Supreme court clears way for Trump to gut education department – as it happened

A US appeals court has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from removing the temporary protective status of thousands of Afghans in the United States, court documents showed on Monday.

An administrative stay on the termination of temporary protected status for Afghans will remain until 21 July, the US court of appeals for the fourth circuit said in an order granting a request from immigration advocacy organization Casa. The group had filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to challenge the terminations of the temporary protected status for Afghans and Cameroonians announced by the Trump administration in April.

In April when the Trump administration terminated temporary deportation protections for thousands of Afghans and Cameroonians, the department had said conditions in Afghanistan and Cameroon no longer merited the protected status.

The US evacuated more than 82,000 Afghans from Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover in 2021, including more than 70,000 who entered the US with temporary “parole”, which allowed legal entry for a period of two years.

News of the temporary pause on the administration’s drive to deport the Afghans was welcomed by Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran who founded the charity #AfghanEvac, “to ensure the United States keeps its promise to our Afghan allies”.

“This pause is not a victory—yet—but it gives us time to organize, advocate, and push for permanent solutions” VanDiver wrote on social media.

VanDiver has been trying to draw attention to the plight of Afghans who helped the US military during its decades in Afghanistan for months, since the Trump administration moved to remove their legal status to remain in the US. Last week, his media tour even brought him to the pro-Trump cable network One America News, where he was interviewed by the former far-right congressman Matt Gaetz, who was Trump’s first nominee to be his second-term attorney general.

As Donald Trump faces intense blowback from supporters over his administration’s decision to not release more information about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, more attention is being paid to the president’s evasive answer on the subject during a portion of an interview with Fox News last year that was not broadcast.

In the interview, which was first broadcast in June 2024 as he campaigned for a second term, Trump was asked by Rachel Campos-Duffy, whose husband is now Trump’s transportation secretary, if he would pledge to declassify government documents related to the September 11 attacks and the assassination of John F Kennedy, both of which have been the subject of elaborate conspiracy theories. Trump said that he would.

“Would you declassify the Epstein files?” Campos-Duffy asked.

“Yeah, yeah, I would,” Trump answered.

In the version of the interview broadcast that week on the Fox & Friends Weekend show, the interview then cut to another question, from the show’s then co-host, now defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.

However, as Max Tani reported for Semafor a few days later, Trump’s full answer, which was not broadcast on the network, but streamed later on the radio show of a third Fox host, Will Cain, was far more equivocal.

In that unedited exchange, the presidential candidate, a friend of the disgraced Epstein who was photographed socializing with him on more than one occasion, backed away from the answer moments later.

As Campos-Duffy said “All right” and prepared to move on, Trump added: “I guess I would. I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would, or at least I – ”

“Do you think that would restore trust – help restore trust?” Campos-Duffy asked.

“Yeah. I don’t know about Epstein so much as I do the others,” Trump replied. “Certainly about the way he died. It’d be interesting to find out what happened there, because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn’t happen to be working, etc, etc, but yeah, I’d go a long way toward that one. The other stuff I would.”

As the NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik observed on social media on Monday: “These cuts by Fox in Trump interview on Epstein are more substantively consequential than those cited in Trump’s lawsuit against CBS (which basically included Harris’s full answer across 2 shows).”

The Senate voted 46-42 to confirm the first federal judge nominated by Donald Trump in his second term, putting Whitney Hermandorfer on the sixth US circuit court of appeals.

The confirmation of Hermandorfer, who worked for Tennessee’s attorney general, fills the first of 49 vacancies on the federal bench inherited by Trump. There are nearly 900 federal judgeships.

During Joe Biden’s term, the Democratic majority in the senate confirmed 235 federal judges, exceeding by one the 234 judges confirmed by the Republican majority senate in Trump’s first term.

Biden, who resisted calls from activists to rebalance the supreme court by expanding the number of justices, was only able to nominate one supreme court justice during his single term. Trump named three of the current justices during his first term, in part due to Republican obstruction in 2016, which prevented Barack Obama’s nominee to the high court, Merrick Garland, from even getting a confirmation vote.

Hermandorfer has defended many of Trump’s policies as director of strategic litigation for Tennessee’s attorney general, including his bid to end birthright citizenship. Democrats and liberal judicial advocacy groups criticized her as extreme on that issue and others, also citing her office’s defense of the state’s strict abortion ban.

Donald Trump sowed widespread confusion on Monday when he told reporters in the Oval office that he was so unhappy with Russia, for failing to halt its bloody assault on Ukraine, that the US “would be doing very severe tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days”.

“Tariffs at about 100%,” Trump added, “you’d call them secondary tariffs, you know what that means.”

But no one knew what Trump meant by the term “secondary tariffs” since it seems to have never been used in this context by anyone else.

Most financial journalists, as well as Trump’s commerce secretary and one of his closest allies in the senate, guessed that the president was talking about “secondary sanctions”, which is a mechanism for imposing financial penalties on nations or businesses that do trade with countries under US sanctions.

But a review of news archives for the past two decades suggests that only Trump has ever referred to secondary sanctions as “secondary tariffs”.

Struggling to make sense of the president’s vague threat, the CNBC Washington correspondent Megan Cassella told the financial network’s viewers, “secondary tariffs, we have to wait to see the fine print and the details but ostensibly these would be designed to punish any countries that are still trading with Russia”.

“I will caution, though, we’ve heard Trump talk about secondary sanctions,” Cassella added later in her report, “with regards to Venezuela that haven’t yet been imposed.”

She was referring to an executive order signed by Trump in March that threatened to impose a 25% tariff on imports to the US from countries, like China, India and Turkey, that still import Russian oil, despite US sanctions.

The week after he signed that order, NBC’s Kristen Welker reported that Trump told her that he could impose secondary sanctions on countries that do business with Russia, but he described them as “secondary tariffs”.

“If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault, which it might not be, but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on all oil coming out of Russia,” Trump told Welker.

Given that backdrop, a reporter for the White House pool asked Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary: “Did he mean secondary sanctions or secondary tariffs?”

Lutnick seemed not to want to correct the president, but gave a reply that suggested secondary tariffs would be identical to secondary sanctions.

“You can do either one,” Lutnick replied. “To Venezuela, he said, ‘If you do business and you buy Venezuelan oil’, right, ‘I’ll put – your country will pay a tariff,’ right?”

“So it’s economic sanction, not a sanction, right? You could say, ‘I don’t want you to do it’, but you could also make an economic penalty. ‘If I catch you doing it, then you’ll have to pay, so why don’t you police yourself?”

Later on Monday, Trump senate ally, Lindsey Graham, issued a press release hailing Trump’s threat to impose “secondary tariffs on Russia” as identical to his bill, the Sanctioning Russia Act. The legislation introduced by Graham in the senate, and a similar bill in the House, calls for the imposition of sanctions on entities that do business with Russia. But on Monday Graham referred to the bill as a move to “impose secondary tariffs and sanctions on countries that continue to fund Putin’s barbaric war in Ukraine”.

In an impassioned dissent, supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor warned on Monday that the conservative majority’s decision to allow the Trump administration to move ahead with dismantling the federal department of education, an independent agency that only congress has the power to close, will do lasting damage.

The court’s ruling allows the administration to immediately fire 1,400 employees of the department, overturning a lower court injunction that the mass layoffs should be put on hold until litigation to decide whether or not the administration is legally allowed to close the department continues.

“The relative harms to the parties are also vastly disproportionate. While the Government will, no doubt, suffer pocketbook harms from having to pay employees that it sought to fire as the litigation proceeds,” Sotomayor wrote, “the harm to this Nation’s education system and individual students is of a far greater magnitude.”

“The Department is responsible for providing critical funding and services to millions of students and scores of schools across the country”, she continued. “Lifting the District Court’s injunction will unleash untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended. The majority apparentlydeems it more important to free the Government from paying employees it had no right to fire than to avert these very real harms while the litigation continues.”

As our colleague Joseph Gedeon has explained, the department manages a budget of approximately $268bn and employs about 4,400 staff members and its core responsibilities have included distributing federal financial aid for education, collecting data on the US’s schools, identifying major educational issues and enforcing federal education laws prohibiting discrimination and implementing congressional education legislation.

“Investigating civil rights violations is a critical function of the department, carried out by their Office of Civil Rights (OCR)”, the Guardian’s Gloria Oladipo reported in January. “In 2023, OCR received a record 19,201 complaints, according to the department’s annual report, with 45% of complaints relating to sex discrimination. Amid an onslaught of legislation targeting transgender youth last year, the OCR fielded several complaints from LGBTQ+ students against their school districts.”

Eighteen percent of complaints in 2023 dealt with race and national origin discrimination, including bullying and racist harassment from school officials.

Leah Litman, a co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast and the author of “Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, & Bad Vibes”, pointed out the apparent hypocrisy of the court’s conservative majority for having previously ruled that a Democratic president, Joe Biden, did not have the authority to order his education department to cancel student loan debt, but a Republican president, Donald Trump, has the power to gut the whole department with approval from congress.

“Let’s take stock here” Litman wrote on Bluesky, “(Democratic) Presidents, via the Dept of Education, can’t cancel student debt because statutes don’t clearly authorize it. Republican Presidents can cancel/shut down the Dept of Education because, even though only Congress can shut down departments”.

The supreme court has cleared the way for Donald Trump’s administration to resume dismantling the Department of Education, part of his effort to shrink the federal government’s role in education in favor of more state control.

In the latest high court win for Trump, the justices lifted a federal judge’s order that had reinstated nearly 1,400 workers affected by mass layoffs at the department and blocked the administration from transferring key functions to other federal agencies.

A legal challenge is continuing to play out in lower courts. The court’s action came in a brief, unsigned order. Its three liberal justices dissented.

As of this morning, nobody in leadership at the justice department had spoken to fuming deputy FBI director Dan Bongino since Wednesday, when he implied that he could no longer continue in his position as long as Pam Bondi remained in post, sources familiar with the matter have told CNN.

As we reported earlier, Bongino didn’t show up for work on Friday and, according to CNN, “largely excommunicated himself from colleagues” following his major falling out with the attorney general over her handling of the Epstein files.

CNN’s report goes on: “The [resignation] threat infuriated Trump, who spent the weekend fuming over both Bongino and FBI director Kash Patel, sources told CNN. Most of his fury was directed at Bongino, causing aides to expect that the deputy director would depart his job in the coming days. But vice-president JD Vance spent the weekend attempting to mediate, at times fielding calls from Patel, Bongino and Bondi, sources said.

“It remains to be seen if Bongino ultimately resigns, which he told others he was considering. But sources say his relationship with the White House has become basically untenable. Even if he does not quit now, some inside the administration believe he will not stay in the job long-term.

What CNN is hearing appears in line with Maga influencer and far-right activist Laura Loomer’s earlier prediction for Politico: “I don’t see how there can be a situation where Bongino can coexist with Blondi [Loomer’s derisive moniker for Bondi] as attorney general, and so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a resignation from Bongino. Perhaps I’m wrong, but it would not shock me if Bongino resigns in the next week.”

Immigrants being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention centers in at least seven states are complaining of hunger, food shortages and spoiled food, detainees and immigration advocates have told NBC News.

Per NBC’s report: “Some detainees have gotten sick; others say they have lost weight. In one facility, an incident involving detainees reportedly broke out in part because of food.

“The food problems come amid overcrowding at Ice facilities tied to the Trump administration’s push to quickly ramp up immigration arrests. While capacity data isn’t publicly available for every Ice detention facility, nationwide figures on the availability of beds show a system beyond its overall capacity. As of mid-June, Ice was detaining nearly 60,000 people, almost 45% above the capacity provided for by Congress.”

King Charles has invited Donald Trump for an unprecedented second state visit in September, scheduling the trip for three days when parliament is not sitting and removing the possibility of the US president addressing parliament.

Buckingham Palace announced today that Trump would come to the UK from 17-19 September, soon after the House of Commons rises for its traditional break for the annual party conferences.

The king will host Trump and his wife, Melania, at Windsor Castle, though the palace has not yet set out any other details of the trip.

The visit is a coup for the White House, with Trump becoming the first elected politician in modern history to be granted two state visits, after his earlier one in 2019. The king first suggested the possibility of a second such event in February, delivered in the form of a letter by Keir Starmer during a meeting in the White House.

The dates of the trip, however, avoid the prospect of the US president making an address to parliament.

Politicians in Kyiv have welcomed Donald Trump’s announcement that billions of dollars worth of US military equipment will be sent to Ukraine, while officials in Moscow officials dismissed his threat of sanctions against Russia as hot air.

In a meeting earlier with the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, at the White House, Trump said the US would send Patriot anti-aircraft batteries and interceptor missiles, paid for by European allies.

He promised that additional Patriot systems would arrive within days, funded by Germany and other Nato partners, which would be a significant step in helping Ukraine to defend itself. Kyiv is believed to have only six functioning Patriot batteries.

Russian officials and pro-war bloggers largely dismissed Trump’s threats, portraying them as far less serious than anticipated.

Konstantin Kosachev, a senior Russian lawmaker, wrote on Telegram that the US president’s ultimatum amounted to “hot air”, suggesting he could easily walk it back. “A lot can change in 50 days - on the battlefield and in the mindset of those in power, both in the US and in Nato,” he wrote.

Yuri Podolyaka, a popular pro-Kremlin military blogger, similarly wrote on Telegram that Trump “could change his ‘opinion’ several times in the next 50 days”.

Podolyaka and other commentators pointed to the main Moscow stock index, which gained more than 2.5% after Trump’s announcement.

Here’s the full story from my colleagues Luke Harding and Pjotr Sauer:

Donald Trump has continued his attacks on Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell today, calling him a “stupid guy” and a “knucklehead”.

He told reporters at the White House earlier:

We have a bad Fed chairman, really bad … I tried being nice to the guy. It doesn’t help. He’s like a knucklehead. No, he’s a knucklehead. Stupid guy. He really is.

He earlier called once again for interest rates to be lowered to 1% or less. “We should be at 1%. We should be less than 1%,” he said.

A coalition of mostly Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit today challenging a move by Donald Trump’s administration to withhold about $6.8bn in congressionally approved federal funding for K-12 schools.

Attorneys general or governors from 24 states and the District of Columbia sued in federal court in Providence, Rhode Island, arguing that the US Department of Education and the office of management and budget threw schools nationwide into chaos by unconstitutionally freezing funding for six programs approved by Congress.

The freeze extended to funding used to support the education of migrant farm workers and their children; recruitment and training of teachers; English proficiency learning; academic enrichment; and after-school and summer programs.

The administration also froze funding used to support adult literacy and job-readiness skills.

The government was legally required to release the money to the states by 1 July, the lawsuit said. Instead, the education department notified states on 30 June that it would not be issuing grant awards under those programs by that deadline. It cited the change in administration as its reason.

An OMB spokesperson at the time cited an “ongoing programmatic review” of education funding and said initial findings showed what he termed as a misuse of grant funds to “subsidize a radical leftwing agenda”.

OMB also raised objections to the use of the grant money to support scholarships for immigrant students and lessons that involved LGBTQ+ themes.

The Democratic-led states said the sweeping funding freeze has disrupted school systems, resulting in summer school and after-school programs being canceled or put at risk and the halting of other initiatives with little time for school districts to fill in the holes left in their budgets.

The states say the administration violated the US constitution by disregarding Congress’ sole authority over spending and ran afoul of federal administrative law by freezing the funds without any reasoned explanation.

The states also say the administration failed to abide by procedures of the Impoundment Control Act, which bars the executive branch from unilaterally refusing to spend funds appropriated by Congress unless certain steps are followed.

The lawsuit follows a series of other cases Democratic-led states and others have filed challenging the administration’s sweeping efforts to freeze or terminate federal funding for programs out of step with Trump’s agenda.

The notorious new “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail in the Florida Everglades contains hundreds of detainees with no criminal records or charges, it was disclosed yesterday, as lawmakers decried “inhumane” conditions inside after touring the facility.

Donald Trump has insisted that the remote camp in swamp land populated by pythons and alligators was reserved for immigrants who were “deranged psychopaths” and “some of the most vicious people on the planet” awaiting deportation.

But at least one detainee shouted out to politicians during Saturday’s visit that he was a US citizen, the Democratic Florida congressman Maxwell Frost said. And the Miami Herald obtained and published a list of 700 people held in cages showing that at least 250 had committed no offense other than a civil immigration violation.

Authorities have refused to release a list of those sent there by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Ice). The Florida department of emergency management, which operates the hastily assembled tent encampment, did not respond to a request from the Guardian for clarification or comment.

Frost said the revelations, and the lawmakers’ visit, raised new questions about the legality of the camp, which federal agencies in court documents have insisted is entirely a state-run and -funded operation.

There are Ice agents there every day, and I was told directly from the guy running the whole thing that Ice tells them exactly what to do, how to put everything together.

They gave them the instructions on how to do the cages, the food, who comes in and goes out. It’s Ice making all the decisions, and he was very clear that the role the state is playing is logistical. This is a federal facility. Ice is calling all the shots.

Joe Biden has denied claims that his circle of aides acted without his knowledge when he granted a slew of pardons and commutations in the final days and hours of his presidency.

“I made every single one of those,” the former president told the New York Times in an interview published yesterday when asked about claims that he was incapacitated and unaware of clemency decisions. Biden called the people making those claims “liars”, adding: “They know it.”

Donald Trump’s successor and predecessor in the Oval Office issued three sets of clemency during his final days, including reducing sentences of hundreds of non-violent drug offenders and commuting the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates to life without parole.

He pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, of convictions on federal gun and tax charges, too. And he also granted pre-emptive pardons to other members of his immediate family, along with the former top public health adviser Dr Anthony Fauci and ex-joint chiefs of staff chair Gen Mark Milley.

Conservatives have alleged that the commutations and pardons, along with executive orders passed during his term, are not binding because they were signed using an autopen printer to reproduce a signature and could therefore not be verified as being directly authorized by Biden himself.

In the NYT interview, Biden hit back at that suggestion, telling the Times he hadn’t personally signed the orders simply “because there were a lot of them”.

“The autopen … is legal,” Biden said. “As you know, other presidents used it, including Trump. But the point is that … we’re talking about a whole lot of people.”

Biden has previously pushed back on Republican claims he was unaware of what was being issued in his name.

“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency,” he said in June. “I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”

In his most recent remarks, to the Times, Biden accused Republicans of using the autopen issue as diversion.

They’ve lied so consistently about almost everything they’re doing. The best thing they can do is try to change the focus and focus on something else. And … I think that’s what this is about.

Donald Trump is still speaking now in the Oval Office alongside Nato leader Mark Rutte.

Trump, while announcing Patriot missiles being sent to Kyiv, said the US will impose “very severe tariffs” on Russia in 50 days if there is no deal to stop the war in Ukraine.

While the Maga world is in disarray over the Epstein files, president Donald Trump is hosting Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte in the White House for talks that will also include state secretary Marco Rubio, defense secretary Pete Hegseth and members of Congress.

Trump announced he was sending Patriot missiles to Ukraine to assist in the war against Russia. He also said he was “disappointed” in Russian president Vladimir Putin for failing to agree to a deal to stop the war.

You can follow our live coverage of Trump and Rutte right now in our Europe blog:

For those who need a refresher on who deputy FBI director Dan Bongino is, here’s a quick recap.

A former New York police officer and Secret Service agent who provided security to presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama, Bongino is best known as a far-right Maga podcaster and conspiracy theorist, who vocally supported Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen”.

Bongino had never served in the FBI, and his appointment as deputy marked the first time in its 117-year history that the second-in-command post has not been held by one of its senior agents.

A former Fox News Host, Bongino has written books alleging the existence of a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump. He also ran unsuccessfully three times as a Republican in congressional races in Maryland and Florida.

As a podcast host, Bongino spent years pushing Epstein conspiracy theories, and has reportedly been very upset with attorney general Pam Bondi over how the Epstein files were handled.

“Bongino is out-of-control furious,” a source close to Bongino told NBC News. “This destroyed his career. He’s threatening to quit and torch Pam unless she’s fired.” Axios reported that Bongino didn’t show up to work on Friday, and the row prompted Trump himself to step in.

