Former Trump adviser turned adversary, John Bolton, surrenders at federal courthouse following criminal charges
John Bolton, the former ally and national security adviser to Donald Trump during his first administration, has arrived at a federal courthouse in Maryland to surrender, following several criminal charges of transmitting and retaining highly classified information under the Espionage Act.
Key events
Lawmakers continue to push Johnson to swear in Arizona representative-elect
Per my earlier post about the House being out today. Important to note that they will hold what’s known as a pro forma session – a constitutional requirement that requires the House hold a procedural session, short of calling an actual recess. This doesn’t require them from doing any actual legislative work.
However, more lawmakers are pushing for the Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, to use the session to swear in Adelita Grijalva, the Democratic representative-elect from Arizona who won her special election weeks ago.
Johnson has said that he will ensure Grijalva is officially sworn in when they House is officially back at work (read: when the shutdown is over). Democrats have accused him of slow rolling the process intentionally, since Grijalva will be the 218th signature needed on a discharge petition to force a vote on the release of the Epstein files.
On Thursday, House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, sent a letter to Johnson urging him to use today’s pro forma session to swear in Grijalva, whose election has also been certified by Arizona’s attorney general Kris Mayes.
Former Trump adviser turned adversary, John Bolton, surrenders at federal courthouse following criminal charges
John Bolton, the former ally and national security adviser to Donald Trump during his first administration, has arrived at a federal courthouse in Maryland to surrender, following several criminal charges of transmitting and retaining highly classified information under the Espionage Act.
House and Senate both out as shutdown enters day 17
Both chambers of Congress are not in session today, as the government shutdown enters day 17.
We’ll hear from the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, at 9:30am, and then Republican House speaker Mike Johnson at 10am ET. Both parties continue to blame the other for the lapse in funding, and the failure to pass a stopgap bill to reopen the government.
Trump to host Zelenskyy at the White House
Donald Trump will host Volodymyr Zelenskyy today at 1pm ET, and we’ll bring you the latest lines as the two leaders meet at the White House for the third time this year. Currently, their bilateral lunch meeting is closed to the press, but as often happens, it may open up.
Zelenksyy’s last meeting in Washington, in August, was an ostensible success, particularly when compared to the disastrous back and forth in February, when the president essentially said that the Ukrainian leader was ungrateful.
Today, Zelenskyy is expected to ask for US-made Tomahawk missiles, and the subject of Trump’s yet-to-be scheduled meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin is sure to come up.
Later, Trump will leave the White House for Palm Beach.
Joseph Gedeon
The US Senate failed on Thursday to re-open the government and to vote to fund the military during the federal government shutdown, ensuring that the standoff will stretch into next week.
The Senate vote on a short-term Republican funding bill failed for the 10th time with just 51 votes. A second vote on Pentagon funding in the afternoon similarly failed in a floor vote, meaning the process to begin fully funding military operations also becomes a non-starter. After the votes, senators are expected to leave Washington for the weekend, almost guaranteeing the shutdown lasts until at least Monday.
Thursday’s vote on defense spending exposed how deep the divisions go in the Senate, with only three Democratic senators – Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada – breaking ranks to support the measure. The $852bn bill had sailed through subcommittee in July, led by appropriations committee leaders Chris Coons, a Delaware senator, and Mitch McConnell, a senator from Kentucky, with broad Democratic backing. But the politics on it have fallen apart since then.
“I won’t vote just for the defense appropriations bill, even though that’s my bill,” Coons, the top Democrat on the appropriations panel overseeing military spending, told reporters.
The Senate majority leader, John Thune, made his clearest offer yet to Democrats on Thursday morning, telling MSNBC he would guarantee them a vote on extending Affordable Care Act subsidies – the most crucial ask from the Democratic side – by a fixed date if they agree to reopen the government. “At some point, Democrats have to take yes for an answer,” Thune said.
Bolton expected to surrender to authorities today
Hugo Lowell
John Bolton, the former national security adviser to Donald Trump who has since become one of the US president’s biggest Republican critics, was expected to surrender to the authorities on Friday and make an initial appearance in court to face criminal charges that he mishandled classified information.
The justice department filed federal charges against Bolton, accusing him of transmitting and retaining highly classified information under the Espionage Act.
The 18-count indictment was handed up by a grand jury in federal district court in Maryland on Thursday. Bolton has been charged with sending diary entries to two unnamed individuals about his day-to-day activities when he was national security adviser, many of which contained highly classified information.
President Donald Trump said he expected an expansion of the Abraham Accords soon and hopes Saudi Arabia will join the pact that normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and some Arab states.
“I hope to see Saudi Arabia go in, and I hope to see others go in. I think when Saudi Arabia goes in, everybody goes in,” Trump said in an interview broadcast Friday on Fox Business Network.
