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      Irate Trump tells Schumer to ‘go to hell’ after Senate standoff over confirmations

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      The US Senate left Washington DC on Saturday night for its monthlong August recess without a deal to advance dozens of Donald Trump’s nominees, calling it quits after days of contentious bipartisan negotiations and the president taking to social media to tell Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer to “GO TO HELL!”Without a deal in hand, Republicans say they may try to change Senate rules when they return in September to speed up the pace of confirmations. Trump has been pressuring senators to move quickly as Democrats blocked more nominees than usual this year, denying any fast unanimous consent votes and forcing roll calls on each one, a lengthy process that can take several days per nominee.“I think they’re desperately in need of change,” Senate Republican majority leader John Thune said of the chamber’s rules on Saturday after negotiations with Schumer and Trump broke down. “I think that the last six months have demonstrated that this process, nominations is broken. And so I expect there will be some good robust conversations about that.”Schumer said a rules change would be a “huge mistake”, especially as Senate Republicans will need Democratic votes to pass spending bills and other legislation moving forward.“Donald Trump tried to bully us, go around us, threaten us, call us names, but he got nothing,” Schumer said.The latest standoff comes as Democrats and Republicans have gradually escalated their obstruction of the other party’s executive branch and judicial nominees over the last two decades, and as Senate leaders have incrementally changed Senate rules to speed up confirmations – and make them less bipartisan.In 2013, Democrats changed Senate rules for lower court judicial nominees to remove the 60-vote threshold for confirmations as Republicans blocked then president Barack Obama’s judicial picks. In 2017, Republicans did the same for supreme court nominees as Democrats tried to block Trump’s nomination of justice Neil Gorsuch.Trump has been pressuring Senate Republicans for weeks to cancel the August recess and grind through dozens of his nominations as Democrats have slowed the process. But Republicans hoped to make a deal with Democrats instead and came close several times over the last few days as the two parties and the White House negotiated over moving a large tranche of nominees in exchange for reversing some of the Trump administration’s spending cuts on foreign aid, among other issues.The Senate held a rare weekend session on Saturday as Republicans held votes on nominee after nominee and as the two parties tried to work out the final details of a deal. But it was clear that there would be no agreement when Trump attacked Schumer on social media Saturday evening and told Republicans to pack it up and go home.“Tell Schumer, who is under tremendous political pressure from within his own party, the Radical Left Lunatics, to GO TO HELL!” Trump posted on Truth Social.Thune said afterward that there were “several different times” when the two sides thought they had a deal, but in the end “we didn’t close it out”.It’s the first time in recent history that the minority party hasn’t allowed at least some quick confirmations. Thune has already kept the Senate in session for more days, and with longer hours, this year to try and confirm as many of Trump’s nominees as possible.But Democrats had little desire to give in without the spending cut reversals or some other incentive, even though they too were eager to skip town after several long months of work and bitter partisan fights over legislation.“We have never seen nominees as flawed, as compromised, as unqualified as we have right now,” Schumer said. More

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      Legal cases could prise open Epstein cache despite Trump’s blocking effort

