Blanche defends Trump’s tirade against supreme court after it blocked mail-in voting executive order – US politics live

A bill co-authored by Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who died earlier this year, that would give Donald Trump broad authority to tariff Russia and its trading partners will be put forward for a vote this week in a high-stakes legislative battle that could provide new sanctioning authority to the US president at a crucial moment in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The bill is facing considerable pushback not only from Ukraine-sceptic Republicans, however, but also from prominent Democrats who say that the bill will give undue tariff power to the US president that could then be abused and turned against US allies.

Congressional staffers have described frenzied last-minute lobbying in the halls of Congress as the vote approached for what one Democratic staffer called the “one opportunity that we have to help Ukraine before they enter the slow winter”. The bill passed a vote in the House rules committee on Monday, and is due for a rule vote on the House floor on Tuesday afternoon, then a general vote on Wednesday.

The Lindsey O Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026 would target Russia’s energy and defense industries, as well as the country’s “shadow fleet” of tankers skirting existing oil sanctions, and would give Trump new authority to slap 100% tariffs on top purchasers of Russian oil, including China and India.

But Trump’s use of tariffs against US partners such as Canada and Mexico have made expanding his powers a controversial aim – even for senior Democrats who have been stalwart backers of Ukraine. They are led by the representative Gregory Meeks; the top Democrats on the House foreign affairs committee; the representative Don Beyer of Congress’s joint economic committee; and Richard Neal, the ranking Democrat on the House ways and means committee.

In a statement, they said the legislation would do “more harm than good”. “This bill would dramatically expand presidential tariff authorities while failing to mandate sanctions on Russia, both of which are unacceptable,” they said. “These flaws would raise Americans’ prices while undermining support for Ukraine in the long term.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Todd Blanche, the US attorney general, alerted reporters at the White House to stand by for what he called “a big development” in the federal crackdown on voting by non-citizens to be announced by Ryan Raybould, the US attorney for the Northern District of Texas.

When it came, however, Raybould’s announcement, that his office had charged six lawful permanent residents and one undocumented immigrant for voting in federal elections over the past eight years, hardly lived up to the billing.

While six of those charged cast ballots in the 2024 general election, the impact of their votes was almost immeasurably small, given that two of them cast provisional ballots that were not counted, and 11,388,670 other Texans voted in that election.

Donald Trump won the state by a margin of 1,558,347 votes over his nearest rival, Kamala Harris.

Of the four illegal votes that were apparently counted in error, three were cast by green card holders from Nigeria, India and Mexico, who might have wrongly thought they were eligible to vote, and just one by an undocumented immigrant from Mexico.

Lawful permanent residents are not allowed to vote in federal elections, but they are permitted to vote in local elections in the District of Columbia and in some jurisdictions of three US states: California, Maryland and Vermont.

Still, the administration framed the criminal charges against the handful of ineligible voters in Texas as significant and even invited a Fox News crew to film the arrest of one of the green-card holders: a 27-year-old from Nigeria who allegedly voted in 2018, two years after becoming a lawful permanent resident.

“I was reliably told this never happens,” the Fox host Will Cain said with sarcasm on Tuesday after the network broadcast the video of the man’s arrest. “We know now at least it’s happened seven times.”

The House of Representatives shot down an attempt to impeach Donald Trump on Tuesday, though many Democrats supported keeping the effort alive.

By a 232-147 vote, with 47 lawmakers voting “present”, the chamber tabled the impeachment effort proposed by Democratic congressman Al Green, a fierce Trump critic who was censured by the House for disrupting a speech the president gave shortly after returning to the White House, and recently lost his primary. Green had proposed impeaching Trump over the killings of US citizens by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) during his second term, and accused the president of trying to create an “authoritarian regime”.

“President Trump has used ICE and CBP to suppress the First Amendment rights to free speech and a free press; violate the Fourth Amendment right to privacy and protections against unlawful searches and excessive force; and defy the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of due process and equal protection by allowing and encouraging racially targeted arrests, unjustified detentions, and unjustified killings,” his resolution read.

The House impeached Trump twice during his first term, but the Senate acquitted him both times, and the question of whether to impeach him again is a sensitive one for Democrats as they eye a return to the majority in Congress in the November midterm elections. In advance of the vote, the party’s House leaders released a statement saying they would vote “present” on Green’s effort, effectively abstaining, saying that none of the investigative work necessary to successfully impeach the president has been done. They vowed to “continue our fight to make life more affordable for everyday Americans, while committing to holding the crooks accountable using every tool available to us beginning on day one.”

The motion to table Green’s resolution was supported by 213 Republican-aligned lawmakers and 18 Democrats, while 147 Democrats were opposed. The “present” votes included 46 Democrats and one Republican.

Donald Trump is taking the ruling on Tuesday by a federal judge that his name can not be added, in any form, to the exterior of the Kennedy Center, which is a memorial to the late president, about as well as you might expect.

Writing on his social media platform, Trump said that adding his name to the memorial for the assassinated 35th US president was a non-negotiable demand and the performing arts center would be closed immediately and not renovated at all if the US supreme court did not intervene to overturn the order against that issued by district court judge Christopher Cooper.

After Cooper reiterated his previous ruling “that Congress named the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for President John F. Kennedy alone”, Trump wrote that the center would be closed immediately and what he described as “a very large and complex” renovation “cannot begin until such time as” Cooper’s ruling on the name is overturned by an appeals court.

“If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Trump wrote, in his usual idiosyncratic style, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”

The ruling by Cooper, who was nominated by former president Barack Obama, made it plain that he sees no scope for reconsidering his decision that adding Trump’s name would simply be illegal.

Four months ago, this Court declared that Congress named the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for President John F. Kennedy alone. It came to this conclusion for a simple reason: The federal law that created the Kennedy Center permitted no other result. In 1983, Congress amended that law to guarantee “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” 20 U.S.C. § 76j(b)(1). The Court ruled that the decision by the Kennedy Center’s Board of Trustees to rename the institution in honor of President Trump violated that congressional prohibition and others. And the Court ordered the permanent removal of the President’s name from the front portico of the main building, as well as any other physical or digital signage or official materials.

“Yet the drama at the Kennedy Center continues,” Cooper added, before barring the Trump-appointed board from enacting a resolution to add Trump’s name to the center’s facade, calling it the Trump Kennedy Center and also naming the plaza outside the center for Trump.

“Defendants are hereby enjoined from inscribing ‘renovated and restored by Donald J. Trump’ on the main building or renaming the campus the ‘President Donald J. Trump Plaza.’ Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Cooper wrote.

• Donald Trump today blasted the supreme court’s ruling which blocked his long-sought executive order which curbs mail-in voting. The president called mail-in voting – which he has used on several occasions to cast a ballot – “a laughing stock” across the world. He has routinely claimed, without evidence, that the voting method is prone to fraud. “The Supreme Court has really let our Country down! Certain Justices are petrified of these crazed and depraved Democrats, and are totally unable to show the courage necessary to save our America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. The president suggested that the justices he nominated for the bench – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – are not “the people I interviewed to serve” but “merely a shell of their original selves”.

• Todd Blanche, the attorney general, defended the president’s earlier criticism of the justices on the bench who ruled to block his order. “He [Trump] is very frustrated,” Blanche said at a White House press conference. “He has every right, and indeed he should communicate his concerns with the supreme court whenever he has them. This isn’t the first time that he’s done it, and it won’t be the last.”

• Blanche also dismissed calls to investigate the contributions of a Russian oligarch, who is close to Putin, and who helped pay for Donald Trump Jr’s wedding in May. “The president doesn’t know who this person is. I think other members of the family don’t know who this person is. The president’s son has said that he’s a very close friend,” the attorney general told reporters. “When you say, ‘am I investigating?’ Am I investigating what? And when you say this person is a friend of Putin, I don’t even know if that’s true or not.”

• However, Democrats on the House oversight committee have started to investigate possible ties between the Trump administration and Kremlev. Congressman Robert Garcia, the panel’s top Democrat, has asked Susie Wiles – the White House chief of staff, to provide documents, records and communications between the White House and Trump Jr about Kremlev, among other requests. More here

• Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, said that Congress has “been asleep at the wheel” when it comes to AI regulation. Sanders decried the speed of the technology’s evolution at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington today. The senator has proposed bicameral legislation with congressman Greg Casar to permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence, and said that the pledges this week from leading AI company CEOs for the industry to “slow down” are encouraging but ultimately not enough. “When the future of humanity is at stake, we need binding international safety rules, not voluntary standards from the industry,” Sanders added.

• A federal judge has ruled that Donald Trump’s name must stay off the facade of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, blocking an effort by the center’s Trump-appointed board to restore his name to the building. The judge also said the board cannot proceed with plans to rename ​the campus where it sits the “President Donald J. Trump ‌Plaza”. Earlier, the board voted to immediately close the institution citing safety and financial concerns.

• And on Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats blocked a major cryptocurrency regulation bill, saying it did not contain enough constraints on Donald Trump and other government officials’ ability to profit from digital assets. A vote to advance the measure, known as the CLARITY act, failed by a 49-50 margin, with all Democrats and three Republicans opposed. The product of months of negotiation, the bill would created the first ever regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies, and included provisions intended to stop Trump and other elected officials from profiting from the assets while in office. More here

• Earlier, FBI director Kash Patel clashed with lawmakers in a Senate judiciary committee hearing over … bestiality (among other issues). Senators from both parties questioned Patel about his department lowering hiring standards for FBI applicants with certain background histories. This includes those who have had sexual encounters with sex workers, theft from an employer or engaging in acts of bestiality. On the last one, the FBI director claimed this only includes people who were “trafficked” into having sex with an animal. More here

Senate Democrats just blocked a major cryptocurrency regulation bill, saying it did not contain enough constraints on Donald Trump and other government officials’ ability to profit from digital assets.

A vote to advance the measure, known as the CLARITY act, failed by a 49-50 margin, with all Democrats and three Republicans opposed. The product of months of negotiation, the bill would created the first ever regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies, and included provisions intended to stop Trump and other elected officials from profiting from the assets while in office. Financial disclosures released over the summer showed the president had made $1bn from crypto, even as his administration adopted policies favored by the industry.

Though the measure’s Republican backed argued the guardrails represented a major concession, they weren’t enough for Democrats, who declined to provide the votes needed to overcome the Senate filibuster.

“All President Trump wants is for the Senate to give him time to crime, and I won’t support any piece of legislation that enables him,” Democratic senator Ruben Gallego said after the vote, which he said Republican leaders forced even as negotiations to address his party’s concerns with the bill were ongoing.

“This legislation failed squarely because Republicans refuse to say no to the president. It takes 60 votes to pass a bill, and instead of spending their time twisting themselves into knots to appease President Trump, Republicans should have worked more closely with Senate Democrats to craft a bill that could pass with strong ethics provisions.”

Fellow Senate Democrat Adam Schiff said: “After more than a year of intensive negotiations with my Senate Democratic colleagues, Republican counterparts and the White House, the administration has made clear it is not willing to reach a deal that would put an end to the president’s profiteering through digital assets.”

He didn’t shut the door on cryptocurrency regulation entirely, saying “I remain open to continuing to work to get an ethics deal that will be acceptable to the American people and crack down on corruption by any and all public officials.”

Steve Bannon spoke immediately after Bernie Sanders at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington earlier today, though the populist pair did not share the stage.

Bannon, host of the War Room podcast, called for an aggressive economic and technological “quarantine” of China, demanding the immediate expulsion of Chinese nationals from US research laboratories, an end to the training of Chinese engineers and technologists and the total severance of capital flows.

“Did our fathers and grandfathers, did they underwrite the Soviet Union?” Bannon asked. “Did they train Soviet Union scientists? Did they take Russian kids over here to college to let them go to the best universities and get the best degree? Did they have Wall Street slobbering to do their deals? Did they have every bank there to lend them money quicker than to lend anyone in this audience?

“The answer is they did not. They stood up to the Soviet Union and the first thing to stand up to them was to choke them off and that’s what we have to do today to the Chinese Communist Party. No deals, no agreements, you’re out of the AI business because we’re going to shut your ecosystem down.”

Demanding immediate executive action to isolate Beijing’s tech sector, Bannon said: “No chips, no black marketing chips, no free ride off American technology, no steal on American tech… To hell with the Chinese Communist Party.”

Only then, Bannon argued, can the US have the time necessary to consider the proper regulation of the AI sector. He delivered a scathing verdict on major technology corporations and executives, accusing them of gambling with public safety for private profit.

Bannon accused Silicon Valley of seeking to “socialise all the risk with the American people including potential bailouts” while keeping all financial upside. “The American people are not going to be supplicants to these tech oligarchs,” Bannon said, praising grassroots campaigns that previously defeated federal pre-emption bills aimed at blocking state-level AI regulations.

Bannon has long praised Trump as a historic figure and endorsed his lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. But on Tuesday, while claiming that executive action is required rather than legislation by Congress, he made only a glancing reference to the president who has dismissed AI concerns as a “hoax” and “sick conspiracy”.

Todd Blanche dismissed calls to investigate the contributions of a Russian oligarch who is close to Putin and who helped pay for Donald Trump Jr’s wedding in May.

A reminder that a ProPublica report revealed that Umar Kremlev spent hundreds of thousands of dollars bankrolling the multi-day event in the Bahamas.

Trump Jr and his wife, Bettina, later confirmed Kremlev’s contributions to the celebrations and characterized them as “an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend”.

Blanche, today, was resolute that there would be no follow-up.

“The president doesn’t know who this person is. I think other members of the family don’t know who this person is. The president’s son has said that he’s a very close friend,” the attorney general told reporters at the White House today. “When you say, ‘am I investigating?’ Am I investigating what? And when you say this person is a friend of Putin, I don’t even know if that’s true or not.”

Blanche added: “It’s fun to talk about this issue and the rhetoric around it. But I think all the relevant people involved, the president and his kids, have already addressed it. I don’t have any information. I don’t know this person either, so I don’t have any information about it beyond that.”

A reminder that Democrats on the House oversight committee have started to investigate possible ties between the administration and Kremlev. Robert Garcia, the panel’s top Democrat, has asked Susie Wiles – the White House chief of staff, to provide documents, records and communications between the White House and Trump Jr about Kremlev, among other requests.

Blanche also said today that he doesn’t anticipate any extra work from the justice department to help educate voters about mail-in voting, given the confusion around the practice as litigation ricocheted through the courts.

“I haven’t seen any suggestion or any information or heard from secretaries of state that that that’s an issue,” the attorney general claimed. “Ballots are confusing in every election. The way they’re distributed, the way they’re talked about, that’s something that the state and locals handle very well every single election cycle for one reason or another. So no, that doesn’t concern me.”

Todd Blanche voiced his support for Pete Hegseth, after Republican congressman Thomas Massie on Tuesday proposed impeaching the defense secretary, saying that he had repeatedly violated the constitution through his handling of war with Iran and the deaths of civilians in conflicts worldwide.

“Secretary Hegseth is doing a phenomenal job … he follows the law, and so the DoJ plays a role in that, and we play an active role in making sure the laws are complied with,” the attorney general said.

When it comes to the ongoing discussion about the need for further guardrails on AI development, Blanche said that it was not the job of the justice department to “regulate”.

“We’re prosecutors, not regulators, so we’re not going to try to regulate AI,” he told reporters in the Rose Garden, adding that the call for checks has “conveniently” become a “flashpoint this week”.

The attorney general said that he agrees with Trump’s assessment in response to the calls to decelerate AI development. A reminder that the president has deemed these warnings from lawmakers and AI executives alike, as hoaxes.

“Every Democrat senator suddenly races to a microphone to talk about AI after being eerily silent for months and months and months,” Blanche added. “To talk about the timing of this as being nothing but an effort to influence the midterms, I shouldn’t have to say that out loud. Of course, that’s what it is.”

Speaking to reporters today, Todd Blanche said that the supreme court’s ruling yesterday that blocks Donald Trump’s executive order to implement restricts on mail-in voting, will not affect “ongoing criminal investigations into illegal voting”.

He added that the “efforts to make sure that we have free and fair elections are not going to stop just in November or after or thereafter”.

The attorney general went on to defend the president’s earlier criticism of the justices on the bench who ruled to block his order.

“He [Trump] is very frustrated,” Blanche said. “He has every right, and indeed he should communicate his concerns with the supreme court whenever he has them. This isn’t the first time that he’s done it, and it won’t be the last … The idea that President Trump shouldn’t be allowed to communicate to the American people his frustration, I … I don’t share that.”

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the nonpartisan agency that provides financial estimates on legislation and policies for lawmakers, has said that the war in Iran has cost the Pentagon approximately $38 billion as of 1 August 2026.

The CBO says the amount reflects the costs of “replacing expended munitions and equipment lost in battle, increased flying hours, other operations, and increased fuel costs”.

The estimate does not include other costs incurred by the war, such as the increased cost of fuel used by the Postal Service. It also doesn’t include costs already accounted for in the federal budget, such as the basic operating costs of the military forces involved in the conflict.

In a short while Todd Blanche, the attorney general, will hold a White House press briefing for reporters. A reminder that Donald Trump has yet to announce a permanent replacement for Karoline Leavitt, the former press secretary who resigned last month.

Sanders capped off his speech by noting that we are at “a dangerous and unprecedented moment in world history”, and it is “imperative” to stand up to AI industry leaders, but also to a “a government of both political parties, which have not been as aggressive in any way, shape, or form as they should be”.

While the senator said that AI has the potential to do “some extraordinarily good things” when it comes to healthcare and prescription drug development, but he stressed the need to make sure that AI “works for all of the people and does not simply end up making a handful of the richest people on Earth even richer”.

Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, has decried the advancement of artificial intelligence the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington today.

The leading progressive lawmaker has emerged as a leading voice in warning against the rapidity of the technology’s evolution.

“If AI surpasses human intelligence, as many scientists believe could happen, this technology will escape human control with potentially catastrophic consequences,” Sanders said in Washington today. “AI is advancing exponentially, exponentially every single day. In other words, what you are looking at right now is the least capable version of AI that we will ever have – the least capable, the dumbest version. The speed and scope of AI development in just the last four years has been almost beyond human comprehension.”

Sanders added that Congress, under both Republican and Democratic control, has been “been asleep at the wheel”.

“We now have a president whose ignorance regarding this issue is truly embarrassing,” he said, referring to Donald Trump’s insistence that the calls for AI guardrails are a “hoax” that would put the US on the back foot in the ongoing technological arms race with China.

Sanders, who we reported earlier, has proposed bicameral legislation with congressman Greg Casar to permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence, said that the pledges from leading AI company CEOs for the industry to “slow down” are encouraging but ultimately not enough.

“When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal. You hit the brakes,” Sanders added. “When the future of humanity is at stake, we need binding international safety rules, not voluntary standards from the industry.”

Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, defended Donald Trump’s $5,000 so-called “dividend” that he promised to every adult US citizen if Republicans win the House and the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections.

“I think it’s a good idea for the American people to keep more of their money,” Bessent said in response to a question from Democratic congressman Juan Vargas at a financial services committee hearing today.

“Does that hurt the deficit or the debt? Does that increase the deficit or does it increase the debt?” Vargas asked the treasury secretary.

“I believe that there are ways to do it without increasing the debt or deficit,” Bessent said. “I’m not ready to discuss it at present, but at Treasury, we’ve been working on it for quite a while.”

This comes as US debt reached $40tn for the first time last month. The milestone marks years of government spending that grew under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

In a post on Truth Social this morning, Donald Trump reiterated claims that the Kennedy Center “is in a virtual state of collapse, and has been for many years”, before claiming that “a large piece of concrete and steel” had fallen from the ceiling in one of the hallways, arguing this posed a risk to the public and meant a security guard had narrowly escaped death.

This was supposedly to add to his argument that the institution should close for renovations, which the board is voting on today. He blamed the “very hostile and conflicted judge” for previously halting the closure, “in which case, unfortunately, the Building is destined to doom.”

Here’s the full post:

The Kennedy Center is in a virtual state of collapse, and has been for many years. A large piece of concrete and steel just dropped down, in a thud, from the ceiling of a heavily trafficked main hallway. If the Building were open, innocent people would have been killed. A security guard had just passed the area, one minute prior to this ceiling collapse. He was, therefore, 60 seconds away from certain death. The Judge has made us keep it open even though there are no performances, and no people that would have the Courage to even go in. The Board of The Kennedy Center has strongly voted to save it, and they know I’m the only one who can do so, because I have the ability to raise the money, and the ability to construct — that few others have. I also have the strength and power of the Presidency, which will be needed do what must be done, and give it a strong shot at Greatness again! Remember, The Kennedy Center was losing Hundreds of Millions of Dollars when I took over. It was failing badly! It had nothing to do with me, I am only there to help. I just got there to reveal the facts, but especially those concerning Building Safety. A very hostile and conflicted Judge (What else is new?) seems like he won’t let that happen, in which case, unfortunately, the Building is destined to doom. Isn’t that too bad? We have already wasted more than 6 months “playing around” in Court. Time is our Enemy! The Board, comprised of some of the most prominent and respected people in our Nation, is meeting again today. It will be interesting to see what happens!

A federal judge has ruled that Donald Trump’s name must stay off the facade of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, blocking an effort by the center’s (Trump-appointed) board to restore his name to the building.

The judge also said the board cannot proceed with plans to rename ​the campus where it sits the “President Donald J. Trump ‌Plaza”.

“Simply put, defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington wrote in the order. “The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”

Per my colleague Joseph Gedeon, Cooper ordered Trump’s name removed from the building in May, ruling that only Congress has authority to rename it, and the lettering came down in June. The board voted in August to reinstate an inscription and proceed with a closure for renovations, the latter of which a vote is expected to formalize today.

And yesterday, the Washington Post (paywall) reported that the Trump-installed leaders of the center claimed the institution was on the brink of bankruptcy, and argued that putting the president’s name on its facade may be the only way ⁠to avoid imminent and “certain fiscal collapse”. The documents obtained by the Post were prepared in advance of today’s meeting.

Here’s Joseph’s story on the vote: