Trump documents trial judge sets first hearing; Georgia grand jury set to weigh 2020 election charges – as it happened

Joe Biden’s pick to become the country’s top military officer warned senators that an indefinite blockade of senior officer promotions could have a far-reaching impact across the US armed forces.

Testifying at his Senate armed services committee confirmation hearing to be the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Charles “CQ” Brown, the outgoing air force chief of staff, said “we will lose talent” as a result of the prolonged hold on general and flag officers.

Brown made the remarks shortly after being questioned by Republican senator Tommy Tuberville, who has used a Senate procedure to put a hold on hundreds of military nominations from moving forward in protest of Pentagon abortion policies. An aide to Tuberville said his block would also apply to Brown, Reuters reported.

Brown also said that the inability of senior officers to take new assignments created a “chain of events” that affects junior officers as well as military families.

Democrats including Senator Elizabeth Warren have slammed Tuberville for punishing uniformed military leaders who were not responsible for the policy on abortion travel that he was protesting. Warren said:

If the senator from Alabama continues his reckless action, he will soon be holding 650 leaders who have served their country honorably hostage.

The Secret Service will provide a briefing to Congress on the discovery of cocaine at the White House, Axios is reporting.

The meeting between Secret Service representatives and the Republican-controlled House oversight committee will take place at 10am EST on Thursday, according to two sources familiar with the plan.

House oversight chair James Comer sent a letter to the Secret Service director last week requesting a briefing after cocaine was found at the White House.

A grand jury selected in Georgia that is expected to decide later this summer whether Donald Trump and associates will face charges over their attempt to overturn the 2020 election has been formally sworn in after a three-hour selection process in Atlanta.

The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, was asked if he has concerns that Senator Tommy Tuberville has a “hard time” denouncing white nationalism, especially in the military.

McConnell replied:

White supremacy is simply unacceptable in the military and in our whole country.

Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville has tripled down on his belief that not all white nationalists should be labelled as “racists”, just a day after he said the definition of a “white nationalist” was a matter of “opinion”.

Tuberville, in an interview with ABC News’ Rachel Scott, was asked why he continued to insist that a white nationalist “to me is an American”. He replied:

Listen, I’m totally against racism. And if Democrats want to say that white nationalists are racist, I’m totally against that, too.

“But that’s not a Democratic definition,” Scott said. Tuberville responded:

Well that’s your definition. My definition is racism is bad.

Scott noted that the definition of a white nationalist is someone believing “the white race is superior to all other races” and asked, “Do you believe that white nationalists are racist?” He replied:

Yes, if that’s what a racist is, yes.

Potential grand jurors were questioned for about two hours before Fulton county judge Robert McBurney announced who were chosen, CBS News reported.

There will be two concurrent grand juries that will be made up of 16 to 23 people and up to three alternates as part of the process.

One group will meet on Mondays and Tuesdays. The other will meet Thursdays and Fridays. Of the 23 Fulton County residents chosen for the grand jury, a majority, 12, would need to vote in favor of an indictment.

Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis is expected to present her case before one of the two new grand juries being seated today.

Ed Garland, a local attorney, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution the jurors selected would face an “awesome responsibility” that “no other group of Georgia citizens has ever dealt with – the potential indictment of a former president”.

Garland added:

This is a case that has been saturated in the media with political overtones, so it is imperative for them to be fair and impartial and for our judicial system to live up to its ideals.

At the courthouse, McBurney reminded reporters of the sensitivity of proceedings. “It would not go well if any of [the jurors’] pictures appear in any of your outlets,” he said.

A grand jury selected in Georgia on Tuesday is expected to decide later this summer whether Donald Trump and associates will face criminal charges over their attempt to overturn the former president’s defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

The district attorney of Fulton county, Fani Willis, has indicated she expects to obtain indictments between the end of July and the middle of August. Trump also faces possible federal charges over his election subversion, culminating in his incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.

Trump faces trials on 71 criminal charges: 34 in New York over hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels and 37 in Florida, from federal prosecutors and regarding his retention of classified documents after leaving office.

Trump’s legal jeopardy does not stop there. In a civil case in New York, he was fined about $5m after being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation against the writer E Jean Carroll. Another civil case, concerning Trump’s business practices, continues in New York.

The grand jury selection for the Fulton county case comes at a febrile moment in US society. Denying all wrongdoing and claiming political persecution, Trump remains the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination to face Biden again at the polls next year.

Every member of the Michigan Republican congressional delegation is backing Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House, his presidential campaign said.

Representatives Jack Bergman, Bill Huizenga, John James, Lisa McClain, John Moolenaar and Tim Walberg will also serve on Trump’s “2024 Michigan federal leadership team”, according to the campaign.

A US thinktank chief who accuses Joe Biden of China-linked corruption involving his son, Hunter Biden, and who has been presented by Republicans as a “missing” witness against the president, was charged with China-linked offenses including failing to register as a foreign agent, arms trafficking and violations of sanctions on Iran.

