Pentagon says Trump and Hegseth ‘completely aligned’ on decision to cancel livestream of firing squad execution – as it happened

This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:

• Donald Trump lied to Michigan voters about Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, calling the American physician “a Muslim Brotherhood member” in a video message recorded in the Oval Office.

• Elected officials in Oregon and lawmakers in Washington DC have expressed dismay at the school shooting at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon on Thursday, in which a 16-year-old attacker killed at least three children and one adult before being fatally shot by a community member.

• Speaking to reporters in Virginia on Thursday, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, claimed that the measles outbreak that has killed at least six people in Pennsylvania was caused by the suspension of vaccination against the disease during the Covid-19 pandemic.

• The Trump administration sued the state of California and its election officials, seeking to compel the state to not count ballots cast by 20,000 registered California voters whom the Department of Homeland Security suspects might not be citizens.

• Trump said that the execution of Nidal Hasan, the US army doctor who killed 13 people at the Fort Hood military base in 2009, would not be livestreamed.

Donald Trump lied to Michigan voters about Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, calling the American physician “a Muslim Brotherhood member” in a video message recorded in the Oval Office and posted on the president’s social media platform on Thursday.

As if to make the anti-Muslim racism of his message entirely clear, the president insisted on referring to El-Sayed as “Mohammed” repeatedly.

Trump acknowledged that El-Sayed, the Michigan-born son of Egyptian immigrant parents, has flatly denied having any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian Islamist social and political movement, before adding, without any explanation at all: “all you have to do is look at his past correspondence”.

While it was not clear what “correspondence” Trump seems to think would contradict El-Sayed’s denial, and there is no evidence at all that the Michigan doctor is a member of the Egyptian group, the president might have been referring to a letter El-Sayed reportedly signed in 2012, in which prominent Egyptian-Americans who supported the revolution that deposed Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak urged the president elected that year, Mohamed Morsi, to keep elements of the old regime from seizing power. Morsi, a former Muslim Brotherhood member, was deposed in a military coup months later.

“Don’t vote for Mohammed El-Sayed,” Trump urged Michigan voters at the end of his nakedly Islamophobic video. “He’s not for us and he hates our country.”

Elected officials in Oregon and lawmakers in Washington DC have expressed dismay at the school shooting at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon on Thursday, in which a 16-year-old attacker killed at least three children and one adult before being fatally shot by a community member.

“They’re killing our babies. Shredding our kids with lead. Forcing us to live in fear,” congresswoman Janelle Bynum, who represents the city, said in a statement. “I feel this deep, deep, deep in my soul. Our whole community does. Our whole state does.And the whole nation should.”

“Our babies are supposed to do arts and crafts at school, not use their desks as cover from gunfire. They’re supposed to make friends, not mourn them,” she continued. “This is every parent’s worst fear. My heart and my prayers and everything else I got is with the families at Silver Rail Elementary. When will it end?”

“All Oregonians mourn this loss today,” the state’s governor, Tina Kotek, said at a news conference in Bend. “This is a horrible day. No parent should have to have this kind of day and no community should have to live through this kind of day.”

“To the community member who heroically intervened to stop further loss of life: your actions carry a heavy emotional burden and I just want to you to know that my thoughts are with you as well,” she added.

Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democratic minority in the House, wrote: “Heartbroken by the shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School in Oregon. Praying for the children, families and educators affected by this tragedy. We must end the scourge of gun violence in America.”

House Republicans repeated a familiar formula in response to mass shootings, writing in a statement “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.”

Citing two US officials and a western official, Reuters reports that an order to limit Ukraine’s access to Starlink satellite internet terminals, used for battlefield communications and drone operations, came from inside the White House.

According to the Reuters report:

The ⁠officials said leaders at the Defense ⁠Department received a message that the SpaceX ​Starshield service for the Ukrainian military needed to be slowed.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, did not specify who in the White House made the decision or who was responsible for implementing the order. The Pentagon is the biggest customer of Starshield, which ⁠is the military-grade version of the Starlink service.

Ukrainian officials said this week that military-grade Starlink receptors stopped working in Ukraine when mounted on fast-moving objects, interfering with the performance of Ukrainian drones that rely on them for onboard guidance systems over Ukrainian territory.

A White House official denied that Donald Trump had ordered the Pentagon to limit Starshield for Ukraine this week, which disrupted its ability to hit Russian targets, telling the news agency: “No such request was ever made by the president.”

The White House did not say if another administration official might have made the request.

Questions are mounting about Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, who told Guardian reporter Shrai Popat that only six days passed between the moment she first received a call from the White House and when she stepped up to the podium for her very first briefing.

Zacharia has offered up little intel on how she plans to take on the role, responding that it is “unknown” how often she will brief the press or speak to reporters. That’s not all that’s unknown, however, information about Zacharia’s work history and experience is also a bit fuzzy.

While she’s been referred to as an attorney by the president, she reportedly failed the California bar exam after graduating from Pepperdine University’s law school in 2011.

As Shrai Popat reports:

After her time in China, there is a 10-year gap on Zacharia’s LinkedIn profile. Wired reported on Thursday that during that period she worked as an “affiliate marketer” for Beachbody, a multi-level marketing company she described to the outlet as “sort of a pyramid scheme”.

She later served as “general counsel” for Fix California, a conservative group founded by Ric Grenell, a longtime Trump ally and the special presidential envoy for special missions. The Guardian has approached both Zhong Lun and Fix California seeking additional details about Zacharia’s legal roles at the organizations.

One thing is for certain, however, and a look at other Trump appointees shows it’s often a credential that outranks experience. Championing her history as a “devoted fan of Maga”, he said she has “an unblemished record of support, and has been a loyal and brilliant supporter, right from the beginning”.

Read the story here:

Speaking to reporters in Virginia on Thursday, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, claimed that the measles outbreak that has killed at least six people in Pennsylvania was caused by the suspension of vaccination against the disease during the Covid-19 pandemic.

After an event focused on efforts to address a shortage of health care providers in the US, a reporter asked Kennedy, the former leader of an anti-vaccination group, if he believes that the number of measles deaths in Pennsylvania “is acceptable”.

When a press aide interrupted to say the question was off-topic, the reporter said, “he’s the highest-ranking health official in the country; he can answer that question. He’s a cabinet secretary.”

“We’ve done better than- we’re having a global measles outbreak right now,” Kennedy replied. “It’s all over the world, and the measles outbreak is occurring because so many people went unvaccinated during the Covid pandemic.

“And this is something that Anthony Fauci, in fact, predicted,” Kennedy added, before referring, imprecisely, to an entry in a private journal kept by Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on 6 May 2020, about the “unintended consequences” of shutdowns to stop the spread of the coronavirus. “He said: ‘We’re gonna kill more people from measles than we save from Covid ‘cause we’re shutting down measles vaccination programs,’” Kennedy said.

What Fauci wrote at that early stage of the shutdowns, as discussions about when to end the restrictions in the US were underway, was that more than “1 million children worldwide have missed their measles vaccinations because of the shutdown. This is terrible and needs to be addressed since on that basis alone, there would be far, far more excess deaths from measles among children than coronavirus deaths among children.”

On Thursday, Kennedy claimed that that pause in childhood vaccination, not fears about vaccines spread by anti-vaccine activists like him, was the cause of the current outbreak.

“So now, six years later”, Kennedy said, “we have a global outbreak.

“We have done better, and particularly my administration has done better, at controlling the outbreak than any other country in the world,” Kennedy claimed. “We’ve had 4,000 measles cases this year. Mexico, which is a third of our population, had 20,000. Canada has 7,000, has a third, or one-eighth of our population. In Europe, they’ve had 135,000 cases. So we’re doing better at controlling it than any country in the world.”

He then pivoted to blaming the severity of the Pennsylvania outbreak on the state’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro.

“Unfortunately, in Pennsylvania”, Kennedy said, “the governor- the only state where the governor would not accept CDC Epi-Aid,” referring to the shorthand for a CDC investigation of an epidemic.

In August, Shapiro said that he blamed Kennedy for spreading anti-vaccine misinformation.

As public polling suggests that the Texas Senate candidate Donald Trump endorsed, Ken Paxton, could lose a seat Republicans have held since 1961 to Democrat James Talarico, the president on Thursday tried to preemptively shift the blame away from himself and on to two other Republicans: Senator John Cornyn and former Karl Rove.

Writing on social media, Trump lashed out at Cornyn, who lost a bitter Republican primary battle after Trump endorsed Paxton, and Rove, a veteran Republican campaign strategist who left college to work for the party during the Watergate scandal and went on to get George W Bush elected president.

Trump accused Cornyn and Rove or “doing everything possible to make it hard for” Paxton “to win”.

The president, who spends much of his day watching Fox News, bitterly complained that Rove, a Fox News contributor, “shouldn’t be allowed to spew his jealousy on” the rightwing network created by a former adviser to Richard Nixon to help elect Republicans.

“If Ken Paxton loses”, Trump added, “it will be because of WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Political Hacks like John Cornyn and Karl Rove, who have ineffectively opposed me for my entire political career.”

Trump, who is not on the midterm ballot, then boasted about how well he had done in the previous election in Texas, using information he said he had gotten from Fox News.

The Trump administration sued the state of California and its election officials on Thursday, seeking to compel the state to not count ballots cast by 20,000 registered California voters whom the Department of Homeland Security suspects might not be citizens.

Officials in California named in the suit rejected the demand, which the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, called “a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day.

“The courts have made clear that the federal government has no role in how a state carries out its election process, and now, in the middle of Californians voting, they have asked local officials – who do a damn good job defending democracy – to violate federal law,” the governor added.

In a letter to the Department of Justice, California’s secretary of state, Shirley Weber, noted that the federal government did not explain the methodology it used to compile the list of 20,000 voters who had been sent mail ballots for the midterm elections. Setting ballots cast by those voters aside, Weber said, would violate federal and state law.

Weber also pointed out that a similar list of suspected noncitizen voters in Nevada had been shown to be entirely wrong. “DHS initially alleged that Nevada’s voter roll included nearly 16,000 potential non-citizens,” Weber wrote. “However, after working with the State of Nevada, DHS officials failed to establish that a single non-citizen was on the voter rolls.”

Dean Logan, the registrar of the state’s largest county, Los Angeles, with 5.8 million registered voters, said in a statement that his office received a thumb drive from the federal government two days ago, said to include a list of 20,000 alleged noncitizens on the voter rolls, with a “hand written note providing a password”.

Logan said that his office did not open the thumb drive, since “we do not consider the device a secure medium.” The secretary of state’s office said the password was written “on a sticky note”.

“Federal and state laws are clear on how voter eligibility is established – and any action to remove a voter from eligibility must be based on verifiable information, not assertions of unconfirmed data matching,” Logan added.

Experts have warned for years that a DHS database that flags people who were once immigrants to the US is not a reliable method of finding current noncitizens, since it is not updated when people become naturalized citizens.

According to a 2024 data analysis from the USC Dornsife Equity Research Institute, 5.7 million Californians are naturalized US citizens, including 1.3 million who became citizens since 2015.

The FBI and the US Postal Inspection Service are investigating letters sent to state officials and election offices across the country containing an “unknown substance”.

Just weeks before November’s US midterm elections, election officers in Louisiana and Oklahoma received envelopes containing a powdery substance, leading to evacuations. A similar package containing white powder was also sent to the Ohio secretary of state, but the US Postal Service intercepted the package.

The US Senate sergeant at arms, who serves as chief law enforcement for the Senate, informed members of the upper chamber on Thursday of the investigation in a message, obtained by the Associated Press.

The notice said law enforcement officials were working to intercept additional mail, but it is possible some could reach their destination. Federal authorities have urged recipients to treat the mail as “potentially hazardous”.

Brendan Donahue, a senior official with the US Postal Inspection Service, confirmed the investigation into the suspicious mailings during a press conference on Thursday. “We are committed to protecting our nation’s election officials from threatening and dangerous mail. Any threat or attack on an election official is unacceptable,” Donahue said.

The US Postal Inspection Service referred the Guardian to the FBI.

In a statement, the FBI said it would not confirm specific instances but said that it was “investigating a series of suspicious mailings sent to various addresses nationwide, including Secretary of State office and their related election officers” alongside the US Postal Inspection Service.

“Some of the letters contained an unknown substance and we are working closely with our law enforcement partners to respond to each incident,” the FBI said. “We are also working with our partners to identify the individual or individuals responsible for the letters.”

The FBI declined to comment on what the purported substance may have been.

• Donald Trump has said that the execution of Nidal Hasan, the US army doctor who killed 13 people at the Fort Hood military base in 2009, would not be livestreamed. The decision, issued via a post on Truth Social, comes after bipartisan backlash to defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement that Hasan’s execution by firing squad, would be broadcast online.“Many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device,” Trump wrote on Thursday. “He [Hasan] will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.”

• Following the news, lawmakers from both parties welcomed the decision. “Good. So sick to have ever considered this,” wrote Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, on X. Meanwhile, Republican Senator John Curtis of Iowa, said “this is the right move, both for the loved ones of the victims and for the country.”

• The Pentagon has said that Hegseth and Trump are “completely aligned” about the decision to not livestream the execution. In the statement to the Guardian, Sean Parnell, the chief defense department spokesperson said that Hegseth and the president spoke before the Truth Social announcement, and the press secretary supports Trump’s decision.

• Key voting groups including independents, rural voters and even some Republicans are increasingly disenchanted with Donald Trump’s economy, according to an exclusive Harris poll for the Guardian. The majority of those surveyed were pessimistic about the economy, with three-quarters of Americans saying they are concerned about a recession while 61% wrongly believe that the US is already experiencing one. By its typical definition, the US is not currently experiencing a recession. More here

While Donald Trump announced on Thursday he was cancelling Pete Hegseth’s recently announced plans to livestream the military execution of Nidal Hasan, because “many very good and well-meaning people would rather not watch him die”. There were, however, some fans of Hegseth’s now-scotched idea: the rightwing religious figures who have long backed his career.

The de facto leader of Hegseth’s theocratic Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), Douglas Wilson, welcomed the announcement.

Wilson, the Idaho pastor who co-founded CREC, has promoted capital punishment as biblically authorized for decades. Last Friday he told Religion News that he prefers “public executions to those conducted in the recesses of a prison somewhere in the middle of the night”, adding that “executions in the scriptures were public”.

Wilson told the outlet that public executions can “turn into a circus”.

Wilson told the Guardian that “I support the execution of Hasan, and prefer public executions to private”, adding: “I prefer the older forms, like a firing squad, as opposed to attempts to ‘medicalize’ it, as with the recent botched execution by injection in Tennessee.”

He did stipulate that “the Pentagon has the responsibility to head off ghoulish behavior by some means”, but admitted: “That will be challenging with a live stream.”

Wilson wrote that he had not spoken to Hegseth nor anyone in his department about the issue.

Wilson and his religious allies are at odds with some other religious leaders, including Pope Leo and the archbishop to the US military, Timothy Broglio, both of whom have condemned Hegseth’s plans.

But CREC pastors, whose church in Washington DC Hegseth attends, have for years advocated the death penalty for many perceived moral infractions including adultery, abortion and homosexuality, and a podcaster from Hegseth’s former church has repeatedly called for executions to be public. Several have expressed hostility to Muslims and Islam, with one calling Allah a “demon God”.

Ilhan Omar’s office did not confirm to the Guardian whether the congresswoman’s phone has been seized, per reporting. But a spokesperson reiterated that the ongoing investigation is “politically motivated and an escalation of Trump’s personal vendetta” against the congresswoman.

“He [Trump] has lied about her family, about her immigration history, and about her love of this country. But the truth is that Trump’s push to strip her of her citizenship and deport her has no basis in the law and has no precedent,” the spokesperson added. “This isn’t a legitimate law enforcement action – it is an authoritarian move to silence an opponent right before an election where he and his party will be rejected by Americans in historic proportions.”

As more emerges about the raid by federal agents on Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s DC home, an unlikely defender has emerged in the form of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The former Republican representative, now estranged from her party after falling out over the handling of the Epstein files and the Gaza war, took to social media to say that while she and Omar are not aligned on many issues, she questioned how the investigation would “bring gas down under $2, make health insurance freaking affordable, make a family’s weekly grocery bill make sense, and stop sending our beloved military off to fight for another fucking foreign war???”

Greene, who previously introduced a resolution in early 2024 to censure Omar over “treasonous” statements about US-Somali relations, said that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) probe was futile.

“People are so sick and tired of the bullshit,” she wrote on X. “When you dumb mf’ers at the WH actually release the Epstein files and lock up the pedophiles and rapists you all hang out with, then we will start paying attention.”

A reminder that federal authorities investigating Omar have reportedly seized her phone and have issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, a person briefed on the inquiry told the Associated Press. Markwayne Mullin previously suggested that agents are examining potential crimes related to her family’s immigration paperwork.

We’re keeping an eye on the press conference between Pete Hegseth and his UK counterpart, Wes Streeting at the Pentagon. The pair are currently on the steps of the Department of Defense.

In the Rose Garden today, Donald Trump joked that “one of those beautiful robots” which they could make “look just like” the president could be sent out to campaign on his behalf.

“You wouldn’t know the difference. They make them pretty good. Send them out on the trail. I could sit home and watch them on television,” Trump said. “But, I love doing it.”

This comes as the president is in the middle of a midterm campaign blitz, to stump for everal Republican nominees across the country. After stops in Alaska, Arizona and Montana so far this week, the president will head to Georgia tomorrow, and Kentucky this weekend.

Trump will also head to Iowa on 22 October and 1 November, according to the chair of the Iowa Republicans.

The Pentagon has also now responded to Donald Trump’s decision to cancel the livestream of the execution of Nidal Hasan.

Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said:

President Trump and Secretary Hegseth spoke about the decision to not livestream Hasan’s execution ahead of the Truth Social announcement. The Secretary supports the President’s decision, and they are completely aligned.

Here’s my colleague Anna Betts’s report:

Britain’s defence secretary Wes Streeting has stressed the importance of standing with Ukraine in its defence against Russia amid mounting fears over the United States’ commitment to Kyiv, the Press Association reports.

During his first visit to Washington in the role, Streeting warned that if Vladimir Putin’s aggression was rewarded, “the consequences will not remain confined to Ukraine or to my continent.”

Streeting is expected to meet his US counterpart Pete Hegseth in a bid to strengthen ties that have been strained by issues including Donald Trump’s stance on Kyiv and the widening US-Nato rift.

His visit comes a day after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited London and said Trump had betrayed his country by curbing its access to a vital Starlink satellite communications system.

Streeting said today that the UK and US must strengthen their defence partnership to confront growing threats at a time when “it is not yet clear if this century will be defined by freedom or tyranny”.

Speaking at an event held by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies and the Royal United Services Institute, he said:

Britain and America have never been content to simply watch history unfold. At defining moments, we have helped determine its course.

The front line for freedom today can be found in Ukraine.

He continued:

Ukraine may be thousands of miles from American shores, but if aggression is rewarded, if borders can be redrawn by force, if the sovereignty of nations becomes negotiable, the consequences will not remain confined to Ukraine or to my continent.

So standing with Ukraine is not a choice between our values and our self-interest. It is a recognition that ultimately they are inseparable.