President tries to downplay issue amid growing outrage from conservatives
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of US politics as the furore over the Epstein files continues to grip the country with the unusual public spectacle of normally-loyal House speaker Mike Johnson breaking with Donald Trump with his calls to make the files public.
It was a rare moment of friction between Trump and the speaker, a top ally on Capitol Hill, and came as the president faces growing backlash from conservatives who had expected him to make public everything known about Epstein, who killed himself in 2019 while in federal custody as he faced sex-trafficking charges.
Vice-president JD Vance on Wednesday will head to the swing political turf of northeastern Pennsylvania to begin selling president Donald Trump’s sweeping budget-and-policy package in a working-class district that could see a ferocious congressional campaign next year.
Adelita Grijalva won the Democratic House primary in Arizona to succeed her father, beating a young social media activist in a closely watched election seen as a test of the party’s generational divide.
Asked by a reporter if that would be grounds for getting rid of Fed chairman Jerome Powell, Trump answered affirmatively. “I think it sort of is, because if you look at his testimony … he’s not talking about the problem,” Trump said. “It’s a big problem.” Trump has repeatedly demanded that Powell cut the short-term interest rate that the central bank controls, in part because the president believes it will lower the government’s borrowing costs.
The Trump administration decided to withdraw half of the 4,000 national guard troops it dispatched to Los Angeles chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell confirmed to the Guardian.
A flight carrying immigrants deported from the US has landed in Eswatini, the homeland security department announced, in a move that follows the supreme court lifting limits on deporting migrants to third countries.
In a rambling set of remarks at an AI and energy investment summit, Trump veered wildly off-topic to praise two partisan, conservative reporters in attendance and made false claims about China having just one wind farm and about his uncle having once taught Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.
Mike Waltz, who was ousted as national security adviser after mistakenly adding a journalist to a group chat on Signal about strikes on Yemen, had his confirmation hearing to become UN ambassador.
The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, asked Israel to “aggressively” investigate the murder of a Palestinian American citizen who was beaten to death by Israeli settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