Asked by reporters yesterday if Bongino would remain in his position, Trump said:

Oh I think so ... I spoke to him today. Dan Bongino, very good guy. I’ve known him a long time. I’ve done his show many, many times. He sounded terrific, actually.

Here’s more on Bongino from my colleague Robert Tait:

Donald Trump has defended attorney general Pam Bondi amid calls from Maga world for her to go.

In a lengthy social media post, Trump hit out at complaints from critics who have accused Bondi of withholding more information about Jeffrey Epstein’s sudden death and his so-called client list.

“LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB,” Trump wrote in all caps, encouraging his supporters to “not waste time and energy” on Epstein.

Bondi suggested to Fox News in February that Epstein’s client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review”. She had also repeatedly pledged to reveal potentially damaging evidence including “a lot of names” and “a lot of flight logs” relating to Epstein.

But the justice department last week released a memo concluding there was no evidence suggesting the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender kept a “client list” to blackmail high-profile figures. It also found no evidence to suggest foul play in Epstein’s death, which had previously been ruled a suicide.

Bondi sought to clarify her remarks in the White House on Tuesday, telling reporters that she had been commenting on the entire Epstein “file” and other files.

Tucker Carlson has told NBC News this morning that he now believes the justice department doesn’t actually have “much relevant information about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes”. “Rather than just admit that, Pam Bondi made a bunch of ludicrous claims on cable news shows that she couldn’t back up, and this current outrage is the result,” Carlson said.

The Democrats are on it too. Later today in the House, representative Marc Veasey is introducing legislation calling for the release of the Epstein files.

Veasey told Politico:

I think [Trump’s] trying to protect some billionaire friend of his. That’s what he lives for more than anything else in the world: protecting billionaires. Look at what he did with the so-called ‘big, beautiful bill’.

A vote would not only be uncomfortable for House Republicans – it would also keep the story in the news when the president would prefer it to disappear. Trump will probably try to latch on to some other story to try to change the narrative today, so we’ll be looking out for that.

Politico also notes that “the growing number of Democrats making similar efforts on the Epstein files spans a wide breadth of the party’s membership, from New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Georgia senator Jon Ossoff; from relative backbenchers to members of the Senate leadership, like Hawaii senator Brian Schatz.”

As we reported earlier, Donald Trump is facing a fast-growing a Maga rebellion over his administration’s handling of the Epstein files – the criminal investigation into convicted child sex offender and wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein.

For years, many in the Maga movement have alleged a huge government cover up to protect Epstein, which Trump and his allies – from vice-president JD Vance to FBI director Kash Patel – played up for political gain, claiming an incriminating client list that Epstein purportedly used to blackmail wealthy co-conspirators was being kept secret by the government.

Former conservative podcaster and now deputy FBI director Dan Bongino did the same, along with attorney general Pam Bondi, who in February told Fox News of the list: “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.”

As my colleagues wrote last week: “Bondi in particular spent months hyping up the materials as being full of damaging details related to child porn and sex trafficking, creating anticipation among a core group of the president’s supporters.”

But last week, a justice department and FBI investigation found there was no secret client list to be released, and that Epstein died by suicide in federal custody in August 2019, which has also long been the subject of rightwing conspiracy theorists who believe he may have been killed before he could implicate famous associates.

Coming after Trump’s administration created so much anticipation that the alleged list would be publicly disclosed, per Politico: “Now? It’s a huge credibility problem. Vance, Patel, Bongino and Bondi – among others – effectively have to either acknowledge that they were not just wrong about the government covering up for Epstein, but actually making stuff up, or they come off like they’re part of a cover-up themselves.”

Indeed the findings have prompted rightwing influencers who are frequently in favor of Trump’s policies to suggest that the federal government is protecting a powerful cabal of pedophiles, with particular ire directed at Bondi who many in Maga world have demanded be fired.

Donald Trump’s threat to impose 30% tariffs on European goods would “practically prohibit” transatlantic trade, the EU’s lead negotiator with the US has said.

Arriving for talks with European ministers in Brussels, Maroš Šefčovič, the EU trade commissioner, said a tariff of 30% or more would have a huge impact, making it “almost impossible to continue” current transatlantic trade, which is worth €4.4bn (£3.8bn) a day.

