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      US supreme court allows Trump to withhold nearly $5bn in foreign aid

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      The supreme court on Friday extended an order that allows Donald Trump’s administration to keep frozen nearly $5bn in foreign aid, handing him another victory in a dispute over presidential power.The court acted on the Republican administration’s emergency appeal in a case involving billions of dollars in congressionally approved aid. Trump said last month that he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a president roughly 50 years ago.The justice department sought the supreme court’s intervention after US district judge Amir Ali ruled that Trump’s action was likely illegal and that Congress would have to approve the decision to withhold the funding.The federal appeals court in Washington declined to put Ali’s ruling on hold, but John Roberts, the chief justice, temporarily blocked it on 9 September. The full court indefinitely extended Roberts’ order.The court has previously cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip legal protections from hundreds of thousands of migrants, fire thousands of federal employees, oust transgender members of the military and remove the heads of independent government agencies.The legal victories, while not final rulings, all have come through emergency appeals, used sparingly under previous presidencies, to fast-track cases to the supreme court, where decisions are often handed down with no explanation.Trump told House speaker Mike Johnson in a 28 August letter that he would not spend $4.9bn in congressionally approved foreign aid, effectively cutting the budget without going through the legislative branch.He used what’s known as a pocket rescission. That’s a rarely used maneuver when a president submits a request to Congress toward the end of a current budget year to not spend the approved money. The late notice essentially flips the script. Under federal law,Congress has to approve the rescission within 45 days or the money must be spent. But the budget year will end before the 45-day window closes, and in this situation the White House is asserting that congressional inaction allows it to not spend the money.The Trump administration has made deep reductions to foreign aid one of its hallmark policies, despite the relatively meager savings relative to the deficit and possible damage to America’s reputation abroad as people lose access to food supplies and development programs.Justice department lawyers told a federal judge last month that another $6.5bn in aid that had been subject to the freeze would be spent before the end of the fiscal year next Tuesday. More

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      Rare orange lobster found in New York supermarket returned to sea

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      A rare orange lobster was released back into the wild this week after being spotted by an enthusiast at a local grocery store.The lobster, swiftly nicknamed Jean-Clawed Van Damme, is a one-in-30m catch, according to Humane Long Island, a wildlife rescue group, and the New York Aquarium, who aided in releasing it.Given that seeing an orange lobster typically means it is dead and boiled and on a plate, shopper Kyle Brancato did a double take when he spotted the lobster moving among the others for sale at a Tops grocery store in upstate New York.“I walked by the lobster tank, and I saw this bright orange lobster,” Brancato told WHAM, a local CNN affiliate. “Very different from all the other ones in the tank.”He suspected other shoppers mistook the lobster as diseased and passed it by.View image in fullscreenBrancato decided to buy it, with the hopes of ultimately freeing it, but without much experience in crustacean care he improvised at first.“I borrowed some tank water from Palmer’s, down the road,” said Brancato, referring to a local restaurant. “That bought me enough time to go to [pet supply store] Petco and pick up a 20-gallon tank, and I got 20 gallons of sea water that they sell in the store in boxes. And I emptied it into the tank, and cooled it down to the proper temperature.”The lobster was released into the open waters of the Long Island Sound on Wednesday, just a day before National Lobster Day, which marks the peak of the annual US lobster harvesting season.Amid seasonal special offers from eateries, thousands more lobsters than usual suffered a different fate from their wild orange cousin and ended up boiled, buttered, and eaten.In 2021 an orange lobster was rescued in Ontario by a Canadian couple, after being held captive in a grocery store tank, where it had languished for weeks after being shunned by shoppers because of its rare hue and was apparently being picked on by the other lobsters. That one ended up in an aquarium. More

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      They fled war and sexual violence and found a safe space in Athens. Then the aid cuts hit

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      The night of 29 May was sombre at 15 Mitsaki Street, a women’s shelter in the centre of Athens. Shoes, winter coats, shampoo bottles and sheets lay strewn around: belongings the 30 refugee women and five children living there had worked hard to acquire, and would now have to abandon. The next day, the shelter would be shuttered for good.“I was so stressed I couldn’t sleep,” says Oksana Kutko, a Ukrainian. “I knew I had nowhere to go.”Operated by the Greek aid organisation METAdrasi since 2020, the shelter’s closure came as a shock.Kutko, 51, had been living there for three years after fleeing Russian bombs in Kharkiv. She hauled what she could carry to a nearby church.Residents could not find alternative accommodation in the short time they were given to leave. A Congolese woman with a seven-year-old son simply laid out a sheet on the pavement outside.By evening, everyone had vacated the refuge, except for one woman.Évodie*, a woman in her 20s who fled severe sexual abuse and violence in the Republic of the Congo, refused to leave. For days after the other women had gone, Évodie clung to the place: the last semblance of stability in her life of uncertainty.Already in a fragile mental and emotional state, losing her place at the shelter cast her back into memories of horrific abuse. Eventually, the police evicted Évodie. She spent the next month homeless.The shelter’s closure is the new reality brought by governments’ overseas aid funding cuts, people with fragile lives being left without lifelines, struggling to stay afloat.“These women’s need for a safe place, their need for hope for the future, their need to heal the past – all these things are connected,” says Thaleia Portokaloglou, a psychologist who knows Évodie from the Melissa Network, an organisation for refugee women in Athens.As support is withdrawn, Portokaloglou is seeing women unravel. How do you ask a person pulled apart like that to keep functioning, she asks.The closure of the Mitsaki Street shelter can be traced back to 20 January 2025, when President Donald Trump, froze the US foreign aid budget hours after his inauguration. Contracts with humanitarian organisations were terminated and over the following months support networks in many countries, including Greece, were gutted; METAdrasi lost a third of its budget, resulting in the shelter’s closure.Greece has received nearly 1.3 million refugees and migrants since 2014. The wait to be granted asylum can take years, leaving many people dependent on humanitarian organisations while their cases are being processed.View image in fullscreenEuropean governments have also been steadily slashing their overseas aid budgets, diverging sharply from the postwar global consensus on humanitarian relief.Lefteris Papagiannakis, director of the Greek Council for Refugees, says: “We are losing the whole of the international protection system that has been in place for the last 80 years in six months.”Meanwhile, Athens has hardened its stance on migration – parliament suspended asylum applications from north Africa in July and instigated laws this month that could mean rejected asylum seekers receiving prison terms if they do not leave within 14 days.Around the world, humanitarian networks have been thrown into chaos. Dimitra Kalogeropoulou, director of the International Rescue Committee in Greece, says: “We are facing an unseen crisis where people are really suffering.”On 30 June, between walls hung with Afghan tapestries, officials from Greece’s migrant-support organisations held an emergency meeting at the Melissa Network.The NGO leaders were visibly shaken. Minutes earlier, they had left an interagency meeting of the Greek branch of the refugee agency, the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR).“All of us are facing an existential crisis,” says Nadina Christopoulou, director and co-founder of the Melissa Network.Before January, 90% of the UNHCR’s funding in Greece came from the US state department, says Papagiannakis. Now, half the funding and half the staff are gone. “Unfortunately, Europe is not stepping in,” he says. “They say, ‘Ah, that’s a good opportunity! We’ll stop too.’”The cuts mean aid organisations have been forced to make hard decisions. Funding for victims of sexual violence has been cut across the board.Christopoulou put it in simple terms: 970 asylum seekers would be stranded without assistance. At least 100 survivors of sexual violence would lose essential services, including emergency housing.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreen“People will no longer come to our centre because they feel it is undignified to come without having taken a shower, without having slept on a bed – and perhaps having been raped overnight,” Christopoulou says. “Because that’s what happens when you sleep in a park.”After her eviction from the METAdrasi shelter, Évodie slept rough in parks and squares for a month. Christopoulou knows from Évodie’s case worker, Irida, that homelessness plunged her into a devastating mental spiral. She has since found a space in a new refuge, but remains uncertain how long she will be able to stay there.When Évodie first came to Melissa in 2023, traumatised by her experiences in the Congo, she did not speak and, unable to find housing, spent nights in a park where she was further harassed. Eventually, Melissa secured a hostel place for her, before she moved into the METAdrasi refuge.Initially, she sat in a corner, without saying a word. It was a surprise, then, when she decided to join Melissa’s choir.On 8 March last year, Évodie stepped on stage and started to sing. Those in the audience who knew her were stunned. “I was crying,” Christiana Kyrkou, a project manager at the Melissa Network, says.“It was one of the first times I heard, loudly and clearly, her voice,” Christopoulou recalls. “Everybody was happy, but Évodie was Oscar happy!”View image in fullscreenWeekly self-defence training sessions offered a space for Évodie to open up. The class instructor, Konstantinos Koufaliotis, says she was his most frequent participant.One day, after Évodie mastered the basics, Koufaliotis taught her how to throw him to the ground. He landed on the foam mats with such a bang that Christopoulou rushed to the room asking if everything was OK.“Évodie laughed and laughed, because she created this,” Koufaliotis says. “She owned that moment.”Over the summer, she opened up to Koufaliotis about her difficulty in trusting those around her. When the conversations were too much for her, Koufaliotis would put up his boxing mitts and they would go back to training.Victims of sexual violence have every reason not to trust people. “Even if you do manage to get out of the circumstances that have created trauma, it’s such a fragile edifice,” Christopoulou says. “What you’re building is so fragile that it may easily fall apart into pieces again.”Now, as funding dries up, and services from therapy to housing face being wrenched away in an instant, hard-earned trust that NGOs have taken years to build up vanishes with it.The shelter’s closure left Évodie once again sees everything as a threat and everyone as an aggressor. She is distrustful of those trying to help her. Melissa’s staff believe this will be a commonplace reaction as since the funding cuts began, needs have turned from healing to survival.“There’s a shift from more psychological requests to more practical, more urgent ones,” Portokaloglou says. “We’re going back to those very primal, basic requests.”The prospect of future funding cuts now risks the survival of the whole Greek humanitarian network. The only certainty is that no programmes will be left unscathed. “It’s vertical, horizontal, diagonal,” says Christopoulou. “Everybody’s impacted.”* Name has been changed to protect her identity More

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      Why is the Trump administration obsessed with autism? – podcast

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      Archive: Good Morning America, NPR, NBC News, WHAS11, BBC News, CBS News, Jimmy Kimmel Live, LiveNowFox
      Listen to Science Weekly’s episode factchecking Trump’s claims about paracetamol
      Buy Carter Sherman’s book, The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over its Future, here
      Buy Jonathan Freedland’s new book, The Traitor’s Circle, here
      Buy John Harris’ book, Maybe I’m Amazed, about connecting with his son James, diagnosed with autism as a child, through music
      Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
      Support the Guardian. Go to theguardian.com/politicspodus More

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      Trump celebrates James Comey indictment as ex-FBI director says ‘I’m innocent: let’s have a trial’ – as it happened

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      This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to a close for the day. We will return on Friday morning. Here are the latest developments:

      Donald Trump’s long public campaign to get someone to bring criminal charges against James Comey, the former FBI director he fired in 2017, finally succeeded on Thursday, as the White House aide he installed as a prosecutor this week indicted the man Trump holds largely responsible for the Russia investigation.

      Trump celebrated the indictment of “One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to”, in a social media post that could be used as evidence that the prosecution is politically motivated.

      “I’m not afraid, and I hope you’re not either,” Comey said in an Instagram video statement. “My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system and I’m innocent, so let’s have a trial.”

      Maurene Comey, the former FBI director’s daughter, who led the federal prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and was fired this summer without explanation, cited Trump’s hatred of her father in a wrongful termination lawsuit filed this month.

      Ilhan Omar, the Somali-born congresswoman from Minnesota, accused Trump of inventing a story he told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, about having supposedly asked Somalia’s president if he would “take her back.”

      Trump signed a presidential memorandum directing the justice department and the FBI’s joint terrorism taskforce to investigate what he claimed is an organized campaign of political violence and domestic terrorism funded by Democrats.

      The House Democratic campaign arm believes their lawmakers have the advantage in the tense battle over government funding, after last week refusing to back a Republican plan to prevent a shutdown unless their demands on healthcare and other issues are met.

      We leave you with video of Hillary Clinton saying in a 2016 debate: “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.” He replied: “Because you’d be in jail.”
      Maurene Comey, the former FBI director’s daughter, who led the prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and was fired this summer without explanation, cited Donald Trump’s hatred of her father in a wrongful termination lawsuit filed this month in federal court.The suit explains that Maurene Comey was “abruptly fired” on 16 July 16 from her job as an assistant US attorney in Manhattan despite an “outstanding” performance review just months earlier.The suit, which names the office of the president and the attorney general as defendants, says that they “fired Ms. Comey solely or substantially because her father is former FBI Director James B. Comey, or because of her perceived political affiliation and beliefs, or both.”It goes on to allege that Trump’s hatred of her father, and the antipathy of Trump’s outside adviser Laura Loomer, were major factors in her wrongful termination.According to the suit:
      James Comey served as the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 2013 until President Trump fired him in 2017. For the past nine years, President Trump has publicly criticized Mr. Comey for his actions while serving as FBI Director, and because after he was fired, Mr. Comey (i) wrote a memoir critical of President Trump, (ii) continued to publicly criticize President Trump and his Administration, and (iii) in May 2025 posted a message on social media that President Trump and others in the Trump Administration claimed to perceive as threatening.
      Following Mr. Comey’s May 2025 social media post and other critical statements, President Trump’s supporters called for Ms. Comey’s firing. Notable among those supporters is Laura Loomer, a social media influencer who, on information and belief, has political influence in the Trump Administration, including influence over the termination of federal employees. President Trump has publicly stated: “If you’re Loomered you’re in deep trouble. That’s the end of your career in a sense.” On May 18, 2025, Ms. Loomer called for Mr. Comey’s “liberal daughter” and her “Democrat husband” to be “FIRED from the DOJ immediately” “for being a national security risk via their proximity to a criminal [i.e., Mr. Comey] who just committed a felony by threatening to assassinate the President.” Ms. Loomer also declared that, “under [Attorney General Pamela] Blondi [sic], every Deep State Operator is being emboldened,” and she “question[ed] the impartiality of Maurene and Lucas [Maurene’s husband] in their prosecutorial roles, especially in high-profile cases, due to the undeniable bias and influence stemming from James Comey’s public criticism of Trump and the ongoing investigation into his Instagram post.”
      James Comey’s son-in-law resigned as a federal prosecutor minutes after the former FBI director was indicted Thursday.Troy Edwards wrote in an email to Lindsey Halligan, the former White House aide with no prosecutorial experience parachuted into the job as US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia this week that he was resigning “To uphold my oath to the Constitution and the country”.Edwards , who helped prosecute pro-Trump January 6 rioters later pardoned by Trump, was deputy chief of the national security section, which covers the Pentagon and CIA headquarters, and handles some of the highest-profile espionage cases.James Comey, the former FBI director, professed his innocence in a video statement posted on Instagram on Thursday after he was indicted by the former White House aide Donald Trump appointed US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia this week.“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump,” Comey said. “But we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way. We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either.”“I’m not afraid, and I hope you’re not either. I hope instead you are engaged, you are paying attention and you will vote like your beloved country depends upon it, which it does,” he added.“My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system and I’m innocent, so let’s have a trial. And keep the faith,” he concluded.Donald Trump’s long public campaign to get someone in his administration to bring criminal charges against James Comey, the former FBI director he fired in 2017, finally succeeded on Thursday, but the president has been so public about his loathing of the indicted man, and his desire to see him jailed, that it might be hard for prosecutors to convince a jury that the case was not brought for political reasons.Comey was fired by Trump in 2017 after he reportedly refused a request to pledge his loyalty to the newly elected president, and then publicly confirmed to Congress that the FBI was conducting a counterintelligence investigation of Russian efforts to get Trump elected president in 2016.Trump’s firing of Comey backfired, however, because it helped convince then deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, to, in his words “oversee the previously confirmed FBI investigation of Russian government efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election and related matters”.Although Mueller’s report, issued in 2019, concluded that his team “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”, the investigation unearthed plenty of evidence that the Russian effort did take place and, in Mueller’s words, “established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome”.Mueller added that the Trump campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts”.While Mueller ultimately elected not to charge Trump’s son, Don Jr, with violating campaign finance laws by soliciting derogatory information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government in a meeting with a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign, the investigation made it plain that the Trump campaign had been open to help from Russia.When a publicist for the Russian oligarch who paid Trump to stage his Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013 wrote to tell Don Jr that a Russian prosecutor wanted to offer the Trump campaign “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia, calling it “part of Russia and its government’s support to Mr Trump”, Trump’s son replied, “If it’s what you say, I love it,” and got Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to attend the meeting.The indictment of Comey comes as Trump seeks to use the power of the justice department to punish a man he sees as a central figure in the Russia investigation he has continually described as “a witch-hunt” and “a hoax”.One of the ironies of the situation is that Comey, who cast himself as a rigidly non-partisan law enforcement official, played an outsized role in helping Trump to get elected in the first place.It was Comey who, as FBI director in the summer of 2016, decided not to recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server to conduct official business while secretary of state, but took it upon himself to hold a press conference to explain his decision.In that public forum, Comey said that while Clinton and her staff had been “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information” and there was “evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information,” he had concluded, as a former prosecutor himself, that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case”.That news conference offered Trump, who was then running against Clinton, ammunition to describe her use of a personal email server as reckless. Trump embraced that line of attack with glee, particularly after WikiLeaks published emails from Clinton campaign aides that had been stolen by Russian government hackers.Then, days before the November election, Comey suddenly announced that the FBI had reopened its investigation of Clinton’s own emails, after copies of some mail was found on the laptop of the disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, who was then married to Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin.Although Comey then announced, before election day, that the review of the additional emails had found nothing of substance, Clinton dropped in the polls in the closing days of the campaign, and narrowly lost to Trump.Another irony is that Comey, who has now been indicted by the new US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, is himself a former federal prosecutor in that office, who went on to serve as the US attorney for the southern district of New York, and deputy attorney general under George W Bush before later being appointed FBI director by Barack Obama in 2013.Donald Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, and FBI director, Kash Patel, welcomed the indictment of James Comey, who served as deputy attorney general during the George W Bush administration and was fired as FBI director by Donald Trump in 2017 after he told Congress that the FBI was conducting a counterintelligence investigation of Russian interference in the election of Trump as president in 2016.A justice department press release sent to reporters on Thursday began:
      Today, a federal grand jury has charged former FBI Director James Comey with serious crimes related to the disclosure of sensitive information. The indictment alleges that Comey obstructed a congressional investigation into the disclosure of sensitive information in violation of 18 USC 1505.
      The indictment also alleges that Comey made a false statement in violation of 18 USC 1001. Comey stated that he did not authorize someone at the FBI to be an anonymous source. According to the indictment that statement was false.
      The statement was followed by a quote from Bondi, which was posted on her official X account earlier. “No one is above the law,” the attorney general said. “Today’s indictment reflects this Department of Justice’s commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people. We will follow the facts in this case.”“Today, your FBI took another step in its promise of full accountability,” Patel added. “For far too long, previous corrupt leadership and their enablers weaponized federal law enforcement, damaging once proud institutions and severely eroding public trust. Every day, we continue the fight to earn that trust back, and under my leadership, this FBI will confront the problem head-on.“Nowhere was this politicization of law enforcement more blatant than during the Russiagate hoax, a disgraceful chapter in history we continue to investigate and expose. Everyone, especially those in positions of power, will be held to account – no matter their perch. No one is above the law.”Despite the intensity of those accusations from the most senior officials in the justice department, the statement included the following disclaimer, written in italics at the bottom of the page:“An indictment is merely an allegation. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.”In a sharp departure from the tradition that presidents should not comment on criminal cases, Donald Trump just celebrated the indictment of the former FBI director James Comey, in terms that could make it even easier for Comey’s lawyers to argue that he is the victim of selective prosecution.The indictment came days after Trump forced out a career prosecutor in the eastern district of Virginia who had determined that there was insufficient evidence to charge Comey, and posted a public instruction to Bondi to replace him with a White House aide, Lindsey Halligan, who could be trusted to prosecute Comey and other officials Trump holds a grudge against.“JUSTICE IN AMERICA!” Trump wrote on his social media platform. “One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to is James Comey, the former Corrupt Head of the FBI. Today he was indicted by a Grand Jury on two felony counts for various illegal and unlawful acts. He has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation,” the president added.He then signed off with his political slogan: “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”As the legality of Donald Trump’s tariffs remains in doubt, the president announced three more on Thursday.Writing on his social media platform, Trump said: “I will be imposing, as of October 1st, 2025, a 25% Tariff on all “Heavy (Big!) Trucks” made in other parts of the World. Therefore, our Great Large Truck Company Manufacturers, such as Peterbilt, Kenworth, Freightliner, Mack Trucks, and others, will be protected.”In a separate post, he added: “We will be imposing a 50% Tariff on all Kitchen Cabinets, Bathroom Vanities, and associated products, starting October 1st, 2025. Additionally, we will be charging a 30% Tariff on Upholstered Furniture.”Ilhan Omar, the Somali-born congresswoman from Minnesota, accused Donald Trump of inventing a story he told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, about having supposedly asked Somalia’s president if he would “take her back.”Omar is a naturalized US citizen who was born in Somalia and raised in a refugee camp in Kenya, but Trump has frequently treated her criticism of him as an affront to the United States from someone he still regards as a foreigner.Trump brought up Omar on Thursday in the course of a rambling answer to a question about Jasmine Crockett, a fellow Democratic congresswoman. When Trump was asked by a conservative reporter if Crockett should face “consequences” for saying, “When I see Ice, I see slave patrols,” the president repeated the racist claim he frequently makes about Black leaders who challenge him: “she is a very low IQ person.”He then brought up Omar, whose name he mispronounced, unprompted.“This is a low IQ person, who I can’t I can’t believe is a congressperson, between her and Ilman Omar,” Trump said. “I met the head of Somalia,” he continued, “And I suggested that maybe he’d like to take her back, and he didn’t want her.”As Trump’s vice-president, JD Vance, doubled over in laughter, and other members of his cabinet chuckled, the president said again: “He said, ‘I don’t want her.’”The White House was so proud of this quip that Trump’s special assistant, Margo Martin, posted video of it on an official government social media account.Omar responded by suggesting the president, who said last week he was not sure if Somalia even has a president, had made the whole thing up. “From denying Somalia had a president to making up a story, President Trump is a lying buffoon. No one should take this embarrassing fool seriously,” she wrote on X.Somalia’s president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, was in New York this week to address the United Nations, but he the US official he met with was not the president, but his advisor on African affairs, Massad Boulos, whose son is married to Trump’s daughter Tiffany.James Comey, the former FBI director and one of Donald Trump’s most frequent targets, was indicted on Thursday on one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstruction of justice, according to a person familiar with the matter, in the latest move in the president’s expansive retribution campaign against his political adversaries.“No one is above the law. Today’s indictment reflects this Department of Justice’s commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people. We will follow the facts in this case,” Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, tweeted on Thursday.The indictment came shortly after Trump instructed Bondi to “move now” to prosecute Comey and other officials he considers political foes, in an extraordinarily direct social media post trampling on the justice department’s tradition of independence.Lindsey Halligan, the president’s former lawyer who was recently sworn in as the US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, asked a grand jury to indict Comey for allegedly lying to Congress in testimony on 30 September 2020 before the five-year statute of limitations expires in the coming days. Comey’s testimony before the Senate judiciary committee was related to his handling of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.Halligan, who has no prosecutorial experience, was elevated to the post after Erik Siebert was forced out of the job for failing to bring indictments against Comey and Letitia James, the New York attorney general. More

