Trump team returns to court over request for special master – live

Federal agents have reportedly raided two New York properties belonging to a Russian oligarch and close ally of the country’s president, Vladimir Putin.

According to NBC New York, teams from the FBI, homeland security department and New York police department were spotted Thursday at a Park Avenue apartment block in Manhattan, and a Long Island house linked to Viktor Vekselberg, billionaire founder of Russian energy conglomerate the Renova Group.

Vekselberg has been sanctioned by the US since 2018, and Spanish police and FBI agents seized his $80m superyacht Tango in Mallorca in April.

In the UK, there have also been calls for the Tate to cut ties with Vekselberg, a prominent donor to numerous western institutions, including the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.

In New York on Thursday, observers witnessed agents removing boxes from the Park Lane apartment and residence in Southampton, a waterfront Long Island town. NBC said Vekselberg has been the subject of a justice department investigation surrounding allegations of bank fraud, although no charges have been filed.

Spokespeople for the FBI and department of homeland security confirmed their agents were at the properties on Thursday but declined further comment. The NYPD did not return a request for comment.

Vekselberg, who was born in Ukraine, is banned from doing business with US entities. Previously, he gave testimony to the Mueller inquiry looking into then-president Donald Trump’s business ties with Russia.

Martin Pengelly

A bronze plaque commemorating the Ku Klux Klan should be removed from the science centre at West Point, a congressional commission said, even though it falls outside the panel’s remit because the racist terror group was formed after the American civil war.

The Naming Commission was established in March 2021, in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd and the protests for racial justice it inspired.

The eight-member panel is tasked with recommending which US military assets should be renamed, to remove associations with Confederates who fought to maintain slavery.

In May, the commissioners released part one of their report, concerning the renaming of military bases – a process opposed by conservatives including Donald Trump.

For one example, the commission said Fort Benning, a major infantry base in Georgia named for a Confederate general, should be renamed Fort Hal and Julie Moore, after a Vietnam-era soldier and his wife, who changed the way the US army notifies next of kin when soldiers die in combat.

In part two of its report, published this week, the commission considered the US Military Academy, at West Point in New York, and the US Naval Academy, at Annapolis in Maryland.

Regarding West Point, the report said: “On the triptych at the entrance to Bartlett Hall, there is a mounted marker bearing the words, ‘Ku Klux Klan’. The marker falls outside the remit of the commission. However, there are clearly ties in the KKK to the Confederacy.”

The Klan was founded in Tennessee in 1865, in the aftermath of the defeat of the slave-holding south. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a general whose troops massacred Black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow in April 1864, was one of the first Klan leaders.’

Read more:

Kellye SoRelle, general counsel for the extremist Oath Keepers group, has been indicted and arrested for alleged involvement in the January 6 Capitol riot, at which a mob of Donald Trump supporters attempted to halt the certification as president of Joe Biden.

SoRelle has been charged with conspiracy to “obstruct, influence, and impede an official proceeding”, according to court papers filed on Thursday.

Several other members of the Oath Keepers, who describe themselves as patriots, have been criminally charged in connection with the riot.

We’ll have more details soon. Meanwhile, Politico has SoRelle’s indictment here.

Ed Pilkington

My colleague Ed Pilkington has taken a look at Sarah Palin’s defeat in Alaska, and the remarkable swing in voting that has lifted the Democratic party’s fortunes in a traditionally Republican state:

A special election for Alaska’s only seat in the US House was won by the Democrat Mary Peltola, delivering a blow to the former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s hopes of a political comeback and putting wind in the sails of the Democratic party as it heads for November’s midterm elections.

Peltola’s victory, by 51.5% to 48.5%, marks a stunning turnaround in a state known for its solid conservative leanings. The single House seat was held for almost 50 years by the Republican Don Young, until his death in March.

Donald Trump, who endorsed Palin and campaigned for her at a rally in Anchorage, won Alaska by 10 points in the 2020 presidential election. That marks a swing of 13 points to Peltola’s three-point lead.

Analysts pored over the results of the vote, which was held two weeks ago under a new ranked-choice system but finalized on Wednesday. It was being seen as a significant outcome on several levels – as a potential response to the recent US supreme court overturning of the constitutional right to abortion, to Trump’s enduring grip on the Republican party, and to Palin herself.

The Washington Post pointed out that Democrats have shown gains over their 2020 margins in all five special elections held since abortion right enshrined in Roe v Wade in 1973 was slung out by the Trump-supercharged supreme court in June. Of the five contests, the Alaska result showed the biggest surge in Democratic support.

Democratic strategists will seek to capitalize on this tendency going into the midterms. Prominent Republicans had hoped ending abortion rights would work in their favour but the exact opposite appears to be happening – a progressive wave, given overwhelming national support for the right to terminate a pregnancy in at least some circumstances.

