber ahead of the long Memorial Day weekend without resolving the debt ceiling standoff.

“House Republicans are skipping town –– willing to risk the full faith and credit of the United States and plunge the country into an unprecedented crisis,” read a statement from Annie Kuster, the chair of the House caucus.

“As Speaker McCarthy remains beholden to the most extreme elements of his party, New Dems are committed to working with responsible Republicans to advance a solution that will pass the House and Senate. As lawmakers, we have a responsibility to rise above partisanship and act in the best interest of our nation. There is no time to waste.”

Reports indicate that Joe Biden and the House speaker, Republican Kevin McCarthy, are nearing an agreement on a bill that would raise the debt ceiling through the 2024 election, which would allow the president to avoid another standoff until after voters go to the polls.

That proposal is already receiving pushback on the far right, underscoring that McCarthy will likely need Democratic votes to get any bipartisan bill through the House.

“Kevin McCarthy is on the verge of striking a terrible deal to give away the debt limit [through] Biden’s term for little in the way of cuts,” said Russ Vought, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Donald Trump.

“Nothing to crush the bureaucracy. They are lining up Democrats to pass it. The DC cartel is reassembling. Time for higher defcon. #HoldTheLine”

Over in the Senate, Republican Mike Lee of Utah has already pledged to “use every procedural tool at my disposal to impede a debt-ceiling deal that doesn’t contain substantial spending and budgetary reforms.” Such a delay in the upper chamber could increase the risk of default.