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      On the campaign trail, Donald Trump vowed that his administration would release a tranche of documents in the criminal investigation into disgraced late financier Jeffrey Epstein.But since Trump returned to the White House, his promises have fallen flat, with few documents released – and backtracking about releasing more records. The lack of disclosure has prompted not only dissatisfaction among those seeking information about Epstein’s crimes, but political flak Trump can’t seem to deflect, especially about his own relations with the convicted sex trafficker.But where political pressures have so far failed, legal pressures that have largely sailed under the radar of the fierce debate about Epstein’s crimes could yet succeed and bring crucial information in the public eye.Several court cases provide some hope that even if Trump’s justice department fails to make good on calls for transparency, potentially revelatory records about Epstein, his crimes and his links to some of the most powerful people in the US might still see the light of day.Moreover, it is possible that the justice department’s unusual request to unseal grand jury transcripts, in Epstein and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal cases, could also undermine opposition to it releasing records.One lawsuit brought by the news website Radar Online and investigative journalist James Robertson stems from their April 2017 public records request for documents related to the FBI’s investigation of Epstein. This request came years after Epstein pleaded guilty to state-level crimes in Florida for soliciting a minor for prostitution – and before his 2019 arrest on child sex-trafficking charges in New York federal court.Radar and Robertson filed suit in May 2017 after the FBI did not respond to their request; the agency ultimately agreed that it would process documents at a rate of 500 pages per month, per court documents.“Despite the FBI identifying at least 11,571 pages of responsive documents, 10,107 of those pages remain withheld nearly 20 years after the events at issue,” according to court papers filed by Radar and Robertson.Although Epstein killed himself in custody awaiting trial, and Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence, the FBI is fighting release of more documents. The agency has invoked an exception to public records disclosure that allow for documents to be withheld if their release would interfere with law enforcement proceedings.The Manhattan federal court judge overseeing this public records suit sided with the FBI’s citation of these exemptions, but Radar is pursuing an appeal that could be heard in the second circuit court of appeals this fall.“In court, they insist that releasing even one additional page from the Epstein file would hurt their ability to re-prosecute Ghislaine Maxwell in the event the supreme court orders a new trial,” a spokesperson for Radar said.“It’s a flimsy rationale and we are challenging it head on in the court of appeals. Our only hope of understanding how the FBI failed to hold Epstein accountable for over a decade – and preventing future miscarriages of justice – is if the government releases the files.”It’s also possible that the justice department’s request to release grand jury transcripts in Epstein and Maxwell’s cases could bolster arguments for the release of records.“The DoJ’s core argument against disclosure for the past six years has been that it would jeopardize their ability to put – and keep – Ghislaine Maxwell in prison. They say that releasing even a single page could threaten their case,” the Radar spokesperson said. “Naturally, any support they offer to release material undermines their claims.”Separately, developments in civil litigation involving Epstein and Maxwell could also potentially lead to the disclosure of more documents surrounding their crimes.A federal judge in 2024 unsealed a cache of documents in the late Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre Roberts’s defamation case against Maxwell. Some documents were kept under seal, however, and journalists pursuing release of documents appealed against that decision.On 23 July, the second circuit decided that it found “no error in the district court’s decisions not to unseal or make public many of the documents at issue”, but it also ordered the lower court to review possibly unsealing them.Robert’s attorney Sigrid McCawley reportedly said she was “thrilled with the decision” and also said she was “hopeful that this order leads to the release of more information about Epstein’s monstrous sex trafficking operation and those who facilitated it and participated in it”, according to Courthouse News Service.Others who have represented Epstein victims have called for disclosure of public records – and voiced frustration about being stonewalled in their pursuit of documents.Jennifer Freeman, special counsel at Marsh Law Firm, who represents Epstein accuser Maria Farmer, previously told the Guardian she had made a public records request for information related to her client, with no success.Spencer T Kuvin, chief legal officer of GoldLaw and an attorney for several Epstein victims, hopes that public records battles could help pull back the veil on Epstein information.“I think that the Foia requests will absolutely assist in the disclosure of information. The DoJ has made blanket objections citing ongoing investigations, but through Foia litigation the courts can test those objections by potentially reviewing the information ‘in camera’,” Kuvin said. “This means that an independent judge may be appointed to review the information to determine whether the DoJ’s objections are accurate or just a cover.”Roy Gutterman, director of the Newhouse School’s Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University, cautioned that calls for disclosures – and even government requests to release some files – might not be a panacea for access to extensive documents.“This case is already complicated, and there were already too many cooks in the very crowded kitchen, and it’s getting more crowded as more public interest grows in the grand jury materials as well as the now-settled defamation case,” Gutterman said.But stonewalling could also continue. With the public records requests, it’s possible that US federal authorities could still successfully cite the investigation exemption and keep documents out of pubic view.“Using Foia for FBI and law enforcement materials related to this case, might be a creative newsgathering tactic, but the law enforcement exemption the government is citing might be legitimate because some of the materials are grand jury materials and some other materials might include private or unsubstantiated allegations,” Gutterman said.“The reporter in me thinks there is an important public interest in revealing these documents, but the law might end up keeping most material secret. Even with the widespread and growing public interest, it might be too big an ask to unseal a lot of this material.“Practically speaking, the DoJ might also be very selective in which materials it would want to release as well because of the political element involved here, too.” More

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      Trump news at a glance: inquiry launched into Trump prosecutor as backlash grows over firing of statistics chief

