Trump officials puts Fema staffers on leave for signing open letter criticizing administration – as it happened

The Trump administration retaliated on Tuesday against some Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) staffers who signed an open letter of dissent about the agency’s leadership one day earlier, the Washington Post reports.

On Monday, about 180 current and former Fema staffers sent a letter to members of Congress and other officials, arguing the current leaders’ inexperience and approach harms Fema’s mission and could result in a disaster on the level of Hurricane Katrina.

By Tuesday evening, the agency’s office of the administrator had sent several of those people letters informing them that they were being placed on immediate administrative leave, according to documents seen by the Post.

Since the White House press office selected reporters from five pro-Trump, partisan news outlets to ask the president questions during his televised cabinet meeting on Tuesday, readers will not be shocked to learn that they largely avoided subjects he would prefer not to talk about.

In fact, two of them went even further than that, using the opportunity to help Trump make his point about crime in Washington DC by sharing their own stories of being assaulted or harassed.

The first to speak, in what was obviously a pre-planned moment, was Iris Tao of the conspiratorial Epoch Times.

Tao’s outlet, which was founded by Chinese exiles affiliated with the Falun Gong spiritual movement that is repressed as a cult in China, has heavily promoted Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that China was responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic.

“I want to mention, you know about crime… we have a young lady here, Iris of Epoch Times,” Trump said, looked down at his briefing notes, where her name was written in large letters. “I heard you were very savagely mugged. Would you like to mention what happened?” he asked.

Tao then described the harrowing experience of being mugged at gunpoint outside her apartment building in January 2023, and struck in the face with a pistol by her attacker when she refused to hand over her phone.

“So, Mr President, thank you so much for what you’re doing right now,” Tao said.

“I’m very grateful for God” she added, “but also to Mr President. Thank you for now making DC safer for us, for our families, for my parents … and now my baby on the way. Thank you so much.”

Trump and his cabinet then gave Tao a round of applause.

In its initial report on her mugging, however, the Epoch Times strongly suggested that the theft of Tao’s phone, and the thief’s demand for her passcode, rather than her wallet, raised “questions about whether the robbery was more than a random act” and was, perhaps, a politically motivated attack in retaliation for its criticism of China.

The report connected the crime less to what was happening in Washington DC than to what it called “a series of attacks” on its reporters “believed to have been orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in a campaign to silence independent reporting”.

Tao’s concerns about crime in Washington DC were echoed by Diana Nerozzi, a New York Post reporter, who told Trump that she and her husband had been attacked by teenagers who threw liquid at them as they made their way home from dinner on the Washington DC Metro.

During the same event, a correspondent from Real America’s Voice, the network set up to host Steve Bannon’s podcast, told the president that she would feel safer in the nation’s capital if he could change the law to permit her to carry a gun.

Another reporter, from the Daily Signal, which began life as a blog for the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing thinktank that devised Project 2025, invited Trump to attack JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois. He did, at great length.

A reporter for a fifth pro-Trump outlet, the Daily Caller, did bring up the possibly delicate subject of Kamala Harris supporter Taylor Swift’s engagement to Travis Kelce.

But when Trump responded, in part, “I think that she’s a terrific person,” the reporter chose not to ask what had changed since 11 months ago when he had responded to Swift’s endorsement of Harris by posting: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”

Cracker Barrel announced on Tuesday that it is scrapping its new logo, and returning to its old one, hours after Donald Trump joined the conservative backlash to the change.

“Cracker Barrel should go back to the old logo, admit a mistake based on customer response (the ultimate Poll), and manage the company better than ever before” the president posted on Tuesday morning. “Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again.”

“We thank our guests for sharing your voices and love for Cracker Barrel”, the company said in a statement. “We said we would listen, and we have. Our new logo is going away and our ‘Old Timer’ will remain.”

The new logo, a corporate rebrand that was widely interpreted on the right as somehow “woke”, removed both the image of a barrel and of the Cracker Barrel store founder Dan Evins’ Uncle Herschel.

The company, in a Monday post on its website, said its fans have shown them “that we could’ve done a better job sharing who we are and who we’ll always be.”

“While our logo and remodels may be making headlines, our bigger focus is still where it belongs … in the kitchen and on your plate,” said the Lebanon, Tennessee-based chain, which opened its first store in 1969.

Cracker Barrel’s shares slumped after the backlash last week, wiping out year-to-date gains, but were up 7% in extended trading on Tuesday after the company, with a market value of $1.29bn, scrapped the new logo.

In a deeply partisan press release, Sean Duffy, the former Republican congressman and Fox host serving as Donald Trump’s transportation secretary, announced the cancellation of $175m in funding for four projects related to what he called “California’s High-Speed Rail boondoggle”.

Last month, Duffy withdrew $4bn in federal grants from the state’s much-delayed high-speed rail project.

The funding cancelled on Tuesday was to build a high-speed rail station in Madera, in addition to grade separation and design work.

California went to court last month to challenge the legality of the decision to cancel previously approved federal funding.

In the press release, Duffy continued a central theme of the Trump administration: attacking former president Joe Biden.

“In twenty years, California has not been able to lay a single track of high-speed rail,” Duffy said. “Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg didn’t care about these failures and dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the state’s wishlist of related fantasy projects.”

The funding cuts are another hurdle to the 16-year effort to link Los Angeles and San Francisco by a three-hour train ride, a project that would deliver the fastest passenger rail service in the United States.

Since a $10bn bond issue was approved by California voters in 2008, the rail system has built more than 50 major railway structures, including bridges, overpasses, under-crossings and viaducts, and completed 70 miles (113km) of guideway.

The San Francisco-to-Los Angeles route was initially supposed to be completed by 2020 for $33bn. But the projected cost has since risen to $89bn to $128bn, and the start of service is expected by 2033.

In 2019, during Trump’s first term, his cancellation of $929m in federal grants was challenged in court by the state. In 2021, after he defeated Trump and took office, Biden restored the funding.

As the Wall Street Journal reports that Donald Trump wants to quickly nominate a replacement for Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor who is resisting his attempt to force her out, the president told reporters he has a favorite candidate.

Asked about possible replacements for Cook during his marathon televised cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Trump said: “We have some very good people for that position.”

“I think, maybe in my own mind, I have somebody that I like,” Trump added, before saying that he would also consult Scott Bessant, the treasury secretary, and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary.

Trump appears to be considering the possibility of naming his economic adviser Stephen Miran to serve out the remainder of Cook’s term, which does not expire until 2038. Earlier this month, Trump nominated Miran to serve for a much shorter term, as a replacement for another member of the Fed’s board, Adriana Kugler, a Biden nominee who was due to be replaced in five months.

Cook has said that she will sue to keep her position as a governor of the independent central bank and her lawyer, Abbe Lowell, called Trump’s move to fire her “illegal”.

In May, when the supreme court’s conservative majority ruled that the president could fire members of other independent agencies without cause, they rejected the argument that allowing him to do so would also permit him to replace members of the Federal Reserve. The court’s order on the other agencies, the justices wrote, had no bearing on “the constitutionality of for-cause removal protections” for members of the central bank.

“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.

Donald Trump filed a notice of appeal on Tuesday, asking New York state’s highest court to vacate a judgment against him in a civil fraud case brought by the state’s attorney general, .

The court filing, first reported by Courthouse News, comes days after a lower-level New York appeals court threw out a penalty of more than $500 million imposed on Trump and his family business after a judge found that he that he had persistently committed fraud by inflating his net worth on financial documents to get bank loans and insurance.

A majority of that lower court’s judges found that the amount, imposed by was “excessive”, but left the finding that Trump committed fraud in place.

Trump’s new appeal seeks to have the rest of the judgment against him overturned as well, including sanctions against the Trump Organization and its former executives, including members of his family.

The president just said that Democratic governors should call him after witnessing the administration’s federal takeover of the police and deployment of the National Guard.

“I’d say, ‘President Trump, we need your help’,” he said. “This is going to be the safest place on earth. And we’ll do the same thing in Chicago. But I’d like to be asked, as opposed to just going in and doing it. Because you know, when you go in and do it, then they start screaming, ‘oh, he shouldn’t be here’.”

Trump went on to say that he “would love” for Illinois governor JB Pritzker to call him for help. “We will stop that problem in Chicago in two months, maybe less, two months, we’ll stop it,” he said. The president added that he hoped other Democratic governors and mayors would ask him to send troops to their cities to quell, what he characterizes as, rampant crime. Ultimately, Trump said that he would have “no problem” intervening if he thinks the country was “in danger”.

For their part, Democratic leaders across the country have pushed back against the president’s threats to send military into blue cities and states. “If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me – not time or political circumstance – from making sure you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.” Pritzker wrote in a post on X.

The president says he’s prepared for a lawsuit from Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook – whose lawyer said that she plans to pursue legal action challenging the president’s move to fire her.

“She seems to have had an infraction, and she can’t have an infraction,” Trump said. “She’s in charge of, if you think about it, mortgages, and we need people that are 100% above board, and it doesn’t seem like she was.”

Cook has not been charged with any crime. Her counsel, Abbe Lowell, said earlier that Trump had “no authority” to remove her from the Fed’s board of governors. Lowell added that the president’s attempt to fire Cook was “based solely on a referral letter, lacks any factual or legal basis”.

Treasury secretary Scott Bessent just projected that revenue from tariffs could reach half a trillion dollars a year.

“On the international front, you have leveled the international trading system whereby countries took advantage of us, and that’s over,” Bessent said, praising Donald Trump.

He added:

I had been saying we were running at a rate of $300bn a year. You chastised me for saying that that number is too low. And as usual, you’re right. We had a substantial jump from July to August, and I think we’re going to see a bigger jump from August to September. So, I think we could be on our way to well over half a trillion, maybe towards a trillion dollar number.

Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) copied and uploaded sensitive Social Security Administration (SSA) data to a vulnerable cloud server, potentially risking the safety of hundreds of millions of Americans and violating federal privacy laws, according to a whistleblower complaint filed on Tuesday.

The complaint from Charles Borges, the chief data officer at the SSA, alleges that Doge staffers effectively created a live copy of the entire country’s social security data from its numerical identification system database. The information is a goldmine for bad actors, the complaint alleges, and was placed on a server without independent oversight that only Doge officials could access.

“These actions constitute violations of laws, rules, and regulations, abuse of authority, gross mismanagement, and creation of a substantial and specific threat to public health and safety,” the complaint states.

The whistleblower complaint, first reported by the New York Times, is one of the most high-profile insider accounts of how Doge staffers have allegedly taken confidential government information and used it for their own ends, at great risk to the public. The database that Doge officials allegedly uploaded to the cloud contains highly personal information about hundreds of millions of US citizens and residents. It includes details such as names, place and date of birth, race and ethnicity, names of family members, phone numbers, addresses and social security numbers.

The Social Security Administration denied that the sensitive data had been compromised and stated that it takes all whistleblower complaints seriously.

As part of his vision for “a crime-free city” Donald Trump has just said that his administration will be seeking the death penalty for homicide in Washington DC.

He told the cabinet meeting:

Anybody murders something [sic] in the capital, capital punishment. Capital, capital punishment. If somebody kills somebody in the capital, Washington DC, we’re going to be seeking the death penalty. And that’s a very strong preventative, and everybody that’s heard it agrees with it.

I don’t know if we’re ready for it in this country, but we have no choice.

So in DC – states are going to have to make their own decision – but if somebody kills somebody … it’s the death penalty, OK?

For the second day running Trump has claimed that some people would prefer to have a dictator in office – and again insisted that he isn’t one. He told his cabinet meeting:

The line is that I’m a dictator. But I stop crime. So a lot of people say, you know, ‘If that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator.’

But I’m not a dictator. I just know how to stop crime.

The president made similar remarks yesterday when referring to critics of his deployment of the national guard to Washington DC and his threats to send the troops to Chicago. He said from the Oval Office:

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.

The US Department of Health and Human Services has asked 46 states and territories to remove all references to gender ideology from a federally funded program that provides sexual health education, or risk losing millions in funding, Reuters reports.

The directive, issued through the agency’s Administration for Children and Families (ACF), gives the states and territories 60 days to revise materials used in the Personal Responsibility Education Program (Prep).

The Prep program educates young people on abstinence and contraception to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, with particular focus on children who are homeless or living in foster care or in areas with high teen birth rates.

The states and territories include Alabama, Massachusetts, New York, Puerto Rico, Guam and Washington DC.

Last week, the HHS terminated California’s federal PREP grant, citing the state’s refusal to remove “radical gender ideology” from its curricula.

The PREP statute “includes no mention of gender ideology, which is ... irrelevant to teaching abstinence and contraception,” the ACF said in its letter to California.

Failure to comply with the directive could result in similar enforcement actions, including suspension or termination of federal Prep funding, the HHS said today.

Overall, the 46 states and territories have about $81m in remaining funds.

It follows a series of executive orders that Donald Trump has signed since taking office in January, including banning transgender people from serving in the military, barring transgender girls and women from competing in female sports and ordering an end to federal funding for school programs that include “gender ideology”.

The lawyer for Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor who Donal Trump has moved to fire, said she will file a lawsuit challenging the president’s attempt to remove her from her position.

“President Trump has no authority to remove Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook,” lawyer Abbe Lowell said in a statement emailed to reporters. “His attempt to fire her, based solely on a referral letter, lacks any factual or legal basis. We will be filing a lawsuit challenging this action.”

A federal judge in Virginia has dismissed an unprecedented lawsuit, filed by the justice department, against the entire federal district bench in Maryland.

It comes after the Maryland chief judge, George L Russell III, issued two standing orders in May which slowed down the Trump administration’s efforts to quickly deport immigrants. The DoJ argued that this ultimately impeded the president from enforcing immigration laws.

Since the government had sued all the Maryland justices, Judge Thomas Cullen – a Trump appointee who normally sits in Virginia – presided over the case. In his ruling, Cullen said that the executive branch should appeal the district court’s order, instead of suing all 15 judges. Cullen described the litigation as “novel and potentially calamitous”.

“Whatever the merits of its grievance with the judges of the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, the Executive must find a proper way to raise those concerns,” Cullen wrote.

He also noted that the “concerted effort by the Executive to smear and impugn individual judges” is “both unprecedented and unfortunate”.

A slew of leading Democratic lawmakers have fired back at Donald Trump’s plans to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook.

Chuck Schumer, the senate minority leader, accused the president of playing “a dangerous game of Jenga with a key pillar of our economy.” Schumer said that by attempting to remove Cook and install a loyalist, Trump would “shred” the Fed of its independence, and put “every American’s savings and mortgage at risk.”

The ranking member on senate banking committee, Elizabeth Warren, called Trump’s letter announcing Cook’s firing an “authoritarian power grab that blatantly violates the Federal Reserve Act, and must be overturned in court.”

As my colleague, Callum Jones, notes, the supreme court suggested earlier this year that the president did not have power to fire, without cause, governors of the US central bank. The Federal Reserve acts as an independent agency, whose members do not serve at the pleasure of the president.

Meanwhile house minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said that Trump was trying to remove Lisa Cook from her position without “a shred of credible evidence that she has done anything wrong”. Jeffries noted Cook’s achievement as the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve board, and added that “to the extent anyone is unfit to serve in a position of responsibility because of deceitful and potentially criminal conduct, it is the current occupant of the White House.”

The response to Hurricane Katrina, which stuck the Gulf Coast 20 years ago this week, was a catastrophe for US disaster management, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) failing to reach victims quickly enough, or provide them with sufficient aid.

This month, I travelled to New Orleans, which was badly affected by the storm and the response. There, victims and other disaster experts told me they are afraid the US has – under Trump – walked back 20 years of progress in the disaster management field.

“We want more support, more help, not for them to take all that help away,” Betina James, whose home was destroyed by Katrina, told me.

Read more below:

A few weeks ago, I broke the story about Mohammed Zaher Ibrahim, a 16-year-old dual American-Palestinian citizen who has been held in an Israeli prison since February over allegations of rock throwing.

Today, over 100 US human rights, faith-based and civil rights organizations launched a major pressure campaign by signing a letter demanding secretary of state Marco Rubio immediately secure his release.

The coalition – which includes the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Pax Christi USA – is warning that Ibrahim’s deteriorating health puts “his life on the line.”

The teenager, who splits his time between the West Bank and Palm Bay, Florida, was 15 when he was arrested from his family’s home in the West Bank. Since then, he’s developed scabies, lost at least 25 pounds, and spent his 16th birthday behind bars.

Read more below:

Attorney general Pam Bondi said that there have been 1,094 arrests in DC since the federal law enforcement surge that began earlier this month. Bondi noted that “not a single carjacking has occurred over the past week” in the nation’s capital.

She also said that authorities arrested a man who was “caught burning our American flag”. Which comes after the president signed an executive order yesterday, instructing federal prosecutors to pursue criminal charges against individuals who burn American flags during protests.

US House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat representing New York, said in a statement Donald Trump was trying to remove Lisa Cook from her position without “a shred of credible evidence that she has done anything wrong”.

Jeffries noted Cook’s achievement as the first black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve board, and added that “to the extent anyone is unfit to serve in a position of responsibility because of deceitful and potentially criminal conduct, it is the current occupant of the White House.”

Lisa Cook responded to Trump’s plan to remove her from the Federal Reserve board of governors “effective immediately”.

In a statement emailed to reporters through the office of the lawyer Abbe Lowell, she said that “no cause exists under the law, and he [Trump] has no authority” to remove her from the job to which she was appointed by Joe Biden in 2022. A reminder that Cook was ultimately appointed for a 14-year term.

“I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022,” she said in the statement.

Lev Menand, a law professor at Columbia law school, said Donald Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve chief Lisa Cook is a “procedurally invalid removal under the statute”.

Menand, who authored a book about the Fed’s actions during the coronavirus pandemic, also said for-cause firings are typically related to misconduct while in office, rather than based on private misconduct from before an official’s appointment.

“This is a procedurally invalid removal under the statute,” he said. “This is not someone convicted of a crime. This is not someone who is not carrying out their duties.”

Donald Trump has said he wants to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, possibly this year, in an attempt to revive the failed nuclear diplomacy of his first term as US president.

“I’d like to have a meeting. I look forward to meeting with Kim Jong-un in the appropriate future,” Trump said during an occasionally awkward meeting at the Oval Office with South Korea’s new president, Lee Jae Myung, in which he raised the prospect of taking ownership of South Korean land that hosts a US military base.

Trump, who met Kim three times in his first term, hailed his relationship with the totalitarian leader and said he knew him “better than anybody, almost, other than his sister” – a reference to Kim’s younger sibling and confidante Kim Yo-jong. “Someday I’ll see him. I look forward to seeing him. He was very good with me,” Trump told reporters, saying he hoped the talks would take place this year.

Lee said the US president, who has attempted to bring peace – so far unsuccessfully – to longstanding disputes in Ukraine and the Middle East, was the “only person” who could end the decades-old standoff between South and North Korea, whose three-year war in the early 1950s ended in a truce but not a peace treaty.

“I look forward to your meeting with Chairman Kim Jong-un and construction of Trump Tower in North Korea and playing golf,” Lee said.

The Utah legislature will need to rapidly redraw the state’s congressional boundaries after a judge ruled on Monday that the Republican-controlled body drew them in violation of voters’ rights.

The current map, drawn in 2021, divides Salt Lake county – the state’s population center and a Democratic stronghold – among the state’s four congressional districts, all of which have since elected Republicans by wide margins.

District court judge Dianna Gibson declared the map unlawful because the legislature circumvented a commission established by voters to ensure districts aren’t drawn to favor any party.

New maps will need to be drawn quickly for the 2026 midterm elections. Lt Gov Deidre Henderson, the state’s top elections official, asked the courts for the case to be finalized by November to leave time for the process before candidates start filing in early January.

But appeals promised by Republican lawmakers could help them run out the clock to possibly delay adopting new maps until 2028.

The Trump administration’s attack on Lisa Cook’s future at the Fed was led by Bill Pulte, a Trump-appointed official leading the US Federal Housing Finance Agency, who alleged she had claimed two different properties were her primary residences when obtaining mortgages in 2021.

“How can this woman be in charge of interest rates if she is allegedly lying to help her own interest rates?” Pulte wrote on X, formerly Twitter. He referred the case to the Department of Justice for investigation.

Trump seized on the claims before Cook had responded, writing on Wednesday on Truth Social, his social network, that she “must resign, now!!!”.

The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, criticised Trump’s move against Cook. “Donald Trump is playing a dangerous game of Jenga with a key pillar of our economy,” he said.

“This brazen power grab must be stopped by the courts before Trump does permanent damage to national, state and local economies. And if the economy comes crashing down, if families lose their savings and Main Street pays the price, Donald Trump will own every ounce of the wreckage and devastation families feel.”

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.

We start with news that Donald Trump has been accused of “cobbling together” allegations to fire Federal Reserve governor, Lisa Cook.

The president said she would lose her job over allegations she committed mortgage fraud - an extraordinary move that marks the latest escalation in Trump’s attack on the central bank’s independence.

Trump wrote to 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.

Top Democrat on the US House of Representatives committee on financial services Maxine Waters said Trump’s attack on Cook was a clear continuation of his ongoing effort to “undermine the independence of the Federal Reserve” and deflect attention to signs of economic challenges caused by his policies. Waters said:

Their latest target is Dr Lisa Cook, a highly qualified, trailblazing economist, and the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors since Congress created it in 1913.

Let me be very clear, the allegations against Dr Cook have been cobbled together as a pretext to try to replace her with someone who will be loyal first to Trump instead of the US Constitution or US law.

Cook responded several hours later in a statement emailed to reporters through the law office of the lawyer Abbe Lowell, saying of Trump that “no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority” to remove her from the job to which she was appointed by Joe Biden in 2022.

She said:

I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy.

Lowell said Trump’s “demands lacked any proper process, basis or legal authority”, adding:

We will take whatever actions are needed to prevent his attempted illegal action.

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.

Meanwhile, top Democratic lawmakers furiously denounced Trump’s attempt to fire Cook. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts senator and ranking member on the Senate banking, housing, and urban affairs committee, called it “the latest example of a desperate president searching for a scapegoat to cover for his own failure to lower costs for Americans”.

“It’s an authoritarian power grab that blatantly violates the Federal Reserve Act, and must be overturned in court,” Warren said.

Read our full report here:

In other developments:

• Unprompted, Trump said three times that he plans to rebrand the “Department of Defense” by returning to the pre-1947 name, the “Department of War”.

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

• A large bruise on the back on 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, renewing speculation that the White House might be concealing information about his health.

• California Republicans went to court to challenge a plan devised by the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, to redraw congressional boundaries in response to a redistricting plan that aims to give Republicans in Texas five more US House seats.

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

• The Utah legislature will need to rapidly redraw the state’s congressional boundaries after a judge ruled Monday that the Republican-controlled body drew them in violation of voters’ rights.