Six green card holders in Texas charged in federal crackdown on illegal voting – as it happened

This concludes out live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:

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  As part of a $2.8bn package of military aid, the Trump administration plans to send Israel a type of one-ton bombs that were withheld by the Biden administration over concerns that they were being used to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

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  Donald Trump “threw a tantrum” when he heard that Democratic congresswoman Joyce Beatty, a trustee of the Kennedy Center whose lawsuit forced Trump’s name to be removed from the facade of the memorial, had again prevailed in court.

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  A televised Michigan Senate debate in Detroit on Tuesday was distinctly one-sided, because the Democratic nominee, Dr Abdul El-Sayed turned up, while his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, chose not to attend.

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  Todd Blanche, the US attorney general, alerted reporters at the White House to stand by for what he called “a big development” in the federal crackdown on voting by non-citizens to be announced by Ryan Raybould, the US attorney for the Northern District of Texas. When it came, however, Raybould’s announcement, that his office had charged six lawful permanent residents and one undocumented immigrant for voting in federal elections over the past eight years, hardly lived up to the billing.

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A televised Michigan Senate debate in Detroit on Tuesday was distinctly one-sided, because the Democratic nominee, Dr Abdul El-Sayed turned up, while his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, chose not to attend.

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screenshot from a televised Michigan Senate debate that only one of the two candidates, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, attended on Tuesday. An empty podium was left for Republican Mike Rogers, who chose not to attend.”,”caption”:”A screenshot from a televised Michigan Senate debate that only one of the two candidates, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, attended on Tuesday. An empty podium was left for Republican Mike Rogers, who chose not to attend.”,”credit”:”Photograph: Fox 2 Detroit”}},{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement”,”html”:”

In his opening statement, standing across from an empty podium reserved for Rogers, which El-Sayed’s campaign clipped and posted on YouTube, the Democrat argued that the absent Republican “took the time to go to Dallas… to give a speech at a convention held in the interest of Donald Trump, but he didn’t have the time to spend an hour with us in Detroit.”

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After the debate, when a reporter began a question for El-Sayed by saying, “Obviously the elephant in the room tonight or lack thereof,” the candidate cut in to say: “No the elephant was not in the room. The elephant elephant decided that they did not want to be in the room.”

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“Although the elephants were all in the room in Dallas,” he said, referring to the Republican midterm convention staged by Trump last week that Rogers attended. “It’s wild to me that this guy is more interested in going to speak for what, six minutes and 48 seconds in Dallas than he is to have 60 minutes with Michiganders here in Detroit. But it tells you who he is. He’s a coward.”

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“If I were him, I wouldn’t debate me either,” El-Sayed added, continuing to hammer his opponent for refusing to debate. “But here he is because Daddy Trump has him stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to Canadian tariff wars or actual wars that we’re all having to pay for. And he doesn’t want to have to answer.”

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In a social media video released on Tuesday, senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat considering a run for the presidency, called for AI developers to slow down their work until government safeguards can be put in place.

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“We are hearing extremely clear warnings from the people building frontier AI models about the risks,” Van Hollen said. “The people building this technology are concerned about the loss of human control. We need to pump the brakes until we have rules in place to stop this technology from doing grave harm. And that includes implementing mandatory safeguards and a comprehensive testing regime.”

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“Make no mistake, putting these federal guard rails in place does not absolve the AI corporations from the harm done by their products,” he continued. “They must be held accountable under our existing civil and criminal laws. That said, the government has a duty to prevent grave harm from happening in the first place.”

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“We need Congress to act. It’s not enough to leave it to Donald Trump. Yesterday he called into a conference of Silicon Valley bigwigs and said that concerns about AI safety are a hoax,” the senator added.

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“The Silicon Valley bigwig investors and tech oligarchs that have bankrolled Donald Trump back into the White House didn’t do it because they all became MAGA overnight,” Van Hollen said. “They did it because there was an implicit deal. In return for their support and for funding his vanity projects like his obscene ballroom, they wanted something in return – a free hand on AI policy.”

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As part of a $2.8bn package of military aid, the Trump administration plans to send Israel a type of one-ton bombs that were withheld by the Biden administration over concerns that they were being used to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

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The aid package, first reported by the Washington Post, includes 20,000 Mk84s as well as 20,000 BLU-117s, US officials told the Associated Press on Tuesday.

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Congress has been informally notified about the pending deal, most of which is to be paid for with foreign military financing — in which American taxpayer dollars are given to Israel which in turn uses it to purchase the weapons from US weapons makers.

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As soon as Trump returned to office in 2025, he lifted a hold on one shipment of MK-84 bombs to Israel imposed by the Biden administration in 2024. In the first months of Israel’s offensive on Gaza, following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack, the Biden administration had sent thousands of the 2,000-pound bombs to Israel.

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American-made one-ton bombs have been used to hundreds of times in deadly strikes in Gaza and Lebanon. The New York Times reported in late 2023 that Israel had routinely dropped MK-84 bombs in areas of Gaza it had designated as safe for civilians.

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Trevor Ball, a former explosive-ordnance-disposal technician for the US army who studies open-source images of civilian harm caused by US weapons, told the Post that the Israeli military uses MK-84 bombs to destroy entire buildings in pursuit of suspected militants. “If Hezbollah or whoever is in a building, an MK-84 will bring down the whole building,” Ball said.

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“I don’t believe the U.S. taxpayer should continue to arm Netanyahu’s government with deadly military equipment,” Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor and a Guardian US columnist, wrote on Bluesky in response to the reported arms sales.

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“I believe Netanyahu is a war criminal and that his government has committed genocide in Gaza. This doesn’t make me antisemitic.”

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Earlier on Tuesday, Todd Blanche, the US attorney general, alerted reporters at the White House to stand by for what he called “a big development” in the federal crackdown on voting by non-citizens to be announced by Ryan Raybould, the US attorney for the Northern District of Texas.

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When it came, however, Raybould’s announcement, that his office had charged six lawful permanent residents and one undocumented immigrant for voting in federal elections over the past eight years, hardly lived up to the billing.

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While six of those charged cast ballots in the 2024 general election, the impact of their votes was almost immeasurably small, given that two of them cast provisional ballots that were not counted, and 11,388,670 other Texans voted in that election.

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Donald Trump, whose false claim that voting by non-citizens is rampant inspired the investigation, won the state by a margin of 1,558,347 votes over his nearest rival, Kamala Harris.

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Of the four illegal votes that were apparently counted in error, three were cast by green card holders from Nigeria, India and Mexico, who might have wrongly thought they were eligible to vote, and just one by an undocumented immigrant from Mexico.

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Lawful permanent residents are not allowed to vote in federal elections, but they are permitted to vote in local elections in the District of Columbia and in some jurisdictions of three US states: California, Maryland and Vermont.

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Still, the administration framed the criminal charges against the handful of ineligible voters in Texas as significant and even invited a Fox News crew to film the arrest of one of the green-card holders: a 27-year-old from Nigeria who allegedly voted in 2018, two years after becoming a lawful permanent resident.

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The video was broadcast multiple times on the president’s favorite network on Tuesday.

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screenshot from a Fox News report on the arrest of green-card holder in Texas accused of illegally voting in 2018.”,”caption”:”A screenshot from a Fox News report on Tuesday, showing the arrest of green-card holder in Texas accused of illegally voting in 2018.”,”credit”:”Photograph: Fox News”}},{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement”,”html”:”

“I was reliably told this never happens,” the Fox host Will Cain said with sarcasm after a report on the arrest. “We know now at least it’s happened seven times.”

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Donald Trump is taking the ruling on Tuesday by a federal judge that his name can not be added, in any form, to the exterior of the Kennedy Center, which is a memorial to the late president, about as well as you might expect.

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Writing on his social media platform, Trump said that adding his name to the memorial for the assassinated 35th US president was a non-negotiable demand and the performing arts center would be closed immediately and not renovated at all if the US supreme court did not intervene to overturn the order against that issued by district court judge Christopher Cooper.

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inscription on the facade of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington has remained covered by a tarp since June, when the administration reluctantly complied with a court order to remove Donald Trump’s name, which had been added to it.”,”caption”:”The inscription on the facade of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington has remained covered by a tarp since June, when the administration reluctantly complied with a court order to remove Donald Trump’s name, which had been added to it.”,”credit”:”Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters”}},{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement”,”html”:”

After Cooper reiterated his previous ruling “that Congress named the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for President John F. Kennedy alone”, Trump wrote that the center would be closed immediately and what he described as “a very large and complex” renovation “cannot begin until such time as” Cooper’s ruling on the name is overturned by an appeals court.

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“If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Trump wrote, in his usual idiosyncratic style, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”

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The ruling by Cooper, who was nominated by former president Barack Obama, made it plain that he sees no scope for reconsidering his decision that adding Trump’s name would simply be illegal.

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Four months ago, this Court declared that Congress named the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for President John F. Kennedy alone. It came to this conclusion for a simple reason: The federal law that created the Kennedy Center permitted no other result. In 1983, Congress amended that law to guarantee “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” 20 U.S.C. § 76j(b)(1). The Court ruled that the decision by the Kennedy Center’s Board of Trustees to rename the institution in honor of President Trump violated that congressional prohibition and others. And the Court ordered the permanent removal of the President’s name from the front portico of the main building, as well as any other physical or digital signage or official materials.

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“Yet the drama at the Kennedy Center continues,” Cooper added, before barring the Trump-appointed board from enacting a resolution to add Trump’s name to the center’s facade, calling it the Trump Kennedy Center and also naming the plaza outside the center for Trump.

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“Defendants are hereby enjoined from inscribing ‘renovated and restored by Donald J. Trump’ on the main building or renaming the campus the ‘President Donald J. Trump Plaza.’ Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Cooper wrote.

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  Donald Trump today blasted the supreme court’s ruling which blocked his long-sought executive order which curbs mail-in voting. The president called mail-in voting – which he has used on several occasions to cast a ballot – “a laughing stock” across the world. He has routinely claimed, without evidence, that the voting method is prone to fraud. “The Supreme Court has really let our Country down! Certain Justices are petrified of these crazed and depraved Democrats, and are totally unable to show the courage necessary to save our America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. The president suggested that the justices he nominated for the bench – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – are not “the people I interviewed to serve” but “merely a shell of their original selves”.

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  Todd Blanche, the attorney general, defended the president’s earlier criticism of the justices on the bench who ruled to block his order. “He [Trump] is very frustrated,” Blanche said at a White House press conference. “He has every right, and indeed he should communicate his concerns with the supreme court whenever he has them. This isn’t the first time that he’s done it, and it won’t be the last.”

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  Blanche also dismissed calls to investigate the contributions of a Russian oligarch, who is close to Putin, and who helped pay for Donald Trump Jr’s wedding in May. “The president doesn’t know who this person is. I think other members of the family don’t know who this person is. The president’s son has said that he’s a very close friend,” the attorney general told reporters. “When you say, ‘am I investigating?’ Am I investigating what? And when you say this person is a friend of Putin, I don’t even know if that’s true or not.”

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  However, Democrats on the House oversight committee have started to investigate possible ties between the Trump administration and Kremlev. Congressman Robert Garcia, the panel’s top Democrat, has asked Susie Wiles – the White House chief of staff, to provide documents, records and communications between the White House and Trump Jr about Kremlev, among other requests. More here

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  Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, said that Congress has “been asleep at the wheel” when it comes to AI regulation. Sanders decried the speed of the technology’s evolution at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington today. The senator has proposed bicameral legislation with congressman Greg Casar to permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence, and said that the pledges this week from leading AI company CEOs for the industry to “slow down” are encouraging but ultimately not enough. “When the future of humanity is at stake, we need binding international safety rules, not voluntary standards from the industry,” Sanders added.

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  A federal judge has ruled that Donald Trump’s name must stay off the facade of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, blocking an effort by the center’s Trump-appointed board to restore his name to the building. The judge also said the board cannot proceed with plans to rename ​the campus where it sits the “President Donald J. Trump ‌Plaza”. Earlier, the board voted to immediately close the institution citing safety and financial concerns.

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  And on Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats blocked a major cryptocurrency regulation bill, saying it did not contain enough constraints on Donald Trump and other government officials’ ability to profit from digital assets. A vote to advance the measure, known as the CLARITY act, failed by a 49-50 margin, with all Democrats and three Republicans opposed. The product of months of negotiation, the bill would created the first ever regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies, and included provisions intended to stop Trump and other elected officials from profiting from the assets while in office. More here

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  Earlier, FBI director Kash Patel clashed with lawmakers in a Senate judiciary committee hearing over … bestiality (among other issues). Senators from both parties questioned Patel about his department lowering hiring standards for FBI applicants with certain background histories. This includes those who have had sexual encounters with sex workers, theft from an employer or engaging in acts of bestiality. On the last one, the FBI director claimed this only includes people who were “trafficked” into having sex with an animal. More here

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Senate Democrats just blocked a major cryptocurrency regulation bill, saying it did not contain enough constraints on Donald Trump and other government officials’ ability to profit from digital assets.

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A vote to advance the measure, known as the CLARITY act, failed by a 49-50 margin, with all Democrats and three Republicans opposed. The product of months of negotiation, the bill would created the first ever regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies, and included provisions intended to stop Trump and other elected officials from profiting from the assets while in office. Financial disclosures released over the summer showed the president had made $1bn from crypto, even as his administration adopted policies favored by the industry.

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Though the measure’s Republican backed argued the guardrails represented a major concession, they weren’t enough for Democrats, who declined to provide the votes needed to overcome the Senate filibuster.

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“All President Trump wants is for the Senate to give him time to crime, and I won’t support any piece of legislation that enables him,” Democratic senator Ruben Gallego said after the vote, which he said Republican leaders forced even as negotiations to address his party’s concerns with the bill were ongoing.

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“This legislation failed squarely because Republicans refuse to say no to the president. It takes 60 votes to pass a bill, and instead of spending their time twisting themselves into knots to appease President Trump, Republicans should have worked more closely with Senate Democrats to craft a bill that could pass with strong ethics provisions.”

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Fellow Senate Democrat Adam Schiff said: “After more than a year of intensive negotiations with my Senate Democratic colleagues, Republican counterparts and the White House, the administration has made clear it is not willing to reach a deal that would put an end to the president’s profiteering through digital assets.”

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He didn’t shut the door on cryptocurrency regulation entirely, saying “I remain open to continuing to work to get an ethics deal that will be acceptable to the American people and crack down on corruption by any and all public officials.”

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Todd Blanche dismissed calls to investigate the contributions of a Russian oligarch who is close to Putin and who helped pay for Donald Trump Jr’s wedding in May.

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A reminder that a ProPublica report revealed that Umar Kremlev spent hundreds of thousands of dollars bankrolling the multi-day event in the Bahamas.

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Trump Jr and his wife, Bettina, later confirmed Kremlev’s contributions to the celebrations and characterized them as “an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend”.

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Blanche, today, was resolute that there would be no follow-up.

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“The president doesn’t know who this person is. I think other members of the family don’t know who this person is. The president’s son has said that he’s a very close friend,” the attorney general told reporters at the White House today. “When you say, ‘am I investigating?’ Am I investigating what? And when you say this person is a friend of Putin, I don’t even know if that’s true or not.”

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Blanche added: “It’s fun to talk about this issue and the rhetoric around it. But I think all the relevant people involved, the president and his kids, have already addressed it. I don’t have any information. I don’t know this person either, so I don’t have any information about it beyond that.”

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A reminder that Democrats on the House oversight committee have started to investigate possible ties between the administration and Kremlev. Robert Garcia, the panel’s top Democrat, has asked Susie Wiles – the White House chief of staff, to provide documents, records and communications between the White House and Trump Jr about Kremlev, among other requests.

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Speaking to reporters today, Todd Blanche said that the supreme court’s ruling yesterday that blocks Donald Trump’s executive order to implement restricts on mail-in voting, will not affect “ongoing criminal investigations into illegal voting”.

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He added that the “efforts to make sure that we have free and fair elections are not going to stop just in November or after or thereafter”.

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The attorney general went on to defend the president’s earlier criticism of the justices on the bench who ruled to block his order.

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“He [Trump] is very frustrated,” Blanche said. “He has every right, and indeed he should communicate his concerns with the supreme court whenever he has them. This isn’t the first time that he’s done it, and it won’t be the last … The idea that President Trump shouldn’t be allowed to communicate to the American people his frustration, I … I don’t share that.”

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The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the nonpartisan agency that provides financial estimates on legislation and policies for lawmakers, has said that the war in Iran has cost the Pentagon approximately $38 billion as of 1 August 2026.

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The CBO says the amount reflects the costs of “replacing expended munitions and equipment lost in battle, increased flying hours, other operations, and increased fuel costs”.

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The estimate does not include other costs incurred by the war, such as the increased cost of fuel used by the Postal Service. It also doesn’t include costs already accounted for in the federal budget, such as the basic operating costs of the military forces involved in the conflict.

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Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, has decried the advancement of artificial intelligence the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington today.

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The leading progressive lawmaker has emerged as a leading voice in warning against the rapidity of the technology’s evolution.

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“If AI surpasses human intelligence, as many scientists believe could happen, this technology will escape human control with potentially catastrophic consequences,” Sanders said in Washington today. “AI is advancing exponentially, exponentially every single day. In other words, what you are looking at right now is the least capable version of AI that we will ever have – the least capable, the dumbest version. The speed and scope of AI development in just the last four years has been almost beyond human comprehension.”

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Sanders added that Congress, under both Republican and Democratic control, has been “been asleep at the wheel”.

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“We now have a president whose ignorance regarding this issue is truly embarrassing,” he said, referring to Donald Trump’s insistence that the calls for AI guardrails are a “hoax” that would put the US on the back foot in the ongoing technological arms race with China.

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Sanders, who we reported earlier, has proposed bicameral legislation with congressman Greg Casar to permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence, said that the pledges from leading AI company CEOs for the industry to “slow down” are encouraging but ultimately not enough.

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“When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal. You hit the brakes,” Sanders added. “When the future of humanity is at stake, we need binding international safety rules, not voluntary standards from the industry.”

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Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, defended Donald Trump’s $5,000 so-called “dividend” that he promised to every adult US citizen if Republicans win the House and the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections.

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“I think it’s a good idea for the American people to keep more of their money,” Bessent said in response to a question from Democratic congressman Juan Vargas at a financial services committee hearing today.

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“Does that hurt the deficit or the debt? Does that increase the deficit or does it increase the debt?” Vargas asked the treasury secretary.

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“I believe that there are ways to do it without increasing the debt or deficit,” Bessent said. “I’m not ready to discuss it at present, but at Treasury, we’ve been working on it for quite a while.”

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This comes as US debt reached $40tn for the first time last month. The milestone marks years of government spending that grew under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

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A federal judge has ruled that Donald Trump’s name must stay off the facade of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, blocking an effort by the center’s (Trump-appointed) board to restore his name to the building.

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The judge also said the board cannot proceed with plans to rename ​the campus where it sits the “President Donald J. Trump ‌Plaza”.

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“Simply put, defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington wrote in the order. “The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”

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Per my colleague Joseph Gedeon, Cooper ordered Trump’s name removed from the building in May, ruling that only Congress has authority to rename it, and the lettering came down in June. The board voted in August to reinstate an inscription and proceed with a closure for renovations, the latter of which a vote is expected to formalize today.

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And yesterday, the Washington Post (paywall) reported that the Trump-installed leaders of the center claimed the institution was on the brink of bankruptcy, and argued that putting the president’s name on its facade may be the only way ⁠to avoid imminent and “certain fiscal collapse”. The documents obtained by the Post were prepared in advance of today’s meeting.

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Here’s Joseph’s story on the vote:

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Congressman Greg Casar has called for the United States to lead the world in artificial intelligence diplomacy, saying it must end the AI arms race instead of trying to win it.

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In remarks at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington today, the Texas Democrat, a leading progressive voice calling for pausing the development of super-advanced AI, warned, “I believe we are closer than ever to breaking the dam on serious AI protections.”

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He outlined three major threats to human existence that loom with the rise of advanced AI:

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Controlled by big business, superpowerful AI could put countless Americans out of work.

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Controlled by an out of control government, superpowerful AI would allow constant monitoring of citizens’ every move.

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And controlled by the wrong humans – or controlled by no human – superpowerful AI could threaten countless lives.

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Evoking the cold war, where humanity was pulled back from the brink of nuclear annihilation, he went on:

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Far too many people seem to be trying to win a race where millions if not billions of lives could be lost at the finish line … No one can win the AI arms race. It’s up to us to end the AI arms race.

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Casar referenced his bill with Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, which proposes to create “a cabinet-level federal agency to protect the public from dangerous AI … requires monitoring of frontier AI systems at all stages of development. And it bans the development of AI superintelligence”.

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The bill would also “direct the United States to pursue international agreements to prevent superintelligence from being developed anywhere in the world”, Casar said.

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“But while we pass safety rules here at home, AI diplomacy may be the most important thing we can do,” he said.

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The FBI director sparred intensely with Democratic Senator Peter Welch, of Vermont, after the lawmaker questioned Patel over his defamation lawsuit against a journalist at the Atlantic, who wrote earlier this year about Patel’s alleged excessive drinking and unexplained absences on the job.

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The FBI director has sued the magazine, and the author of a story it published, filing a defamation lawsuit in US district court for the District of Columbia that seeks $250m in damages.

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“I have every right to claim the truth,” Patel said, accusing Sarah Fitzpatrick, the reporter, of printing “false material”. The FBI director added that he was acting as a “personal private citizen” in the lawsuit. “I am allowed to participate in my own defense, especially when there’s a smear campaign, one which you are participating and continuing the falsehoods and lies that have been directed at me,” he told Welch.

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Patel also said that he did not direct the FBI to investigate Fitzpatrick for her reporting.

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Welch also questioned Patel about after a video surfaced earlier this year, which shows the FBI director chugging a bottle and spraying beer in a locker room with the men’s USA hockey team in Milan, following their gold medal victory against Canada at the Winter Olympics.

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“What you’ll never understand is the players who are my friends invited me into the locker room. What you’ll never understand is that during that trip, where 300,000 Americans went to Italy to participate in the games and watch them, not a single security incident occurred,” Patel said.

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Kash Patel did not commit to keeping FBI agents away from polls during the November midterm elections.

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While responding to Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal, the FBI director said that his department has an election counselor coordinator in every field office where they “quarterback these election activities”.

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When Blumenthal pushed Patel on whether he would confirm that agents wouldn’t be physically present at ballot sites, Patel said: “The FBI will follow the law if there’s a reason to go there because there’s been a violation of law”.

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The FBI director noted that the priority to “monitor elections” rests with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

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“I don’t know that we can’t legally do it. I’m telling you, we’re going to house our agents and intel analysts in our field offices for election security,” Patel told Blumenthal.

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Donald Trump has blasted the supreme court’s ruling which blocks his long-sought executive order which curbs mail-in voting. The president called mail-in voting – which he has used on several occasions to cast a ballot – “a laughing stock” across the world. He has routinely claimed, without evidence, that the voting method is prone to fraud.

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“The Supreme Court has really let our Country down! Certain Justices are petrified of these crazed and depraved Democrats, and are totally unable to show the courage necessary to save our America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

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A reminder, only two of nine justices – Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – sided with the administration. Trump called both of the conservative members of the bench “legends” in their dissent.

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“This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years,” the president added, while chiding the court’s decision at the end of its last term which also rejected Trump’s executive order which attempted to limit birthright citizenship and the earlier ruling which found a number of the administration’s tariffs unlawful. The president suggested that the justices he nominated for the bench – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – are not “the people I interviewed to serve” but “merely a shell of their original selves”.

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“The damage done to America is incalculable, and they know this, just as everyone else does – It is an irreparable and unrecoverable harm! The Court’s inability and unwillingness to do the right thing for our Country will go down, in a very negative way, in the annals of History,” Trump wrote. “It is not easy for me to write this criticism of the United States Supreme Court – it will likely cost me dearly for years to come – but I feel it my obligation and duty, as President, to do so for the America we love!”

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Senator Bernie Sanders and conservative ⁠podcaster Steve Bannon will together on Tuesday call for restrictions on AI systems, uniting two political adversaries around concerns that the technology will ⁠harm humans.

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Both are due to speak ⁠at the ​same Washington gathering on Tuesday.

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Public alarm about the potential danger ⁠posed by AI is growing, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned, in part because the “people building AI earnestly believe that ⁠it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

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AI-related stocks fell worldwide ​on Monday after leaders of some of ‌the industry’s largest companies ‌called for slowing the pace of the technology’s development.

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Bannon, a longtime ally of president ‌Donald Trump, has criticized Trump’s approach to overseeing AI, placing the blame for the president’s unwillingness to regulate the technology squarely on tech companies.

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On his Monday podcast, Bannon said Congress should not pass laws that prohibit states from enforcing their own rules for the technology.

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“The American people are not going to be supplicants to these tech oligarchs,” ‌Bannon said.

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FBI director Kash Patel is set to return to Capitol Hill on Tuesday for an oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

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The Republican-led panel is likely to try to keep the focus on Patel’s efforts to combat violent crime, counter drug trafficking and pursue the Trump administration’s agenda from his perch at the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency.

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But Democrats will almost certainly seize on the tumult inside the bureau over the last year, including sweeping firings of agents who participated in investigations into president Donald Trump, efforts by the bureau to investigate Trump’s perceived political adversaries and Patel’s travel schedule that has blended private leisure with professional responsibilities.

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Patel has made multiple appearances before Congress while serving as director, including to testify about the FBI’s budget, but this will be his first time since last September before the Senate committee that has principal oversight jurisdiction over the bureau.

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Donald Trump is facing a rare backlash from the US Congress as Democrats and some Republicans push for guardrails on the world’s most powerful AI companies.

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Concerns over the dangerous potential of AI reached fever pitch this week after tech leaders sounded the alarm over the rapid advancement of the technology and its potential threat to humanity.

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Trump dismissed the anxieties on Monday, describing them as a “HOAX” and “conspiracy” and insisting on social media: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”

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But the 80-year-old president, who has sidelined Congress on numerous issues during his second term, looks increasingly isolated as members of both major parties acknowledged the risks and expressed a desire to act before it was too late.

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Don Beyer, a Democratic congressman from Virginia, said: “History will look very poorly on that tweet. He’s not paying attention – or he’s paying attention to the wrong people. He’s being really foolish: not the first time he’s been really foolish but perhaps catastrophically foolish in this case.”

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Recent surveys by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation found 85% of Democrats and 79% of Republicans want a new federal agency to monitor and regulate AI; and 82% of Democrats and 78% of Republicans favour government safety tests for AI making critical decisions.

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Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

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Lawmakers have given their support to the supreme court’s rejection of Donald Trump’s bid to restrict mail ballots for the midterm elections.

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The decision capped a flurry of last-minute legal action with voting already underway, with states allowed to continue sending out mail ballots under the same processes used for years.

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Election officials have said there was simply no way to carry out a complete overhaul in the weeks before the midterms. Alabama, North Carolina and Wisconsin began sending mail ballots to voters over the past week while the new system was still not active.

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Washington’s secretary of state Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, said the decision means work “to carry out a safe, secure, and accurate election” can continue ‘without having to upend our election processes to meet unrealistic ballot mail requirements.”

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In Arizona, another largely vote-by-mail state, Democratic secretary of state Adrian Fontes said “it is crucial for us to continue rejecting the notion that access and security are mutually exclusive when it comes to running strong elections.”

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Utah Lt Gov Deidre Henderson, a Republican serving as the state’s chief election officer, said on social media that the supreme court’s decision means “Utahns can have confidence that the 2026 election will proceed as normal.”

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In other developments:

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  Mitch McConnell, the 84-year-old former Senate majority leader from Kentucky, was seen in Washington for the first time in months on Monday, minutes before his office released a statement saying that he was back at work.

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  With a slip of the tongue reminiscent of Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, told CNN that he would not run for president in 2028 if his fellow Californian, former vice-president Kamala Harris, decides to run again, since “I know what that means: I know her base of supporters, I know her friends, the zen diagram on that is just pure crossover.”

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  Donald Trump claimed there is a “SICK conspiracy” against artificial intelligence and data centers in response to the growing calls for greater checks on AI development.

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  In a statement posted on social media, Barack Obama, the former US president, called for the pace of AI development to be slowed to allow time for the federal government to develop regulations to address “serious safety concerns”.

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Key events

Closing summary

This concludes out live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:

• As part of a $2.8bn package of military aid, the Trump administration plans to send Israel a type of one-ton bombs that were withheld by the Biden administration over concerns that they were being used to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

• Donald Trump “threw a tantrum” when he heard that Democratic congresswoman Joyce Beatty, a trustee of the Kennedy Center whose lawsuit forced Trump’s name to be removed from the facade of the memorial, had again prevailed in court.

• A televised Michigan Senate debate in Detroit on Tuesday was distinctly one-sided, because the Democratic nominee, Dr Abdul El-Sayed turned up, while his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, chose not to attend.

• Todd Blanche, the US attorney general, alerted reporters at the White House to stand by for what he called “a big development” in the federal crackdown on voting by non-citizens to be announced by Ryan Raybould, the US attorney for the Northern District of Texas. When it came, however, Raybould’s announcement, that his office had charged six lawful permanent residents and one undocumented immigrant for voting in federal elections over the past eight years, hardly lived up to the billing.

Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and trustee of the Kennedy Center whose lawsuit forced Donald Trump’s name to be removed from the facade of the memorial, told MS NOW on Tuesday that the president had thrown “a tantrum” in a phone call to the board when he learned that she had prevailed in court.

“It was the most unprofessional thing that I’ve ever witnessed or been a part of it,” Beatty said. “He went into name calling,” she added, saying that Trump had called her dumb.

“He said, ‘I think you’re incompetent,’ and I said, ‘I know you’re incompetent,’” the congresswoman recalled.

“He said he was going to hold me responsible if something fell out of the ceiling and killed someone,” she added. “And I told him, I said, ‘You’re already killing people, we’re at war.”

“Then he wanted to talk about how great he was with developing and he didn’t know anything about me, but I had never done anything. This was the biggest thing I had done. So I reminded him that he had more bankruptcies than anybody in the room,” Beatty said.

Abdul El-Sayed dominates one-sided Michigan Senate debate in Mike Rogers’ absence

A televised Michigan Senate debate in Detroit on Tuesday was distinctly one-sided, because the Democratic nominee, Dr Abdul El-Sayed turned up, while his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, chose not to attend.

In his opening statement, standing across from an empty podium reserved for Rogers, which El-Sayed’s campaign clipped and posted on YouTube, the Democrat argued that the absent Republican “took the time to go to Dallas… to give a speech at a convention held in the interest of Donald Trump, but he didn’t have the time to spend an hour with us in Detroit.”

After the debate, when a reporter began a question for El-Sayed by saying, “Obviously the elephant in the room tonight or lack thereof,” the candidate cut in to say: “No the elephant was not in the room. The elephant elephant decided that they did not want to be in the room.”

“Although the elephants were all in the room in Dallas,” he said, referring to the Republican midterm convention staged by Trump last week that Rogers attended. “It’s wild to me that this guy is more interested in going to speak for what, six minutes and 48 seconds in Dallas than he is to have 60 minutes with Michiganders here in Detroit. But it tells you who he is. He’s a coward.”

“If I were him, I wouldn’t debate me either,” El-Sayed added, continuing to hammer his opponent for refusing to debate. “But here he is because Daddy Trump has him stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to Canadian tariff wars or actual wars that we’re all having to pay for. And he doesn’t want to have to answer.”

Senator Chris Van Hollen calls for ‘mandatory safeguards’ on AI development

In a social media video released on Tuesday, senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat considering a run for the presidency, called for AI developers to slow down their work until government safeguards can be put in place.

“We are hearing extremely clear warnings from the people building frontier AI models about the risks,” Van Hollen said. “The people building this technology are concerned about the loss of human control. We need to pump the brakes until we have rules in place to stop this technology from doing grave harm. And that includes implementing mandatory safeguards and a comprehensive testing regime.”

“Make no mistake, putting these federal guard rails in place does not absolve the AI corporations from the harm done by their products,” he continued. “They must be held accountable under our existing civil and criminal laws. That said, the government has a duty to prevent grave harm from happening in the first place.”

“We need Congress to act. It’s not enough to leave it to Donald Trump. Yesterday he called into a conference of Silicon Valley bigwigs and said that concerns about AI safety are a hoax,” the senator added.

“The Silicon Valley bigwig investors and tech oligarchs that have bankrolled Donald Trump back into the White House didn’t do it because they all became MAGA overnight,” Van Hollen said. “They did it because there was an implicit deal. In return for their support and for funding his vanity projects like his obscene ballroom, they wanted something in return – a free hand on AI policy.”

Trump plans to send Israel a type of one-ton bombs withheld by Biden over killing of civilians in Gaza

As part of a $2.8bn package of military aid, the Trump administration plans to send Israel a type of one-ton bombs that were withheld by the Biden administration over concerns that they were being used to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

The aid package, first reported by the Washington Post, includes 20,000 Mk84s as well as 20,000 BLU-117s, US officials told the Associated Press on Tuesday.

Congress has been informally notified about the pending deal, most of which is to be paid for with foreign military financing — in which American taxpayer dollars are given to Israel which in turn uses it to purchase the weapons from US weapons makers.

As soon as Trump returned to office in 2025, he lifted a hold on one shipment of MK-84 bombs to Israel imposed by the Biden administration in 2024. In the first months of Israel’s offensive on Gaza, following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack, the Biden administration had sent thousands of the 2,000-pound bombs to Israel.

American-made one-ton bombs have been used to hundreds of times in deadly strikes in Gaza and Lebanon. The New York Times reported in late 2023 that Israel had routinely dropped MK-84 bombs in areas of Gaza it had designated as safe for civilians.

Trevor Ball, a former explosive-ordnance-disposal technician for the US army who studies open-source images of civilian harm caused by US weapons, told the Post that the Israeli military uses MK-84 bombs to destroy entire buildings in pursuit of suspected militants. “If Hezbollah or whoever is in a building, an MK-84 will bring down the whole building,” Ball said.

“I don’t believe the U.S. taxpayer should continue to arm Netanyahu’s government with deadly military equipment,” Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor and a Guardian US columnist, wrote on Bluesky in response to the reported arms sales.

“I believe Netanyahu is a war criminal and that his government has committed genocide in Gaza. This doesn’t make me antisemitic.”

Congressman Adam Smith, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, expressed outrage on Tuesday at a new estimate by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that Donald Trump’s ongoing war against Iran cost American taxpayers approximately $38 billion in just the first five months, through 1 August.

“The CBO’s findings underscore two important points,” Smith said in a statement. “First, Trump’s disastrous war against Iran has exacted a staggering toll in terms of lives lost and wounded in action, as well as in the waste of hard-earned taxpayer dollars; and second, there is an overwhelming lack of transparency and level of incompetence that have together been the hallmarks of this administration. This report is based on the information the CBO has been able to analyze. Yet even the CBO has not had access to the full accounting of losses and damage to equipment and infrastructure, munitions stockpiles, materiel, and force posture.”

“The CBO analysis also highlights the impact of Trump’s failed policy on the domestic and global economies, including increased inflation,” the congressman from the state of Washington added. “Again, the Trump Administration has refused to provide all relevant information needed to make a full assessment, information that Congress and the American public need and deserve, meaning that this cost is likely even higher.”

Andrew Roth

A bill co-authored by Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who died earlier this year, that would give Donald Trump broad authority to tariff Russia and its trading partners will be put forward for a vote this week in a high-stakes legislative battle that could provide new sanctioning authority to the US president at a crucial moment in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The bill is facing considerable pushback not only from Ukraine-sceptic Republicans, however, but also from prominent Democrats who say that the bill will give undue tariff power to the US president that could then be abused and turned against US allies.

Congressional staffers have described frenzied last-minute lobbying in the halls of Congress as the vote approached for what one Democratic staffer called the “one opportunity that we have to help Ukraine before they enter the slow winter”. The bill passed a vote in the House rules committee on Monday, and is due for a rule vote on the House floor on Tuesday afternoon, then a general vote on Wednesday.

The Lindsey O Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026 would target Russia’s energy and defense industries, as well as the country’s “shadow fleet” of tankers skirting existing oil sanctions, and would give Trump new authority to slap 100% tariffs on top purchasers of Russian oil, including China and India.

But Trump’s use of tariffs against US partners such as Canada and Mexico have made expanding his powers a controversial aim – even for senior Democrats who have been stalwart backers of Ukraine. They are led by the representative Gregory Meeks; the top Democrats on the House foreign affairs committee; the representative Don Beyer of Congress’s joint economic committee; and Richard Neal, the ranking Democrat on the House ways and means committee.

In a statement, they said the legislation would do “more harm than good”. “This bill would dramatically expand presidential tariff authorities while failing to mandate sanctions on Russia, both of which are unacceptable,” they said. “These flaws would raise Americans’ prices while undermining support for Ukraine in the long term.”

Six green card holders in Texas swept up in federal crackdown on illegal voting

Earlier on Tuesday, Todd Blanche, the US attorney general, alerted reporters at the White House to stand by for what he called “a big development” in the federal crackdown on voting by non-citizens to be announced by Ryan Raybould, the US attorney for the Northern District of Texas.

When it came, however, Raybould’s announcement, that his office had charged six lawful permanent residents and one undocumented immigrant for voting in federal elections over the past eight years, hardly lived up to the billing.

While six of those charged cast ballots in the 2024 general election, the impact of their votes was almost immeasurably small, given that two of them cast provisional ballots that were not counted, and 11,388,670 other Texans voted in that election.

Donald Trump, whose false claim that voting by non-citizens is rampant inspired the investigation, won the state by a margin of 1,558,347 votes over his nearest rival, Kamala Harris.

Of the four illegal votes that were apparently counted in error, three were cast by green card holders from Nigeria, India and Mexico, who might have wrongly thought they were eligible to vote, and just one by an undocumented immigrant from Mexico.

Lawful permanent residents are not allowed to vote in federal elections, but they are permitted to vote in local elections in the District of Columbia and in some jurisdictions of three US states: California, Maryland and Vermont.

Still, the administration framed the criminal charges against the handful of ineligible voters in Texas as significant and even invited a Fox News crew to film the arrest of one of the green-card holders: a 27-year-old from Nigeria who allegedly voted in 2018, two years after becoming a lawful permanent resident.

The video was broadcast multiple times on the president’s favorite network on Tuesday.

“I was reliably told this never happens,” the Fox host Will Cain said with sarcasm after a report on the arrest. “We know now at least it’s happened seven times.”

Chris Stein

The House of Representatives shot down an attempt to impeach Donald Trump on Tuesday, though many Democrats supported keeping the effort alive.

By a 232-147 vote, with 47 lawmakers voting “present”, the chamber tabled the impeachment effort proposed by Democratic congressman Al Green, a fierce Trump critic who was censured by the House for disrupting a speech the president gave shortly after returning to the White House, and recently lost his primary. Green had proposed impeaching Trump over the killings of US citizens by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) during his second term, and accused the president of trying to create an “authoritarian regime”.

“President Trump has used ICE and CBP to suppress the First Amendment rights to free speech and a free press; violate the Fourth Amendment right to privacy and protections against unlawful searches and excessive force; and defy the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of due process and equal protection by allowing and encouraging racially targeted arrests, unjustified detentions, and unjustified killings,” his resolution read.

The House impeached Trump twice during his first term, but the Senate acquitted him both times, and the question of whether to impeach him again is a sensitive one for Democrats as they eye a return to the majority in Congress in the November midterm elections. In advance of the vote, the party’s House leaders released a statement saying they would vote “present” on Green’s effort, effectively abstaining, saying that none of the investigative work necessary to successfully impeach the president has been done. They vowed to “continue our fight to make life more affordable for everyday Americans, while committing to holding the crooks accountable using every tool available to us beginning on day one.”

The motion to table Green’s resolution was supported by 213 Republican-aligned lawmakers and 18 Democrats, while 147 Democrats were opposed. The “present” votes included 46 Democrats and one Republican.

Trump says Kennedy Center will not be renovated at all unless his name is added to memorial for assassinated predecessor

Donald Trump is taking the ruling on Tuesday by a federal judge that his name can not be added, in any form, to the exterior of the Kennedy Center, which is a memorial to the late president, about as well as you might expect.

Writing on his social media platform, Trump said that adding his name to the memorial for the assassinated 35th US president was a non-negotiable demand and the performing arts center would be closed immediately and not renovated at all if the US supreme court did not intervene to overturn the order against that issued by district court judge Christopher Cooper.

After Cooper reiterated his previous ruling “that Congress named the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for President John F. Kennedy alone”, Trump wrote that the center would be closed immediately and what he described as “a very large and complex” renovation “cannot begin until such time as” Cooper’s ruling on the name is overturned by an appeals court.

“If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Trump wrote, in his usual idiosyncratic style, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”

The ruling by Cooper, who was nominated by former president Barack Obama, made it plain that he sees no scope for reconsidering his decision that adding Trump’s name would simply be illegal.

Four months ago, this Court declared that Congress named the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for President John F. Kennedy alone. It came to this conclusion for a simple reason: The federal law that created the Kennedy Center permitted no other result. In 1983, Congress amended that law to guarantee “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” 20 U.S.C. § 76j(b)(1). The Court ruled that the decision by the Kennedy Center’s Board of Trustees to rename the institution in honor of President Trump violated that congressional prohibition and others. And the Court ordered the permanent removal of the President’s name from the front portico of the main building, as well as any other physical or digital signage or official materials.

“Yet the drama at the Kennedy Center continues,” Cooper added, before barring the Trump-appointed board from enacting a resolution to add Trump’s name to the center’s facade, calling it the Trump Kennedy Center and also naming the plaza outside the center for Trump.

“Defendants are hereby enjoined from inscribing ‘renovated and restored by Donald J. Trump’ on the main building or renaming the campus the ‘President Donald J. Trump Plaza.’ Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Cooper wrote.

Here’s a recap of the day so far

• Donald Trump today blasted the supreme court’s ruling which blocked his long-sought executive order which curbs mail-in voting. The president called mail-in voting – which he has used on several occasions to cast a ballot – “a laughing stock” across the world. He has routinely claimed, without evidence, that the voting method is prone to fraud. “The Supreme Court has really let our Country down! Certain Justices are petrified of these crazed and depraved Democrats, and are totally unable to show the courage necessary to save our America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. The president suggested that the justices he nominated for the bench – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – are not “the people I interviewed to serve” but “merely a shell of their original selves”.

• Todd Blanche, the attorney general, defended the president’s earlier criticism of the justices on the bench who ruled to block his order. “He [Trump] is very frustrated,” Blanche said at a White House press conference. “He has every right, and indeed he should communicate his concerns with the supreme court whenever he has them. This isn’t the first time that he’s done it, and it won’t be the last.”

• Blanche also dismissed calls to investigate the contributions of a Russian oligarch, who is close to Putin, and who helped pay for Donald Trump Jr’s wedding in May. “The president doesn’t know who this person is. I think other members of the family don’t know who this person is. The president’s son has said that he’s a very close friend,” the attorney general told reporters. “When you say, ‘am I investigating?’ Am I investigating what? And when you say this person is a friend of Putin, I don’t even know if that’s true or not.”

• However, Democrats on the House oversight committee have started to investigate possible ties between the Trump administration and Kremlev. Congressman Robert Garcia, the panel’s top Democrat, has asked Susie Wiles – the White House chief of staff, to provide documents, records and communications between the White House and Trump Jr about Kremlev, among other requests. More here

• Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, said that Congress has “been asleep at the wheel” when it comes to AI regulation. Sanders decried the speed of the technology’s evolution at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington today. The senator has proposed bicameral legislation with congressman Greg Casar to permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence, and said that the pledges this week from leading AI company CEOs for the industry to “slow down” are encouraging but ultimately not enough. “When the future of humanity is at stake, we need binding international safety rules, not voluntary standards from the industry,” Sanders added.

• A federal judge has ruled that Donald Trump’s name must stay off the facade of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, blocking an effort by the center’s Trump-appointed board to restore his name to the building. The judge also said the board cannot proceed with plans to rename ​the campus where it sits the “President Donald J. Trump ‌Plaza”. Earlier, the board voted to immediately close the institution citing safety and financial concerns.

• And on Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats blocked a major cryptocurrency regulation bill, saying it did not contain enough constraints on Donald Trump and other government officials’ ability to profit from digital assets. A vote to advance the measure, known as the CLARITY act, failed by a 49-50 margin, with all Democrats and three Republicans opposed. The product of months of negotiation, the bill would created the first ever regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies, and included provisions intended to stop Trump and other elected officials from profiting from the assets while in office. More here

• Earlier, FBI director Kash Patel clashed with lawmakers in a Senate judiciary committee hearing over … bestiality (among other issues). Senators from both parties questioned Patel about his department lowering hiring standards for FBI applicants with certain background histories. This includes those who have had sexual encounters with sex workers, theft from an employer or engaging in acts of bestiality. On the last one, the FBI director claimed this only includes people who were “trafficked” into having sex with an animal. More here

Senate blocks consideration of major cryptocurrency regulation bill

Chris Stein

Senate Democrats just blocked a major cryptocurrency regulation bill, saying it did not contain enough constraints on Donald Trump and other government officials’ ability to profit from digital assets.

A vote to advance the measure, known as the CLARITY act, failed by a 49-50 margin, with all Democrats and three Republicans opposed. The product of months of negotiation, the bill would created the first ever regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies, and included provisions intended to stop Trump and other elected officials from profiting from the assets while in office. Financial disclosures released over the summer showed the president had made $1bn from crypto, even as his administration adopted policies favored by the industry.

Though the measure’s Republican backed argued the guardrails represented a major concession, they weren’t enough for Democrats, who declined to provide the votes needed to overcome the Senate filibuster.

“All President Trump wants is for the Senate to give him time to crime, and I won’t support any piece of legislation that enables him,” Democratic senator Ruben Gallego said after the vote, which he said Republican leaders forced even as negotiations to address his party’s concerns with the bill were ongoing.

“This legislation failed squarely because Republicans refuse to say no to the president. It takes 60 votes to pass a bill, and instead of spending their time twisting themselves into knots to appease President Trump, Republicans should have worked more closely with Senate Democrats to craft a bill that could pass with strong ethics provisions.”

Fellow Senate Democrat Adam Schiff said: “After more than a year of intensive negotiations with my Senate Democratic colleagues, Republican counterparts and the White House, the administration has made clear it is not willing to reach a deal that would put an end to the president’s profiteering through digital assets.”

He didn’t shut the door on cryptocurrency regulation entirely, saying “I remain open to continuing to work to get an ethics deal that will be acceptable to the American people and crack down on corruption by any and all public officials.”

David Smith

Steve Bannon spoke immediately after Bernie Sanders at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington earlier today, though the populist pair did not share the stage.

Bannon, host of the War Room podcast, called for an aggressive economic and technological “quarantine” of China, demanding the immediate expulsion of Chinese nationals from US research laboratories, an end to the training of Chinese engineers and technologists and the total severance of capital flows.

“Did our fathers and grandfathers, did they underwrite the Soviet Union?” Bannon asked. “Did they train Soviet Union scientists? Did they take Russian kids over here to college to let them go to the best universities and get the best degree? Did they have Wall Street slobbering to do their deals? Did they have every bank there to lend them money quicker than to lend anyone in this audience?

“The answer is they did not. They stood up to the Soviet Union and the first thing to stand up to them was to choke them off and that’s what we have to do today to the Chinese Communist Party. No deals, no agreements, you’re out of the AI business because we’re going to shut your ecosystem down.”

Demanding immediate executive action to isolate Beijing’s tech sector, Bannon said: “No chips, no black marketing chips, no free ride off American technology, no steal on American tech… To hell with the Chinese Communist Party.”

Only then, Bannon argued, can the US have the time necessary to consider the proper regulation of the AI sector. He delivered a scathing verdict on major technology corporations and executives, accusing them of gambling with public safety for private profit.

Bannon accused Silicon Valley of seeking to “socialise all the risk with the American people including potential bailouts” while keeping all financial upside. “The American people are not going to be supplicants to these tech oligarchs,” Bannon said, praising grassroots campaigns that previously defeated federal pre-emption bills aimed at blocking state-level AI regulations.

Bannon has long praised Trump as a historic figure and endorsed his lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. But on Tuesday, while claiming that executive action is required rather than legislation by Congress, he made only a glancing reference to the president who has dismissed AI concerns as a “hoax” and “sick conspiracy”.

Attorney general dismisses possible investigation into Russian oligarch who helped pay for Donald Trump Jr’s wedding

Todd Blanche dismissed calls to investigate the contributions of a Russian oligarch who is close to Putin and who helped pay for Donald Trump Jr’s wedding in May.

A reminder that a ProPublica report revealed that Umar Kremlev spent hundreds of thousands of dollars bankrolling the multi-day event in the Bahamas.

Trump Jr and his wife, Bettina, later confirmed Kremlev’s contributions to the celebrations and characterized them as “an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend”.

Blanche, today, was resolute that there would be no follow-up.

“The president doesn’t know who this person is. I think other members of the family don’t know who this person is. The president’s son has said that he’s a very close friend,” the attorney general told reporters at the White House today. “When you say, ‘am I investigating?’ Am I investigating what? And when you say this person is a friend of Putin, I don’t even know if that’s true or not.”

Blanche added: “It’s fun to talk about this issue and the rhetoric around it. But I think all the relevant people involved, the president and his kids, have already addressed it. I don’t have any information. I don’t know this person either, so I don’t have any information about it beyond that.”

A reminder that Democrats on the House oversight committee have started to investigate possible ties between the administration and Kremlev. Robert Garcia, the panel’s top Democrat, has asked Susie Wiles – the White House chief of staff, to provide documents, records and communications between the White House and Trump Jr about Kremlev, among other requests.

Blanche also said today that he doesn’t anticipate any extra work from the justice department to help educate voters about mail-in voting, given the confusion around the practice as litigation ricocheted through the courts.

“I haven’t seen any suggestion or any information or heard from secretaries of state that that that’s an issue,” the attorney general claimed. “Ballots are confusing in every election. The way they’re distributed, the way they’re talked about, that’s something that the state and locals handle very well every single election cycle for one reason or another. So no, that doesn’t concern me.”