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      The US office of special counsel, an independent federal agency, confirmed to NBC News that it is investigating former Department of Justice prosecutor Jack Smith for possible violations of the Hatch Act.Smith led investigations into Donald Trump’s part in the 6 January US Capitol riot and alleged mishandling of classified documents.It comes as senior Republican lawmakers condemn the decision of their party leader, Trump, to fire the leading US labor market statistician after a report that showed the national economy added just 73,000 jobs – far fewer than expected – in July.Trump claimed, without evidence, that the numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad” and the US economy was, in fact, “BOOMING” on his watch.Here are the key US politics stories of the day:Inquiry into ex-special counsel Jack Smith over Trump investigationsThe confirmation of an investigation into Jack Smith comes after Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, a Republican, requested last week that Smith be investigated for “unprecedented interference in the 2024 election”.The Hatch Act, ​​​​​​​a federal law passed in 1939, limits certain political activities of federal employees. Trump, along with other prominent Republican lawmakers, have argued that Smith’s investigations into Trump amounted to illegal political activity.Smith ultimately brought two criminal indictments against Trump in 2023 but resigned in January this year before either came to trial.Read the full storyRepublicans slam Trump’s firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics chiefThe firing of Erika McEntarfer, who had been confirmed to her role in January 2024 during Joe Biden’s presidency, has alarmed members of Trump’s own party.“If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn’t like the numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” said Wyoming Republican senator Cynthia Lummis. “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for.”Kentucky senator Rand Paul, another Republican, questioned whether McEntarfer’s firing was an effective way of improving the numbers.Read the full storyTrump says Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s past comments make pardoning him ‘more difficult’Donald Trump says he considers Sean ‘“Diddy” Combs “sort of half-innocent” despite his criminal conviction in federal court in July – but the president called pardoning the music mogul “more difficult” because of past criticism.“When I ran for office, he was very hostile,” Trump said of the Bad Boy Records founder. “It’s hard, you know? We’re human beings. And we don’t like to have things cloud our judgment, right? But when you knew someone and you were fine, and then you run for office, and he made some terrible statements.”Combs was found guilty on 2 July of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, with each leaving him facing up to 10 years in prison – but he was acquitted of more serious sex-trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges.Read the full storyAnalysis: Durham disclosures further undermine Gabbard’s claims of plot against TrumpTulsi Gabbard, the director of US national intelligence, hoped to uncover evidence that Barack Obama and his national security team conspired to undermine Donald Trump in a slow-motion coup.But a previously classified annexe to a report by another special counsel, John Durham – appointed towards the end of Trump’s first presidency – has further undermined Gabbard’s case.It confirms that Russian spies were behind the emails that were originally released as the result of a Russian cyber-hack of internal Democratic information channels and which Trump supporters believed showed the campaign of Hillary Clinton, his 2016 opponent, conspiring to accuse him of colluding with Moscow.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The Trump administration terminated 1,902 National Institutes of Health grants totalling more than $4.4bn between January and the end of July, according to Grant Witness data. NIH followed guidance from the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and Trump’s executive orders to cut costs.

      According to Donald Trump’s White House, the US economy is booming, inflation is dead and jobs are surging. A blizzard of economic reports has cast a pall on such claims in recent days.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened 1 August 2025. More

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      Federal agency opens inquiry into ex-special counsel Jack Smith over Trump investigations

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      The US office of special counsel, an independent federal agency, confirmed to NBC News on Saturday that it is investigating former Department of Justice prosecutor Jack Smith for possible violations of the Hatch Act.Smith led investigations into Donald Trump’s part in January 6 US Capitol riot and alleged mishandling of classified documents.The confirmation of an investigation comes after Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, a Republican, requested last week that Smith, 56, be investigated for “unprecedented interference in the 2024 election”.The Hatch Act, ​​​​​​​a federal law passed in 1939, limits certain political activities of federal employees. Trump, along with other prominent Republican lawmakers, have argued that Smith’s investigations into Trump amounted to illegal political activity.Smith was appointed as special counsel by then attorney general Merrick Garland in 2022 – three days after Trump announced his bid for a second term – to investigate potential interference with the 2020 election and the handling of classified documents.However, the US office of special counsel, the federal agency investigating Smith, is different from the type of justice department-appointed special counsel position that was held by Smith.As an independent federal agency, it lacks the power to bring criminal charges, but can instead seek disciplinary action for a federal government employee or refer its findings to the justice department for investigation.In a series of social media posts on Wednesday, Cotton said that Smith’s legal actions “were nothing more than a tool for the Biden and Harris campaigns. This isn’t just unethical, it is very likely illegal campaign activity from a public office.”Cotton said Smith “pushed for an out-of-the-ordinary, rushed trial for President Trump, with jury selection to begin just two weeks before the Iowa caucuses. No other case of this magnitude and complexity would come to trial this quickly.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSmith ultimately brought two criminal indictments against Trump in 2023 but resigned in January this year before either came to trial.His resignation came soon after the justice department asked a federal appeals court to reverse a judge’s order, blocking the release of his investigative report focused on Trump’s alleged efforts to undo the 2020 presidential election. A second Smith-authored report, into Trump’s handling of classified documents, was also blocked from publication. More

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      Republicans slam Trump’s firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics chief

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      Senior Republican lawmakers are condemning the decision of their party leader, Donald Trump, to fire the leading US labor market statistician after a report that showed the national economy added just 73,000 jobs – far fewer than expected – in July.The disappointing figures – coupled with a downward revision of the two previous months amounting to 258,000 fewer jobs and data showing that economic output and consumer spending slowed in the first half of the year – point to an overall economic deterioration in the US.Trump defended his decision to fire US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Erika McEntarfer. Without evidence to back his claims, the president wrote on social media that were numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad” and the US economy was, in fact, “BOOMING” on his watch.But the firing of McEntarfer, who had been confirmed to her role in January 2024 during Joe Biden’s presidency, has alarmed members of Trump’s own party.“If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn’t like the numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” said Wyoming Republican senator Cynthia Lummis. “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for.”Lummis added that if the numbers are unreliable, the public should be told – but firing McEntarfer was “kind of impetuous”.North Carolina senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, said: “If she was just fired because the president or whoever decided to fire the director just … because they didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up.”Kentucky senator Rand Paul, another Republican, questioned whether McEntarfer’s firing was an effective way of improving the numbers.“We have to look somewhere for objective statistics,” he said. “When the people providing the statistics are fired, it makes it much harder to make judgments that you know, the statistics won’t be politicized.”According to NBC News, Paul said his “first impression” was that “you can’t really make the numbers different or better by firing the people doing the counting”.Tillis and Paul were both opponents of Trump’s recent economic legislative package, which the president dubbed the “big, beautiful bill”.But Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican who supported the legislation after winning substantial economic support for her state, remarked that the jobs numbers could not be trusted – and “that’s the problem”.“And when you fire people, then it makes people trust them even less,” she said.William Beach, a former BLS commissioner appointed by Trump in his first presidency, posted on X that McEntarfer’s firing was “totally groundless”. He added that the dismissal set a dangerous precedent and undermined the BLS’s statistical mission.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBeach also co-signed a letter by “the Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics” that went further, accusing Trump of seeking to blame someone for bad news and calling the rationale for McEntarfer’s firing “without merit”.The letter asserted that the dismissal “undermines the credibility of federal economic statistics that are a cornerstone of intelligent economic decision-making by businesses, families and policymakers”.The letter pointed out that the jobs tabulation process “is decentralized by design to avoid opportunities for interference”, adding that US official statistics “are the gold standard globally”.“When leaders of other nations have politicized economic data, it has destroyed public trust in all official statistics and in government science,” the letter said.Democrats have also hit out at Trump’s decision. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders described it as “the sign of an authoritarian type”, and he said the decision would make it harder for the American people “to believe the information that comes out of the government”.Paul Schroeder, executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, described the president’s allegation against McEntarfer as “very damaging and outrageous”.He said: “Not only does it undermine the integrity of federal economic statistics, but it also politicizes data which need to remain independent and trustworthy. This action is a grave error by the administration and one that will have ramifications for years to come.” More

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      Trump says Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s past comments make pardoning him ‘more difficult’

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      Donald Trump says he considers Sean ‘“Diddy” Combs “sort of half-innocent” despite his criminal conviction in federal court in July – but the president called pardoning the music mogul “more difficult” because of past criticism.Trump spoke about Combs during an interview on Friday night on the friendly environs of Newsmax. Combs was found guilty on 2 July of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, with each leaving him facing up to 10 years in prison – but he was acquitted of more serious sex-trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges.“He was essentially, I guess, sort of half-innocent,” Trump remarked to Newsmax host Rob Finnerty. “He was celebrating a victory, but I guess it wasn’t as good of a victory.”A number of media outlets reported that Trump has been weighing a pardon for Combs, with whom he had partied in public and exchanged mutual declarations of friendship before winning his two presidencies.Trump has built a track record of pardoning convicted political supporters in what has been widely seen as a broader rebuke of a justice system that found him guilty of criminally falsifying business records less than six months prior to his victory in the 2024 White House election.Yet Combs evidently complicated matters for himself by having told the Daily Beast in 2017 that he did not “really give a fuck about Trump”. And in 2020, when Trump’s first presidency ended in defeat to Joe Biden, Combs – who is Black – told radio host Charlamagne tha God that “white men like Trump need to be banished”.“The number one priority is to get Trump out of office,” Combs said.Trump seemingly alluded to those comments in his interview on Friday with Newsmax when asked to revisit the concept of pardoning Combs.“When I ran for office, he was very hostile,” Trump said of the Bad Boy Records founder. “It’s hard, you know? We’re human beings. And we don’t like to have things cloud our judgment, right? But when you knew someone and you were fine, and then you run for office, and he made some terrible statements.“So I don’t know … It makes it more difficult to do.”Combs was convicted of flying people around the country, including male sex workers and girlfriends, for sexual encounters. He is tentatively scheduled to be sentenced on 3 October and has asked to be freed from custody on a $50m bond while awaiting that hearing.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt the time of Trump’s Newsmax interview on Friday, Combs was being housed at New York City’s only federal lockup.Another federal lockup in New York City closed after the 2019 death there of disgraced financier, convicted sex offender and former Trump friend Jeffrey Epstein while awaiting federal trial.Trump’s justice department drew bipartisan political criticism after announcing that it would not release any more documents from the Epstein investigation despite earlier pledges from the president and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to disclose more information about the case.Amid the furor, Trump has been asked about whether he is mulling a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, who has been serving a 20-year prison sentence for conspiring with Epstein to sexually traffic and abuse minors.“Well, I’m allowed to give her a pardon,” Trump has said with respect to Maxwell, who as of Friday had been transferred from a federal prison in Florida to a lower-security facility in Texas. “But right now, it would be inappropriate to talk about it.” More

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      Durham disclosures further undermine Gabbard’s claims of plot against Trump

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      Tulsi Gabbard, the director of US national intelligence, hoped to uncover evidence that Barack Obama and his national security team conspired to undermine Donald Trump in a slow-motion coup.But if her crusade was aimed at proving that Obama embarked on a “treasonous conspiracy” to falsely show that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election to help Trump, Gabbard made a mistake. A previously classified annexe to a report by another special counsel, John Durham – appointed towards the end of Trump’s first presidency – has further undermined Gabbard’s case.It was a quixotic enterprise from the start.After all, the 2019 report from Robert Mueller, the original special counsel appointed to investigate the Russia allegations, and a bipartisan five-volume report the following year from the Senate intelligence committee – then chaired by Marco Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state – both affirmed the offending January 2017 intelligence community assessment, which expressed “high confidence” in Russian interference.Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, seemed to validate the intelligence’s premise in 2018 when, standing beside Trump at a news conference in Helsinki, he admitted wanting him to win.The newly unclassified 29-page document from Durham, made public this week, contains a deflating conclusion for Gabbard. It confirms that Russian spies were behind the emails that were originally released as the result of a Russian cyber-hack of internal Democratic information channels and which Trump supporters believed showed the campaign of Hillary Clinton, his 2016 opponent, conspiring to accuse him of colluding with Moscow.“The office’s best assessment is that the July 25 and July 27 emails that purport to be from Benardo were ultimately a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the US-based thinktanks,” Durham writes. He is referring to Leonard Benardo, of the Open Society Foundation, funded by George Soros, a philanthropist and bete noire of Trump’s Maga base.One of the emails purportedly from Benardo proposes a plan “to demonize Putin and Trump” and adds: “Later the FBI will put more oil on the fire.”That message and others, including from a Clinton foreign policy aide, Julianne Smith, became part of the so-called “Clinton Plan intelligence”. Benardo and Smith disputed ever writing such emails.In his 2023 report annexe, released on Thursday in heavily redacted form, Durham at least upholds Benardo’s disavowal – concluding that it has been cobbled together from other individuals’ emails to produce something more incriminating than the actuality.For Gabbard, who is feverishly trying to prove the existence of a “deep state” determined to sabotage Trump, emails suspected to have been confected by Russia is hardly a brilliant look in her evidence package.Some former intelligence insiders find that unsurprising – dismissing the idea as a Trump-inspired fiction. “Trump is lying when he speaks of a ‘deep state’,” said Fulton Armstrong, a retired CIA analyst who served under Democratic and Republican administrations. “But if there were one, it would not be Democrat. The culture of that world is deeply Republican.”The national intelligence director – who has never served in the intelligence services or sat on its eponymous congressional committee when she was in the House of Representatives – is likely to see Durham’s finding as immaterial to her quest to put Obama officials on trial for “manufacturing” intelligence.But Gabbard’s insistence – echoing her boss’s view – on the existence of a plot to torpedo Trump was dismissed on Friday by John Brennan, the CIA director under Obama, who told the New Yorker that Obama issued instructions that intelligence showing Russian meddling to be kept hush-hush, at least until polling day, to ensure a fair election.“He made very clear to us [that] he wanted us to try to uncover everything the Russians were doing, but also not to do anything that would in any way interfere in the election,” Brennan said.Gabbard has cited a 2020 House of Representatives intelligence committee report – endorsed only by its Republican members – challenging the assertion that Putin wanted to Trump to win.However, Michael Van Landingham, one of the CIA authors of the 2017 intelligence assessment now in her crosshairs, said credible intelligence cast the Russian leader’s motives in an unambiguous light.“The primary evidence to get to Putin’s mindset was a clandestine source that said, essentially, when Putin realized that Clinton would win the election, he ordered an influence campaign against Hillary Clinton,” Van Landingham told PBS News Hour.“Then we saw a series of events that happened with the hacked US materials by the Russian special services or intelligence services to leak those materials similar to the information a clandestine source had provided. At the same time, we saw lots of members of the Russian media portraying Donald Trump in a more positive light.“There was other information … collected by the US intelligence community … over time, having a high-quality, clandestine source telling you that Putin was counting on Trump’s victory, having members of the Russian state saying Trump would be better to work with because of his views on Russia that don’t represent the US establishment, all of those things gave us high confidence that Putin wanted Trump to win.” More

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      India to still buy oil from Russia despite Trump threats, say officials

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      Indian oil refineries will continue to buy oil from Russia, officials have said, before threatened US sanctions next week against Moscow’s trading partners over the war in Ukraine.Media reports on Friday had suggested India, a big energy importer, would stop buying cheap Russian oil. Trump later told reporters that such a move would be “a good step” if true.“I understand that India is no longer going to be buying oil from Russia,” he said. “That’s what I heard. I don’t know if that’s right or not. That is a good step. We will see what happens.”However, official sources in India, quoted by the news agency ANI, rebutted Trump’s claim, saying Indian oil companies had not paused Russian imports and that supply decisions were based on “price, grade of crude, inventories, logistics and other economic factors”.Trump’s remarks came a day after the White House announced tariffs of 25% on all Indian goods, along with a penalty for buying arms and energy from Russia amid the war in Ukraine.Trump has given an 8 August deadline for Vladimir Putin to stop the war or risk further sanctions on tariffs on countries that import Russian oil.Earlier this week, Reuters reported that Indian state-owned refineries had suspended Russian oil purchases amid the tariff threats and narrowing price discounts.But on Saturday, the New York Times cited two unnamed senior Indian officials who said there had been no change in Indian government policy related to importing Russian oil. One said the government had “not given any direction to oil companies” to cease buying oil from Russia.“These are long-term oil contracts,” one of the sources said. “It is not so simple to just stop buying overnight.”The sources cited by ANI said Indian oil refineries operated in full compliance with international norms, and that Russian oil had never been directly sanctioned by the US or EU. “Instead, it was subjected to a G7-EU price-cap mechanism designed to limit revenue while ensuring global supplies continued to flow.”They added: “India’s purchases have remained fully legitimate and within the framework of international norms.”The sources also noted that if India had not “absorbed discounted Russian crude combined with Opec+ production cuts of 5.8 mb/d [millions of barrels a day], global oil prices could have surged well beyond the March 2022 peak of US$137/bbl [a barrel], intensifying inflationary pressures worldwide”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRussia is the top oil supplier to India, responsible for about 35% of the country’s supplies. India says that as a major energy importer it must find the cheapest supplies to protect its population against rising costs.On Friday, India’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Randhir Jaiswal, said: “We look at what is available in the markets, what is on offer, and also what is the prevailing global situation or circumstances.”Jaiswal added that India had a “steady and time-tested partnership” with Russia.This partnership has been a point of contention for the White House, with Trump posting on Truth Social on 30 July that while India was “our friend”, it had always bought most of its military equipment from Russia and was “Russia’s largest buyer of ENERGY, along with China, at a time when everyone wants Russia to STOP THE KILLING IN UKRAINE – ALL THINGS NOT GOOD!”In a second post, Trump added: “I don’t care what India does with Russia. They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care.”Ukraine’s military said on Saturday it had hit oil facilities inside Russia, including a refinery in Ryazan, causing a fire on its premises. The strike also hit an oil storage facility, a military airfield for drones and an electronics factory. More