Epstein confidante Ghislaine Maxwell urges supreme court to overturn her conviction – live

In a rare break with Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump told Israel to allow “every ounce of food” into Gaza as he acknowledged for the first time that there is “real starvation” in the devastated Palestinian territory. During a visit to Scotland, the US president contradicted the Israeli prime minister, who claimed it was a “bold-faced lie” to say Israel was causing starvation in Gaza. Trump is under growing pressure to intervene in the humanitarian crisis, with dozens of Palestinian people having died of hunger in recent weeks in a crisis attributed by the UN and other humanitarian organisations to Israel’s blockade of almost all aid into the territory. The US president told reporters that Israel bore “a lot of responsibility” for the crisis”. Here is our report.

Trump also criticised Hamas for not releasing the remaining hostages and said they were “very difficult to deal with”, while suggesting he had asked the Israeli government to change its approach. “I told Israel, I told Bibi, that you have to now maybe do it a different way,” he said.

Trump also announced that he would cut his deadline for Vladimir Putin to move on Ukraine from 50 days to “10 or 12” saying: “There’s no reason in waiting. It’s 50 days. I want to be generous, but we just don’t see any progress being made.” His final decision on the exact deadline is expected to be made “tonight or tomorrow,” the US president said. Trump went further, adding that he was “not so interested” in talking to the Russian president any more, after being disappointed by the outcome of their previous talks. Our report is here.

Away from foreign affairs, Trump couldn’t escape questions about Jeffrey Epstein, even from across the pond. Asked about his denials that his name appears in the Epstein files and whether the attorney general would have to tell him if it did, Trump claimed (unbelievably) that he hadn’t been “overly interested” in the whole affair and, as usual, blamed the Democrats.

Asked if he would consider giving Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficker and Epstein’s close confidante, a pardon, Trump said: “Nobody’s approached me with it. Nobody’s asked me about it. It’s in the news about that, that aspect of it, but right now, it would be inappropriate to talk about it.”

He also told reporters that he “never had the privilege” of visiting Epstein’s island, saying he turned down an invitation from the convicted sex offender in what the president called a moment of good judgment. “I never had the privilege of going to his island, and I did turn it down,” Trump told reporters in Scotland. “In one of my very good moments, I turned it down.”

He also revealed the reason for his falling out with Epstein, telling reporters in Scotland: “For years I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein. He did something that was inappropriate. He hired help and I said ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He stole people that worked for me and I said ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ And he did it again and I threw him out of the place … and that was it. I’m glad I did.”

Trump also today asked a US court to order a swift deposition for billionaire Rupert Murdoch in the president’s defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over its 17 July article asserting that Trump’s name was on a 2003 birthday greeting for Epstein. Trump’s lawsuit called the alleged birthday greeting “fake” and said the Journal published its article to harm the president’s reputation. In a court filing, Trump’s lawyers said Trump told Murdoch before the WSJ’s article was published that the birthday letter to Epstein referenced in the story was fake, and Murdoch told Trump he would “take care of it”. “Murdoch’s direct involvement further underscores Defendants’ actual malice,” Trump’s lawyers wrote, referring to the legal standard Trump must clear to prevail in his lawsuit. His lawyers asked US district judge Darrin Gayles in Miami to compel Murdoch, 94, to testify within 15 days. Gayles ordered Murdoch to respond by 4 August.

Ghislaine Maxwell urged the supreme court to take up her pending appeal and overturn her conviction, claiming that she was covered by an agreement Epstein made with federal authorities that shielded her from prosecution. “This case is about what the government promised, not what Epstein did,” Maxwell’s attorneys told the justices in a new brief. Maxwell has serving a 20-year in federal prison since 2022 for carrying out a years-long scheme with Epstein to groom and sexually abuse teenage girls. She has recently had meetings with deputy attorney general Todd Blanche for interviews amid a political firestorm over the Trump administration’s mishandling of the Epstein case. Those talks were not mentioned in the latest supreme court filing.

Speaking of those meetings, the top Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, Dick Durbin, and senator Sheldon Whitehouse today called for the release of the transcripts and recordings of the Department of Justice’s meetings last week with Maxwell.

And in another headache for the Department of Justice, it is facing a federal lawsuit for refusing to release a legal memorandum that reportedly cleared the way for Trump’s acceptance of a $400m luxury jet from Qatar’s government. The Freedom of the Press Foundation, represented by the watchdog group American Oversight, filed the Freedom of Information Act (Foia) lawsuit in Washington DC’s federal district court after the justice department failed to produce the document despite granting expedited processing more than two months ago. The president’s “deal to take a $400m luxury jet from a foreign government deserves full public scrutiny – not a stiff-arm from the Department of Justice”, American Oversight’s executive director, Chioma Chukwu, said in a press release. “This is precisely the kind of corrupt arrangement that public records laws are designed to expose.” Here’s our story.

Elsewhere, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and ordered that it keep getting Medicaid funds. The judge ruled that Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide must continue to be reimbursed for Medicaid funding as the nation’s largest abortion provider fights Trump’s administration over efforts to defund the organization in his signature tax legislation.