Judge imposes gag order on Trump in hush-money trial – as it happened

Donald Trump-supporting Super Pac Make America Great Again Inc unleashed an attack on Robert F Kennedy Jr, after he announces Nicole Shanahan as his running mate.

“Robert F Kennedy Jr is a far-left radical that supports reparations, backs the Green New Deal, and wants to ban fracking. It’s no surprise he would pick a Biden donor leftist as his running mate,” said spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer.

Third party candidates with dedicated followings can add an element of unpredictability to tight presidential races – just ask Al Gore. But despite Team Trump’s vitriol, polls have shown Kennedy may sap support from Biden in states where he’s on the ballot.

The Democratic National Committee has gone on the attack against Kennedy’s campaign, including by filing a complaint accusing him of improperly coordinating with a political action committee:

In seeking a gag order against Donald Trump, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office argued the former president had a “longstanding history of attacking witnesses, investigators, prosecutors, judges, and others involved in legal proceedings against him”, the New York Times reports.

Judge Juan Merchan agreed, writing in the order that, “his statements were threatening, inflammatory, denigrating.”

The Times notes that earlier today, Trump called his former fixer Michael Cohen “death”, in a post on Truth Social – just the sort of statement that Merchan’s gag order is meant to prohibit.

Liz Cheney, the Donald Trump foe who ended up being forced out of Congress due to her opposition to the former president, also described NBC’s elevation of McDaniel as a danger, the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports:

The Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “enabled criminality and depravity” in her support for Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the former congresswoman Liz Cheney said as controversy swirled over McDaniel’s media role.

“Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome,” Cheney, a Republican who was vice-chair of the House January 6 committee, wrote on social media.

“She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”

McDaniel rose in Republican politics as a member of the powerful Romney family before reportedly dropping the name at Trump’s behest and becoming RNC chair in 2017.

In February 2022, the RNC said Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the other anti-Trump Republican on the committee that investigated the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, were engaged in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”.

Cheney lost her seat in Congress that year. Kinzinger chose to retire. McDaniel was eased out of the RNC last month, to be replaced in part by Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law.

The White House said that meetings over the last two days between the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, have been “productive”.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, yesterday canceled a high-level delegation from Israel to the White House to discuss Rafah, with the visit meant to take place today. He withdrew his agreement for talks after the US abstained from – rather than vetoed – a UN security council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the release of hostages held by Hamas.

Gallant was already in Washington for longer-planned talks at a lower level. Meanwhile, in the Middle East earlier today, Israel recalled its negotiators from Doha, in Qatar, after deeming mediated talks on a Gaza truce “at a dead end” due to demands by Hamas, Reuters reported earlier, citing an Israeli official.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said to reporters board Air Force One moments ago: “We are committed to supporting Israel in its fight against Hamas … We cannot expect Israel to live under active threat.” She added that it was critical for Israel to do “whatever is possible” to protect civilians in Rafah.

There, about 1.7 million Palestinians are trapped under Israeli siege and suffering bombardment and food deprivation as international talks about a ceasefire and access for more aid founder.

Aid agencies and international bodies including United Nations officials have said that people stranded further north in Gaza are on the brink of famine.

The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, has just been speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One, on the way to Raleigh, North Carolina.

Joe Biden and the vice-president, Kamala Harris, are holding a joint event there to talk about healthcare.

Reporters were firing off their questions, in a short gaggle on a short flight. Jean-Pierre is confirming the US president’s position is he will “move heaven and earth” to reopen the port and rebuild the bridge.

She’s being asked about the state of US infrastructure but emphasizes that although the government pledges to work with Congress for funding to rebuild the bridge, the search and rescue effort that’s still under way in Baltimore is the main focus.

Here’s what Yale University historian Timothy Snyder had to say about the danger of NBC News hiring former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, as told by the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly:

The former Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “tried to disassemble our democracy” by supporting Donald Trump’s electoral fraud lies and should not be given such a media role, a leading historian said amid uproar over the appointment.

“What NBC has done is they’ve invited into what should be a normal framework someone who doesn’t believe that framework should exist at all,” Timothy Snyder, a Yale professor and author of On Tyranny, told MSNBC, part of the network now employing McDaniel.

“What NBC has done of its own volition is bring into a very important conversation about democracy, one which is going to take place for the next seven months or so, someone who … tried to disassemble our democracy. Who personally took part in an attempt to undo the American system.”

NBC announced the hire on Friday. Carrie Budoff Brown, the senior vice-president for politics, said McDaniel would contribute analysis “across all NBC News platforms”.

On Sunday, McDaniel told Meet the Press Joe Biden won the 2020 election “fair and square”, adding that she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse”.

Joe Biden did not say when he expected the Francis Scott Key Bridge to be rebuilt or, more crucially for the nation’s economy, the port of Baltimore to be able to resume operations.

The president also gave no update on the six people still missing from the collapse, but said the search and rescue operation to find them is a “top priority”.

For the latest on this developing story, follow our live blog:

As we wait for Joe Biden to begin his speech on the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, here are some scenes from earlier today in Baltimore:

The just-concluded supreme court arguments over mifepristone were a deep dive into the technicalities of how the US government approves and regulates medication. The Guardian’s Carter Sherman has taken a close look at what the case entails, and when the nation’s highest court may rule:

Less than two years after it overturned Roe v Wade and ended the national right to abortion, the US supreme court is back on the frontlines of the American abortion wars.

On Tuesday, the court will hear oral arguments in one of the most highly watched cases of the session, which could dramatically curtail access to mifepristone, a drug typically used in medication abortions. The court is reviewing decisions made by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to loosen restrictions on the drug, such as allowing non-physicians to prescribe it, as well as letting providers prescribe it through telehealth rather than in-person appointments.

Any decision to restrict mifepristone will affect everyone in the US, not only those who live in the 16 states that have banned nearly all abortions. This case could also have wide-ranging consequences for the FDA’s future decision-making.

A decision from the nation’s highest court in the case will probably arrive by summer 2024.

The arguments have repeatedly returned to the question of emergency abortions and the role of a federal law known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, or Emtala, which broadly requires hospitals to stabilize patients who are facing medical emergencies rather than turning them away.

Erin Hawley, a lawyer representing the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, has said that in emergency situations, the anti-abortion doctors she represents do not have the time or ability to turn down cases that involve complications from abortions -even though working on such a case could run counter to their objections to abortion. (More than 100 studies have concluded that mifepristone is a safe and effective way to end a pregnancy.)

Solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar, however, has contended that hospitals prepare and protect doctors from being forced to work on cases to which they object. “The federal government has never taken the position that Emtala would override an individual doctor’s conscience objections,” she said.

As for Emtala, the court will turn to that law next month, when the justices consider if it requires doctors to perform emergency abortions. Oral arguments are set for 24 April.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson gave Danco’s lawyer Jessica Ellsworth some air to explain why pharmaceutical companies have lined up in opposition to undermining the FDA’s authority.

“Do you have concerns about judges parsing medical and scientific studies?” Jackson asked.

Ellsworth, the lawyer for the manufacturer of mifepristone, said pharmaceutical companies have “significant concerns” and rely on the “FDA’s gold standard review process”.

“The reality is … you have a district court that, among other things, relied on one study that was an analysis of anonymous blog posts,” said Ellsworth. Other studies “have since been retracted for lack of scientific rigor and misleading data”.

“Precisely because judges are not experts in statistics and the methodologies used for studies in clinical trials – that is why FDA has many hundreds of pages of analysis in the record of what the scientific data showed, and courts are just not in a position to parse and second-guess” that, she said.

Justice Samuel Alito’s question about complications from mifepristone goes to the heart of why the medical and pharmaceutical industry considers it so scary for judges to decide questions of science.

Alito asked whether the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) shouldn’t have provided a more extensive explanation of why telehealth prescribing of mifepristone could lead to an increase in emergency room visits.

“The increase in ER visits is just of no consequence? It doesn’t even merit some comment?” Alito asked Elizabeth Prelogar, the US solicitor general.

Defending the FDA, Prelogar said: “It fully explained its decision-making and I think it falls well within the realm of reasonableness.” To researchers, the FDA comment in question made an obvious point: an increase in emergency room visits does not denote greater risk for adverse events. An emergency room visit is a proxy measure – in other words, it might indicate the possibility of adverse events, but it may also indicate only an increase in women seeking reassurance, particularly in connection with a drug like mifepristone, which induces bleeding.

This is exactly the kind of complicated parsing of science that the FDA considers every day when looking at studies on the safety and efficacy of drugs.

Speaking of the Comstock Act, Mr Comstock himself turned up outside the court:

That would be Anthony Comstock, the former US postal service inspector and 19th century anti-vice crusader. Outside of Washington DC, abortion foes have seized on the legislation bearing his name to attempt to get the procedure banned:

The conservative justice Samuel Alito also asked about the role of the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that bans the mailing of all abortion-related materials.

He suggested that the FDA should have considered the Comstock Act when it changed the rules around the availability of mifepristone, which can now be sent in the mail.

Before the overturning of Roe v Wade, the Comstock Act was long regarded as a relic that no longer applied in the modern world.

The Biden administration has issued guidance declaring that the Comstock Act only applies in situations where people intend to break the law. However, since Roe fell, anti-abortion activists have tried to argue that Comstock is good law and should block the mailing of at least abortion pills.

If the federal government enforced the Comstock Act, it would result in a de facto nationwide abortion ban, because abortion clinics rely so heavily on receiving equipment and other materials through the mail to perform abortions.

The liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor posed a hypothetical about mifepristone’s safety to Elizabeth Prelogar, the US solicitor general who is defending the government’s handling of the drug.

“Even if there is some increase in emergency room visits, the question of when that rises to a sufficient safety risk is up to the” US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Sotomayor said.

“That’s right,” Prelogar replied, and noted that the FDA studied the drug’s safety during the Covid-19 pandemic, when it was even easier to get, and noticed no change in adverse reactions:

I also want to emphasize, Justice Sotomayor, that the studies were far from the only evidence FDA consulted at the time it acted in 2021. It had real world experience during the Covid-19 pandemic, a period of time when the in-person dispensing requirement was not enforced. And FDA started by looking at, as a comparative analysis, the two periods of time when you had in-person dispensing and when you didn’t, and saw that there was no relevant increase in serious adverse events or difference between those two timeframes.

That’s significant because a federal appeals court last summer ruled against FDA decisions in 2016 and 2021 that made mifepristone easier to access. Those are now being challenged by the government in this hearing.

Here’s more about that:

The oral arguments began with a debate on whether the doctors have standing, or the right to bring the case in the first place.

Anti-abortion doctors claim they will suffer harm if they have to treat women who experience complications from mifepristone, an argument the Biden administration, which appealed the case to the court, has rejected as too speculative, especially given mifepristone’s proven safety record.

The supreme court has historically rejected standing arguments based on such potential harm, which the solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, said rested on a “long chain of remote contingencies”.

But conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, both abortion opponents, seemed skeptical of Prelogar’s arguments against standing, with Thomas even suggesting that theories of standing should be reconsidered if they don’t allow the case to move forward.

“Is there anybody who can sue and get a judicial ruling on whether what FDA did was lawful?” Alito asked. “Shouldn’t somebody be able to challenge that in court?”

As we await the start of the supreme court’s oral arguments in the conservative challenge to abortion medication mifepristone, here’s the Guardian’s Carter Sherman with a rundown of what we can expect in today’s hearing:

Abortion is back at the US supreme court, with arguments on Tuesday in the first major case on the issue since a 6-3 majority ruled in 2022 to overturn Roe v Wade and end the national right to abortion – a decision that unleashed abortion bans throughout the country as well as a political backlash that Democrats hope will serve them in the coming presidential election.

At issue in the case is the future of mifepristone, a drug typically used in US medication abortions. The rightwing groups that brought the case are seeking to roll back measures taken by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to expand the drug’s availability in recent years.

A decision in their favor would apply nationwide, including in states that protect abortion access, and would likely make the drug more difficult to acquire. The loosening of restrictions on mifepristone have helped mitigate the impact of post-Roe abortion bans; if those restrictions are reimposed, abortion rights groups anticipate it will become significantly more difficult to access abortions in the US.

“More than 60% of abortions in the US are medication abortions, so that would impact a substantial number of people, whether you live in a protective state or a restricted state,” said Nicole Huberfeld, a health law professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health.

A key moment in the conservative challenge to mifepristone occurred last year, when a federal appeals court issued a ruling to restrict access to the drug. The Guardian’s Melissa Segura reports on the connections between one of the judges who issued that decision, and a group opposing the drug:

When the former president Donald Trump appointed the Texas attorney James Ho to the fifth circuit court of appeals in 2017, lawyers at the prominent law firm Gibson Dunn – where Ho worked before his appointment – had a problem: how to replace the politically connected Ho. Turns out, they didn’t even need to change the home address for his replacement. Ho’s wife, Allyson, moved into her husband’s position and his old office.

Meet the Hos.

Few people outside of legal circles have heard of the Hos, yet the couple is tied to the case before the US supreme court that will determine women’s access to mifepristone, a drug commonly used in medication abortions. The court hears arguments in the case on Tuesday.

Ho served on the three-judge panel last summer that ruled to restrict access to mifepristone. The legal group behind the mifepristone case, Alliance Defending Freedom, made at least six payments from 2018 through 2022 to his wife, Allyson, a powerhouse federal appellate lawyer who has argued in front of the supreme court and has deep connections to the conservative legal movement that has led the attack on the right to abortion in the US.

Protesters have gathered outside the supreme court ahead of the 10am kickoff of oral arguments in the conservative challenges against mifepristone.

Both sides of the debate are well represented:

Robots included: