Nato chief says Donald Trump is ‘the only one who can get this done’ on Ukraine war – US politics live

The treasury secretary Scott Bessent just gaggled with reporters outside the White House.

He said that a “substantial pick up” in sanctions on Russia are coming soon. “We are going to announce either after the close this afternoon, or first thing tomorrow,” he said.

As Jeff Merkley hits the 20th hour of his Senate floor speech, his Democratic colleagues in the upper chamber have praised his efforts, and joined him on the floor to ask questions and give him small breaks as he continues his marathon monologue.

The senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, called it “incredible”, characterizing the speech as part of the “fight to protect American families from Trump’s reckless and corrupt administration”.

Earlier, senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, said that it “says a lot” about the Trump administration that Merkley can spend hours “talking all the different ways Trump is hurting hardworking Americans and not run out of things to say”.

Cory Booker, the senator from New Jersey who currently holds the record for longest floor speech (coming in at over 25 hours), said Merkley was “demonstrating how Trump is moving us towards tyranny, instead of standing up for American ideals”.

Donald Trump has urged US cattle farmers to “get their prices down” in order to encourage Americans to buy their beef.

On Truth Social, the president said that ranchers throughout the country “don’t understand” that the only reason they are “doing so well” is because of Trump’s tariffs on several countries, “including a 50% Tariff on Brazil”.

He added:

If it weren’t for me, they would be doing just as they’ve done for the past 20 years – Terrible! It would be nice if they would understand that, but they also have to get their prices down, because the consumer is a very big factor in my thinking, also!

Over the weekend, Trump told reporters he was considering importing beef from Argentina in order to lower prices for consumers.

The revelation that a top federal prosecutor used an encrypted messaging application and had messages set to auto-delete after eight hours is “deeply troubling” and may be illegal, a watchdog group said.

Lindsey Halligan, the interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, used Signal to communicate with Anna Bower, a journalist for Lawfare, about the criminal case she is pursuing against New York attorney general Letitia James. Bower published the full conversation Monday evening and said Halligan had set messages to auto-delete after eight hours.

“The story about US attorney Lindsey Halligan’s use of Signal is deeply troubling. That she used the app apparently to discuss government business with a reporter and configured her messages to disappear after eight hours, raises serious concerns that she is actively violating the Federal Records Act and the justice department’s own records-retention rules,” said Chioma Chukwu, the executive director of American Oversight, a non-profit that frequently files lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain federal records.

“Even if portions of the conversation might contain information not typically subject to immediate public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, federal law still requires that such records be preserved for specified periods. Setting such communications to automatically delete is not only inconsistent with those obligations but patently unlawful,” she said. “If Halligan failed to ensure these Signal messages were preserved, her actions may have violated federal law and warrant investigation or corrective action by attorney general Pam Bondi and acting archivist Marco Rubio.”

The justice department did not return a request for comment.

Federal law generally requires government employees to preserve official government records and sets penalties for destroying them.

Per my last post, it’s worth underscoring that Platner has achieved significant momentum since he entered the race to challenge incumbent Republican senator Susan Collins.

Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, launched her bid for Senate recently – making the schism between the old and new guard of the party abundantly clear.

Meanwhile, Jordan Wood, another Maine Democratic candidate for Senate, said today that Platner’s Reddit comments are “disqualifying and not who we are as Mainers or as Democrats”.

He added:

With Donald Trump and his sycophants demonizing Americans, spewing hate, and running roughshod over the constitution, Democrats need to be able to condemn Trump’s actions with moral clarity. Graham Platner no longer can.

Graham Platner, the Democratic senate candidate from Maine, said that he has covered a tattoo on his chest that is widely recognized as a Nazi symbol.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Platner said he decided to get it covered instead of removed – a promise he initially made – because it would be faster and easier given the options of where he lives in Maine.

“Going to a tattoo-removal place is going to take a while,” he told the AP. “I wanted this thing off my body.”

This comes after Platner revealed, on an episode of the Pod Save America podcast, that he got the skull-and-crossbones tattoo in 2007, when he was in the US Marine Corps. He said that he didn’t realize, until recently, that the image has been associated with Nazi police.

Platner has recently found himself embroiled in controversy after inflammatory Reddit posts spanning 2013 to 2021 resurfaced. These included Platner calling police officers “bastards”, questioning why Black people tip less, and appearing to agree with characterizations of rural white voters as “racist” and “stupid”. Last week he issued a video apology for the comments.

Speaking to reporters after a meeting with a bipartisan group of senators on Capitol Hill, the Nato secretary general Mark Rutte said that he had “complete confidence” in Donald Trump’s ability to broker peace between Ukraine and Russia. He evaded a question about whether he was concerned that the president has persuaded Volodymyr Zelenskyy to “go softer” on Russia.

“He is the only one that can get this done,” Rutte said. “You have a president with a lot of experience because of his first term in office, and who has a clear vision on bringing this war to a durable and lasting end.”

Rutte will meet with Trump in a few hours. “We will discuss further how we from Nato can be helpful in delivering his vision of getting a full-scale peace in Ukraine, which, of course, we all pray for after his enormous success in Gaza,” Rutte said earlier.

Jeff Merkley, Oregon’s Democratic senator, has been speaking on the floor of the upper chamber for 19 hours. As my colleague, Chris Stein, reports, a spokesperson for the senator says he is planning to speak “as long as he can”.

Merkley started speaking on Tuesday evening and has issued several damning critiques of the president and his administration. “Equal justice under law – that’s the vision here in America. Not unequal injustice, which is what the president is pursuing by taking the power of the government and going after individuals that he does not like or perceives to be political opponents,” he said.

Robert Garcia, ranking member of the House oversight committee, has called on US attorney general Pam Bondi and the justice department to turn over all Jeffrey Epstein-related files.

Following this week’s release of a posthumous memoir by Virginia Giuffre, a survivor of the disgraced financier’s sex-trafficking operations, Garcia said:

Virginia Giuffre’s allegations are heartbreaking and horrific, including testimony that prominent world and US leaders perpetrated sexual assault and sex trafficking of girls and young women. Ms Giuffre clearly contradicts the agency’s claim that the Epstein files did not justify further investigation. In light of this, the DOJ must comply with our subpoena and provide our Committee with the full Epstein files immediately, because the American people demand the truth, the survivors deserve justice, and we must end this White House cover-up.

Meanwhile, in a letter to Bondi, Garcia wrote:

Your refusal to release the files and your continued disregard of a congressional subpoena raises serious questions about your motives. Oversight Democrats support transparency and accountability for the survivors of Epstein’s crimes, as described by Ms Giuffre, regardless of the identities of the perpetrators or co-conspirators or their positions of power. You, however, are going to extreme lengths to conceal the truth from the American people, apparently in cooperation with President Trump.

The No Kings alliance, the left-leaning groups behind the mass days of protest last Saturday and in June, is building a nationwide rapid response network that will call on supporters to take new actions each week.

Leaders of the organizations told the Guardian that there was energy for “some type of disruption”, and future actions could include targeted boycotts, campaigns at universities, more street protests, and electoral organizing in local communities.

After an estimated 7 million people took to the streets last weekend, tens of thousands joined a national call on Tuesday to hear what’s next for the growing movement. Leaders celebrated the broad turnout, saying it showed how much opposition to Trump there was in all corners of the US, and talked about how to sustain and grow a movement during an increasingly authoritarian moment for the country.

The next steps for this burgeoning resistance will show the durability of the movement and whether it can pressure Democrats or pillars of civil society to stand stronger against Trump, or whether it can force defections from Trump’s Republican allies to fracture his power.

For the full story, click here:

Democrat Scott Wiener will run for the US House seat long held by Nancy Pelosi, the California state senator announced on Wednesday.

Pelosi, the first female speaker of the House, has represented San Francisco in Congress since 1987 and has not yet said whether she will seek re-election in 2026. But Democrats are increasingly facing calls for change with younger candidates who will offer new opposition to Donald Trump.

Wiener has served as a state lawmaker since 2016 and said he was seeking office to stand up to Trump as the president wages a “full-on war against immigrants and LGBTQ people” and the cost of living continues to increase.

“We need more than rhetoric and good intentions from Democrats. We need action. We need someone who will fight like hell for the most marginalized in our community – someone who will stand up for trans kids, undocumented immigrants even when it’s unpopular, even when it means getting personally attacked and threatened,” Wiener said in a statement. “We need leaders with spines, who don’t just put their finger in the air to see where the winds are blowing or what polls well.”

As a state lawmaker, Wiener, an attorney who attended Harvard law school, authored a recently passed bill banning federal and state law enforcement from wearing masks and has promoted legislation to address California’s housing crisis and expand climate action.

“I’m running for Congress to defend San Francisco, our values, our people and the constitution of the United States with everything I have,” Wiener said in a video announcing his candidacy. “I’ve stood up to violence and hate my entire life. Trump and his Maga extremists don’t scare me.”

Ahead of the president’s meeting with Nato secretary general Mark Rutte, where we can expect the stalled progress to end the war in Ukraine to be top of the agenda, my colleagues are covering the latest developments in Europe.

My colleague, Tom Ambrose, notes that Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that that Donald Trump’s call for Ukraine and Russia to stop at the current frontlines was “a good compromise”, but is doubtful that Vladimir Putin will agree.

Just a quick update, senator Jeff Merkley, of Oregon, is still speaking on the senate floor. He’s been speaking for 16 hours in a far-ranging critique of the Trump administration’s policies.

A short while ago, vice-president JD Vance met with families of Israeli hostages who returned alive and families members of deceased hostages who have not been returned.

Earlier, Vance met with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who maintained that Israel has an “unmatched alliance” and partnership with the US.

“I was impressed with your clarity, with your incisiveness, with your solidarity for our common cause,” he said of Vance.

The vice-president said that the nations they would be sitting down to work on the Gaza peace plan. “We’re have a very tough task ahead of us, which is to disarm Hamas but rebuild Gaza,” he said.

When Vance was asked about the fragility of the current ceasefire he said “this thing takes monitoring, and it’s going to take a lot of work.”

One repeated refrain from House Republicans today was how Democrats push back on several policy issues simply because they are loth to support the president.

Most of today’s speakers repeated this claim today, with House conference chair Lisa McClain even saying “president Trump could have the cure for cancer, and the Democrats would vote no” because it came from him.