Palin, who left the Alaska governor’s mansion in 2009, had been hoping to use the special election as a stepping stone towards a return to the national political stage. The flamboyant conservative, who styled herself as a “mama grizzly” and who has been seen as a precursor of Trump’s populism, was thrown into the limelight as John McCain’s vice-presidential running mate against Barack Obama and Joe Biden in 2008.

Read the full story:

At least some of Donald Trump’s key financial papers will be available to a House panel investigating the former president’s “unprecedented conflicts of interest, self-dealing, and foreign financial ties”.

New York Democrat Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House committee on oversight and reform, issued a statement Thursday stating that subpoenas to Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars USA, had yielded “critical” documents, and halted his legal action to protect them:

After numerous court victories, I am pleased that my committee has now reached an agreement to obtain key financial documents that former president Trump fought for years to hide from Congress.

In April 2019, the oversight committee issued a lawful subpoena for financial records as part of our investigation into President Trump’s unprecedented conflicts of interest, self-dealing, and foreign financial ties.

After facing years of delay tactics, the committee has now reached an agreement with the former president and his accounting firm, Mazars USA, to obtain critical documents. These documents will inform the committee’s efforts to get to the bottom of former president Trump’s egregious conduct and ensure that future presidents do not abuse their position of power for personal gain.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, testified to the committee in 2019 that financial statements falsely represented the then-president’s assets and liabilities, and Trump “inflated his total assets when it served his purposes” or, at other times, “deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes”.

Cohen, who served a short prison term after pleading guilty to evading taxes, lying to Congress and facilitating campaign finance crimes, also faced questions from New York prosecutors last year investigating Trump’s business dealings.

There is no indication that the papers being turned over to the House panel include the tax returns that Trump has long refused to release.

Last month a federal appeals court ruled that another House committee looking into Trump’s finances, ways and means, could demand to see the returns stretching back several years, but Trump’s legal team is expected to appeal.

Martin Pengelly

After a federal judge said New York could implement new gun restrictions passed after the US supreme court struck down a century-old law, the state attorney general saluted “a victory in our efforts to protect New Yorkers”.

“Responsible gun control measures save lives and any attempts by the gun lobby to tear down New York’s sensible gun control laws will be met with fierce defense of the law,” Letitia James said on Wednesday night.

In June, in the aftermath of mass shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, the conservative-dominated US supreme court overturned a New York law passed in 1911.

The law said anyone wanting to carry a handgun in public had to prove “proper cause”.

Justice Clarence Thomas said the 111-year-old law was a violation of the second amendment right to bear arms and also the 14th amendment, which made second-amendment rights applicable to the states:

Apart from a few late-19th-century outlier jurisdictions, American governments simply have not broadly prohibited the public carry of commonly used firearms for personal defense.

In dissent, Stephen Breyer, a liberal, wrote: “In 2020, 45,222 Americans were killed by firearms. Since the start of this year there have been 277 reported mass shootings – an average of more than one per day.”

The same source, the Gun Violence Archive, now puts that total at 450.

Read the full story:

Donald Trump’s push to have an independent “special master” review highly classified documents seized in an FBI raid on his Florida mansion last month returns to court today, amid extraordinary legal wrangling over the criminal probe into the former president.

In a court filing last night, ahead of an afternoon hearing at which district judge Aileen Cannon will consider his request, Trump’s lawyers argued that it shouldn’t be a surprise that a US president would have possession of top secret material.

“Simply put, the notion that presidential records would contain sensitive information should have never been cause for alarm,” the filing said.

Because of that, they say, there was no justification for the FBI raid at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, and no basis for a criminal probe into why he had such documents.

It is not, however, quite that simple.

In its own filing opposing a special master on Tuesday, the justice department said Trump had no business holding on to government-owned documents the National Archives had been trying to retrieve from him for months after he left office.

Trump’s team did not answer why he retained them.

And they suggested Trump, or his representatives, tried to obstruct the investigation by denying that any classified documents remained at Mar-a-Lago, then hiding them, months before federal agents found them there, some in a drawer of Trump’s desk.

Notably, Trump’s legal team made no mention of the debunked claim he has espoused publicly, and without evidence, that he had “declassified” the documents before his term in office ended.

Judge Cannon, a Trump-appointee who has previously indicated she is sympathetic to his request for a special master, will attempt to sort it all out in the hearing scheduled to begin at 1pm.

Many analysts believe Trump’s request is a characteristic delaying tactic while he mulls another run at the White House in 2024.

Others warn there is no guarantee of an early resolution. “The judge is unlikely to rule from the bench, and she will probably take the case under advisement and review all of the written and oral arguments”, Carl Tobias, Williams chair in law at the University of Richmond’s school of law, told the Guardian.

We’ll bring you developments from the hearing as we get them.

Meanwhile, here’s Lloyd Green for the Guardian on Trump’s questionable legal strategy: