Trump says he is firing Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, over alleged mortgage fraud claims – as it happened

Video recorded for a Fox News streaming documentary about Donald Trump proves that the president lied on Monday when he told reporters that Maryland’s governor, Wes Moore, had hugged and praised him at the Army-Navy football game in December.

After complaining that Moore was “trying to be derogatory” when he invited Trump to walk the streets of Baltimore with him, to see firsthand that the city is not overwhelmed by crime, Trump suddenly claimed that Moore was secretly one of his fans.

“I met him at the Army-Navy game”, Trump said in the Oval Office. “They said, ‘Oh there’s Governor Moore, he’d love to see you’. He came over to me, he hugged me, shook my hand – you were there – he said, ‘Sir, you’re the greatest president of my lifetime’. I said, ‘That’s really nice that you say that. I’d love you to say it publicly, but I don’t think you can do that, so it’s okay’. But: ‘No, sir, you’re doing a fantastic job, I want to just shake your hand’”.

A short time later, Moore responded on X by posting “lol” above the video of Trump’s account of their meeting. “Keep telling yourself that, Mr. President”, he added.

Moore then told WBAL NewsRadio in Baltimore “that conversation never happened, that imaginary conversation never happened”.

Trump’s appearance in a box at the Army-Navy game was well-documented, particularly since one of his guests was Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who killed the street performer Jordan Neely on a New York City subway train in 2023 but was acquitted by a court.

But it appears that just one camera, recording for the behind-the-scenes Fox documentary Are of the Surge, caught the brief meeting between the president-elect and Maryland’s Democratic governor, a former US army officer.

In a bizarre segment broadcast on Monday, Fox’s usually pro-Trump producers showed that video and, despite host Will Cain’s best efforts to present it as inconclusive, offered direct evidence that Trump had indeed imagined the praise from Moore.

The video shows that Moore shook Trump’s hand, without hugging him, and said: “Welcome back to Maryland, sir. Welcome back to Maryland. It’s good to see you”. The game took place in Landover, Maryland.

After Trump praised Moore’s appearance, Moore said, “Thank you, sir. Great to see you, great to see you, and great to have you back here”.

Moore then added that his administration was “very, very anxious to work closely with you”, and said that the reconstruction of the Key Bridge was of particular importance.

“We’ll help you out”, Trump said.

Donald Trump wrote to Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook on Monday, telling her that he was removing her from her position, “effective immediately”, based on the allegation from one of his allies that she had obtained a mortgage on a second home she incorrectly described as her primary residence.

Trump posted the full text of the letter on social media on Monday night. In it, he said that he found “sufficient cause” in the allegation against her to remove her from her position.

In May, the US supreme court suggested that the president does not have the power to fire governors of the US central bank, an independent agency whose members do not serve at the pleasure of the president, without cause.

In a 6-3 decision, when the court’s conservative majority ruled that the president did have the power to fire “without cause” members of two independent agencies, the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, they added that their order had no bearing on “the constitutionality of for-cause removal protections” for members of the Federal Reserve Board

“The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States,” the conservative justices wrote.

Justice Elena Kagan, in a dissent, wrote that there was simply no logic to the exception the conservative had carved out for the Fed, since “the Federal Reserve’s independence rests on the same constitutional and analytic foundations as that of the NLRB, MSPB, FTC, FCC, and so on”.

Last week, after Bill Pulte, head of the US Federal Housing Finance Agency and a close ally of the president, accused Cook of “potentially committing mortgage fraud”, Cook said she had “no intention of being bullied” into stepping down.

Cook, whose current term on the Fed’s board extends until 2038, previously served on the council of economic advisers under Barack Obama. When she took office in May 2022, she became the first Black woman to sit on the central bank’s board.

A large bruise on the back on Donald Trump’s right hand, which the president appeared to be hiding, poorly, under a daub of makeup last week, was clearly visible during public appearances on Monday, renewing speculation that the White House might be concealing information about his health.

Last month, after similar speculation over Trump’s swollen ankles prompted questions, the White House physician, Sean Barbabella, revealed in a memo that the president was suffering from chronic venous insufficiency.

In the same memo, Barbabella said that images showing bruising on Trump’s hand were “consistent with minor soft tissue irritation from frequent handshaking” and his use of aspirin as a precaution against heart attacks.

However, more than five weeks later, photographs of Trump shaking hands with the South Korean president, Lee Jae Myung, on Monday suggest that the bruise extends across a far larger area of his hand than that impacted by a handshake.

While sitting at his desk in the Oval Office on Monday and speaking to reporters, Trump appeared to make an effort to keep his right hand covered with his left, hiding the bruise from the cameras.

Last week, images of Trump’s hand clumsily covered in makeup that did not match his skin color circulated widely.

Responding to those images, Dr Jonathan Reiner, a cardiologist and professor of medicine, observed: “The problem involving the dorsum of the president’s hand doesn’t seem to be getting better. Rather than issue unlikely explanations, if the position of the White House is that the health of the president is a private, matter they should simply say that.”

A group of Republican lawmakers in California filed an emergency petition to the state supreme court on Monday asking that a redistricting initiative devised by the state’s Democratic leadership be removed from a special election scheduled for November.

Last week, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a bill to put Proposition 50 to the state’s voters, which would temporarily suspend an independent redistricting commission, until after the 2030 election, and put in place a new map of congressional districts, which is tilted in favor of the Democrats. The new map, which would likely give the Democrats an extra five seats in the US House, is intended to cancel out a new map drawn by Texas Republicans at the request of Donald Trump.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of four Republican members of the state legislature, three California voters and a former member of the state’s independent redistricting commission. Last week, the same court declined a request from one of the same Republican lawmakers to block the Democrats from putting the proposition on the ballot.

The Republican lawmakers are represented by the Dhillon Law Group, whose founder, Harmeet Dhillon, formerly represented the conservative media activists James O’Keefe and Andy Ngo, and is now the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the justice department.

In a court filing on Friday, the Trump administration said that it intends to withdraw federal approval for an offshore wind farm off the coasts of Maryland and Delaware.

The filing, in a case challenging the 2024 approval of US Wind’s Maryland Offshore Wind Project in US district court in Delaware, came the same day that the interior department issued a stop-work order that halted the construction of a nearly complete wind farm off the coasts of Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Lawyers for the justice department told the Delaware court that the interior department, which is now run by the former North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, who has close ties to oil and gas producers, would move to vacate approval of the facility’s construction and operations plan by September 12.

When the interior department approved the offshore wind project, in December 2024, the government said the project had the potential to power over 718,000 homes, using up to 114 wind turbine generators located approximately 10 nautical miles offshore Ocean City, Maryland, and approximately 9 nautical miles offshore Sussex County, Delaware.

US Wind is owned by funds managed by Apollo Global Management, an American investment firm, and Renexia SpA, a subsidiary of Italy’s Toto Holding SpA. The project was scheduled to begin construction in 2026.

After the scuttling of the wind farm off the coasts of Rhode Island and Connecticut was reported over the weekend, Lee Zeldin, the was asked by a Fox News anchor, “What’s the problem with this wind farm in Rhode Island?”

Zeldin replied: “President Trump has been very consistent: he’s not a fan of wind”.

Donald Trump just said for the third time today that he plans to rebrand the “Department of Defense” by returning to the pre-1947 name, the “Department of War”.

The president, whose pre-politics business career was largely focused on marketing, first raised the idea on Monday morning, while signing executive orders in the Oval Office with his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, standing behind him.

“So Pete, you started off by saying the ‘Department of Defense’, and somehow it didn’t sound good to me, you know, it didn’t sound good. ‘Defense’ what are we ‘defense’, why are we ‘defense’? So it used to be called the ‘Department of War’ and it had a stronger sound”, the president said.

He then told the handful of officials lined up behind him – namely: JD Vance, the vice-president; Pam Bondi, the attorney general; Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary; Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff; Terry Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration; and Hegseth – “if you people want to, standing behind me, if you take a little vote and you want to change it back to what it was when we used to win wars all the time, that’s okay with me”.

Later, while taking questions alongside the president of South Korea, Lee Jae Myung, Trump again raised the idea, out of the blue.

“Pete Hegseth has been incredible with the, as I call it, the ‘Department of War’. You know, we call it the ‘Department of Defense’, but, between us, I think we’re going to change the name”, Trump said during a riff about border security.

By way of explanation, the president added: “We won the World War I, World War II, it was called the ‘Department of War’. And to me, that’s really what it is”.

Trump raised the idea a third time during a meeting on Monday afternoon with family members of 13 US military personnel who were killed by an Islamic State suicide bomber, along with 170 Afghan civilians, at Hamid Karzai International Airport’s Abbey Gate in 2021, as the US withdrew its forces from Afghanistan.

Asked by a reporter how he plans to rename the defense department the ‘Department of War’, since that would require an act of Congress, Trump said: “We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along, if we need that, I don’t think we even need that”.

“It just to me, seems like a just a much more appropriate… the other is, ‘Defense is too defensive. And we want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too if we have to be. So, it just sounded to me better”.

The House oversight committee also subpoenaed Jeffrey Epstein’s estate today, as part of their ongoing investigation.

Republican congressman and committee chair, James Comer, wrote that the estate is in “custody and control of documents that may further the Committee’s investigation and legislative goals”.

Last week, at the committee’s request, the justice department sent over the first tranche of records relating to the late sex-offender.

Comer notes that recent reporting suggests the estate is in possession of the notorious “birthday book” – an album of messages to Epstein for his 50th birthday, compiled by his associate, convicted sex-trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump was a contributor.

Chris Van Hollen, the Democratic senator from Maryland, said the Trump administration “continues to spread lies about the facts” of Kilmar Ábrego García’s case. The Maryland man was detained earlier, after reporting to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents in Baltimore.

In April, Van Hollen visited Ábrego García in El Salvador, while he was being detained at the Terrorism Confinement Center, otherwise known as Cecot.

Today, Van Hollen said that Ábrego was entitled to due process:

Instead of spewing unproven allegations in the press and social media, the Trump Administration needs to put up or shut up in court and allow Mr. Ábrego García the opportunity to defend himself.

The House oversight committee is launching their own investigation into claims of “manipulated” crime data by the Metropolitan police department (MPD).

In a letter, Republican congressman James Comer, who chairs the committee, asked DC police chief Pamela Smith for transcribed interviews with the seven commanders of DC’s patrol districts. Comer added that the investigation was the result of reports that commander Michael Pulliam was suspended from MPD for allegedly falsifying data. Charges that denies.

Comer also notes that a whistleblower informed the committee that “crime statistics were allegedly manipulated on a widespread basis and at the direction of senior MPD official.”

Federal prosecutors have also launched a criminal investigation into allegations that Washington DC police systematically manipulated crime statistics to make the city appear safer than it actually is, according to various reports.

A reminder that Donald Trump has routinely accused city officials, without evidence, of producing “phoney” crime data.

Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Ken Martin exhorted his party to “fight like hell” against Donald Trump – and the “weak, spineless Republican rubber stamps who aid and abet him.”

“This is not politics as usual, my friends,” Martin said, in a fiery speech that adopted the party’s more confrontational turn of late. “This is authoritarianism. It’s fascism dressed in a red tie.”

DNC officials gathered in Martin’s home town of Minneapolis for a three-day summer meeting as Democrats search for a new direction, and the chair, just six months into the job, faces questions about his ability to steer the party to victory ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

In his opening remarks on Monday, Martin nodded to some of the internal disagreements roiling the party: “No one should confuse unity with unanimity.”

He chastised Democratic officials for being too content “winning arguments” rather than elections. “We need to fight harder, we need to organise smarter, and we need to make sure that people everywhere, no matter where they live, understand that the Democratic Party is their party,” he said.

The session was poignant for Martin. He spoke emotionally about his late friend, the former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, who prosecutors say was assassinated by a man posing as a police officer, alongside her husband, at their home in June. Martin acknowledged state senator John Hoffman who was seriously wounded, alongside his wife, by the alleged gunman. Hoffman was in attendance, Martin said.

“If I can leave you with one thing this morning, let it be something that Melissa knew,” he said. “Power is fleeting. We never know when we’ll have it again. So use your power. Use your power when you have it to make the biggest difference you can for as many people as you can.”

When asked if the president would consider sending national guard troops to “red cities” that are experiencing high crime, Trump said that “there aren’t that many of them”.

He then said “if you look at the top 25 cities that the crime, just about every one of those cities is run by Democrats”. But according to a report by Rochester Institute of Technology, which analysed FBI data from 2024, two of the cities in the list of highest homicide rates have Republican mayors. And out of the 24 cities in that list, six states are led by GOP governors.

The president continued to repeat the false claim that it’s been “many years” since DC experienced seven days without a murder. City police data shows that as recently as July of this year, the capital experienced a week without a homicide. There have also been several earlier periods throughout 2025 without a murder in DC for more than a seven day stretch.

The president said a short while ago that the US is sending $60m worth of food and aid to Gaza, as the humanitarian crisis in the region continues.

The president then said the end of the conflict is in sight, but offered few details to expand on his reasoning:

I think within the next two to three weeks, you’re going to have a pretty good, conclusive ending. It’s a hard thing to say, because they’ve been fighting for 1000s of years. You want to know that’s a that’s been a hotbed forever, but I think we’re doing a very good job. But it does have to it does have to end.

When Trump was asked about whether there was a “diplomatic push” to end the conflict, he simply punted to special envoy Steve Witkoff who also gave no further details, but offered vague and heaping praise on the president:

We wouldn’t be anywhere, but for the President’s truth [post] last week, which was a statement to Hamas that they better get their act together and get to the peace table. But for that, it would have been all stalled. So as usual, he is the man who moves it.

The president is now taking questions from reporters, and says that he’d like for Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy to meet first.

“I may be there. I may not. I’ll see but I wanted them to work out their differences first, because it is ultimately between them,” he adds. “This is a whole new form of war, but it’s a violent war, and there’s been nothing like this since the second world war. So we’ll see what happens over the next week or two.”

Asked if he was intending to challenge California’s redistricting plans (which let’s not forget are a direct response to developments in Texas), Trump said:

Well, I think I’m going to be filing a lawsuit pretty soon, and I think we’re going to be very successful in it. We’re going to be filing it through the Department of Justice. That’s going to happen.

Trump added that he’ll “probably” also file a suit challenging the Senate “blue slip” process that has held up several of his nominees for judges and US attorney.

You know, blue slips make it impossible for me as president to appoint a judge or a US attorney, because they have a gentleman’s agreement ... It’s a gentleman’s agreement that’s about 100 years old, where, if you have a president like a Republican and if you have a Democrat senator, that senator can stop you from appointing a judge or or US attorney.

Trump said he believes it’s “unconstitutional”.

Trump said the US military might deploy to Chicago and is ready to go anywhere on short notice to crack down on crime.

“We can go anywhere on less than 24 hours’ notice,” Trump said in the Oval Office earlier when asked whether the Pentagon was preparing for deployment to Chicago.

He said Chicago needs federal help to clean up the city but did not announce a decision.

“They need help. We may wait. We may or may not, we may just go in and do it, which is probably what we should do,” Trump told reporters.

Trump has seized control of the police force in Washington and is now allowing national guard troops to carry weapons while on patrol in the city. He’s also now threatening to expand the US military presence to Democrat-controlled cities like Baltimore and Chicago.

In comments made in the Oval Office earlier, Donald Trump claimed that some people think they might “like a dictator” – but insisted that he isn’t one.

Referring to critics of his deployment of the national guard to Washington DC and his threats to send the troops to Chicago, the president said:

They say, ‘We don’t need him. Freedom. Freedom. He’s a dictator. He’s a dictator.’

A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator.’ I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense, and I’m a smart person.

And when I see what’s happened to our cities, and then you send in troops. Instead of being praised, they’re saying, ‘You’re trying to take over the Republic.’ These people are sick.

He said that, “in a certain way, we should wait to be asked” to bring in troops, but reflecting on the impact of his sending national guard into Los Angeles earlier this summer, he added:

But I think people should want us to be there, because otherwise all they’ll do is complain as we do our job. So we’ll have to think about that.

Donald Trump signed an executive order this morning instructing federal prosecutors to pursue criminal charges against individuals who burn American flags during protests.

The order tells the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, to look at cases where people burned flags and see if they can be charged with other crimes like disturbing the peace or breaking environmental laws.

It’s an attempt by Trump to go around a supreme court decision from 1989, when the court ruled 5-4 in Texas v Johnson that destroying the flag is protected political expression under the first amendment.

That court ruling threw out flag-burning laws in 48 states and made it clear that people have the right to burn flags as a way to express their political views.

“All over the country they’re burning flags,” Trump said in the Oval Office a short while ago when he signed the order. “All of over the world they burn the American flag, and as you know, through a very sad court, I guess it was a 5-4 decision, they called it freedom of speech.

“But when you burn the American flag, it incites riots, at levels we’ve never seen before,” he added.

Still, Trump has long advocated for criminalizing flag burning. In 2016, he posted on social media: “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag – if they do, there must be consequences – perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”

Most Americans tend to agree with Trump on this issue. Polling conducted by YouGov in 2020 showed nearly half of Americans support making flag destruction illegal, while about one-third believe it’s permissible. An updated YouGov survey from September 2023 found that 59% of Americans now consider burning an American flag during protests to be “never” acceptable.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has chosen Retsef Levi, a member of its key vaccine panel, to lead its Covid-19 immunization task force, a spokesperson for the health department told Reuters.

Levi had critiqued mRNA vaccines in the past, spreading misinformation that they can cause serious harm and death, especially among children, and called for their immediate withdrawal.

Levi did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Donald Trump is signing executive orders around ending cashless bail in the nation’s capital. Trump is claiming that this is possible due to his takeover of the city’s police force, citing a public safety emergency.

One of the orders directs the attorney general to identify jurisdictions across the country with cashless bail policies and withhold or revoke federal funds and grants. The president points to Illinois’s policy and spends some time undermining the governor, JB Pritzker: “They threw him out of the family business, and he becomes governor. Now he wants to run for president. I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

The president has repeated inaccurate claims that DC was the most dangerous city in the country until the federal takeover of the DC police and deployment of the national guard.

Trump also says that the 11 days without any murders in the capital is “the first time that’s taken place in years”. In fact, DC experienced a streak without any homicides, that lasted more than two weeks, in March of this year.

The president also said that Congress has apparently said “they’ll give us whatever money is needed to fix up the capital,” referring to his request for billions of dollars to continue his “beautification” project. On Friday, Trump said he’d spoken to top congressional Republicans about the funding request.

Democratic leaders across Illinois and Congress are condemning Donald Trump’s reported plans to send national guard troops to Chicago, denouncing what they call an unprecedented abuse of presidential power.

The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, is set to hold a news conference alongside the state’s attorney general, Kwame Raoul, later on Monday to formally oppose any federal troop deployment in the city.

Pentagon sources confirmed to news outlets that planning is actively under way for the operation, though no final decision has been announced. Pentagon officials also told Fox News ahead of the weekend that up to 1,700 national guard personnel are prepared to mobilise across 19 predominantly Republican states from August to mid-November to support immigration enforcement operations.

Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, said the targeting of Chicago was “the most flagrant violation of our constitution in the 21st century” and promised court battles if troops arrive. Johnson also said his office received no direct communication from the White House regarding the reported plans.

In a statement, following Kilmar Ábrego García’s detention today, Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem said that he is being processed for deportation, but didn’t confirm where he would be sent.

She also repeated several unfounded claims about Ábrego:

President Trump is not going to allow this illegal alien, who is an MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, serial domestic abuser, and child predator to terrorize American citizens any longer.

Early on Tuesday morning, as parents went to drop off their young children at a bilingual childcare center in north-west Washington DC, they received a message from the administrator saying that unmarked cars were parked directly outside.

Shortly after 8am, federal agents in tactical vests arrested two people unaffiliated with the center, the administrator said.

“While these activities are not connected to our program, we are closely monitoring the situation and taking extra precautions to ensure everyone feels safe entering and leaving the building,” read the message to parents, reviewed by the Guardian.

Foram Mehta, whose son attends the daycare, said she had feared immigration raids there for months, but her fears escalated when Donald Trump sent national guard troops and federal agents to Washington two weeks ago. She said she was concerned about her own safety as a brown person, even though she’s an immigrant in the country lawfully, and also worries for her undocumented neighbors.

In a city already upended by the second Trump administration’s mass firings of government workers, Trump’s decision to take over the city’s police force, send thousands of federal agents to Washington, and ramp up immigration enforcement has left many residents on edge and grappling with how to go about their lives in a city that no longer feels safe. The return to school for most public schools on Monday has cast that in sharp relief.

Attorney general Pam Bondi said today that there have been 1,007 arrests in DC since the beginning of the federal law enforcement surge earlier this month.

She said that on Sunday night alone there were 86 arrests, which included the apprehension of a suspected member of the Tren de Aragua gang.

Kilmar Ábrego García, who was wrongly deported to El Salvador earlier this year and released just days ago from criminal custody in Tennessee, has been taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) custody in Baltimore.

Ábrego turned himself into the Ice field office today, after the Trump administration vowed to detain him if he was released from criminal custody. He’s currently awaiting trial on human smuggling charges, and allegations that he is a member of the notorious MS-13 gang.

“To me, happiness is being with my family, and being able to spend simple memories with them,” he said to throngs of supporters outside the Ice facility earlier. “Those moments will continue to give me hope, to continue in this fight.”

US immigration officials said they intend to deport Ábrego to Uganda, after he declined an offer to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for remaining in jail and pleading guilty to human smuggling charges, according to a Saturday court filing.

Ábrego declined to extend his stay in jail and was released on Friday to await trial in Maryland with his family. Later that day, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) notified his attorneys that he would be deported to Uganda and should report to immigration authorities on Monday.

Ice also directed Ábrego to report to its Baltimore office on Monday, according to records posted online.

National guard troops patrolling the streets of Washington DC as part of what President Donald Trump said was his crackdown on crime will begin carrying weapons on Sunday night, two officials said.

The exact number of troops who would carry their weapons was fluid, but they will either carry their M17 pistols or M4 rifles, according to the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

Hundreds of unarmed national guard troops have been in Washington’s streets for the past two weeks after Trump declared a crime emergency in the district. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth last week authorized the troops to carry weapons.

The guard’s Joint Task Force-DC said in a written statement on Sunday that its personnel would only use force “as a last resort and solely in response to an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm.”

Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Monday that aims to eliminate “cashless bail” for arrested suspects in Washington DC, Axios reported on Monday.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report.

Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth has said in a statement that Trump’s national guard plan for Chicago “distracts the military from executing its core mission of keeping Americans safe from real adversaries”.

In a statement, she said:

We know this isn’t about ‘law and order’ because Trump is once again refusing to coordinate with state and local officials. And if he really cared about ‘health and safety,’ he wouldn’t have cut millions of dollars in gun violence prevention funding just weeks ago.

This is just another attempt to distract the American people from the price increases his own policies are causing and the various personal scandals he wants to change the subject from.

Forcing the military, uninvited, into Chicago to intimidate Americans in their own communities does not make our nation stronger, it simply distracts the military from executing its core mission of keeping Americans safe from real adversaries who wish us harm.

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you the latest news lines over the next few hours.

We start with news that Donald Trump has been accused of “turning the military on American citizens” after a Pentagon official confirmed that planning is under way to send national guard troops to Chicago.

Illinois attorney-general Kwame Raoul also told CBS News that the president’s actions are both “un-American” and “unwise strategically”.

Accusing the president of “turning our military on American citizens in his ongoing attempts to move our nation toward authoritarianism,” he added:

His actions are not just un-American. They are unwise strategically. Our cities are not made safer by deploying the nation’s service members for civilian law enforcement duties when they do not have the appropriate training.

To be clear: We have made no such request for the type of federal intervention we have seen in Los Angeles or Washington DC. There is no emergency in the state of Illinois.

It comes as lieutenant-governor Juliana Stratton accused Trump of pursuing “political theatrics, not safety”, since crime in Chicago is already declining and there was no local request for troops.

In a statement to ABC7 Chicago, she said:

Tonight’s reporting from the Washington Post that President Trump is preparing to deploy federal troops in Chicago proves what we all know: he is willing to go to any lengths possible to create chaos if it means more political power-no matter who gets hurt.

As lieutenant-governor and throughout my career, I’ve fervently fought for the reformation of our criminal legal system and under the Pritzker-Stratton administration, we’ve made tremendous progress.

Crime in Chicago is declining and there’s absolutely no rationale for this decision, other than to distract from the pain Trump is inflicting on working families with his dangerous agenda. Illinois, governor Pritzker and I are here to stand for your rights, your freedoms, and will protect you against whatever storms of hate and fear come our way.

Earlier on Sunday, Hakeem Jeffries, House minority leader and New York Democratic congressman, said Trump has “manufactured a crisis” to justify sending federalized national guard troops into Chicago next, over the heads of local leaders.

Read our full report here:

In other developments:

• France summoned the American ambassador Charles Kushner after he wrote a letter to president Emmanuel Macron alleging France had failed to do enough to stem antisemitic violence, a French foreign ministry spokesperson said on Sunday.

• Sergei Lavrov, Moscow’s most senior diplomat, praised efforts by Donald Trump to end the war, in an interview on NBC on Sunday, while US vice-president JD Vance said Washington would “keep on trying” to broker talks in the absence of a deal.

• In the opening weeks of Donald Trump’s second term, Gavin Newsom wagered that peacemaking was best: a tarmac greeting for Air Force One, an Oval Office visit and a podcast slot for Maga’s biggest names. But then Trump came for California, and its governor dropped the niceties. Read the full report here.

• The president and his allies have been accused of executing a “pattern of lawfare” akin to those exerted by authoritarian regimes in Hungary and Russia after adopting a new strategy to target political opponents: allegations of mortgage fraud. Read the full report here.

• The justice department is alleging in a new court filing that three Smartmatic executives who were indicted last year on bribery and money-laundering charges transferred money from a 2018 voting machine contract with Los Angeles county into slush funds that were originally set up to pay bribes to overseas election officials.