Trump nominee to lead whistleblower office withdraws after racist texts – US politics live

Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Donald Trump repeated his wildly false claim that the city of Portland, Oregon is beset by fires started by protesters.

The president was asked to comment on a federal appeals court ruling on Monday, in which a three-judge panel lifted a lower court’s order that blocked his deployment of national guard troops to Portland, to quell a persistent but small protest outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) office.

“That was the decision, that I can send the national guard if I see problems,” Trump replied. “I looked at Portland over the weekend. The place is burning down, just burning down.”

“Maybe that influenced the court,” the president added, in apparent reference to an incident on Saturday evening, in which federal officers opened fire with chemical agents on a crowd of peaceful protesters who gathered outside the Ice office in an outlying Portland neighborhood, after a much larger, festive anti-Trump, No Kings protest in the city’s downtown.

In fact, the only member of the three-judge panel who lives in Portland, Susan Graber, dissented very strenuously from the decision by two her colleagues, who were both nominated by Trump, that national guard troops were needed in the city.

“You look at a place like Portland, it’s ridiculous when they say that there’s no problem,” Trump added. “The place was, it was on fire over the weekend.”

Video from Oregon Public Broadcasting showed the actual scene outside the Ice facility in Portland’s South Waterfront district on Saturday, as reporters noted that federal officers used chemical munitions to disperse a protest by about 500 people that looked more like a street party than a riot.

During the White House celebration of Diwali, Donald Trump repeated a disputed claim that he brokered a ceasefire this year between India and Pakistan by threatening to impose tariffs if the conflict continued.

“Let me also extend our warmest wishes to the people of India. I just spoke to your prime minister today. We had a great conversation. We talk about trade, we talk about a lot of things, but mostly the world of trade, he’s very interested in that,” Trump said.

“Although we did talk a little while ago about, ‘let’s have no wars with Pakistan,’ and I think the fact that trade was involved, I was able to talk him out of that,” Trump added.

Trump’s claim that he brokered the India-Pakistan ceasefire in May reportedly infuriated the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, who insists that it was settled directly between the two nations, and caused a rift between Trump and Modi.

The fact that Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, gave Trump credit and nominated the US president for the Nobel Peace Prize, is unlikely to have improved relations between Modi and Trump.

In his remarks, Trump repeatedly suggested that he had used tariffs to bring peace around the globe, perhaps previewing the case his administration will make next month at the supreme court when it asks the court to overturn lower court rulings that most of Trump’s tariffs are illegal.

Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, at a celebration of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, Donald Trump was asked about a report that he is demanding hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the thwarted legal cases against him after his first term.

While Trump initially suggested that he was unaware of the report, he said, “I guess they probably owe me a lot of money for that.”

He added that he would donate any money paid to him by the government to charity or to pay for public works, like the construction of a massive ballroom at the White House.

“We have numerous cases, having to do with the fraud of the election, the 2020 election” Trump added. “Because of everything we found out, I guess they owe me a lot of money.”

“With the country, it’s interesting because I’m the one that makes the decision and that decision would have to go across my desk and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself,” the president said. “But I was damaged very greatly and any money I would get, I would give to charity.”

He then suggested that both Kash Patel, the FBI director, and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, “are working on” investigations of the 2020 election he falsely claims was stolen from him.

“What they did, they rigged the election,” Trump said later, suggesting that the compensation he expects is not simply to pay his legal fees but a sort of compensation for not being named the winner of the 2020 election he lost.

The New York Times reported earlier on Tuesday that Trump had filed two claims demanding that the justice department he now controls pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him, including the FBI and special counsel investigation into the Russian government’s hack and leak scheme to boost his chances of winning the 2016 election, and the 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago, when federal investigators found a huge trove of classified documents he illegally retained after leaving office.

Graham Platner, the Maine oysterman and former US marine campaigning to be the Democrat’s candidate in next year’s US Senate race, “has an anti-Semitic tattoo on his chest” and “knows damn well what it means,” according to one of his close aides who resigned last week.

Platner tried to get ahead of the revelation that he has a skull and crossbones tattoo on his chest known as Totenkopf, a symbol used by the Nazi SS, by releasing video of himself shirtless to Pod Save America, and offering an explanation to the podcast run by former Obama communications staffers.

In the interview, Platner claimed that he was unaware of the Nazi link when he got the tattoo while on leave in the Croatian city of Split during his time in the marines.

Genevieve McDonald, Platner’s former political director, disputed that in a Facebook post shared by Alex Seitz-Wald, the editor of Maine’s Midcoast Villager newspaper.

“Graham has an anti-Semitic tattoo on his chest,” McDonald wrote. “He’s not an idiot, he’s a military history buff. Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it, but he got it years ago and he should have had it covered up because he knows damn well what it means.”

“His campaign released it themselves to some podcast bros,” she added, “along with a video of him shirtless and drunk at a wedding to try to get ahead of it.”

Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, told Igor Bobic of HuffPost on Tuesday that he continues to support Platner. “There’s a young man who served his country in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he went through some really difficult experiences seeing friends of his killed or whatever, and in spite of all of that he had the courage to run”, Sanders said.

“I personally think he is an excellent candidate. I’m going to support him, and I look forward to him becoming the next senator in the state of Maine”, he added.

Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill today, House speaker Mike Johnson said a vote to release the full tranche of Epstein files will hit the House floor, after representative-elect Adelita Grijalva is sworn in.

Grijalva will be the 218th signature needed on a discharge petition that would force a vote in the House. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have accused Johnson of delaying the formal swearing in of the Arizona representative and staving off a vote.

“If you get the signatures, it goes to a vote,” Johnson said today. However, at a press conference earlier he said the bipartisan effort would be redundant as the House oversight committee continues its investigation into the handling of the Epstein case.

Democratic congressman Ro Khanna said that Johnson saying he would not block the vote is ultimately “a big deal”.

“I appreciate Speaker Johnson making it clear we will get a vote on Rep. Thomas Massie and my bill to release the Epstein files. The advocacy of the survivors is working. Now let’s get Adelita Grijalva sworn in and Congress back to work,” Khanna added in a statement.

Addressing reporters after lunch in the Rose Garden, Senate majority leader John Thune took a question about the White House’s updated stance on Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel, which now remains in question after Politico reported text messages in which Ingrassia allegedly described himself as having “a Nazi streak” and suggested Martin Luther King Jr Day should be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell”.

“They’ll have something official to say about that. But you know what we’ve said,” Thune said, after he told reporters on Monday that Ingrassia’s nomination is “not going to pass”.

The New York Times reports that the president is demanding the justice department pay him about $230m in compensation for the federal investigations into him. They cite anonymous sources familiar with the matter.

The sources tell the Times that Trump is seeking damages for “a number of purported violations of his rights”, including the FBI and special counsel investigation into Russian election tampering and possible connections to the 2016 Trump campaign.

They add that the president has made these complaints through and administrative claims process, that have yet to be made public. Another complaint allegedly says that the FBI violated Trump’s rights when his Mar-a-Lago estate was searched in 2022 for classified documents.

The report has raised significant concerns from legal experts about the ethics of these unprecedented demands – which would essentially require a department, that the president now oversees, to pay him out for their work investigating him.

A group consisting of several hundred former US national security officials have issued a letter to Congress, urging its leaders to examine the existence of an “Interagency Weaponization Working Group.”

The Steady State, a group of over former officials committed to their oath to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” wrote the letter Tuesday in response to reports of the IWWG, which is “apparently tasked with pursuing retributive actions against individuals perceived as political opponents of the president.”

Citing a recent Reuters investigation, the letter said:

If accurate, these reports describe a profound and dangerous subversion of the apolitical foundation of the Intelligence Community… The activities described in the Reuters report echo the worst examples of intelligence politicization and misuse of ‘security services’ in our history, and would represent a direct violation of the statutory and ethical boundaries designed to separate intelligence functions from domestic political operations.

The letter went on to call leaders from the Senate and House intelligence, judiciary and armed services committees to:

1. Hold immediate closed hearings with the Director of National Intelligence, the Attorney General, and relevant agency heads to determine the existence, authority, and scope of any such interagency group;
2. Request all documents, communications, and membership lists related to the IWWG and similar “weaponization” initiatives, including taskings and technical-collection authorizations;
3. Assess potential violations of the National Security Act, Executive Order 12333, and statutory prohibitions on domestic intelligence activities; and
4. Affirm publicly—in a bipartisan statement—that the Intelligence Community must never be employed for political or personal retribution.

It is nearly 2pm ET in Washington DC. Here’s a look at where things currently stand across US politics:

• There are no plans for Donald Trump to meet with Vladmir Putin “in the immediate future”, a White House official told the Guardian. The official added that the recent call between secretary of state Marco Rubio and Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was “productive”, and therefore an additional-in-person meeting between the envoys is “not necessary”.

• Hosting several Republican lawmakers at the White House for lunch, Trump spent most of his opening remarks heralding the success of his sweeping tariffs. “We’re a wealthy nation again, and we’re a nation that can be secure. We’re a nation that can start paying down our debt, and with tariffs, we’re the wealthiest nation ever in the history of the world,” he said.

• Earlier today, Trump said on Truth Social that several Middle East allies told him they would “welcome the opportunity” at Trump’s request to go into Gaza “with a heavy force” and “straighten our Hamas” if they “continue to behave badly”. This comes after the 11-day ceasefire in Gaza was seriously undermined on Sunday when Israel launched waves of deadly airstrikes and said it would cut off aid into the territory “until further notice” after a reported attack by Hamas, which the militant group denied being involved in.

• Meanwhile, JD Vance, who is currently on a visit to Israel, said that he would not “put an explicit deadline” on Hamas to comply with the key points of the Gaze ceasefire deal. “If Hamas doesn’t comply with the deal, very bad things are going to happen,” Vance said, reiterating Donald Trump’s threats earlier today on social media.

• New York state police announced recently that a pardoned rioter at the January 6 insurrection was arrested last weekend for allegedly threatening to kill Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader. House Republican speaker Mike Johnson noted that “anybody who threatens political violence against elected officials or anyone else should be have the full weight and measure of the Department of Justice on their head.”

• Johnson also said that lawmakers on the House oversight committee are “working around the clock” to ensure “maximum transparency” in the ongoing investigation into the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. He added that the committee’s work is “already accomplishing” what the bipartisan discharge petition, which would force a vote on the House floor to release the full tranche of Epstein records, seeks to do achieve.

• Some Republican senators have said they don’t support Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel, ahead of his confirmation hearing on Thursday. Politico reported on Monday that Ingrassia told other Republicans he “has a Nazi streak” and said holidays commemorating Black people should be “eviscerated”, in a private group chat.

• The CIA is providing the bulk of the intelligence used to carry out the controversial lethal air strikes by the Trump administration against boats in the Caribbean Sea suspected of carrying drugs from Venezuela, according to three sources familiar with the operations. Experts say the agency’s central role means much of the evidence used to select which alleged smugglers to kill on the open sea will almost certainly remain secret.

The Senate’s top Republican, John Thune, closed out the lunch in the Rose Garden by urging his colleagues across the aisle to “get wise” and “vote to reopen the government”.

“Everybody here has voted now 11 different times to open up the government, and we are going to keep voting to open up the government, and eventually, the Democrats, hopefully, sooner or later, are going to come around,” Thune said.

As he welcomes the Republican senators, and thanks them for his help, Trump notes – without naming him – that senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has routinely voted against the stopgap funding bill to reopen the federal government, did not turn up.

“We’re just missing one person. You’ll never guess who that is,” Trump said. “He automatically votes no. He thinks it’s good politics. It’s really not good politics.”

Hosting several Republican lawmakers at the White House, Trump says that “this is supposed to be sort of a private event, and there is no such thing in politics as a private event”.

There are no plans for Donald Trump to meet with Vladmir Putin “in the immediate future”, a White House official told the Guardian.

The official added that the recent call between secretary of state Marco Rubio and Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was “productive”, and therefore an additional-in-person meeting between the envoys is “not necessary”.

This comes after Trump announced a yet-to-be determined bilateral summit with Putin in Budapest, Hungary, after his conversation with the Kremlin Leader last week.

The vice-president said he doesn’t know the answer to the question about the ultimate authority in Gaza.

“We need to reconstruct Gaza. We need to make sure that both the Palestinians living in Gaza, but also the Israelis, are able to live in some measure of security and stability. We’re doing all those things simultaneously,” he said.

“Let’s focus on security, rebuilding, giving people some food and medicine. If we get to the point where we’re arguing exactly what the governance structure in Gaza is long term, then we should pat ourselves on the back. That’s a very good problem to have.”

The vice-president said that he would not “put an explicit deadline” on Hamas to comply with the key points of the Gaze ceasefire deal.

“If Hamas doesn’t comply with the deal, very bad things are going to happen,” Vance said, reiterating Donald Trump’s threats earlier today on social media.

“I don’t think it’s actually advisable for us to say this has to be done in a week, because a lot of this work is very hard. It’s never been done before, and in order for us to give it a chance to succeed, we’ve got to be a little bit flexible,” the vice-president added.

Vice-president JD Vance is now addressing members of the press in Israel. He’s speaking at a civilian military coordination center, which he is also opening today.

“The Israeli government has been remarkably helpfulness. I want to thank them,” Vance said, before criticizing the American media.

“There’s almost this desire to root for failure, that every time something bad happens, that every time that there’s an act of violence, there’s this inclination to say, ‘oh, this is the end of the cease fire, this is the end of the peace plan.’ It’s not the end,” the vice-president said. “It is, in fact, exactly how this is going to have to happen when you have people who hate each other, who have been fighting against each other for a very long time.”

New York state police announced recently that a pardoned rioter at the January 6 insurrection was arrested last weekend for allegedly threatening to kill Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader.

At today’s press conference, Republican speaker Mike Johnson said he didn’t know any details about the arrest, but noted that “anybody who threatens political violence against elected officials or anyone else should be have the full weight and measure of the Department of Justice on their head.”

However, he added that “violence on the left is far more prevalent than the violence on the right.” He didn’t offer any evidence to prove that claim, simply saying “don’t make me go through the list”.

“Let’s not make it a partisan issue. You don’t want me to go there,” Johnson said, before criticizing the No Kings protests across the country over the weekend. It’s worth noting that police departments in several major cities said they made no arrests following the protests on Saturday.

At a press conference on day 21 of the government shutdown, Mike Johnson said that lawmakers on the House oversight committee are “working around the clock” to ensure “maximum transparency” in the ongoing investigation into the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Johnson added that the committee’s work is “already accomplishing” what the bipartisan discharge petition, which would force a vote on the House floor to release the full tranche of Epstein records, seeks to do achieve. The House speaker also said that the commitee’s investigation is “far broader in scope” than what is covered by the discharge petition, and has “already yielded significant results”.

The House oversight committee chair, congressman James Comer of Kentucky, said today that Democrats are using the Epstein case to deflect from the ongoing shutdown. “Let’s be clear, Democrats don’t care about transparency or accountability in this matter,” he said. “The evidence we’ve gathered does not implicate president Trump in any way.”

On Friday, the committee released the transcript of the closed-door interview with Alex Acosta, the labor secretary during Trump’s first administration and the former US attorney for the southern district of Florida, who was accused of giving Epstein a “sweetheart deal” in 2008 – which saw the late financier sentenced to a 13-month sentence on state prostitution crimes.

In a post on Truth Social, the president said that several allies in the Middle East have told him they would “welcome the opportunity” at Trump’s request to go into Gaza “with a heavy force” and “straighten our Hamas” if they “continue to behave badly”.

This comes after the 11-day ceasefire in Gaza was seriously undermined on Sunday when Israel launched waves of deadly airstrikes and said it would cut off aid into the territory “until further notice” after a reported attack by Hamas, which the militant group denied being involved in.

“There is still hope that Hamas will do what is right. If they do not, an end to Hamas will be FAST, FURIOUS, & BRUTAL! I would like to thank all of those countries that called to help,” Trump wrote today, reiterating his threat on Monday, when he said that Hamas would be “eradicated” if they did not “behave”.

Vice-president JD Vance touched down in Tel Aviv a short while ago. He then caught up with special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner for about two hours.

He is currently taking part in private briefings with members of the Israeli military, according to the press pool traveling with the vice-president.

Vance will hold a press conference at 11am ET/6pm local time. And tomorrow he’s set to meet with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

My colleagues, who are covering the latest developments in the Middle East, report that Gaza’s health ministry said in its latest update that the bodies of 13 people were brought to hospitals across the territory in the last 24 hours. It said eight people had been injured over this time period.

This means that at least 68,229 Palestinian people have been killed and 170,369 others injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza since 7 October 2023.

Some Republican senators have said they don’t support Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel, ahead of his confirmation hearing on Thursday.

Politico reported on Monday that Ingrassia told other Republicans he “has a Nazi streak” and said holidays commemorating Black people should be “eviscerated”, in a private group chat.

Senate majority leader, John Thune, told Politico that Ingrassia is “not gonna pass”. While Republican senator Rick Scott of Florida, told reporters that he would not support the 30-year-old Trump ally.

Politico also reported that James Lankford, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, has “tons of questions” for Ingrassia, adding he “can’t imagine supporting that”.

The Central Intelligence Agency is providing the bulk of the intelligence used to carry out the controversial lethal air strikes by the Trump administration against small, fast-going boats in the Caribbean Sea suspected of carrying drugs from Venezuela, according to three sources familiar with the operations.

Experts say the agency’s central role means much of the evidence used to select which alleged smugglers to kill on the open sea will almost certainly remain secret.

The agency’s central role in the boat strikes has not previously been disclosed. Donald Trump confirmed last Wednesday that he had authorized covert CIA action in Venezuela, but not what the agency would be doing.

The sources say the CIA is providing real-time intelligence collected by satellites and signal intercepts to detect which boats it believes are loaded with drugs, tracking their routes and making the recommendations about which vessels should be hit by missiles.

“They are the most important part of it,” said one of the sources. Two sources said that the drones or other aircraft actually launching the missiles used to sink the boats belong to the US military, not the CIA.

Information the agency gathers against any of the alleged smugglers – dead or alive – is likely to remain classified and out of public view. That is in spite of the worldwide public interest and debate over the killing of civilians.

The agency’s intelligence, unlike information gathered by the DEA or the Coast Guard, which used to handle maritime interdiction operations against smugglers, is not designed as legal evidence.

A decision in Donald Trump’s favor by a three-judge panel issued on Monday, which lifted a block on his planned deployment of Oregon national guard troops to Portland, could be reconsidered by a new, larger panel of federal appeals court judges.

Hours after the three-judge panel decided, 2-1, that Trump has the legal authority to deploy federalized troops to Portland, a judge on the ninth circuit court of appeals formally requested “a vote on whether this case should be reheard” by a larger panel of judges.

That triggered a formal order for lawyers for the state of Oregon and the city of Portland to submit written briefs arguing for a rehearing, and lawyers for the Trump administration to argue against it, by midnight on Wednesday.

After those briefs are submitted, all 29 active judges on the appeals court, the country’s largest, will vote on whether or not to rehear the case.

Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, said that she hopes the full ninth circuit court of appeals vacates the panel’s 2-1 decision, as the dissenting judge, Portland-based Susan Graber, urged her colleagues to do.

“I’m very troubled by the decision of the court,” Kotek told reporters. “I still urge the Trump administration to send all the national guard members home.”

If the vote for a new hearing wins, legal journalist ‪Chris Geidner‬ said, the case will be heard again by 11 judges, including the court’s chief judge, Mary Murguia, an Obama nominee, and 10 randomly assigned judges.