Pjotr Sauer
Volodymyr Zelenskyy will head to the White House on Friday for a crucial meeting with Donald Trump, hours after the US president said he had agreed to another summit with Vladimir Putin in Budapest after a “very productive” call.
The possible supply of US Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine is expected to top the agenda during the Ukrainian president’s visit. Trump has repeatedly hinted in recent weeks that he may deliver Tomahawks, which would give Kyiv its longest-range weapon yet that would be capable of striking Moscow with accurate, destructive munitions.
However, Trump’s conciliatory tone after the call with Putin left in question the likelihood of immediate assistance to Ukraine and reignited European fears of US capitulation to Moscow.
Trump said Putin “didn’t like it” when he raised the possibility during their call of giving Ukraine Tomahawks – which have a range of up to 1,500 miles (2,415km) – but then appeared to cast doubt on whether Zelenskyy would actually get the American-made arm, saying the US could not “deplete” its own supply.
“We need them too, so I don’t know what we can do about that,” Trump said.
Rachel Leingang
Donald Trump has promised to crack down on dissent and sent troops into US cities. His allies are claiming antifa, the decentralized antifascist movement, is behind plans to protest. He’s looking for any pretext to go after his opponents.
Still, this Saturday, even in cities with troops on the ground, millions of people are expected to march against the president as part of a second “No Kings” protest. The last No Kings protest in June drew several million people across more than 2,000 locations. This time, more than 2,500 cities and towns nationwide are hosting protests.
Organizers expect this Saturday’s protests to draw more people than the June events as the American public sees the excesses of the Trump administration more clearly.
“Their goal is to dissuade you from participating,” said Ezra Levin, a cofounder of Indivisible, the progressive movement organization with chapters around the US that is a main organizer of No Kings.
“That doesn’t mean that everybody has the same threat level. It doesn’t mean that people should ignore what the threats are, but it does mean we’re going to need to see a lot of courage out there on Saturday.”
More than 200 organizations are signed on as partners for the 18 October protests; none have dropped off for fear of a Trump backlash, Levin said. The American Civil Liberties Union, the civil rights group, is a partner, as is advocacy group Public Citizen. Unions including the American Federation of Teachers and SEIU are in the coalition.
The new protest movement 50501, which began earlier this year as a call for protests in all 50 states on a single day, is also a partner. Other partners include the Human Rights Campaign, MoveOn, United We Dream, the League of Conservation Voters, Common Defense and more.
Rachel Leingang
When Donald Trump named leftwing billionaire George Soros as the next on his growing list of targets for retribution, he was also targeting the long list of progressive causes that Soros funds.
Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) network, now run by his son Alex, is a major funder of non-profits large and small, across sectors including democracy, voting rights, climate justice, racial justice, Palestinian rights and higher education.
Public documentation of the group’s grant-making shows thousands of worldwide recipients receiving anywhere from small amounts to multimillion-dollar grants, and include major non-profit organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union.
The US justice department has reportedly instructed US attorneys to come up with plans to investigate OSF as efforts to attack the left accelerate following the killing of rightwing commentator Charlie Kirk.
In a presidential memo, Trump said the government needed to “investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence”, adding a comment that Soros was at “the top of everything”.
“We have always and will continue to adhere to our rigorous compliance practices and operate within the bounds of the law while also refusing to surrender our legal and constitutional rights to free speech, association, due process, and the rule of law without challenge,” an OSF spokesperson said.
Jenna Amatulli
After a federal judge tossed Donald Trump’s $15bn defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, book publisher Penguin Random House and two Times reporters last month, the US president filed a 40-page amended complaint on Thursday.
US district court judge Steven Merryday in Florida gave Trump 28 days to refile and amend the action he threw out on 19 September.
The initial lawsuit named investigative reporters Suzanne Craig, Russ Buettner and Michael S Schmidt as well as the New York Times’s chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker. All but Schmidt are still named in the amended complaint.
The amended complaint includes an itemized list of dozens of allegations tied to specific publications and statements. Like the first lawsuit, Trump is asking for $15bn in compensatory damages. He’s also asking for “punitive damages in an amount to be determined upon trial of this action.”
In his initial disqualifying, Merryday cited rule 8(a) of the federal rules of civil procedure requiring a complaint to include a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.
“Alleging only two simple counts of defamation, the complaint consumes 85 pages,” Merryday wrote. “Count one appears on page 80, and count two appears on page 83 … Even under the most generous and lenient application of rule 8, the complaint is decidedly improper and impermissible.”
A phone call between US president Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin shows that the Russian president reacts to pressure for serious peace talks, a German government spokesperson said on Friday.
“The pressure on Vladimir Putin for serious peace talks must be increased as a matter of urgency,” the spokesperson said.
“He reacts to pressure … this telephone call yesterday also showed that it is also a consequence of decisions based on announcements by the US side.”
Anna Betts
New York City’s three mayoral candidates faced off on Thursday night in the first of two televised debates, less than three weeks before voters head to the polls.
On stage were Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, former governor Andrew Cuomo – now running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary to Mamdani in June – and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa. Mayor Eric Adams, who dropped out of the race several weeks ago, did not participate.
During the two-hour-long debate, the candidates clashed over a variety of local and national issues, including crime, policing, affordability, housing and transportation, as well as how they would handle the Trump administration and the recent Gaza ceasefire deal.
Mamdani and Cuomo, the race frontrunners, wasted no time and began sparring – with Sliwa between them – almost immediately.
Cuomo is notably attempting a political comeback after resigning as governor of New York in 2021 in the wake of multiple allegations of sexual harassment. He started the night echoing his performance in the primary debates, painting Mamdani as too unqualified and inexperienced to lead the city.
“This is no job for on-the-job training,” Cuomo said. “If you look at the failed mayors, they’re ones that have no management experience.”
Mamdani, the 33-year-old state assemblyman from Queens and self-described democratic socialist, pushed back on Cuomo by citing his five years in the New York state assembly and his lived experience in New York City. He touted himself as “someone who has actually paid rent in the city” and “who has had to wait for a bus that never came, someone who actually buys his groceries in this city”.
Cuomo shot back: “What the assemblyman said is he has no experience.”
Mamdani fired back: “What I don’t have in experience, I make up for in integrity, and what you don’t have in integrity, you could never make up for in experience.”
John Bolton indicted on charges of mishandling classified information
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with the news that the justice department has filed federal charges against John Bolton, the former national security adviser to Donald Trump who turned into one of his biggest critics, accusing him of transmitting and retaining highly classified information under the Espionage Act.
The 18-count indictment was handed up by a grand jury in federal district court in Maryland on Thursday. Bolton has been charged with sending diary entries to two unnamed individuals about his day-to-day activities when he was national security adviser, many of which contained highly classified information.
The indictment marked the third time in recent weeks the justice department has secured criminal charges against one of Trump’s critics. In response to a question about the charges, Trump told reporters on Thursday that he was not aware of them but that Bolton was a “bad guy”.
While Bolton parted on sour terms from the White House, the criminal investigation gained momentum during the Biden administration over disclosures that troubled the US intelligence community.
The justice department pursues Espionage Act cases in the event of so-called “aggregating factors”: willful mishandling of classified information, vast quantities of classified information to support an inference of misconduct, disloyalty to the US and obstruction.
“BOLTON took detailed notes documenting his day-to-day meetings, activities, and briefings. Frequently, BOLTON handwrote these notes on yellow notepads throughout his day at the White House complex or in other secure locations, and then later re-wrote his notes in a word processing document,” the indictment said.
“The notes that BOLTON sent to Individuals 1 and 2 using his non-governmental personal email accounts and messaging account described in detail BOLTON’s daily activities as the National Security Advisor. Often, BOLTON’s notes described the secure setting or environment in which he learned the national defense and classified information that he was memorializing in his notes.”
In a statement, Bolton said, “I look forward to the fight to defend my lawful conduct and to expose his abuse of power.” Bolton’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said his client had not engaged in wrongdoing.
Read our full story here:
In other developments:
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Volodymyr Zelenskyy will head to the White House on Friday for a crucial meeting with Donald Trump, hours after the US president said he had agreed to another summit with Vladimir Putin in Budapest after a “very productive” call. The possible supply of US Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine is expected to top the agenda during the Ukrainian president’s visit.
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New York City’s three mayoral candidates faced off on Thursday night in the first of two televised debates, less than three weeks before voters head to the polls. On stage were Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, former governor Andrew Cuomo – now running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary to Mamdani in June – and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa. Mayor Eric Adams, who dropped out of the race several weeks ago, did not participate.
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After a federal judge tossed Donald Trump’s $15bn defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, book publisher Penguin Random House and two Times reporters last month, the US president filed a 40-page amended complaint on Thursday. US district court judge Steven Merryday in Florida gave Trump 28 days to refile and amend the action he threw out on 19 September.
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Amid escalating tensions with Venezuela and US military strikes on suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean, the US admiral who commands military forces in Latin America will step down at the end of this year, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, announced on social media. Adm Alvin Holsey’s abrupt departure comes less than a year after he took over as head of the US military’s southern command, which oversees operations in Central America, South America and the Caribbean. The posting typically lasts three years.
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The US Senate failed on Thursday to reopen the government and to vote to fund the military during the federal government shutdown, ensuring that the standoff will stretch into next week. The Senate vote on a short-term Republican funding bill failed for the 10th time with just 51 votes.
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More than two centuries have passed since France celebrated the emperor Napoleon’s birthday by laying the foundation stone of the Arc de Triomphe. Now Donald Trump has imperial ambitions of his own. On Wednesday, the US president unveiled plans for a grand arch in Washington that has already been dubbed the “Arc de Trump”.
