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      When Trump comes to UK, normal rules of state visits will not apply

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      Donald Trump has repeatedly described Keir Starmer as a “good man”, distancing himself from the attacks on the UK prime minister mounted by other figures on the US far right such as Elon Musk.One of the many known unknowns, however, of a Trump state visit is what kind of Trump will show up when a microphone is placed in front of him.The US president is often a bundle of contradictions. During his first state visit in 2018 most UK diplomats said he was a picture of affability, yet he took it upon himself to conduct an interview with the Sun in which he insulted Theresa May, and said Boris Johnson would make a great prime minister. He seemed unaware he might have caused offence.Starmer as host will have to grin and bear whatever brickbats Trump sends his way about the state of free speech in the UK, recognition of the state of Palestine, immigration, or the possibility that Reform will lead the next government in the UK. The one thing the Foreign Office knows is that the normal rules of state visits do not apply.An added loose mooring will be the absence of the former UK ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson, who was dismissed for his connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Ambassadors are known to personally visit every site of every stop on a state visit. Their job is often quite literally to look round corners for what might be coming. Lord Mandelson, a stickler for detail, would have been poring over every angle of the state visit in conjunction with Buckingham Palace and the White House. Fortunately, most of it will have been battened down weeks ago. But his knowledge of the mood inside the Trump administration in the days before the visit will be missed.Behind the formal glamour, and pre-cooked agreements on tech and nuclear power cooperation, Starmer will have to choose how to spend his limited political capital. The two most pressing foreign policy issues are ones on which the UK and the US cannot agree: Israel’s future relationship with the Arab world, and the threat posed to Europe and Ukraine by Vladimir Putin. But it is the latter on which Starmer hopes to make progress.Speaking at the weekend in Kyiv, Jonathan Powell, the UK’s national security adviser, gave a glimpse of current Downing Street thinking. “Putin’s sport is judo. He likes to counterbalance the action with reaction. He likes having options. If we can close his options off and leave him with only one, he will take it,” Powell said.“The main message we should be sending is real pressure to convince [Putin] the war will go on for a long time if he doesn’t make peace. His summer campaign more or less has failed already, the Russian economic position is not good, the whole economy is a war economy. If we can apply the pressure the US president is talking about in terms of targeted sanctions, and tariffs that he put on India, we might bring him to the table.”But Powell skirted around whether Trump’s latest proposal for sanctions was serious or a smokescreen to avoid doing anything. After months and months of patience-sapping delay, Trump has set out in the past fortnight new preconditions that would need to be in place before the US would ever massively sanction Russia. He said he would only do so if every Nato country, including Turkey, stopped importing Russia energy and also punished China with 50%-100% tariffs for its imports of Russian energy. Trump has already put 25% tariffs on India, the other great importer of Russian energy.The Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who has spent a lot of time trying to blend the European and US approaches to Russia, explained on Sunday: “We have tried the red-carpet approach. It is not working … It is now time for the Europeans to follow President Trump’s lead to go after India and China – if China and India change their practices towards Putin, this war will end.”Starmer intends to test Trump on whether 50% tariffs on China, which would rupture China-Europe trade, is a deal-breaker. Concerted transatlantic sanctions might yet be possible if Trump demanded a ban on Russian crude imports by Hungary and Slovakia, or of imports of fuel made from Russian crude refined in third countries such as India. A ban on seaborne Russian crude oil has already cut the EU’s Russian oil imports by 90%, but Hungary and Slovakia still import it via a pipeline.Starmer’s task will be to steer Trump to more targeted sanctions on Chinese and Indian refineries, as well as yet more measures against the Russian shadow fleet. Trump’s Ukraine special envoy, Keith Kellogg, said: “If you look at the strength of sanctions from a scale of one to 10, we’re at a six. But we are at an enforcement level of three.”Starmer will also try to convince Trump the incursion of about 20 drones into Polish airspace by Russia was not the accident that Trump has suggested. Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, ridiculed the accident theory in Kyiv, saying: “We don’t believe in 20 mistakes at the same time.”Behind this argument is the fundamental discussion that Starmer tries to avoid in public – whether Trump knows Putin is stalling on a ceasefire but does not greatly care, since he believes Ukraine will lose the war and inevitably will have to cede large tracts of its territory.That requires going back to the very first principles about the victim and aggressor in Ukraine. More

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      Americans have 400 days to save their democracy | Timothy Garton Ash

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      I return to Europe from the US with a clear conclusion: American democrats (lowercase d) have 400 days to start saving US democracy. If next autumn’s midterm elections produce a Congress that begins to constrain Donald Trump there will then be a further 700 days to prepare the peaceful transfer of executive power that alone will secure the future of this republic. Operation Save US Democracy, stages 1 and 2.Hysterical hyperbole? I would love to think so. But during seven weeks in the US this summer, I was shaken every day by the speed and executive brutality of President Trump’s assault on what had seemed settled norms of US democracy and by the desperate weakness of resistance to that assault. There’s a growing body of international evidence to suggest that once a liberal democracy has been eroded, it’s very difficult to restore it. Destruction is so much easier than construction.That’s why all democrats, irrespective of party or ideology, must hope the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives in midterm elections on 3 November 2026. Not because of the Democrats’ policies, which are a muddle, or their current leadership, which is a mess, but simply because US democracy needs Congress, the principal check on presidential power envisaged in the US constitution, to start doing its job again. That will not happen so long as the Republicans, dominated and intimidated by Trump, control both houses.Much has been made of comparisons to other authoritarian power grabs, from Europe in the 1930s to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, but I’m most struck by the distinctive features of the US case. To name just four: excessive executive power; chronic gerrymandering; endemic violence; and the way a would-be authoritarian can exploit the intense capitalist competition that permeates every area of US life.The danger of executive overreach has been there from the very beginning. Revolutionary war hero Patrick Henry (“give me liberty or give me death”) voted against the constitution at the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788 precisely because he thought it would give a criminal president the chance “to make one bold push for the American throne.” Throughout the 20th century, presidents of both parties extended the “executive power” that is so ill-defined in article 2 of that constitution. More recently, a conservative-dominated supreme court has given succour to the unitary executive theory developed by rightwing legal theorists, which gives the most expansive reading of presidential power. And now the Trump administration – well prepared, unlike in 2017 – has exploited every inch and wrinkle of existing executive power, as well as simply breaking the law and defying the courts to stop it.Tom Ginsburg, a leading US comparative constitutionalist, argues that the biggest single flaw of the unreformed US constitution is that it gives state legislatures the power to draw electoral boundaries. The word gerrymandering was coined as early as 1812. In recent times, partisan redistricting has become more extreme as US politics has become more polarised. And then, in 2019, the supreme court declared that it could not correct even the most blatant party-political gerrymandering (only that done on racial lines). So now, at Trump’s direct request, Texas sets out to change constituency boundaries explicitly to win five more seats for the Republicans in the midterms, whereupon California says it will counter-gerrymander to win five more for the Democrats. There’s no longer even a bare pretence of impartiality about the most basic procedure of democracy.No European society can compare to the US for the ubiquity of violence. Hardly a day passed this summer without the evening news reporting at least one violent crime, including yet another horrific school shooting. The US has more guns than people. France loves its pseudo-revolutionary political theatre, but the US had the 6 January 2021 mob assault on the Capitol. Now the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk has been shot. Before the identity of the killer was known, Elon Musk said “the left is the party of murder” and Trump blamed the hate speech of the “radical left”. It will be a miracle if the US avoids a downward spiral of political violence, as last seen in the 1960s. That in turn could be the pretext for Trump to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, bring more military on to US streets and further exploit an alleged state of emergency.Meanwhile, universities, business leaders, law firms, media platforms and tech supremos have utterly failed to engage in collective action in response. They have either kept their heads down, settled humiliatingly like Columbia University and the law firm Paul, Weiss, or fawned on the president, like Mark Zuckerberg. Why? Because they all follow the logic of fierce free-market competition and fear targeted reprisals. I never imagined I would see fear spread so far and fast in the US.Add in attempts to disqualify or intimidate voters, plus Trump’s threat to ban mail-in ballots, and there’s a real doubt how far next November’s midterm elections will be fully free and fair. The task for democrats of all parties is to ensure they are, so far as possible. The task for the Democrats (capital D) is to win them in spite of any such obstacles.The key to that will probably still be bread-and-butter issues. Here, in the economy, lies paradoxical hope. We’re already beginning to see Trump’s tariffs feed through into higher prices. The job numbers are weakening. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” will further increase an already gobsmacking national debt of $37tn (£27tn). Already in the 2024 fiscal year, servicing that debt cost more than the entire $850bn defence budget. But until a debt crisis actually hits, such macro-risks remain remote and abstract to most voters, rather as predictions of diminished GDP growth made little impact in the Brexit referendum debate.So the big question is whether the negative economic consequences of Trump will be palpable to ordinary voters before the midterms. One astute political observer suggested to me that Trump, flush with revenue from the new tariffs, could do a pre-election cash handout to voters, perhaps presented as compensation for the “temporary difficulties” of the transition to a Maga economy. That would be a classic populist move.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe single most important thing for the Democrats in the next 400 days is therefore to bring those economic costs irresistibly home to voters. Democrats won’t win just by talking about the defence of democracy, important though that is, let alone by engaging in culture wars. They need to follow the advice of former Clinton adviser James Carville and focus relentlessly on kitchen-table issues. In doing so, they will also show that they do actually care about the ordinary working- and middle-class Americans whose support they have lost over the last 30 years.Then there’s stage 2, the presidential election in 2028. But sufficient unto the day are the challenges thereof. Despite all the serious threats to democracy itself in the US, for now the first rule of democratic politics still applies: just win the next election.

      Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist More

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      Trump at first says he is ‘not familiar’ with Minnesota Democrat’s assassination

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      In response to a question about why he did not order flags lowered to half-staff to honor Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives who was assassinated alongside her husband this summer, Donald Trump initially said he was “not familiar” with the case.The question came up during a briefing in the Oval Office on Monday, in light of the president’s order last week to lower flags in response to the killing of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk.Trump was pressed on why he and Republicans continued cast blame the left for a rise in political violence when elected officials and activists from both parties have been targets.The exchange began when the reporter asked about the tributes paid by the White House to Kirk, the founder of the conservative youth activist group Turning Point USA and a close ally of the president and his family.“Do you think it would have been fitting to lower the flags to half-staff when Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota house speaker, was gunned down by an assassin as well?” asked Nancy Cordes, the chief White House correspondent for CBS News.“I’m not familiar. The who?” Trump replied, leaning in across the Resolute Desk.“The Minnesota house speaker, a Democrat, who was assassinated this summer,” she said.“Oh,” Trump replied. “Well, if the governor had asked me to do that, I would have done that.”Trump did not mention the Minnesota governor Tim Walz – a Democrat and the vice-presidential nominee in 2024 – by name, but suggested that had he made the request, the White House might have obliged.“I wouldn’t have thought of that, but I would’ve, if somebody had asked me,” Trump said. “People make requests for the lowering of the flag, and oftentimes you have to say no, because it would be a lot of lowering.”At the time, Trump said that speaking to Walz, a close friend of Hortman, would have been a “waste of time”.“I could be nice and call, but why waste time?” Trump said then, referring to Walz as “whacked out” and a “mess”.Kirk was fatally shot last week while speaking at Utah Valley University. In the wake of his death, Trump and other prominent conservatives have sought to place the blame for political violence squarely on Democrats, vowing to crack down on the left-wing groups and institutions they allege “fund it and support it”.As Republicans grieve the loss of Kirk, they have largely ignored the violence against Democrats, including Hortman’s assassination, the arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, the violent assault on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former speaker Nancy Pelosi, and a thwarted plot to kidnap the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer.House Republicans and a handful of Democrats gathered at prayer vigil for Kirk on Capitol Hill on Monday. In brief remarks, Representative Tom Emmer, a Republican from Minnesota, reflected on several recent incidents of political violence, including Hortman’s killing by “another evil coward” who also shot a second Democratic state lawmaker that night.Trump, who survived two assassination attempts during the 2024 presidential campaign, denied on Monday that he had blamed just “one side” before accusing the “radical left” of causing “tremendous violence”.“The radical left really has caused a lot of problems for this country,” he said. “I really think they hate our country.”Earlier on Monday, vice president JD Vance, a close friend of Kirk’s, said he hoped for national “unity” while hosting the slain activist’s podcast. But then he insisted that this was not a “both sides problem” and that Democrats were primarily to blame, despite widespread condemnation of Kirk’s killing by party officials and elected leaders.During the lengthy episode, Vance made no reference to Hortman or other acts of political violence, such as the 6 January assault on the US Capitol.“Something has gone very wrong with a lunatic fringe – a minority, but a growing and powerful minority on the far left,” he said, and committed to using the levers of the federal government to “dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country”. More

