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    Trump news at a glance: Epstein case haunts administration even as Vance blames Democrats for mishandling

    Vice-president JD Vance’s attempt to deflect attention away from the Trump administration’s handling of the case against convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has backfired, triggering renewed calls for transparency.In an interview with Fox News broadcast on Sunday, Vance tried to brush off criticism of the administration’s refusal to release documents related to the scandal, accusing Joe Biden of doing “absolutely nothing” about it when he was in the White House.Within minutes of the Fox News interview being broadcast, social media began to hum with renewed cries of “release the files!”The White House has been caught in a bind over the Epstein affair, which spawned conspiracy theories among many of Donald Trump’s supporters which now senior figures in the administration had actively encouraged during the 2024 campaign.Here are the key US politics stories at a glance:Vance’s attempt to link Democrats to Epstein renews calls to ‘release the files’Four days after JD Vance reportedly asked top Trump administration officials to come up with a new communications strategy for dealing with the scandal around the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, the vice-president appears to have put his foot in it, sparking a new round of online outrage even as he tried to defuse the furor.Read the full storyNvidia and AMD reportedly agree to pay 15% of China chip sale revenues to USNvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15% of their revenues from chip sales in China, under an unprecedented arrangement to obtain export licenses for the semiconductors, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.Read the full storyTexas redistricting fight ‘could last years’, threatens Greg AbbottThe Texas governor, Greg Abbott, has stepped up his war of words with Democratic lawmakers who have left the state to foil an aggressive redistricting plan aimed at giving his Republican party five additional seats in Congress, saying on Sunday that the fight “could literally last years”.Read the full storyCourt overrides Trump officials’ rollback and blocks fishing in Pacific Islands monumentA federal judge in Hawaii has ruled that commercial fishing is illegal in the Pacific Islands Heritage marine national monument, a federally protected area in the central Pacific Ocean.Read the full storyTrump orders homeless he passed en route to golf course to leave Washington DCIn a social media post on Sunday, the president demanded homeless residents of Washington DC leave the country’s capital or face eviction, and again promised to use federal officers to jail criminals, even though violent crime in the city was at a 30-year low when he took office in January.Read the full storyCompanies aiding Trump’s immigration crackdown see ‘extraordinary’ revenuesThe technology, surveillance and private prison providers arming Trump’s massive expansion and weaponization of immigration enforcement are running a victory lap after reporting their latest financial results.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

    Ahead of the a meeting between president Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin scheduled for Friday, our correspondent Shaun Walker has written this analysis about how confusion over the summit shows Putin still calls the shots.

    Trump’s second term has seen a sustained assault on democratic institutions – political, judicial, media, cultural and academic – that appears to be only accelerating, writes David Smith in this feature.
    Catching up? Here’s what happened 9 August 2025. More

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    Nvidia and AMD reportedly agree to pay 15% of China chip sale revenues to US

    Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15% of their revenues from chip sales in China, under an unprecedented arrangement to obtain export licenses for the semiconductors, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.The revenue share applies to Nvidia’s H20 chips and AMD’s MI308 chips, the report said, citing a US official, noting that the Trump administration had yet to determine how to use the money.The chipmakers agreed to the quid pro quo arrangement as a condition for obtaining export licenses for the Chinese market that were granted last week, according to the unnamed official.According to export control experts, no US company has ever agreed to pay a portion of their revenues to obtain export licenses, the newspaper reported. But Donald Trump has encouraged firms, and countries, to make investments in the US to, in his words, “buy down” the tariff rates he imposes.Nvidia follows rules the US government sets for its participation in worldwide markets, an Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters in an emailed statement. “While we haven’t shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide.”AMD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The US commerce department started issuing licenses to Nvidia to export its H20 chips to China last week, removing a significant hurdle to the artificial intelligence bellwether’s access to a key market.The US in July reversed an April ban on the sale of the H20 chip to China. The company had tailored the microprocessor specially to the Chinese market to comply with the Biden-era AI chip export controls.Nvidia’s chips are a major driver of the AI boom, and in July the company became the first ever to have its market value surpass $4tn.Complications facing the company are not necessarily over, however, with growing scrutiny of Nvidia by Chinese authorities. Late last month China’s cyberspace watchdog summoned Nvidia to a meeting to discuss whether the chips had any “backdoor” security risks which would allow remote access or control. Nvidia said they did not.But Chinese state media has continued to raise concerns. In a commentary earlier this month, the People’s Daily said Nvidia must produce “convincing security proofs” to eliminate Chinese users’ worries over security risks in its chips and regain market trust. And On Sunday a state media account on Chinese social media platform WeChat said the H20 chips posed a security risk for China. The account, Yuyuan Tantian, claimed Nvidia chips could achieve functions including “remote shutdown” through a hardware “backdoor”. Nvidia has not responded.With Reuters More

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    JD Vance’s attempt to blame Democrats

    Four days after JD Vance reportedly asked top Trump administration officials to come up with a new communications strategy for dealing with the scandal around the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, he appears to have put his foot in it, sparking a new round of online outrage even as he tried to defuse the furor.In an interview with Fox News broadcast on Sunday, the vice-president tried to deflect criticism of the administration’s refusal to release the Epstein files by blaming Democrats. He accused Joe Biden of doing “absolutely nothing” about the scandal when he was in the White House.“And now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this. And yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years,” he said. Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted of conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse multiple minor girls and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison during the Biden administration.If Vance’s attempt to switch public blame onto Democrats was the big idea to emerge from his strategy meeting with attorney general Pam Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel, which according to CNN he convened at the White House last week, then their labours appear to have backfired. (Vance denied to Fox that they had discussed Epstein at all, though he did acknowledge the meeting took place.)Within minutes of the Fox News interview being broadcast, social media began to hum with renewed cries of “release the files!”Clips of Vanc smearing Democrats quickly began to circulate on X. “We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with leftwing politicians and leftwing billionaires … Democrat billionaires and Democrat political leaders went to Epstein island all the time. Who knows what they did,” he said. Vance also repeated Trump’s previously debunked claim that Bill Clinton had visited Epstein’s private island dozens of times. Clinton has acknowledged using Epstein’s jet, but denied ever visiting his island.“Fine. Release all the files,” was the riposte from Bill Kristol, the prominent conservative Never Trumper who urged the documents to be made public with “no redactions of clients, enablers, and see-no-evil associates”.Jon Favreau, Barack Obama’s former head speechwriter, replied: “Release the names! Democrats, Republicans, billionaires, or not. What are you afraid of, JD Vance?”Favreau added that Trump’s name “is in the Epstein files”. That was an apparent reference to a report in the Wall Street Journal last month that a justice department review of the documents conducted under Bondi had found that the president’s name did appear “multiple times”.Other social media users used the Fox News interview as an excuse to re-run video of Trump in the hosting Epstein and Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago.Epstein died in August 2019, during Trump’s first presidency, while the financier and socialite was awaiting trial in a Manhattan jail; the death was ruled a suicide.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe White House has been caught in a bind over the Epstein affair which spawned conspiracy theories among many of Trump’s supporters, which now senior figures in the administration had actively encouraged during the 2024 campaign.In July the justice department announced that there was no Epstein client list and that no more files would be made public, a decision that clashed with earlier statements from top Trump officials, including Bondi’s statement in February that a client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review”. The decision triggered an immediate and ongoing uproar that crossed the partisan political divide.Among the most viral clips in the aftermath of that reversal was video of Vance himself telling the podcaster Theo Von, two weeks before the election: “Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list, that is an important thing.”In his Fox News interview Vance also warned that “you’re going to see a lot of people get indicted” after Trump accused Obama of “treason” and called for his predecessor to be prosecuted.The director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has passed documents to the justice department that she claims show that the Obama administration maliciously tried to hurt Trump by linking Russian interference in the 2016 election to him.Obama has dismissed Trump’s call for his prosecution as weak and ridiculous. More

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    Court overrides Trump officials’ rollback and blocks fishing in Pacific Islands monument

    A federal judge in Hawaii has ruled that commercial fishing is illegal in the Pacific Islands Heritage marine national monument, a federally protected area in the central Pacific Ocean.The decision from judge Micah WJ Smith overturns an April letter released by the National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS) – also known as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) Fisheries – that allowed fishing in parts of the monument that Barack Obama had protected during his presidency. The letter came about a week after Donald Trump’s presidential proclamation to reverse fishing regulations across the national monument, a world heritage site that includes archeological treasures, marine mammals, seabirds and coral reefs.Regulations banning commercial fishing in the area remain in effect, according to Friday’s ruling. The court said “no commercial fishing operators may reasonably rely on” the April letter, meaning fishing in waters 50 to 200 nautical miles around Johnston Atoll, Jarvis Island, and Wake Island must halt immediately.“The Fisheries Service cannot ignore our perspectives as the native people who belong to the islands and to the ocean that surrounds us,” said Solomon Pili Kaho’ohalahala, founding member of the non-profit group Kāpaʻa, the Conservation Council for Hawaii and the Center for Biological Diversity. “The law guarantees a process where we can advocate for protecting the generations of our children’s children who are yet to be born.”The environmental conservation group Earthjustice, representing the non-profits in Hawaii, filed its lawsuit in May and argued NMFS violated federal law by bypassing the formal process for changing fishing rules, which requires public notice and comment.“The court forcefully rejected the Trump administration’s outrageous claim that it can dismantle vital protections for the monument’s unique and vulnerable species and ecosystems without involving the public,” Earthjustice attorney David Henkin said.Then president George W Bush created the marine monument in 2009. It consists of about 500,000 sq miles (1.3m sq km) in the remote central Pacific Ocean south-west of Hawaii. Obama expanded it in 2014.As part of his push to make the US the “world’s dominant seafood leader”, Trump called the regulations “so horrible and so stupid” – and claimed they force US fishers “to go and travel four to seven days to go and fish in an area that’s not as good”.The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument is about 370,000 sq nautical miles (1,270,000 sq km), or nearly twice the size of the state of Texas. It is managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Noaa and the defense department. The monument is home to one of the largest collections of deep ocean coral reef, seabird, and shorebird protected areas on the planet. It provides refuge for species threatened by the climate crisis and other stressors caused by humans.Kingman Reef, considered one of the most pristine coral reefs in US waters, is also part of the monument. Unesco reports it has the highest proportion of apex predators of any studied coral reef worldwide.Its waters are home to several shark species, including grey reef, oceanic whitetip, hammerhead and silky sharks, all of which play an important role in maintaining ecological balance.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlong with the ecological value, the islands and ocean areas in and adjacent to the monument hold great value to Indigenous Pacific Islanders and researchers. The lawsuit says allowing commercial fishing in the monument expansion would harm the “cultural, spiritual, religious, subsistence, educational, recreational, and aesthetic interests” of a group of Native Hawaiian plaintiffs who are connected genealogically to the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific.“This is a huge win for the Pacific’s irreplaceable marine life and for the rule of law,” Maxx Phillips, staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said about Friday’s ruling. “These sacred and irreplaceable ecosystems are home to endangered species, deep-sea corals, and rich cultural heritage.”Associated Press contributed to this report More

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    Trump orders homeless he passed en route to golf course to leave Washington DC

    In a social media post on Sunday, Donald Trump demands homeless residents of Washington DC leave the country’s capital or face eviction, and again promised to use federal officers to jail criminals, even though violent crime in the city was at a 30-year low when he took office in January.“The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Sunday morning, shortly after being driven from the White House to his golf club in Virginia. “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital.”View image in fullscreenThe post was illustrated with four photographs, all apparently taken from the president’s motorcade along the route from the White House to his golf course. Two of the images showed a total of 10 tents pitched on the grass along a highway on-ramp just over a mile from the White House. The third image showed a single person sleeping on the steps of the American Institute of Pharmacy Building on Constitution Avenue. The fourth image showed the line of vehicles that whisk Trump to his golf course passing a small amount of roadside litter on the E Street Expressway, near the Kennedy Center.Trump’s post promoted a previously announced news conference on Monday, which he has promised, “will, essentially, stop violent crime” in the capital district, without explaining how. In a subsequent post, he said that the news conference at 10am Monday, “will not only involve ending the Crime, Murder, and Death in our Nation’s Capital, but will also be about Cleanliness”.The Free DC movement, which advocates for self-determination, immediately scheduled a protest on Monday to coincide with Trump’s news conference.Despite Trump’s claims, there is no epidemic of homelessness or violent crime in the capital.According to the Community Partnership, which works to prevent homelessness in Washington DC, on any given night there are about 800 unsheltered persons sleeping outdoors in the city of about 700,000 people. A further 3,275 people use emergency shelters in Washington, and 1,065 people are in transitional housing facilities.Trump’s repeated claims that it might be necessary to federalize law enforcement in the city to make it safe also ignores data collected by the Metropolitan police department, released in January by the federal government, which showed that violent crime in Washington DC in 2024 was down 35% from 2023 and was at the lowest level in over 30 years.“We are not experiencing a crime spike,” Washington DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, told MSNBC on Sunday. “We have spent over the last two years driving down violent crime in this city, driving it down to a 30-year low.” She added that Washington DC police statistics show that violent crime is down a further 26% so far this year.“Federal law enforcement is always on the street in DC, and we always work cooperatively with them” Bowser said, adding the the Washington DC national guard, which Trump has threatened to deploy, is under the control of the president.Earlier this week, Trump ordered a surge of federal officers from a variety of agencies to increase patrols in Washington DC, pointing to the assault on a young federal worker who came to Washington to work with Elon Musk as evidence that the city’s police force was failing to combat violent crime. Washington DC police, however, had stopped the assault Trump focused attention on, and arrested two 15-year-old suspects at the scene.Asked by Reuters, the White House declined to explain what legal authority Trump would use to evict people from Washington. The president controls only federal land and buildings in the city.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe US Congress has control of the city’s budget but the DC Home Rule Act, signed into law in 1973 by Richard Nixon, gives Washington DC residents the right to elect the mayor, council members, and neighborhood commissioners to run day-to-day affairs in the district.Trump told reporters on Wednesday that White House lawyers were “already studying” the possibility of legislation to overturn the law granting the Washington DC self-rule and imposing direct federal control of the capital.“Even if crime in D.C. weren’t at a historic low point, President Trump’s comments would be misguided and offensive to the more than 700,000 people who live permanently in the nation’s capital,” Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents DC as a nonvoting delegate in congress said in a statement. “D.C. residents, a majority of whom are Black and brown, are worthy and capable of governing themselves without interference from federal officials who are unaccountable to D.C.”“The only permanent remedy that will protect D.C.’s ability to govern itself is enactment of my D.C. statehood bill into law,” the 88-year-old congresswoman added.Reuters contributed reporting More

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    Texas redistricting fight with Democrats ‘could last years’, threatens Greg Abbott

    Texas governor, Greg Abbott, has stepped up his war of words with Democratic lawmakers who have left the state to foil an aggressive redistricting plan aimed at giving his Republican party five additional seats in Congress, saying on Sunday that the fight “could literally last years”.Abbott issued his new threat on Fox News Sunday, saying that he would use his powers to call a special session of the Texas legislature to extend the battle indefinitely. The special session lasts 30 days, he said, “and as soon as this one is over, I’m going to call another one, then another one, then another one, then another one”.Whenever the absent Democrats return to Texas, Abbott said, they would be arrested for violating their oath of office. “If they want to evade that arrest, they’re going to stay outside Texas for literally years,” he remarked. “And they might as well start voting in California or Illinois, or wherever they may be.”Sunday’s TV political talk shows were dominated by the increasingly acrimonious dispute over Texas’s audacious gerrymandering plans which were instigated at the direct behest of Donald Trump.The move to flip five US House seats to the Republicans is being made as polls indicate that the US president’s party will struggle to hang on to its razor-slim majority in the chamber in next year’s midterm elections. The Republicans currently hold a margin of just three seats.The stakes could not be higher: were Trump able to hang onto his narrow control of Congress, he could cement the attacks on democratic and constitutional norms that he has begun in the first six months of his second presidency.As the crisis reaches a crunch, more than 50 Texas Democrats have left the state, heading to Democratically-controlled states, including Illinois and New York. The relocation is designed to deprive Republicans of a quorum needed to pass the new gerrymandered maps in the Texas legislature in Austin.Democratic governors went on the political shows on Sunday to launch their own barrage of words threatening counter-action. The strong language deployed was the latest indication that the leadership of the Democratic party, which has floundered in the face of Trump’s radical authoritarian-leaning tactics, is determined at this point to take a stand.New York’s Democratic governor Kathy Hochul accused Abbott on Fox News Sunday of being a “lap dog” for Trump. “Knock it off,” she told her counterpart in Texas. “Let’s get back to governing.”She added that if Texas continued with what she called “these games”, “we’re not going to sit on the sidelines – we’re New Yorkers. We fight back.”New York’s room for maneuver, however, is more limited than that of Texas. The state has an independent redistricting commission that oversees the drawing of its electoral maps which has been the subject in recent years of much court action.Hochul said that the restrictions would not hold New York back. “We amend constitutions – we did it a few years ago,” she said. “We can put it to the people. I’m not going to let our democracy be eroded away because there’s a blatant power grab in our nation’s capital.”JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois where many of the Texas Democrats are holed up in an undisclosed hotel outside Chicago, unleashed his own verbal volley on NBC’s Meet the Press. He accused Trump of being a cheater, saying: “He cheats on his wives. He cheats at golf. And now he’s trying to cheat the American people out of their votes.”Pritzker was dismissive of claims by Texas US senator John Cornyn that the FBI had been brought in to help find the missing Democrats. “Texas law does not apply in the state of Illinois, and there’s no federal law that would allow the FBI to arrest anybody that’s here visiting our state,” Pritzker said. “So, it’s a lot of grandstanding.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs the governors were thrashing it out in the TV studios, lawsuits continued to fly around Texas’s courts as both sides seek to gain the upper hand legally. Texas attorney general Ken Paxton is suing a sample group of 13 of the Democratic lawmakers claiming that the “runaways” have officially vacated their offices.Paxton is now asking the state’s supreme court to remove the 13 from their seats.Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic presidential candidate from El Paso, Texas, has also waded into the fray. On Friday, a state court in Fort Worth blocked his political action committee, Powered By People, from using its funds to support the fleeing lawmakers.O’Rourke has counter-sued, arguing that Paxton was trying to “intimidate” a potential rival in next year’s US senate race. Speaking at an event in New Orleans on Friday, he accused the Republicans of being “would-be fascists” and warned that if they got away with their plan to maintain power in Congress in 2026 “the consolidation of authoritarian control in the hands of Donald Trump will be nearly unstoppable”.Trump’s ruse to create more winnable congressional seats is being taken so seriously in Democratic circles that it has gelled even die-hard opponents of party political gerrymandering to come out in favor of counter measures. Bernie Sanders, the independent US senator from Vermont, is a fierce critic of the redrawing of electoral maps for partisan benefit.Yet he told CNN’s State of the Union that the Democratic party had no option but to fight fire with fire, saying: “Democrats have got to fight back. I think it’s pathetic, but I think that’s what they’ve got to do.”Asked whether that his position was defensible, given his years of opposing gerrymandering, Sanders said: “What we have now is terrible, and Republicans are making it worse. Well, what do you do if Republicans are doing it? You have to respond. It’s pathetic, but I think you have to respond.” More

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    Confusion over the Alaska summit shows Vladimir Putin still calls the shots

    In the five months since Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy met at the Oval Office in late February, Ukrainian officials have worked hard to repair the damage of that day, which ended with the Ukrainian president being kicked out of the White House.With advice from European allies, Zelenskyy recalibrated his strategy for dealing with the Trump administration, and there was a feeling it was broadly going well. “We managed to reset communications, to find a new language to work with Trump,” said one senior official in Kyiv a week ago.It has also seemed as if Trump’s rhetoric was finally shifting, as he termed Russia’s bombing of Ukrainian cities “disgusting” in recent weeks and set Vladimir Putin a deadline of last Friday to stop the war or face the imposition of crippling new sanctions.Then came envoy Steve Witkoff’s visit to Moscow last Wednesday. Putin appears to have made no major concessions during the three-hour Kremlin meeting, and in return was rewarded not with debilitating sanctions but with an invitation to meet Trump in Alaska. The offer to thrash out a Ukrainian peace deal at a bilateral summit with Trump represents exactly the sort of great-power deal-making Putin has always craved. It will be his first trip to the US since 2007, with the exception of visits to the UN.Exactly how the Alaska summit will look is still unclear, with a particularly Trumpian kind of confusion and chaos accompanying its announcement. Kyiv, European capitals and even Trump’s own staff have been trying to understand what exactly was agreed in the Kremlin.The first announcements from the White House suggested Putin would meet Trump, followed by a three-way meeting between Trump, Putin and Zelenskyy. This was swiftly denied by Putin. As he put it, “we are still far from creating the conditions” for a meeting with Zelenskyy. An aide denied that the Russian side had ever agreed to a three-way meeting.A White House source told the New York Post on Thursday that if Putin did not agree to meet Zelenskyy, the meeting with Trump would not go ahead. But a few hours later, Trump denied that: he was happy to meet Putin anyway. The back-and-forth gave the distinct impression, not for the first time, that in the relationship between Trump and Putin, it is the Russian president who calls the shots.View image in fullscreenSome administration officials later briefed US media outlets that they may invite Zelenskyy anyway, and the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said in a Sunday interview he “hopes and assumes” that Zelenskyy will take part. For now, this does not seem likely. A senior White House official told NBC that Trump was “open” to a trilateral summit, but was “focusing on planning the bilateral meeting requested by president Putin”.As worrying for Kyiv as the planned format of the talks is the apparent Russian deal now on the table. The plan, as it has been reported after filtering through the Trump administration and then to European capitals, is that the Ukrainian army should unilaterally withdraw from the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk it still controls, which would presumably include the fortified military stronghold of Kramatorsk. In exchange, the Kremlin would agree to freeze the lines in other places.“Ukrainians will not give their land to occupiers,” Zelenskyy said over the weekend, adding that handing over land to Russia would violate the Ukrainian constitution. He said any deal done without Ukraine was destined to be “stillborn”.Zelenskyy’s public posture that Ukraine will never cede land is true up to a point. Kyiv is unlikely to renounce legal claims to its own territory, but the Ukrainian elite and much of Ukrainian society is increasingly ready for a deal that would recognise Russian de facto control, perhaps for a set period of time, in exchange for ending the fighting.The main problem with such a deal has always been what kind of guarantees Ukraine would receive that Russia would not simply use a ceasefire as time to regroup before attacking again. Brief discussions earlier this year about a European peacekeeping force to police a ceasefire were quickly scaled back to a “reassurance force” stationed far from the frontlines. Ukrainians would therefore have not much to rely on but Putin’s word, which they have learned from experience not to trust.Even still, there is a significant camp in the Ukrainian political and military elite who believe that, after more than three years of war, the situation has become so dire that the country is obliged to take such a deal, simply to allow for a pause in the fighting.The problem for Kyiv is the deal Putin apparently pitched to Witkoff is significantly worse than simply freezing the lines. “As things stand, Ukraine and Europe are on the verge of being confronted with exactly the kind of Faustian deal they feared would emerge back in February,” Sam Greene, a professor at King’s College London, wrote on X.Over the past few days, Zelenskyy and his team have been rallying support among European leaders and trying to put together an alternative, European plan. Unfortunately for Kyiv, previous experience suggests Trump is unwilling or unable to exert real pressure on Putin.“If Putin and Trump reach an agreement directly, Europe will be faced with a fait accompli. Kyiv – even more so,” said Roman Alekhin, a Russian war blogger, on Sunday. It is exactly that prospect Ukraine’s leadership will be doing their utmost to prevent in the days before Friday’s summit. More

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    Pam Bondi fired him for prosecuting January 6 rioters. He’d do it again: ‘it’s about justice’

    When he showed up to work on 27 June, Mike Gordon was having one of the best weeks of his career.Gordon, a federal prosecutor in Tampa, had spent the last month working on a complex case involving allegations that well-known businessman Leo Govoni stole $100m from a fund for children with special needs. That Monday, the US attorney for the middle district of Florida held a press conference announcing an indictment in the case. On Wednesday, Gordon had his semi-annual performance review and received the top rating: outstanding. On Thursday, he appeared on behalf of the government in court and successfully convinced a judge that Govoni should remain in jail until his trial.As the end of the day rolled around on Friday 27 June, Gordon was fired.He wasn’t given a reason for his dismissal. An office assistant simply knocked on his door while he was preparing a witness for trial, and handed him a letter that told him he was being immediately fired “Pursuant to Article II of the United States Constitution and the laws of the United States”, signed by the US attorney general, Pam Bondi. Gordon was told to turn in his devices, pack up his things and leave. The firing was so abrupt he had no chance to hand over his work to colleagues.Even without an official explanation, there was little doubt why he was fired. From 2021 until the end of 2023, Gordon had volunteered for the team prosecuting people involved in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. During his time working in a unit called the Capitol siege section, Gordon became known as one of the most skilled trial litigators and became a kind of coach to other prosecutors as they prepared for trials.But on his first day in office, Donald Trump issued a blanket pardon to anyone involved in January 6.“I got fired because I prosecuted people that this administration wanted protected. Bottom line,” Gordon said.Trump has made no secret of his desire to exact revenge on those who investigated and prosecuted him and his allies. Scores of career prosecutors have been fired for getting in the president’s political crosshairs. Gordon’s firing is one of the best examples to date of how Trump is executing that promise and purging the justice department. It’s an attack on a fundamental pillar of the rule of law – that prosecutors should make decisions about whether and how they should bring cases without political concerns.View image in fullscreenEven though January 6 was one of the most explosive political events in recent history, Gordon said he never had any conversations with a supervisor in which they discussed the political ramifications of what they were doing. The political implications “didn’t matter”, he said.“What we did discuss was the importance we saw in protecting democracy and prosecuting these cases. And creating the precedent and the deterrence that political violence was unacceptable. Full stop,” he said. “And that was worth doing no matter what. It’s why I still think all these prosecutions were worth doing. Even after the pardons, even after my own firing.”The mass firings of career prosecutors is “unprecedented”, said Max Stier, the CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a watchdog group.“There’s enormous discretion that prosecutors have, and there is a tradition that it’s not about winning, it’s about doing justice, and we’re watching that tradition change into it’s neither about winning or doing justice, but it’s doing the bidding of President Trump,” he said.Two other prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases were fired on the same day. Their dismissals came after Ed Martin, a prominent defense lawyer for January 6 defendants, launched a “weaponization working group” at the Department of Justice.Gordon and others who work with him aren’t sure why he and two other colleagues were singled out among hundreds of career prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases. The justice department did not return a request for comment on his firing.One theory is that Gordon was targeted because he took on some of the most high-profile cases, including that of Richard Barnett, who was photographed with his feet on a desk in Nancy Pelosi’s office (sentenced to 54 months in prison), Eric Munchel, known as Zip Tie Guy (sentenced to 57 months in prison), and Ray Epps, who became the center of conspiracy theories about January 6.In person, Gordon, who is 47 with salt-and-pepper hair, has a boyishness that belies his intensity as a prosecutor. During an interview at his home in Tampa, where an American flag was flying outside his door, he sat barefoot and in shorts, knees tucked to his chest as he recounted his time working on the January 6 cases and processing his firing.View image in fullscreenLast month, Gordon and two other justice department employees filed a federal lawsuit challenging his dismissal, alleging that they had been wrongfully fired. A litigator in his bones, Gordon has mapped out in his head how he thinks the administration is likely to defend itself. He thinks the case will ultimately be decided by the US supreme court.“I can tell you that I have been contacted plenty of times by colleagues from my former office who tell me that they’re all wondering, am I next? Have I done something that’s going to be on the wrong side of this administration? Am I going to be punished for some other work I’ve done?” he said.Before he was a prosecutor, Gordon taught high school humanities and his voice still carries the boom of someone who can hold the attention of a classroom of teenagers. He does not mix up facts. When I mistakenly said Barnett, one of the defendants he successfully prosecuted, had put his feet on Pelosi’s desk, he politely responded that it had been a desk in her office. And when I repeated what I thought were the names of his two cockapoos – Cereal and Cheerio – he quietly corrected me. “Maple and Cheerio,” he said.Gordon said he saw the January 6 riot unfold on television while he was folding laundry, four years after he joined the justice department. The prosecutor part of his brain quickly kicked in, he said: “I’m watching a crime scene, I’m watching a crime unfold. And there are all these television cameras around, which is really rare.”In the back of his mind, he recalled something that a mentor told him as a newly minted federal prosecutor in 2017. Throughout his whole life, she told him, he had probably seen something that might be a crime and thought “somebody should do something about that”. Now, he was the person who could do something about it.Initially, Gordon, who was working on violent crimes and narcotics cases in the US attorney’s office for the middle district of Florida, thought that he could help on some of the cases if they involved people from around Tampa. But as the federal prosecutor’s office in Washington charged with investigating January 6 began its work, more attorneys were needed and the department sent out a request for more staff. Gordon volunteered and was chosen.Working remotely from Tampa and traveling to Washington for trials, Gordon became one of several prosecutors taking on cases as they were randomly assigned. In 2022, one of the cases he prosecuted was Kyle Fitzsimons, a 39-year-old man from Maine who wore a white butcher’s jacket and fur pelt, and carried an unstrung bow, and who assaulted five law enforcement officers in a span of about five minutes. He was sentenced to 87 months in prison.Gordon’s performance got the attention of his supervisors and he earned a reputation as a skilled trial litigator. He was put on more trials on some of the more high-profile cases the department was prosecuting. He eventually got a new title – “senior trial counsel” – and would work with lawyers in the Capitol siege section to go over their briefs, help them prepare arguments and go to trial.“I felt the weight of the responsibility to do it well and do it right,” he said. Taking a long pause, he added: “I felt passionate about the righteousness of what we were doing.“I welcome the scrutiny. I’m well aware of the irony that it’s those kinds of things that are probably why I’m unemployed now, probably why I was fired, because I did take on those higher-profile things and this is the risk that sort of comes with it.”“I mean, he worked his ass off,” said Gregory Rosen, Gordon’s boss, and the head of the Capitol siege section (Rosen resigned from the justice department in June). “He is absolutely the heavy hitter in terms of getting cases across the line and taking these high-profile cases. He doesn’t shy away easily. He’s not afraid of the limelight. And he knows how to put his head down and get through the nitty-gritty.”Other prosecutors in the Capitol siege section would even come watch Gordon cross-examine a witness or present to a jury, said Jason Manning, a former federal prosecutor who worked with Gordon.“Mike’s reputation for excellence in court was such that people really made time to go watch him perform,” Manning said. “You simply don’t replace people like Mike overnight.”One of the highest-profile cases Gordon took on was that of Barnett, an Arkansas man who had become one of the most prominent January 6 rioters when he was photographed with his feet on a desk in Pelosi’s office. He also left her a note that said: “Hey Nancy Bigo was here, biatch.” Even though Barnett’s conduct was “somewhere in the middle” on the spectrum of January 6 cases, Gordon understood there would be considerable public attention on the trial.He welcomed the opportunity to show the public how thoroughly the government had investigated the case against Barnett. He also embraced the opportunity to show that Barnett’s crime wasn’t that he merely put his feet on a desk in Pelosi’s office – he came to the Capitol with weapons: a 10lb metal pole and a stun device concealed in a walking stick, which he brandished at a police officer.“The cross-examination got a lot of attention,” he said.View image in fullscreenBarnett offered a litany of excuses trying to downplay his conduct on the day of January 6, at one point arguing that he had been looking for a bathroom and had wandered into Pelosi’s office. Gordon pointed out he had spent a considerable amount of time wandering around the Capitol and never asked for directions to a bathroom.Barnett also stole an envelope from Pelosi’s office, but said he didn’t consider it a crime because it was a “biohazard” as he had gotten blood on it. He had left a quarter and said he didn’t consider it theft.“He had a number of just patently obvious lies,” Gordon said. “It’s very clear that he had the intent, and here’s all the evidence we’ve amassed against this guy to show the public we’ve done our homework.“People can see all the different witnesses. They can hear from Barnett himself, how he responds to cross-examination. Because folks go on friendly podcasts, they post on Twitter, there’s nobody pushing back.”Barnett was convicted on eight counts, both felonies and misdemeanors, and sentenced to more than four years in prison.After Barnett was sentenced, Gordon prosecuted the case against Epps, an Arizona man who was on the Capitol grounds on January 6 and, the night before, encouraged protesters to go to the Capitol. He initially wasn’t charged with a crime, but his life was upended when he became the subject of a conspiracy theory, touted by Tucker Carlson and others, that he was a federal agent. Eventually he was charged with a misdemeanor, making him one of the few people charged with a crime who didn’t enter the Capitol on January 6.Epps eventually pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor. Gordon submitted a sentencing memo on behalf of the government that said Epps should be sentenced to six months in prison, $500 in restitution and a year of supervised release. He was eventually sentenced to a year of probation.Gordon said the case was the hardest one he worked on.“Figuring out what the right thing to do with the Ray Epps case was a real challenge,” he said.“I’m well aware that not everyone agrees. But someone needed to be the lightning rod to handle that, and somebody needed to be able to handle the public appearances.”Edward Ungvarsky, Epps’s lawyer, said that while he and Gordon disagreed on what should happen in the case, he saw Gordon as apolitical, “thoughtful” and “just very by the book”.“He wasn’t political in the slightest,” Ungvarsky said. “I wouldn’t have known if he was a Republican or a Democrat.”When Gordon and I first spoke shortly after he was fired, he was hesitant to go on the record because he thought there was an outside chance that he could get his job back. “It seemed so unjust. It seemed so, not only at odds with my performance, but also what I understood my reputation to be within my office,” he said. As the weeks stretched on, he said, it became clear that wasn’t going to happen.He’s since explained to his children why he was fired. Gordon’s 10-year-old son “understands the idea that something wrong happened to me and I’m doing what I can to speak up about it and to fight back”, he said. “And he really admires that. And that’s another thing that gives me inspiration and fuel.”These days, Gordon says that he has no regrets.“It was the right thing to do,” he said. “I will always operate from the position that I will do the right thing first, and then I’ll worry about what the consequences of that are.” More