Judge to appoint ‘special master’ to review Mar-a-Lago documents – follow live

Senator Bernie Sanders said on Sunday that he believes Democrats have a “reasonable chance” of maintaining control of the Senate in the fallout from the US Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the constitutional right to abortion care, and the wave of state-level anti-abortion laws that have followed.

“That decision is going to reverberate very poorly for Republicans who think that women do not have a right to control their own bodies,” he told ABC’s This Week.

Democratic campaigns are spending heavily on abortion rights messaging – and linking Republicans to draconian laws on reproductive health and bodily autonomy – in the weeks ahead of midterm elections. DNC chair Jaime Harrison told CBS’s Face the Nation that abortion rights will be “extremely important” in November.

While some GOP candidates are now softening their hardline anti-abortion agendas, Republican-led efforts to restrict abortion access and criminalise care are going in effect across the US, where abortion is outlawed in 12 states and more than 20 million women have lost access to care in the two months after the Supreme Court ruling.

Democratic candidate for Texas governor Beto O’Rourke has suspended his campaign events after being hospitalized with a bacterial infection, he announced on Sunday.

“While my symptoms have improved, I will be resting at home in El Paso in accordance with the doctors’ recommendations,” he said.

He was discharged from the hospital, according to his campaign.

Maryland’s Republican Governor Larry Hogan said there is “no question” when asked whether there are strains of authoritarianism in the GOP.

“I’m one of the ones speaking out,” he said.

Officials and experts are meanwhile sounding the alarm over a surge in Republican-led efforts to subvert democratic elections and a wave of candidates who denied 2020 election results and promoted conspiracy theories.

Bernie Sanders rebuked GOP criticism of Joe Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in federal student debt per borrower, contrasting their outrage with their support for Donald Trump’s 2017 tax plan that slashed the corporate tax rate from from 35 per cent to 21 per cent.

“I don’t hear any of these Republicans squawking when we give massive tax breaks to billionaires,” the Vermont progressive senator told ABC’s This Week on Sunday.

“I know it is shocking … to some Republicans that the government actually, on occasion, do something to benefit working families and low-income people,” he said. “Suddenly when we do something for working people, it is a terrible idea.”

Election experts and secretaries of state are sounding the alarm, warning that an explosion of legislation – and a wave of prominent election deniers running for office to put it in place – give antidemocratic actors the tools to do what spurious attempts to overturn the 2020 results could not, and with a greater chance of success.

“The perverse creativity of election subversion is growing,” according to one expert.

The Independent’s Alex Woodward reports:

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, among Republican critics of Donald Trump, echoed other GOP officials calling for “transparency” into the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.

But he has sought to distance himself from full-throated defence of the former president, and has not echoed their allegations that the investigation was politically motivated. He previously called GOP reactions “just reactions” and said the search was justified.

“I think some Republicans are saying, ‘without you showing us more to it, we don’t – we think it may be political,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.

“On the one hand, it could be, as some Republicans think, just, you know, just a political witch hunt,” he said. “On the other hand, it could be really serious, you know, federal felonies. We don’t know that yet.”

The Justice Department has warned a federal magistrate judge that the safety of a “significant” number of witnesses would be endangered by forcing federal prosecutors to further reveal parts of an affidavit which led to the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago.

The warning came on Friday, in the form of a previously sealed memo explaining the redactions that officials made to the document.

Prosecutors warn that “the materials marked for redaction must remain sealed to protect the safety and privacy of a signficant number of civilian witnesses”.

The Independent’s John Bowden reports from Washington:

A federal judge in Florida has suggested that she might be inclined to grant Trump his request to have a “special master” review documents seized by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago

Judge Aileen M Cannon signalled on Saturday that she agreed with Trump’s legal team to appoint an impartial third-party lawyer to review the documents. However, she added that her order “should not be construed as a final determination on plaintiff’s motion”.

She gave the government until Tuesday to present its arguments in the case and scheduled a court hearing on Thursday.

The new poll from USA Today/Ipsos found that 59 per cent of Republican respondents want Trump to run in the 2024 presidential election, while 82 per cent think he can win.

The poll was performed between 18 August and 22 August – notably, after the FBI search at his Mar-a-Lago compound and Justice Department suspicion of obstruction and national security concerns – among 2,3445 respondents.

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu repeatedly asked to know what was inside the redacted FBI affidavit for probable cause to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property while also ackowledging that the whole point of redacting them was to protect sensitive information that was at risk in the first place.

“I think I speak for everyone when we’re all pretty disappointed to see it was almost all redacted,” he told CNN on Sunday. “I get you got to redact certain things here and there, but you had pages upon pages upon pages redacted, to the point where you say, well, what’s the point?”