Gal Luft, 57 and a dual US-Israeli citizen, is co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS), based in Maryland, near Washington.

He was charged on Monday in absentia, having skipped bail in Cyprus in April while awaiting extradition.

Announcing the charges, Damian Williams, US attorney for the southern district of New York, said Luft “engaged in multiple, serious criminal schemes.

He subverted foreign agent registration laws in the United States to seek to promote Chinese policies by acting through a former high-ranking US government official; he acted as a broker in deals for dangerous weapons and Iranian oil; and he told multiple lies about his crimes to law enforcement.

The charges seemed guaranteed to infuriate Republicans in Congress seeking to use Hunter Biden’s troubled personal life and business dealings in attacks on his father, potentially including attempts by rightwingers in the House to bring about impeachment proceedings.

Read the full story here.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer slammed Senator Tommy Tuberville for “fanning the flames of bigotry and intolerance” after Tuberville said the definition of a “white nationalist” was a matter of “opinion” during a television interview last night.

During the interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Tuberville was asked to clarify his prior comments on whether white nationalists should be barred from serving in the US military. “If people think that a white nationalist is a racist, I agree with that,” he said.

Collins noted that, by definition, a white nationalist is “someone who believes that the white race is superior to other races”. Tuberville replied: “Well, that’s some people’s opinion.”

My opinion of a white nationalist, if someone wants to call them white nationalist, to me, is an American. It’s an American.

Now if that white nationalist is a racist, I’m totally against anything that they want to do because I am 110% against racism.

Tuberville was “wrong, wrong, wrong”, Schumer said today, adding that “the definition of white nationalism is not a matter of opinion”. Schumer added:

For the Senator from Alabama to obscure the racist nature of white nationalism is indeed very, very dangerous.

Joe Biden has declared a state of emergency in Vermont, where torrential rainfall has triggered life-threatening flash floods.

The declaration allows for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) to provide aid to the state amid the flash flooding.

The National Weather Service has issued flash flood warnings and advisories across Vermont from the Massachusetts line north to the Canadian border. In the south and west, states were blistering under a worsening heatwave, as the US embarked on another week of extreme weather and experts warned that the human-caused climate crisis is driving the record-breaking conditions.

You can follow the latest extreme weather news from across the US on our live blog.

At least one of the far-right lawmakers on the House rules committee, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, said he planned to oppose the defense authorization bill.

Norman, a Freedom Caucus member, told CNN he was concerned the bill did not go far enough to target “woke” Pentagon policies, and won’t receive the amendment votes to change that.

Another conservative member of the panel, Chip Roy of Texas, said “there are still glaring issues at the DOD that it needs to address in order to receive my support”.

Few Republicans are highly confident that votes will be counted accurately in next year’s presidential election, according to a new poll.

The poll, conducted by Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, found that only 22% of Republicans have high confidence that votes in the upcoming presidential election will be counted accurately, compared with 71% of Democrats.

While Democrats’ confidence in elections has risen in recent years, the opposite is true for Republicans. Overall, the poll found that fewer than half of Americans – 44% – have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence that the votes in the next presidential election will be counted accurately.

The results suggest years of sustained attacks against elections by former president Donald Trump and his allies have taken a toll, AP writes.

As California considers implementing large-scale reparations for Black residents affected by the legacy of slavery, the state has also become the focus of the nation’s divisive reparations conversation, drawing the backlash of conservatives criticizing the priorities of a “liberal” state.

“Reparations for Slavery? California’s Bad Idea Catches On,” commentator Jason L Riley wrote in the Wall Street Journal, as New York approved a commission to study the idea. In the Washington Post, conservative columnist George F Will said the state’s debate around reparations adds to a “plague of solemn silliness”.

Roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose the idea of reparations, according to 2021 polling from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 2022 polling from the Pew Research Center. Both found that more than 80% Black respondents support some kind of compensation for the descendants of slaves, while a similar majority of white respondents opposed. Pew found that roughly two-thirds of Hispanics and Asian Americans opposed, as well.

But in California, there’s greater support. Both the state’s Reparations Task Force – which released its 1,100-page final report and recommendations to the public on 29 June – and a University of California, Los Angeles study found that roughly two-thirds of Californians are in favor of some form of reparations, though residents are divided on what they should be.

When delving into the reasons why people resist, Tatishe Nteta, who directed the UMass poll, expected feasibility or the challenges of implementing large programs to top the list, but this wasn’t the case.

“When we ask people why they oppose, it’s not about the cost. It’s not about logistics. It’s not about the impossibility to place a monetary value on the impact of slavery,” said Nteta, provost professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

It is consistently this notion that the descendants of slaves do not deserve these types of reparations.

Read the full story here.

More than 1,5000 amendments were filed to the FY2024 defense authorization bill, which is projected to hit the House floor this week. At issue is whether the House will take up the hard-right amendments, with the weight falling once again on Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Some of the most closely watched amendments relate to abortion, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) funding, and transgender troops, according to Politico’s Playbook.

McCarthy will need to navigate between the demands of his most conservative members – three of whom serve on the House rules committee – and the need for Democratic votes in order to get a bill ultimately signed into law, Playbook writes. It continues:

In the past, House leaders typically have told the hard right to pound sand, knowing they weren’t going to vote for the final bill anyway. But after pissing off conservatives during the debt limit standoff, McCarthy looks poised to make a different calculation this time.

Facing heavy criticism from the House Freedom Caucus and other conservatives, McCarthy is under pressure to give on a number of high-profile issues touching defense policy, Punchbowl News writes. It says:

Every ‘culture war’ provision from the Freedom Caucus that’s added to the base legislation will cost Democratic votes. It will also make GOP moderates unhappy.

The House rules committee is scheduled to mark up the FY2024 defense authorization bill, the annual bill setting Pentagon priorities and policies, today.

The bill, which is expected to hit the floor later this week, has been signed into law 60 years straight. But this year, Speaker Kevin McCarthy and GOP leaders are confronting a legislative landmine as the far-right House Freedom Caucus push for dozens of proposed changes to the legislation.

Adam Smith, the head Democrat on the House armed services committee, said he was worried about a flurry of “extreme right-wing amendments” attached to the bill and that he wasn’t “remotely” confident the bill will pass this week.

Smith told the Washington Post he was concerned about GOP measures on “abortion, guns, the border, and social policy and equity issues”. Without the controversial amendments, Smith predicted that well over 300 House members would vote for the bill. With them, “you lose most, if not all, Democrats,” he told Politico’s Playbook.

Iowa’s state legislature is holding a special session on Tuesday as it plans to vote on a bill that would ban most abortions at around six weeks of pregnancy, when most people don’t yet know they are pregnant.

The state is the latest in the country to vote on legislation restricting reproductive rights after the overturning of Roe v Wade last year, which ended the nationwide constitutional right to abortion.

Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, called for the special session last week, vowing to “continue to fight against the inhumanity of abortion” and calling the “pro-life” movement against reproductive rights “the most important human rights cause of our time”.

Lawmakers in the GOP-controlled legislature will debate House Study Bill 255, which was released on Friday and seeks to prohibit abortions at the first sign of cardiac activity except in certain cases such as rape or incest.

Iowa’s house, senate and governor’s office are all Republican-controlled, and the bill faces few hurdles from being passed.

Read the full story here.

Trump was charged with retention of national defense information, including US nuclear secrets and plans for US retaliation in the event of an attack, which means his case will be tried under the rules laid out in the Classified Information Procedures Act, or Cipa.

Cipa provides a mechanism for the government to charge cases involving classified documents without risking the “graymail” problem, where the defense threatens to reveal classified information at trial, but the steps that have to be followed mean it takes longer to get to trial.

The process includes the government turning over all of the classified information they want to use to the defense in discovery, like any other criminal case, in addition to the non-classified discovery that is done in a separate process.

Trump’s lawyers argued the amount of discovery – the government is making the material available in batches because there is so much evidence and it has not finished processing everything that came from search warrants – meant that they could not know how long the process would take.

Trump’s lawyers wrote:

From a practical manner, the volume of discovery and the Cipa logistics alone make plain that the government’s requested schedule is unrealistic.

Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis launched the investigation in early 2021, after Donald Trump tried to overturn his election defeat in Georgia by calling Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, and suggesting the state’s top elections official could help him “find 11,780 votes”, just enough needed to beat Joe Biden.

The investigation expanded to include an examination of a slate of Republican fake electors, phone calls by Trump and others to Georgia officials in the weeks after the 2020 election and unfounded allegations of widespread election fraud made to state lawmakers, according to AP.

About a year into her investigation, Willis asked for a special grand jury. At the time, she said she needed the panel’s subpoena power to compel testimony from witnesses who had refused to cooperate without a subpoena. In a January 2022 letter to Fulton county superior court chief judge, Christopher Brasher, Willis wrote that Raffensperger, who she called an “essential witness”, had “indicated that he will not participate in an interview or otherwise offer evidence until he is presented with a subpoena by my office”.

That special grand jury was seated in May 2022, and released in January after completing its work. The panel issued subpoenas and heard testimony from 75 witnesses, ranging from some of Trump’s most prominent allies to local election workers, before drafting a final report with recommendations for Willis.

Portions of that report that were released in February said jurors believed that “one or more witnesses” committed perjury and urged local prosecutors to bring charges. The panel’s foreperson said in media interviews later that they recommended indicting numerous people, but she declined to name names.

Here’s a bit more on the grand jury being seated today in Atlanta, Georgia, that will probably consider charges against Donald Trump and his Republican allies for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The new grand jury term begins today in Fulton county, and two panels will be selected at the downtown Atlanta courthouse, each made up of 16 to 23 people and up to three alternates. One of these panels is expected to handle the Trump investigation.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney will preside over today’s court proceedings, CNN reported. McBurney oversaw the special grand jury that previously collected evidence in the Trump investigation, and he is also expected to oversee the grand jury tasked with making charging decisions in the case.