Judge promises to rule soon on Trump’s ban of journalists from the White House – live

Ted Boutrous, a prominent First Amendment lawyer who represented CNN, Politico and MS NOW in court on Wednesday, reportedly told the judge that, when he first saw three unsigned letters sent to the news organizations on Tuesday, four days after they were banned from the White House by Donald Trump, which attempted to justify the bans on national security grounds, he “didn’t think they were real”, the legal journalist Adam Klasfeld reports.

Boutrous pointed out that the three letters – to CNN, Politico and MS NOW – were unsigned and not on White House letterhead. All three cited articles published by the outlets months ago, most of them written by reporters who do not have passes to the White House.

The letters, Boutrous said, looked a “post hoc” attempt to justify the bans that the president himself told reporters on Friday were in response to overly negative coverage of his performance as president, by grafting on national security grounds.

In a supplemental declaration filed with the court Sudeep Reddy, MS NOW’s Washington bureau chief, pointed out that only one of the three articles cited in the White House press office letter, a report published on 11 June 2026 by Jake Traylor, “was written by a journalist who held a White House hard pass.”

Reddy also noted that the broadcaster submitted a request for the renewal of Traylor’s hard pass on 18 June 2026, a week later, “and his hard pass was subsequently renewed.”

There have been “eight suicide attempts” by US Navy personnel assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group since the start of their lengthy deployment as part of the US war on Iran, the acting US Navy secretary, Hung Cao, revealed in a letter to senator Kirsten Gillibrand obtained by CNN.

“Since the beginning of Lincoln’s deployment, there have been a total of eight suicide attempts across the strike group,” Cao wrote to Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who is a member of the Senate armed services committee, the broadcaster reports.

“This number includes the Lincoln crew and sailors from the carrier airwing, strike group and destroyer squadron staff, escorting destroyers and all embarked aviation squadrons”, Cao reportedly wrote in a letter this week responding to written oversight questions from the senator.

The Guardian has asked the US Navy for comment on the report.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services and a figurehead of the Make America Healthy Again movement, has taken millions of dollars in book advances and gifts from personal allies active in that movement outside of the government, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Kennedy received $4 million in book advances for a pair of books forthcoming from a company belonging to one of his friends and business partners, Tony Lyons, who runs several MAHA-related organizations.

Mr. Lyons also helms a nonprofit that paid $210,000 in consulting fees to Mr. Kennedy’s wife, the actress Cheryl Hines.

And Gavin de Becker, a friend of Kennedy’s who donated to his presidential campaign, provided him with $126,000 worth of lodging in a Washington, D.C. residence de Becker owned.

Ethics experts who spoke to the Times warned the payments may violated rules preventing government officials like Kennedy from leveraging their offices for profit.

A federal court in Washington just finished hearing arguments in the lawsuit over Donald Trump’s self-described “ban on the free press,” in which he barred three news organizations – CNN, MS Now and Politico – from the White House over what he considers overly negative coverage of his work as a president.

C-SPAN posted an audio stream of most of the court hearing on YouTube, which has now, sadly, been removed, but before it was, the judge overseeing the case promised to issue a ruling soon on the request from the media organizations to have the credentials of the outlets restored while the court case goes on.

Judge Timothy Kelly, a former federal prosecutor nominated to the US district court for the District of Columbia in 2017 by Trump, is hearing the arguments from the government and the news organizations. In 2018, Kelly ordered the White House to restore the press pass of a CNN reporter, Jim Acosta, after he challenged Trump at a news conference and was briefly banned.

CNN’s chief media correspondent, Brian Stelter, reports that Kelly “began the hearing Wednesday by telling attorneys that the White House did not give reporters appropriate due process before revoking their access to the building, running against previous court decisions.”

Kelly himself previously held that the White House cannot suspend or revoke a journalist’s access without notice or giving them a chance to appeal that decision on due process grounds.

That process “wasn’t played out here,” Kelly said. “I just say to both sides that’s where I am,” Kelly said. “Before we get to any core First Amendment issues, there is a due process claim and a due process issue that seems to me the first stop in figuring out how to resolve the motion.”

Trump is set to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in a major diplomatic summit. Xi, the long-serving leader of the Chinese Communist Party, will land at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland for a three-day visit. Trump plans to receive him with a red carpet and a personal greeting on the tarmac — a warmed welcome than Trump has ever given the Chinese leader.

The Trump administration’s White House ban on three news outlets will go to court today. The Trump administration will have to defend the president’s ban on CNN, Politico and MS Now from the White House before a Trump-appointed federal judge. Trump himself has said he isn’t optimistic about the outcome.

The Iranian president addressed the United Nations, a day after Trump’s apocalyptic threats. A day after Trump threatened to “annihilate” his country and drive its people “into Hell,” Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian issued a forceful rebuttal to the gathered world leaders. He accused the US of engaging in terrorism, and vowed Iran would “never bow” to American threats.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in his address to the UN, pushed for global pressure on Russia. He sought greater economic pressure on Russia to end its years-long invasion of Ukraine, and warned that continued attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure would be met with similar strikes in Russia. That might worry the Trump administration, which is trying to bring down gasoline and diesel prices before the midterms.

Susan Collins’ alleged pay-for-play scheme is providing fuel to Maine Democrats. The alleged corruption, detailed in a ProPublica investigation published yesterday, is providing campaign fodder for the state’s Democrats, including Collins’ challenger for a key Senate seat.

Speaking to the United Nations annual assembly of world leaders for the fifth time since the invasion of his country, Volodymyr Zelenskyy sought to rally global support for the defense of Ukraine from Russia.

Zelenskyy warned that Putin would not be appeased by a partial victory in Ukraine, and would continue pursuing conquest in Ukraine even if granted a piece of its territory.

He also asked world leaders to help end the conflict by pressuring Russia financially, stepping up sanctions to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin to seek peace.

“When someone gives Russia more money through trade, they give this war more time. And that is exactly why we insist on limiting trade with the aggressor, and why we are burning Russia’s revenues ourselves,” he says.

In one particularly relevant comment for the Trump administration, Zelenskyy warned that continued Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy system would result in retaliation in kind. “Ukrainians understand that this winter could be very hard for us,” he said. “But in response we will have no choice but to make it painful for Russia too”

The day before, Zelenskyy met with President Trump, who was quick to point out while speaking to reporters that Ukraine’s latest efforts to take out Russian oil infrastructure had impacted global fuel prices. Those prices (which have been worsened by Trump’s military campaign against Iran) have become a burden for Republicans ahead of the midterms.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 threw Europe, and the international order, into crisis when it began more than four years ago. What was predicted to be a swift conquest has devolved into a grinding war of attrition reminiscent of World War I.

It has also since become just one unfolding crisis in a world increasingly at war. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel has sparked a devastating Israeli retaliation against Gaza and renewed war between Israel and Lebanon; the US-Israel joint strikes on Iran, downstream of the Gaza war, have turned into a protracted conflict that has set the Persian Gulf ablaze; and a tenuous transition to democracy in Sudan has spiraled into a vicious civil war, each side backed by foreign allies.

Zelenskyy used his appearance at the UN General Assembly to remind delegates of the scale of devastation facing Ukraine, as just today Russia launched a punishing round of bombing on its capital, Kyiv.

“Russia has used over 2100 missiles against us. More than 950 of them were ballistic missiles,” Zelenskyy said, adding: “They launch jet-powered Shahed [missiles] every hour… We are fighting them 24/7”.

He said this is “to make life harder for the economy and to disrupt our lives. They disrupt children at school. Would your country survive something like this?”

Bernie Sanders, the left-wing independent Senator from Vermont who has quickly become one of the loudest AI-skeptical voices in US politics, announced on Wednesday new legislation that would, in his words, “ban artificial superintelligence.”

“The leading experts are clear: AI is rapidly escaping our control,” Sanders wrote in a post to social media announcing the bill. “Congress must act NOW. Today I’m introducing legislation to permanently ban artificial superintelligence and pause advanced AI until clear safety rules are in place.”

The Associated Press reported earlier this morning that the legislation – backed in the House of Representatives by Texas Democrat Greg Cesar – would pause the development of frontier AI until a new “Department of Artificial Intelligence” could establish guardrails around the industry.

It would also ban, in perpetuity, “artificial superintelligence,” a category that includes AI systems that exceed the limits of human intelligence or have “sufficient capabilities to plan and execute the destruction or disempowerment of humanity,” per AP.

The allegations, first reported in a ProPublica story yesterday, were the latest development in an already chaotic Maine Senate race: that Maine GOP senator Susan Collins’ campaign had accepted large donations from a defense contractor in return for Collins steering government funds to the company.

A day later, Maine Democrats are centering those allegations as they seek to win Collins’ seat in the November midterm elections.

“I cannot stress enough today the seriousness of these allegations,” Devon Murphy-Anderson, executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, said at a party press conference called to highlight the investigation.

Collins, Murphy-Anderson said, had “sold us out yet again, and gotten bailed out of trouble by the President of the United States. It is not the first time she has betrayed us. However, this November we have the opportunity to ensure it is one of the last.”

Collins’s team has fiercly denied the allegations, which emerged from an FBI investigation into Martin Kao, former executive of the defense contractor Navakek. Kao, who detailed the alleged scheme to the FBI, has since been convicted and sentenced to prison on unrelated charges.

ProPublica reports that the FBI has been investigating Collins as part of a wide-ranging probe into members of Congress, but that the inquiry died as part of the Trump administration’s restructuring of the FBI.

Troy Jackson, Collins’ opponent for her Maine Senate seat in November, has also seized on the corruption allegations, implying that Collins has been deferential to Trump because his FBI helped kill the probe into her conduct. (Jackson was chosen by the Maine Democrats to replace their previous nominee, one-time progressive darling Graham Platner, after allegations of sexual assault led him to terminate his campaign.)

“This is corruption of the highest order,” Jackson wrote in a post to social media. “Susan Collins delivered millions in taxpayer dollars for a corrupt donor bankrolling her campaign, and then Donald Trump helped her cover it up.”

“The jig is up,” he added in another post today.

The Trump administration is readying to launch a 90-day ban on diesel fuel exports from the United States, following mounting calls from his party to take action to bring down the fuel’s price ahead of the midterm elections, POLITICO reported Wednesday.

Several people with inside knowledge of the conversations told POLITICO (currently one of three outlets banned from the White House by Trump) that the plan has created a schism within pro- and anti-embargo camps in the administration. It’s also prompted furor from the oil and gas industry that has broadly supported the president.

One oil industry executive privy to the conversations told the outlet that Trump seemed intent on announcing a ban by the end of the week.

The price of fuel has weighed heavily on Republicans in the lead-up to the midterms, which will determine whether Trump’s party retains control of Congress for the second half of his term. Trump ran in 2024 in part on bringing down the price of gas, but the war he helped kick off between the US and Iran, and the closure of vital oil shipping arteries it prompted, has sent the cost of fuel skyrocketing.

Diesel, in particular, has become a sore spot. The fuel for everything from semi-trucks to tractors to heavy machinery, it has surged in price even more than standard gasoline, to more than $6.50 per gallon.

That’s prompted some Republicans, especially those representing farming-heavy states, to publicly call on the president to take drastic action to lower the price of diesel.

The pushback, POLITICO reports, is coming from oil and gas executives and administration officials who warn that the embargo could raise fuel prices in the long run.

Yesterday, Britain’s new prime minister Andy Burnham navigated his way through a first high-stakes meeting with Donald Trump at the UN general assembly in New York. His aides were delighted with how the meeting went, as Trump praised the US-UK relationship and described Burnham as a “natural businessman”.

The anticipated sticking points – the Chagos Islands, West Bank settlement sanctions and Ireland – appear not to have derailed the talks nor cast a shadow over the future relationship.

In today’s edition of The Latest podcast, Lucy Hough speaks to the our policy editor in London, Kiran Stacey. You can also watch on YouTube.

The Washington Post (paywall) reports today that James McCrery II, the first architect on Donald Trump’s controversial $400m White House ballroom project, resigned after repeatedly clashing with the president, who dismissed his warnings that design features Trump was insisting on violated building safety codes.

McCrery withdrew from the project last October after warning Trump that a preliminary design he wanted “did not provide adequate emergency exit routes or fire-containment measures”, according to the Post’s report, which cites two people with knowledge of the discussions and corroborating documents reviewed by the paper.

The sources said Trump brushed off the architect’s concerns, and argued that no building codes apply to White House construction. “I am the code,” Trump reportedly said.

The Post previously reported that they had also clashed over the size of the ballroom. One document obtained by the paper features an image of a planned data center overlaid on a map of Manhattan, with a note that appears to be poking fun at McCrery’s concerns. “James,” it reads. “And you think we are big.”

Another note made in Sharpie makes clear Trump’s preference for Corinthian-style columns.

When approached by the Post, McCrery didn’t say why he stepped down. A White House official said it was “factually false and totally inaccurate” to suggest he left the project over issues with the code, and said he was a “valued member of the initial design team.”

Discussions about the safety issues continued for months after McCrery’s departure, according to White House records reviewed by the Post.

It is not clear from those records whether the safety issues he identified have been resolved in more recent designs by Shalom Baranes Associates, the architecture firm that took over McCrery’s firm’s role in the project late last year.

The ballroom project is – unusually – being overseen by the Executive Residence, rather than the General Services Administration or National Park Service. The small office is exempt from rules that require federal agencies to solicit competitive bids and disclose details to the public, the Post previously reported. Typically, it’s responsible for routine repairs, entertainment expenses, and the purchase of furniture, art and other items for the executive mansion.

Rubio, in his press conference, also touched on the war in Iran at several points, including on the surprise negotiations that took place yesterday between Trump administration envoys and the Iran delegation.

“I don’t want to mischaracterize this as a major breakthrough,” Rubio said. “But at the same time I think it was significant that at least there was a conversation.”

Little detail has been shared about what was discussed at that meetings, though Rubio framed the conversation as a continuation of the earlier back-and-forth between the two sides.

Rubio also notably insisted that Trump would be able to see through his campaign in Iran acting on his authority alone, even if Republicans lose control of Congress in November and if Democrats were to oppose the continuation of US operations against the country.