Critics denounce Lindsey Graham for warning of ‘riots in the street’ if Trump indicted – live

Karine Jean-Pierre took a swipe at Washington politicians for failing to act on the Biden administration’s request for pandemic funding, and hastening the end of widespread free Covid-19 tests.

The White House has announced it is halting the distribution of free tests starting next month, and blames a lack of funding. The last day for orders will be 2 September.

White House press secretary Jean-Pierre said the lack of progress in the House towards funding a package to support testing, vaccines and therapies had led to “some tough decisions”:

We warned that congressional inaction would bring unacceptable trade-offs and harm our preparedness and response and guidance, and the consequences would worsen over time.

This is an action we’ve been forced to take that will help preserve our limited remaining supply, ensuring we have a limited supply of tests available in the fall.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is delivering her daily briefing and is taking pains to stress again that Joe Biden has not been briefed about, and has had no input in the justice department’s criminal investigation into Donald Trump.

The office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI) is currently sifting material seized in the FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, where he is alleged to have hidden improperly retained classified documents from his administration.

Without evidence, the former president has accused Biden, the ODNI, the FBI and anybody else he believes had a hand in the search and seizure, of a political witch-hunt against him.

But Jean-Pierre said this afternoon that Trump was off track:

We have been very clear that the president was not briefed in advance of the justice department’s recent actions. We have not been involved. We are committed to the independence as it relates to any matter the justice department has.

This is an ODNI decision that they have made. The president hasn’t been briefed on any of this. None of us have.

Biden plans Labor Day tour of battleground states

An “aspiring member” of the far-right Proud Boys extremist group was sentenced on Monday to more than four years in prison for storming the US Capitol during the 6 January riot, the Associated Press reports.

Joshua Pruitt, 40, came face-to-face with Chuck Schumer, the Democratic senate majority leaders as he joined fellow Donald Trump supporters in efforts to halt the certification of Joe Biden’s election win, the court heard.

“One look at Pruitt, and the leader of Senator Schumer’s security detail immediately saw the threat and hustled the 70-year-old senator down a hallway, having to change their evacuation route on a dime,” assistant US attorney Alexis Loeb wrote in a court filing.

US district court judge Timothy Kelly sentenced Pruitt, of Maryland, to four years and seven months of imprisonment followed by three years of supervised release.

Prosecutors wanted a five-year sentence for Pruitt, a bartender and personal trainer they described as “an aspiring Proud Boys member” whose intimidating figure made him an “ideal recruit” for the group.

Democrats’ apparently resurgent fortunes ahead of November’s midterms are pushing Republicans into panic-buying “aggressive” media slots in markets where believe they are lagging.

That’s the assessment from Axios, which has looked into Republican campaign spending across the country, including a $125m ad buy by House minority leader Kevin McCarthy’s political action committee, the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), in almost entirely Democrat held districts.

Of McCarthy’s spending, “$9 of every $10 [is] targeting seats carried by President Biden in 2020,” Axios reports.

“CLF is doubling down on offensive spending, even in places where Biden won by double digits two years ago”.

Biden’s approval ratings have climbed steadily since earlier this year, buoyed by a series of legislative successes including the Inflation Reduction Act, and a perceived backlash by more moderate voters to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade federal abortion protections.

Republicans who once assumed retaking control of the House in November was a given appear increasingly fearful that there will be no rout of the Democratic majority, and the rash of sudden spending is an attempt to shore up their support, Axios says.

“Democrats hope to harness voter energy around protecting abortion rights to motivate their base and appeal to independents in an election Republicans had hoped would focus on economic anxiety,” the media site says.

Critics are decrying as “irresponsible” and “shameful” South Carolina Republican Senator and enthusiastic Trump convert Lindsey Graham’s comments that there will be “riots in the street” if Donald Trump is prosecuted.

Graham twice made the reference when he went on Fox News’s Sunday Night in America show last evening, the Washington Post reports.

Richard Haass, president of the nonpartisan think tank the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank, tweeted that Graham’s “prediction that violence may follow any prosecution of the former Potus may not qualify legally as incitement but it is irresponsible all the same as it will be seen by some as a call for violence. Public officials are obligated to call for the rule of law.”

Republican Joe Walsh, described by the Post as the former congressman and a tea party adherent turned frequent Trump critic, also tweeted “a message for Graham” that: “Yes, if Trump is indicted, there will be violence. I see & hear those threats all the time. But threats of violence should NEVER stop the pursuit of justice. NEVER. And you KNOW that Lindsey. But you’re too much of a coward to say that. Shameful.”

And the Post added that Trump posted the Fox News interview without comment to his Truth Social platform.

I’m handing the blog over to Richard Luscombe now, fresh from his disappointment at Cape Canaveral at seeing NASA’s Artemis rocket not lift off from the Kennedy Space Center, but ready to take you through US political news developments for the next few hours.

US intelligence community review of risk posed by documents seized from Trump is “appropriate” – White House

Interim summary

In the Department of Justice’s filing in federal court in south Florida today, relating to the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago and seizure of classified documents apparently secreted there by former president Donald Trump, it has told the court it will comply with the request to provide “a more detailed receipt” for property seized during the search on August 8.

The government has promised “a sealed, supplemental filing” on this with the court “as well as a ‘particularized notice indicating the status of [the United States’] review of the seized property, including any filter review conducted by the privilege review team and any dissemination of materials beyond the privilege review team’,” according to the filing.

More from Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe on the legal case around the FBI search and seizure of classified documents from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club-resort and home.

Tribe v Oz

And Tribe does not think highly of the federal judge, Aileen Cannon in south Florida, nominated by Trump, who is handling the former president’s lawsuit against the government over the FBI search.

Lawyers for Georgia’s Brian Kemp had argued that immunities related to his position as governor protect him from having to testify before the special grand jury that’s investigating possible illegal attempts by then-president Donald Trump and others to influence the 2020 election in the state.

There are more details from the Associated Press, which reports that Georgia’s Fulton county superior court judge, Robert McBurney, who’s overseeing the special grand jury, disagreed and said the governor must appear before the panel.

But he did agree to a request from Kemp’s lawyers to delay that testimony until after the November 8 election, in which the Republican governor faces a rematch with Democrat Stacey Abrams.

The governor is in the midst of a re-election campaign and this criminal grand jury investigation should not be used by the district attorney, the governor’s opponent, or the governor himself to influence the outcome of that election.

The sound and prudent course is to let the election proceed without further litigation or other activity concerning the Governor’s involvement in the special grand jury’s work,” McBurney wrote earlier today.

But once the election is over, McBurney wrote that he expects Kemp’s lawyers to “promptly make arrangements for his appearance.”

A delay could increase the likelihood that Trump will be a declared presidential candidate by the time the investigation moves toward its conclusion, further raising the political stakes.

The investigation is one of several that could have serious legal consequences for the former president.

A statement from the governor’s office says McBurney “acknowledged the potential political impact of the timing of these proceedings and correctly paused” Kemp’s involvement until after the election. The governor plans to work with Willis’ team and the judge “to ensure a full accounting of the Governor’s limited role in the issues being investigated is available to the special grand jury.”

A spokesperson for Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But:

Kamala Harris chairs the National Space Council and has been at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida all morning, only to be disappointed by the postponement of Nasa’s milestone, though unmanned, test flight of its rocket that, for the first time in 50 years, can ferry humans to and from the moon.

The White House informed the media moments ago that, since the launch was scrubbed this morning because of technical problems, the US vice-president no longer plans to deliver a speech at 12pm, as previously planned.

The next opportunity for the launch of Nasa’s Artemis 1 rocket is early afternoon this Friday 2 September if the engine issue that sunk today’s plan is remedied.

Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff had earlier met astronauts and been given a tour of a lot of the relevant hardware at the space center as well as going out on to the official observation deck to see Artemis as it was poised to launch.

They are now about to return to Washington DC aboard Air Force Two.

You wouldn’t have thought that this would or should be a “fight” these days but as the Guardian has been charting extensively, a battle to stop the erosion of voting rights and to ensure properly conducted elections is exactly what is going on in America.

Colorado secretary of state Jena Griswold’s most recent tweet is stark in its simplicity.

She spoke to my Washington DC colleague Lauren Gambino last week and warned that: “What we can expect from the extreme Republicans running [for office in this November’s midterm elections] across this country is to undermine free and fair elections for the American people, strip Americans of the right to vote, refuse to address security breaches and, unfortunately, be more beholden to Mar-a-Lago than the American people.”

You can read the full interview about the threats to US democracy that we published yesterday, here.

And in case there was any doubt about the seriousness of the issue, the Guardian US team collates our coverage on voting rights on a special page entitled The fight to vote, no less. Our Sam Levine in New York does a lot of the reporting on this issue.

The US justice department’s search of former president Donald Trump’s Florida home this month turned up a “limited” number of documents subject to attorney-client privilege, federal prosecutors said in a court filing this morning, Reuters reports.

The DoJ is updating us in gobbets. This is part of its process where intelligence officials are conducting a classification review of materials seized from Mar-a-Lago during a search by the FBI on 8 August.

As the government sifts the materials, a partially redacted affidavit released last Friday made the case, as Hugo Lowell reported for Guardian US, that the FBI needed to forcibly retrieve the United States government’s most sensitive secrets, especially after it came to suspect Trump and his team were holding on to classified documents despite repeated efforts – including with a subpoena – to secure their return.

Most pressing, according to the affidavit, was that the FBI had identified probable cause that documents containing national defense information were scattered across Mar-a-Lago, potentially jeopardizing intelligence gathering and revealing the identities of human clandestine sources.

You can read more of that report here. And here are Hugo’s five takeaways from Friday’s developments.

The Associated Press adds that the DoJ has now completed its review of potentially privileged documents seized in the search.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp ‘must testify’ before a special grand jury – but …

Here’s a pithy take on what’s going down in the lawsuit in south Florida over the FBI search for hoarded government secrets at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

It’s from Harvard law professor Larry Tribe commenting on the federal judge dealing with the lawsuit and a piece in the New York Times.

Federal judge Aileen Cannon, who was nominated by Donald Trump in late 2020, issued an order two days ago that set out the issues and timetable this week involving the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.

To refresh, as the affidavit made public on Friday noted: “The government is conducting a criminal investigation concerning the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces, as well as the unlawful concealment or removal of government records.”

And as my colleague Hugo Lowell reported, the affidavit indicated that the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago earlier this month after speaking to a significant number of witnesses and finding probable cause that national defense information and evidence of obstruction existed at the former president’s property.

Judge Cannon’s order last Saturday came after Trump sued the government over the search and demanded that an overseer – or special master – be appointed to review what’s going on.

She noted her “preliminary intent to appoint a special master in this case” and set this Thursday, 1 September, for a hearing on the case, at 1pm in federal court in West Palm Beach – just across the bridge over the lagoon that separates the millionaires’ and billionaires’ ocean-facing playground of Palm Beach from the more plebeian West Palm Beach

Cannon also asked the defendant in the case – the USA as manifested in the Department of Justice – to provide on or before Tuesday 30 August, “under seal”, a “more detailed receipt for property specifying all property seized pursuant to the search warrant executed on August 8, 2022” and a notice “indicating the status of Defendant’s review of the seized property, including any filter review conducted by the privilege review team and any dissemination of materials beyond the privilege review team.”

Department of Justice squares off against Donald Trump’s team over FBI search at Mar-a-Lago

US DoJ squares off with Trump team over seized records