Judge bars Trump from presenting own closing arguments in fraud trial – as it happened

As Republicans convened to weigh holding Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress for not appearing for a deposition, the president’s son seized the spotlight by showing up unannounced at the House oversight committee room. It was something of a stunt, but succeeded in pulling media attention away from the hearing, and giving Democrats an opportunity to accuse the GOP of hypocrisy, since Biden’s attorney said he would have been willing to testify then, if asked. In New York City, Donald Trump was briefly set to personally deliver closing arguments at his civil fraud trial tomorrow, until judge Arthur Engoron said no.

Here’s what else happened today:

• Conservative Republicans blocked the consideration of legislation on the House floor, in protest of speaker Mike Johnson’s government spending deal with Democrats.

• Joe Biden finally saw tentative improvement in his polling in a key swing state.

• Democrats of color blasted Republican Nancy Mace, who accused Hunter Biden of exhibiting “white privilege”.

• A group of constitutional law experts wrote an open letter saying that impeaching homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas simply because Republicans disagree with his policies is unjustifiable.

• Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania became the first House Democrat to call on Lloyd Austin to resign as defense secretary for not promptly telling the White House he had been hospitalized.

Chris Deluzio, a freshman House Democrat from Pennsylvania and Iraq war veteran, has called on defense secretary Lloyd Austin to resign after he waited several days to notify the White House that he had been hospitalized.

“I have lost trust in Secretary Lloyd Austin’s leadership of the Defense Department due to the lack of transparency about his recent medical treatment and its impact on the continuity of the chain of command. I have a solemn duty in Congress to conduct oversight of the Defense Department through my service on the House Armed Services Committee. That duty today requires me to call on Secretary Austin to resign,” Deluzio said.

The White House has said Joe Biden has confidence in Austin, who remains hospitalized:

Meanwhile, in Iowa, two of the leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination will debate this evening, though frontrunner Donald Trump will not be joining them, the Guardian’s Alice Herman reports:

Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis will face off one-on-one in Des Moines, Iowa, on Wednesday night in their fifth and most high-stakes attempt to take support away from Donald Trump before Monday’s Iowa caucus, the country’s first state primary election.

The former president has repeatedly declined to debate his party’s opponents, and will again forgo this debate, instead participating in a town hall hosted by Fox News, also in Iowa.

Unlike the prior debates, this one was not coordinated by the Republican National Committee (RNC), which decided in December to stop hosting GOP debates for the rest of the primary season.

The RNC debates narrowed the field of Republican contenders to five, and CNN’s debate requirement that candidates poll at 10% in at least three national or Iowa-based surveys has left only Haley, DeSantis and Trump qualifying. Chris Christie, Trump’s most vociferous critic among the Republican contenders, did not make the cut, but will likely qualify in New Hampshire.

House Republicans’ bad day just got worse, after conservative lawmakers disrupted a procedural vote in protest at speaker Mike Johnson’s deal with Democrats to fund the government:

A vote on a rule to bring multiple pieces of legislation up for consideration just failed, and the House’s Republican leadership then announced there would be no votes for the rest of the day.

It was the latest disruption for the House GOP, after Hunter Biden upstaged an oversight committee hearing convened this morning to hold him in contempt by showing up unexpectedly. That gave Democrats the opportunity to claim the majority does not actually want to hear from the president’s son about allegations of corruption. Just take it from the spokesman for the committee’s Democrats:

After months of worrying poll numbers, Joe Biden has received some tentatively good news in the form of a just-released Quinnipiac University survey showing the president ahead of Donald Trump in must-win state Pennsylvania.

Biden garnered 49% support against Trump’s 46% in what Quinnipiac said was the first time that the president led in their surveys of the swing state. Trump was ahead of Biden in two previous polls the university commissioned, though the university noted the race remained “too close to call”.

Biden carried Pennsylvania when he was first elected in 2020, while Trump had won it in 2016.

When Hunter Biden turned up before the House oversight committee today, South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace accused him of exhibiting “white privilege”.

That comment did not sit well with at least two Democratic lawmakers on the panel, who excoriated Mace’s choice of words. Here’s Jasmine Crockett of Texas:

And New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

In response to Florida’s Republican representative Byron Donalds who asked Maryland’s Democratic representative Jamie Raskin whether he has ever stayed at a Trump hotel, Raskin replied:

“I would never stay at a Trump hotel. I’ve got too much self-respect and a concern for hygiene.”

Raskin’s comments came as he offered to take Donalds “up on his challenge to see whether the Trump hotel in Washington, the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, the Trump hotel on Fifth Avenue, the Trump hotel on UN Plaza, the four of the more than 500 businesses that we got documentation for, whether they actually had the same level of business coming from Saudi Arabia, the communist bureaucrats of China … the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, India, Egypt … ”

“We will make that comparison about what was done before if you get the chairman to call off the ban on further documents,” he added, referring to House oversight committee chairman James Comer.

Last Thursday, a report published by Democrats from the House oversight committee found that Trump’s businesses received at least $7.8m in payment from 20 countries during his presidency.

In an email New York judge Arthur Engoron sent to Donald Trump’s lawyer Chris Kise on Wednesday surrounding Trump’s closing arguments, Engoron wrote:

“Dear Mr. Kise,

Not having heard from you by the third extended deadline (noon today), I assume that Mr. Trump will not agree to the reasonable, lawful limits I have imposed as a precondition to giving a closing statement above and beyond those given by his attorneys, and that, therefore, he will not be speaking in court tomorrow.”

Fani Willis, Georgia’s Fulton county district attorney who brought election interference charges against Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants, has been subpoenaed in a divorce case involving a special prosecutor she hired in the Trump case.

A process server delivered the subpoena to Willis’s office on Monday, according to a court filing reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the subpoena. The subpoena requests Willis to testify in the divorce case involving her top prosecutor Nathan Wade and his wife Joycelyn Wade.

The Wades filed for divorce in Cobb county, just outside Atlanta, in November 2021, according to a county court docket. The filings in the case have been sealed since February 2022.

Earlier this week, Mike Roman, a former Trump campaign official and co-defendant in the election interference case who is facing seven criminal charges, filed a motion accusing Willis and Nathan Wade of an “improper, clandestine personal relationship during the pendency of this case”. The filing offered no proof of the relationship or of any wrongdoing.

For the full story, click here:

Donald Trump’s real estate empire is facing peril.

For 11 weeks, the inner workings of his company have been discussed at a New York fraud trial. A judge has already decided Trump committed fraud. He will rule on punishment later.

Trump’s companies could lose their New York licenses, making it nearly impossible for him to run his real estate business. He is also facing a vast fine – state lawyers made the case for a $370m penalty on Friday – which could force the company to sell off its properties.

At this point, prosecutors and Trump’s defense team have rested their cases. Closing arguments are set to take place on Thursday.

The last three months offered Trump and his lawyers their chance to defend Trump in court against accusations that he purposely exaggerated his net worth on government documents. Instead, they worked to uphold the shimmering portrait Trump has painted of himself for the last 40 years. The story that gave Trump celebrity and, ultimately, the White House could lead to the downfall of his company.

A scathing pre-trial summary judgment made the trial an uphill battle for Trump’s team. Issued on 26 September, less than a week before the trial started, the ruling said documents submitted by prosecutors showed Trump had committed fraud. The ruling is currently under review by an appellate court, but if upheld, Trump will lose his business licenses, severely curtailing his real estate business in New York.

You can read more here.

Donald Trump will be barred from his reported aim to deliver his own closing argument on Thursday in his New York civil business fraud trial.

Judge Arthur Engoron had reportedly been prepared to allow the former president, in a highly unusual move, to address the court tomorrow in addition to his lawyers doing so.

But fresh news now being reported by the Associated Press – Engoron has “rescinded permission”.

Trump is a defendant in the case brought by the New York attorney general, Letitia James. She claims his net worth was inflated by billions of dollars on financial statements that helped him secure business loans and insurance.

An attorney for Trump informed Engoron earlier this week that Trump wished to speak during the closing arguments, and the judge approved the plan, according to one of the two people who spoke to the AP.

Read more about the case from the Guardian’s Lauren Aratani, who had a great report from last weekend, here.

House Republicans today condemned Alejandro Mayorkas during the opening hearing in the impeachment process they’ve instigated against the homeland security secretary over record numbers of migrants making unauthorized entry across the US-Mexico border.

Mark Green, the Republican chairman of the committee leading the impeachment effort, said in opening remarks that Mayorkas had intentionally encouraged illegal immigration with lax policies, Reuters reports.

But congressman Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the committee, called the impeachment effort a “circus sideshow” crafted by Republicans “to try to distract from their own failures” to address border security.

The impeachment effort is the culmination of years of Republican criticism of Joe Biden’s border management and the president’s moves to reverse some of the harshest policies of Donald Trump.

“The secretary’s actions have brought us here today, not ours,” Green said at the hearing, calling Mayorkas “the architect of the devastation” at the border.

Not only Democrats across both congressional chambers but also Senate Republicans have questioned the attempt to remove Mayorkas over a policy dispute, which legal experts say does not satisfy the high standard for impeachment.

Border security is a core issue for Republican base voters and the party has intensified its criticism of the Biden administration in the run-up to 5 November election.

The only cabinet secretary to ever be impeached was Ulysses Grant’s secretary of war in 1876 following allegations of corruption – demonstrating the exceptional nature of today’s proceedings.

More on Thompson:

It’s been a lively morning on Capitol Hill, to say the least. And there is a lot more action to come so stay with us as we bring you the US political news as it happens.

Here’s where things stand:

• Hunter Biden made a surprise appearance at a congressional hearing, as Republicans on the US House oversight committee convened to consider a resolution to hold the US president’s son in contempt of Congress over his refusal to comply with a subpoena for testimony over his business interests.

• Appearing with his attorney, Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden sat silently in the front row of the hearing room as the chair and vice-chair of the oversight committee delivered their opening statements.

• After Hunter Biden walked into the House oversight committee hearing room in Washington, Republican Nancy Mace laid into him, prompting objections from Democrats. “Who bribed Hunter Biden to be here today? That’s my first question,” she said.

• Meanwhile, in a separate proceeding, House Republicans leading the homeland security committee were barreling ahead with efforts to impeach homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, part of a broader effort to make immigration and border security a defining issue of this year’s presidential election. The committee was holding its first hearing in the process, but Mayorkas was not attending.

• A group of constitutional law experts has written an open letter saying that impeaching Mayorkas simply because Republicans disagree with his policies is unjustifiable.

The Republican campaign against Hunter Biden centers on allegations that his father, president Joe Biden, benefited illicitly from his business dealings overseas.

The GOP has turned up no proof of such ties. What they have discovered is that, per the testimony of Hunter Biden’s former business partner, he would sometime put his father on speakerphone during business meetings, but their conversations were casual.

As he was departing the House oversight committee room, Hunter Biden was asked why he had his father talk to his clients. Here’s what he had to say:

According to Reuters, Hunter Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell spoke briefly to reporters about why the president’s son made an unexpected appearance in the House oversight committee’s audience.

“We have offered to work with the House committees to see what and how relevant information to any legitimate inquiry could be provided,” Lowell said after Biden left the hearing room.

“Our first five offers were ignored. And then in November, they issued a subpoena for a behind-closed-doors deposition, a tactic that the Republicans have repeatedly misused in their political crusade to selectively leak and mischaracterize.”