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      ‘Like Amazon Prime but with human beings’: inside Trump’s deportation machine – podcast

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      Near the 13th hole of a golf course in Alexandria, rural Louisiana, the Guardian US’s southern bureau chief, Oliver Laughland, could see ‘a telling image of where America is at the moment’. On one side, golfers teeing off on a scorching hot day; on the other, in the distance and through a fence, ‘lines of people shackled at the feet and hands, loaded on to planes’.They were people being held at the Alexandria staging facility, a detention and removal centre that has become central to Donald Trump’s deportation regime.The centre’s role was revealed by a Guardian investigation of leaked data, detailing tens of thousands of flights transporting immigrants across the US, carried out for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Ice).Laughland and the immigration reporter Maanvi Singh talk about what the investigation tells us about the inner workings of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies – and concerns about the denial of due process and the ‘disappearance’ of people from lawyers and their families.Is the chaos and the cruelty by accident, asks Helen Pidd, or is it by design? More

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      White House tells agencies to prepare for firings if government shuts down

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      The White House is telling federal agencies to prepare large-scale firings of workers if the government shuts down next week in a partisan fight over spending plans – prompting the Democrats to accuse Donald Trump of intimidation tactics.In a memo released on Wednesday night, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said agencies should consider a reduction in force for federal programs whose funding would lapse next week, is not otherwise funded and is “not consistent with the president’s priorities”.That would be a much more aggressive step than in previous shutdowns, when federal workers not deemed essential were furloughed but returned to their jobs once the US Congress approved a new financial plan.A mass firing would eliminate employees positions, which would trigger yet another massive upheaval in a federal workforce that has already faced major rounds of cuts this year, leading with the dramatic intervention by Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) early in the second Trump administration.When asked by reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon about the possibility of a government shutdown, Trump said: “Could be, yeah, because the Democrats are crazed. They don’t know what they’re doing.”Asked whether he would agree to a request from Democrats for an extension of subsidies for the costs of healthcare plans under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, on which millions of Americans depend for health insurance – which has become the sticking point in negotiations over the government funding bill – Trump simply repeated his false claim that Democrats are insisting on funding “to give the money to illegal aliens”.Once any potential government shutdown ends, agencies are asked to revise their reduction in force plans “as needed to retain the minimal number of employees necessary to carry out statutory functions”, according to the memo, which was first reported by Politico.This move from the OMB significantly increases the consequences of a potential government shutdown next week and escalates pressure on the US Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, and the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, both New York Democrats.The two leaders have kept nearly all of their Democratic lawmakers united against a clean funding bill pushed by the US president and congressional Republicans that would keep the federal government operating for seven more weeks, demanding immediate improvements to health care in exchange for their votes to approve the short term plan, known as a continuing resolution (CR).“We will not be intimidated by your threat to engage in mass firings,” Jeffries wrote in a post on X shortly after the OMB memo was released. “Get lost.”Jeffries called Russ Vought, the head of the OMB, a “malignant political hack”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSchumer said in a statement that the OMB memo is an “attempt at intimidation” and predicted the “unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back.”“It has never been more important for the administration to be prepared for a shutdown if the Democrats choose to pursue one,” the memo reads, which also notes that the GOP’s signature law, a major tax and anti-immigration spending package, gives “ample resources to ensure that many core Trump Administration priorities will continue uninterrupted.” OMB noted that it had asked all agencies to submit their plans in case of a government shutdown by 1 August.Meanwhile, hundreds of federal employees who were fired in Musk’s cost-cutting blitz are being asked to return to work.The General Services Administration ( GSA) has given the employees – who managed government workspaces – until the end of the week to decide, according to an internal memo obtained by the Associated Press. Those who accept must report to work on 6 October after what amounts to a seven-month paid vacation.“Ultimately, the outcome was the agency was left broken and understaffed,” said Chad Becker, a former GSA real estate official. “They didn’t have the people they needed to carry out basic functions.” More

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      George Soros foundation hits back at Trump after report that DoJ plans to target group

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      The Open Society Foundations (OSF), the major philanthropic group funded by George Soros, has criticized the Trump administration for “politically motivated attacks on civil society” after a report that the justice department had instructed federal prosecutors to come up with plans to investigate the charity.The New York Times reported on Thursday that a lawyer in the office of Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, sent a memo to several federal prosecutors in attorney’s offices in California, New York, Washington DC, Chicago and Detroit, offering a range of charges to consider against the group. Those charges included racketeering, arson, wire fraud and material support for terrorism, the newspaper reported.The push comes as Trump has ramped up efforts to deploy the justice department to target his enemies. He has pledged to crack down on leftwing groups in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing and has repeatedly singled out Soros, a major funder of liberal groups, as a target. “We’re going to look into Soros, because I think it’s a Rico case against him and other people,” Trump said on 12 September, using an acronym to refer to racketeering charges. “Because this is more than like protests. This is real agitation.”In a statement, the OSF described the effort as “meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with and undermine the first amendment right to free speech”.“The Open Society Foundations unequivocally condemn terrorism and do not fund terrorism. Our activities are peaceful and lawful, and our grantees are expected to abide by human rights principles and comply with the law,” it said in a statement.“When power is abused to take away the rights of some people, it puts the rights of all people at risk. Our work in the United States is solely dedicated to strengthening democracy and upholding constitutional freedoms. We stand by the work we do to improve lives in the United States and across the world.”Trump has pledged to prosecute Soros and has increased pressure on the justice department to prosecute his political rivals. Last week, Trump forced out a top federal prosecutor in Virginia after it was determined there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against former FBI director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James.Trump installed a White House aide, Lindsey Halligan, in the role, and prosecutors are said to be nearing filing charges against Comey. More