Expressing disappointment, he said his negotiating team thought they had been close to a deal. “The feeling on our side was that we are very close to an agreement,” as he said the two sides had been negotiating an agreement in principle – the outlines of a deal – for four weeks prior to Trump’s blunt announcement at the weekend.

The US president said on Saturday that EU imports would face a tariff of 30% from 1 August, denting European optimism that talks to secure a still painful 10% duty were almost finalised.

In response to Trump’s latest deadline, the EU decided to postpone retaliatory countertariffs on €21bn of US goods that had been due to kick in at midnight on Monday until 1 August.

Ministers will also discuss plans for a further round of countermeasures, targeting €72bn of US imports to the EU.

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 begin with news that president Donald Trump said on Sunday he spoke to deputy FBI director Dan Bongino to try to calm an uproar over how the Justice Department handled the probe into the death of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged clientele, Reuters reported.

Asked by reporters if Bongino remained in his position after reportedly pondering resigning, Trump said: “Oh I think so... I spoke to him today. Dan Bongino, very good guy. I’ve known him a long time. I’ve done his show many, many times. He sounded terrific, actually.”

Bongino represents a part of Trump‘s ‘Make America Great Again’ base of support that has long been suspicious of Epstein, whose 2019 death in federal custody has been ruled a suicide. In a joint memo released last Monday, the FBI and the Justice Department said there was no evidence to support a number of long-held conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death and his alleged clientele.

Conservative influencers from Laura Loomer to Elon Musk have criticized attorney general Pam Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel for their findings, which came months after Bondi pledged to reveal major revelations about Epstein, including “a lot of names” and “a lot of flight logs.”

US media, including Fox News and NBC News, have reported that Bongino has clashed with Bondi over the issue and was considering stepping down.

Patel and Bongino, a former conservative podcaster, both previously made statements before working at the FBI about a so-called client list and often suggested that the government was hiding information about Epstein from the American public.

In other news:

• King Charles has invited Donald Trump for an unprecedented second state visit in September, scheduling the trip for three days when parliament is not sitting and removing the possibility of the US president addressing parliament. The visit is a coup for the White House, with Trump becoming the first elected politician in modern history to be granted two state visits, after his earlier one in 2019.

• However, the US president received a frostier reception when he made an appearance at the Club World Cup final in New Jersey on Sunday. Trump was booed and jeered by the crowd during the national anthem before the match and again while presenting the trophy to Chelsea alongside Fifa president Gianni Infantino.

• The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has called on the EU to “defend European interests resolutely” after Trump threatened to impose 30% tariffs on nearly all imports from the EU. It came as the EU moved to de-escalate tensions after the blunt move by Trump on Saturday. The bloc declared a further pause on €21bn of retaliatory tariffs until 1 August, dovetailing with the US president’s new deal deadline.

• Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said on Sunday that Trump wants to have the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) “remade” instead of eradicated entirely. In a new interview on Sunday with NBC, Noem defended the Trump administration’s response to the deadly Texas floods that have killed at least 120 people, saying: “I think the president recognizes that Fema should not exist the way that it always has been. It needs to be redeployed in a new way, and that’s what we did during this response.”

• Rosie O’Donnell has shrugged off a threat from Trump to revoke her US citizenship on the grounds that she is “a threat to humanity”. The New York-born actor and comedian said on Sunday that she was the latest in a long list of artists, activists and celebrities to be threatened by the US president.

• A new Senate committee report on the attempted assassination of Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, described the events as a “cascade of preventable failures” and called for more severe disciplinary action to be taken with the Secret Service in the future. In the 31-page, highly critical findings released on Sunday, the Senate homeland security and governmental affairs committee lamented the mishandling of communications around the rally and said Trump was denied extra security on the day.

• Trump said the US will send Patriot air defence systems to Ukraine to help it fight off Russian attacks amid a souring of his relations with Vladimir Putin.

• Kevin Hassett, the White House economic adviser, said Trump has seen some trade deal offers and thinks they need to be better, adding that the president will proceed with threatened tariffs on Mexico and the EU if they don’t improve.