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      Trump news at a glance: JD Vance vows vengeance after Charlie Kirk killing

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      JD Vance and senior Trump aide Stephen Miller doubled down on promises of vengeance in the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk, vowing to destroy what they claimed is a leftwing “domestic terror movement” and calling on people to go hard against anyone deemed to be celebrating the rightwing political activist’s death.The US vice-president stepped in to host an episode of Kirk’s podcast and was joined by the White House deputy chief of staff for Monday’s episode. Miller sought to blame what he called “far left” organisations for Kirk’s death, despite the motive for the shooting remaining unclear.He told Vance: “We are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks,” Miller said, adding that they would do this “in Charlie’s name”.Vance then urged Americans to go hard against anyone perceived to be celebrating Kirk’s murder. He said: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. Hell, call their employer.”JD Vance threatens crackdown on ‘far-left’ groups after Kirk shootingJD Vance assailed what he called the “far left” and its increased tolerance for violence while guest-hosting Charlie Kirk’s podcast on Monday, saying the administration would be working to dismantle groups who celebrate Kirk’s death and political violence against their opponents.Vance, hosting the podcast from his office next to the White House, spoke to high-profile members of the Trump administration and some of Kirk’s long-time friends in the movement, including Tucker Carlson and Trump adviser Stephen Miller.Vance said the administration would “work to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country”.Read the full storyTrump announces deadly US strike on another alleged Venezuelan drug boatDonald Trump said on Monday that the United States had carried out a strike on a second Venezuelan boat and killed three alleged terrorists he claimed were transporting drugs, expanding his administration’s war against drug cartels and the scope of lethal military force to stop them.Read the full storyTrump to send national guard to Memphis, with Chicago ‘probably next’Donald Trump on Monday announced that he was sending in the national guard and other federal authorities into Memphis, in a “replica” of the administration’s expanding military-led response to urban crime in Democratic-run cities.Announcing the taskforce in an Oval Office meeting, Trump vowed to end the “savagery” and said Chicago was “probably next”. “We’re going to fix that just like we did Washington,” Trump said.Read the full storyProsecutor in Epstein case sues Trump’s DoJ over abrupt firingMaurene Comey, a federal prosecutor involved in cases against Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell and led the recent case against Sean “Diddy” Combs, filed a lawsuit on Monday challenging her abrupt termination as politically motivated retaliation against her father, former FBI director James Comey.Read the full storyUS and China reach deal to transfer TikTok ownership, trade officials sayJamieson Greer, a US trade representative, said on Monday that Washington and Beijing have struck a framework agreement on transferring TikTok to US-controlled ownership.Speaking after emerging from negotiations with Chinese officials, Scott Bessent said the deal was coming but declined to reveal the commercial terms.Read the full storyRubio says Netanyahu has full support of US over plans to destroy HamasThe US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has put the Trump administration’s full support behind Benjamin Netanyahu in a visit to Jerusalem, saying Washington’s priorities were the liberation of Israeli hostages and the destruction of Hamas.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The backlash to “inappropriate” public comments made in the days following Charlie Kirk’s death has sparked a new wave of firings and suspensions, with a number of university employees disciplined for sharing their views.

      Rev William Barber, a left-leaning pastor and social activist, has condemned last week’s “brutal, ugly” murder of Charlie Kirk while calling for a broader denunciation of political violence on all sides. Barber, leader of the “Moral Monday” events staged by Repairing The Breach, a pro-social justice group, also appeared to criticize the rightwing political activist’s brand of Christianity.

      Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah says she has been firedfrom the newspaper over social media posts about gun control and race in the aftermath of far right commentator Charlie Kirk’s killing.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 14 September 2025. More

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      Trump says military carried out strike on alleged Venezuelan drug cartel vessel

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      Donald Trump said on Monday that the United States had carried out a strike on a second Venezuelan boat and killed three alleged terrorists he claimed were transporting drugs, expanding his administration’s war against drug cartels and the scope of lethal military force to stop them.The US president gave few details about the strike, saying in a social media post that the action was on his orders and that it had happened earlier in the morning. The post was accompanied by a video clip showing the boat, which appeared to be stationary, erupting into a fireball.“The strike occurred while these confirmed narco-terroists from Venezuela were in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics (A DEADLY WEAPON POISONING AMERICANS!) headed to the US,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.Trump’s announcement of the strike appeared to be worded in a way to suggest there was a valid legal basis for the strike – an issue that became a source of heavy criticism in Washington after the operation against the first alleged Venezuelan drug boat earlier this month, which killed 11 people.According to people familiar with the matter, the administration briefed Congress last week that the first strike was legal under the president’s article 2 powers because it involved a boat connected to the Tren de Aragua gang, which Trump designated a foreign terrorist organization.The administration has provided little evidence that the first boat was carrying illegal drugs beyond asserting they had tracked the drugs being loaded on to the boat in order to be distributed in the United States, even if the boat at one point was said to have turned around.Asked on Sunday about that first strike and claims it was a fishing vessel, Trump said in response to questions from the Guardian: “You saw the bags of white. It’s nonsense. So we knew it before they even left. We knew exactly where that boat, where it came from, where the drugs came from and where it was heading.”By claiming, for the strike on the second boat, that the drugs were a threat to the United States and asserting that the boat’s crew were “terrorists”, Trump appeared to be preemptively setting the groundwork to make the same Article II legal claim to order a missile strike against the second boat.The latest strike comes as the US continues a massive buildup of forces around Venezuela. Over the weekend, five F-35 fighter jets arrived in Puerto Rico to join about half a dozen US navy destroyers already moved to the US territory recently, and support assets the administration said had been deployed to disrupt the flow of illegal drugs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump demurred on whether the US would conduct operations inside Venezuela against drug cartels there. He also deflected a question from the Guardian about its president, Nicholás Maduro, accusing Trump of acting illegally. “What’s illegal are the drugs that were on the boat,” he said.The Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group – including the USS San Antonio, the USS Iwo Jima and the USS Fort Lauderdale, carrying 4,500 sailors – and the 22nd marine expeditionary unit, with 2,200 marines, were deployed to the region ahead of the first strike this month. The US also deployed several P-8 surveillance planes and submarines, officials said. More

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      JD Vance threatens crackdown on ‘far-left’ groups after Charlie Kirk shooting

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      JD Vance assailed what he called the “far left” and its increased tolerance for violence while guest-hosting Charlie Kirk’s podcast on Monday, saying the administration would be working to dismantle groups who celebrate Kirk’s death and political violence against their opponents.Vance, hosting the podcast from his office next to the White House, spoke to high-profile members of the Trump administration and some of Kirk’s long-time friends in the movement, including Tucker Carlson and Trump adviser Stephen Miller.Vance said the administration would “work to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country”.The administration would be working to do that in the coming months and would “explore every option to bring real unity to our country and stop those who would kill their fellow Americans because they don’t like what they say”, Vance said.Miller also detailed how the administration would use the federal government to achieve this goal.“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, [Department of] Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks,” Miller said, adding that they would do this “in Charlie’s name”.Vance added: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. Hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility, and there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.”Miller said he had been feeling “incredible sadness, but there’s incredible anger” and would be focusing his “righteous anger” on the “organized campaign that led to this assassination, to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks”.Detailing what he believes is a “vast domestic terror movement”, Miller pointed to what he said were “organized doxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging designed to trigger, incite violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence”.The political leanings of the shooter who killed Kirk are not yet clear. Bullet casings found with the shooter’s gun were inscribed with references to video games and online culture. Still, prominent figures on the right – before a shooter was apprehended – declared war on the left, claiming it was responsible for Kirk’s death.There is no evidence of a network supporting the shooter, and Miller did not provide substantiation of his claims that there is a “vast domestic terror movement” at play.Since Kirk’s death, rightwing influencers have found examples of people they say are glorifying or celebrating the violence and have sought to get them fired. One post that Miller retweeted said people should go beyond contacting employers and should go after professional licenses for lawyers, teachers and medical professionals because they “cannot be trusted to be around clients, children, or patients”.Trump has also said the problem today is on the left, not the right. “When you look at the agitators – you look at the scum that speaks so badly of our country, the American flag burnings all over the place – that’s the left, not the right,” Trump said on Sunday.On the podcast, Vance said that after he left Kirk’s family in Arizona, he read a story in the Nation, a leftwing publication, where the author detailed Kirk’s views and, he said, took a quote about several prominent Black women out of context to imply it applied to all Black women.The magazine is not a “fringe blog” but a “well-funded, well-respected magazine whose publishing history goes back to the American civil war. George Soros’s Open Society Foundation funds this magazine, as does the Ford Foundation and many other wealthy titans of the American progressive movement”, Vance said, hinting at the organizations the administration might target.Vance later mentioned that the foundations that helped fund the magazine are tax-exempt, a sign that the government could go after that status.“Charlie was gunned down in broad daylight, and well-funded institutions of the left lied about what he said so as to justify his murder,” Vance said. “This is soulless and evil, but I was struck not just by the dishonesty of the smear, but by the glee over a young husband’s and young father’s death.”The writer of the Nation article said on Bluesky that she was not paid by the Ford Foundation or Open Society to write the article.Vance said he “desperately” wants national unity and appreciated the many condolences he has received from Democratic friends and colleagues, but he said there was no unity without confronting the truth. “The data is clear, people on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence,” he said, citing the results from a recent YouGov poll. “This is not a both-sides problem. If both sides have a problem, one side has a much bigger and malignant problem, and that is the truth.”On the show, Vance also interviewed Kirk’s friends and political allies, showing how Kirk worked to keep the warring factions of the right aligned behind Trump and tried to bring in other political movements by elevating them into roles in the administration. They shared how Kirk was omnipresent in the transition after Trump won the White House.Robert F Kennedy Jr said Kirk was a “spiritual soulmate” to him and that his endorsement of Trump, at a Turning Point rally in Arizona amid fireworks and sparklers on stage, was “Charlie’s orchestration”. Kirk helped shepherd Kennedy into his role as health secretary, Kennedy said, and also helped his daughter-in-law get a role in the administration.On breaks between guests, the live stream rolled footage of Kirk during his typical college campus visits debating about the Trump administration’s first 100 days or the left’s views on immigration.Since Kirk’s killing, Turning Point USA has seen a massive rise in inquiries to start new chapters on high school and college campuses. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for the organization, said on X that the group received over 32,000 inquiries over the course of two days. Turning Point currently has about 900 official college chapters and 1,200 high school chapters.“Charlie’s vision to have a Club America chapter (our high school brand) in every high school in America (around 23,000) will come true much much faster than he could have ever possibly imagined,” Kolvet wrote. More

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      Prosecutor in Epstein case sues Trump justice department over abrupt firing

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      Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor involved in cases against Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell and led the recent case against Sean “Diddy” Combs, filed a lawsuit on Monday challenging her abrupt termination as politically motivated retaliation against her father, former FBI director James Comey.According to the court documents, the justice department fired Comey without cause or explanation on 16 July, citing only “article 2 of the United States constitution and the laws of the United States” in a brief email. When she asked for a reason, interim US attorney Jay Clayton told her: “All I can say is it came from Washington. I can’t tell you anything else.”Just three months before her termination, the 35-year-old prosecutor received a glowing review from the same attorney who would later deliver news of her firing, the lawsuit alleges.The lawsuit seeks her reinstatement, back pay, and a declaration that her termination violated the constitution.Her removal came after a sustained pressure campaign by Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and Trump administration whisperer with clear influence over personnel and policy decisions. In May, Loomer posted to her 1.7 million X followers calling for the firing of James Comey’s “liberal daughter”.“Both Maurene Comey and Lucas Issacharoff need to be FIRED from the DOJ immediately,” Loomer wrote. After the termination, Loomer celebrated: “This comes 2 months after my pressure campaign on Pam Blondi to fire Comey’s daughter.”The lawsuit alleges the firing was designed to retaliate against James Comey, whom Trump has attacked in hundreds of social media posts, repeatedly calling him the “worst” FBI director in history. Tensions escalated in May when the elder Comey posted a cryptic message featuring seashells arranged to spell “8647”, which Trump interpreted as an assassination threat.Maurene Comey’s case portfolio included high-profile wins: the conviction of Maxwell for sex trafficking, the prosecution of gynecologist Robert Hadden for sexual abuse, and most recently leading the team that convicted Combs.The Trump administration has argued that article 2 grants unlimited presidential removal authority over career prosecutors, but the federal lawsuit claims that violates constitutional separation of powers and federal service protections.In a farewell email to colleagues, Comey said: “If a career prosecutor can be fired without reason, fear may seep into the decision of those who remain. Do not let that happen.” More