Trump claims he was the victim of ‘triple sabotage at the UN’, demands investigation
Donald Trump demanded a formal investigation on Wednesday of three technical mishaps that marred his speech to the United Nations general assembly on Tuesday: a malfunctioning escalator, a faulty teleprompter and an apparent sound problem in the hall.
Although Trump, in an enraged social media post, called the technical failures “triple sabotage”, UN officials told reporters that at least two of the problems were likely caused by Trump’s own delegation.
The chief UN spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said in a statement that a read-out of the escalator’s central processing unit indicated that it had stopped because a built-in safety mechanism at the top had been triggered by accident, most likely by a White House videographer who was moving up the escalator backwards to record Trump’s ascent.
A UN official told Colum Lynch, a veteran UN correspondent, that the US delegation was operating the teleprompter from their own laptop, and Trump had simply arrived at the podium before it was ready.
According to Mike Waltz, who was demoted from national security adviser to US ambassador to the UN after accidentally adding a journalist to a confidential Signal group chat to discuss US strikes on Yemen in March, the third technical flub was interruptions of Trump’s speech in the hall with Portuguese interpretation.
Trump himself, on social media, claimed that the audio problem was much more substantial. “I was told that the sound was completely off in the Auditorium where the Speech was made, that World Leaders, unless they used the interpreters’ earpieces, couldn’t hear a thing,” Trump wrote.
That, however, appears unlikely to be true, since video evidence shows that there were numerous occasions throughout his speech when the audience reacted immediately to hat he was saying.
At the start of his remarks, for instance, when Trump said, “I can only say that whoever’s operating this teleprompter’s in big trouble,” his remark was met with immediate laughter from the delegates in the hall.
Similarly, when Trump criticized other nations for deciding to recognize the state of Palestine, calling the diplomatic move “a reward” for “horrible atrocities” carried out by Hamas militants on October 7,” the pool camera in the room cut to Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, who nodded in agreement.
Danon clearly had no trouble hearing Trump’s speech, since he posted video of that moment on social media later, and told reporters outside the hall that it was “a great speech; we are grateful to president Trump for a powerful speech.”
Similarly, other members of the US delegation who listened in the hall, including the energy secretary, Chris Wright, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who were photographed smiling as Trump described his escalator mishap, gave no indication after it that they had any difficulty hearing Trump’s speech. “Incredible speech at the UN”, Rubio wrote on social media on Tuesday, before Trump claimed that there was no audio in the hall he had been sitting in.
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but we will resume our labors on Thursday. Here are the day’s developments:
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Lindsey Halligan, the former White House aide installed as interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, plans to seek an indictment against James Comey, the former FBI director, for allegedly lying to Congress, despite being briefed by prosecutors that there is insufficient evidence to obtain a conviction.
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Donald Trump demanded an investigation of what he called “triple sabotage” of his UN address on Tuesday: a malfunctioning escalator, a faulty teleprompter and an apparent sound problem in the hall. UN officials said the US delegation was responsible for the first two, and the third was less dramatic than Trump claimed.
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JD Vance, the vice-president, claimed without evidence that a gunman who opened fire at an Ice facility in Dallas, killing one detainee and wounding two more before taking his own life, was a “violent leftwing extremist”.
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The White House used a wall of the presidential residence to stage an elaborate prank, creating a “walk of fame” featuring framed portraits of 44 of the 45 men to have served as president, all except for Joe Biden, who was represented by an image of an autopen, to suggest that he did not actually run his administration.
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House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, said that Democrats “have drawn a line in the sand” when it comes to the Republican-written short term spending bill, that extends government funding until 21 November.
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The state superintendent in Oklahoma announced plans to put rightwing Turning Point USA chapters in every high school in the state, saying it would counter “radical leftist teachers’ unions” and their “woke indoctrination”.
The US justice department notified a lawyer for the families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on Wednesday that it is dropping an investigation of a retired FBI agent who responded to the 2012 school shooting and testified in a defamation lawsuit against Alex Jones, over the radio host’s damaging conspiracy theory that the massacre was staged by the government.
Ed Martin, a veteran Republican operative who now leads a “weaponization working group” inside the department of justice had previously sent a letter to the Sandy Hook families’ lawyer, Christopher Mattei, asking for information about the former FBI agent, William Aldenberg, who was a plaintiff in the lawsuit, along with victims’ relatives, that led to a $1.4bn judgment against Jones for calling the massacre a hoax.
Martin’s letter suggested that he was looking into whether Aldenberg broke a federal law by receiving financial benefits for helping to organize the lawsuit. Jones, who said he met with Martin last week in Washington, has accused Democrats and justice department officials of orchestrating the lawsuit to silence him.
Jones had posted a copy of a letter Martin sent to Mattei this month on his X account on Tuesday. Jones and Martin had posed for a photograph together earlier this month, prompting speculation that the Trump administration was using the threat of investigation to harass the plaintiffs who won the judgement against the Trump-supporting rightwing conspiracy theorist who rallied Trump supporters outside the Capitol on 6 January 2021.
Mattei posted a copy of a new letter he received from Martin on Wednesday in which the justice department official said there was no investigation of Aldenberg and “I hereby withdraw my request for information.”
“Jones and Martin corruptly used DOJ to harass Sandy Hook families and the heroic FBI agent who ran into the school to save any children he could,” Mattei wrote on X. “I called them out and now the so-called inquiry has been withdrawn. This is a moment to stand up to bullying, lawless misconduct.”
The school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, on 14 December 2012 killed 20 first graders and six educators. Jones, based in Austin, Texas, repeatedly called it a hoax and pushed false claims that it was staged by the government in an effort to increase support for gun control, and the grieving family members were all “crisis actors”.
Under pressure, the Infowars host eventually said he believed the shooting was “100% real”.
At the 2022 defamation trial in Connecticut, Aldenberg and relatives of many of the victims testified about being subjected to threats and abuse by people who believed Jones’ conspiracy theories about the shooting.
Aldenberg was among the law enforcement officers who responded to the school, and he broke down while testifying during the trial about finding dead children and teachers.
Trump’s hand-picked US attorney in Virginia expected to indict Comey despite lack of evidence
Justice department sources tell multiple news outlets that Lindsey Halligan, the former White House aide installed as interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia on Monday, plans to seek an indictment against James Comey, the former FBI director, for allegedly lying to Congress, despite being briefed by prosecutors that there is insufficient evidence to obtain a conviction.
ABC News, MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Times all report that Halligan, who has no experience as a prosecutor, has decided to seek an indictment despite being presented with a memo by prosecutors in the office that explains there is not enough evidence to bring charges.
Halligan was picked for the role by Donald Trump to replace a career prosecutor who declined to indict either Comey or New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, who are both high up on the president’s enemies list.
The appointment of Halligan, who was the most junior lawyer on Trump’s personal legal team before he took office, came after the president explicitly called for Comey, James and Adam Schiff, the California senator, to be charged with crimes in revenge for their past roles in investigations of him, for contacts between his 2016 campaign and Russia, business fraud and withholding military aid from Ukraine unless it agreed to investigate conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
Trump claims he was the victim of ‘triple sabotage at the UN’, demands investigation
Donald Trump demanded a formal investigation on Wednesday of three technical mishaps that marred his speech to the United Nations general assembly on Tuesday: a malfunctioning escalator, a faulty teleprompter and an apparent sound problem in the hall.
Although Trump, in an enraged social media post, called the technical failures “triple sabotage”, UN officials told reporters that at least two of the problems were likely caused by Trump’s own delegation.
The chief UN spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said in a statement that a read-out of the escalator’s central processing unit indicated that it had stopped because a built-in safety mechanism at the top had been triggered by accident, most likely by a White House videographer who was moving up the escalator backwards to record Trump’s ascent.
A UN official told Colum Lynch, a veteran UN correspondent, that the US delegation was operating the teleprompter from their own laptop, and Trump had simply arrived at the podium before it was ready.
According to Mike Waltz, who was demoted from national security adviser to US ambassador to the UN after accidentally adding a journalist to a confidential Signal group chat to discuss US strikes on Yemen in March, the third technical flub was interruptions of Trump’s speech in the hall with Portuguese interpretation.
Trump himself, on social media, claimed that the audio problem was much more substantial. “I was told that the sound was completely off in the Auditorium where the Speech was made, that World Leaders, unless they used the interpreters’ earpieces, couldn’t hear a thing,” Trump wrote.
That, however, appears unlikely to be true, since video evidence shows that there were numerous occasions throughout his speech when the audience reacted immediately to hat he was saying.
At the start of his remarks, for instance, when Trump said, “I can only say that whoever’s operating this teleprompter’s in big trouble,” his remark was met with immediate laughter from the delegates in the hall.
Similarly, when Trump criticized other nations for deciding to recognize the state of Palestine, calling the diplomatic move “a reward” for “horrible atrocities” carried out by Hamas militants on October 7,” the pool camera in the room cut to Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, who nodded in agreement.
Danon clearly had no trouble hearing Trump’s speech, since he posted video of that moment on social media later, and told reporters outside the hall that it was “a great speech; we are grateful to president Trump for a powerful speech.”
Similarly, other members of the US delegation who listened in the hall, including the energy secretary, Chris Wright, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who were photographed smiling as Trump described his escalator mishap, gave no indication after it that they had any difficulty hearing Trump’s speech. “Incredible speech at the UN”, Rubio wrote on social media on Tuesday, before Trump claimed that there was no audio in the hall he had been sitting in.
Witnesses recount Dallas Ice facility shooting
Here are video interviews with three witnesses to the deadly shooting in Dallas on Wednesday:
Edwin Cardona was waiting for an appointment with his wife and son outside the Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement building when a gunman opened fire on the facility on Wednesday. Four people were reportedly shot, one fatally, in an attack which the FBI said was being investigated as “an act of targeted violence”. The Department of Homeland Security said one detainee was killed and two others were in critical condition.
Obama calls Trump’s claims about autism and Tylenol ‘violence against the truth’
Speaking in London on Wednesday, Barack Obama strongly criticized his successor Donald Trump for making what the former president called “broad claims around certain drugs and autism that have been continuously disproved”.
Obama added, in remarks that were captured on video and shared on social media:
The degree to which that undermines public health, the degree to which that can do harm to women who are pregnant, the degree to which that creates anxiety for parents who do have children who are autistic – which, by the way, itself is subject to a spectrum, and a lot of what is being trumpeted as these massive increases actually has to do with a broadening of the criteria across that spectrum so that people can actually get services and help – all of that is violence against the truth.
According to Metro, a free London newspaper, Obama began his interview with the British historian and broadcaster David Olusoga by telling the audience that London is “one of the greatest cities in the world”. At the United Nations on Tuesday, Trump had falsely claimed that London, under the leadership of its popular, Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, was in decline and implementing Shariah law.
Khan was reportedly in the audience of about 14,000 people for Obama’s appearance.
Trump turns White House wall into venue for trolling Biden
As parts of the federal government focused on the deadly shooting at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Dallas on Wednesday, Donald Trump returned, again, to a major focus of his second term in office: ruthlessly mocking his predecessor, Joe Biden.
Photographs posted on the official White House accounts on Instagram and X showed Trump inspecting what his special assistant, Margo Martin, called the new “Presidential Walk of Fame” on the wall of the West Wing colonnade: a series of framed photographs of 44 of the 45 men who have served as president of the United States. A framed image of an autopen signing Biden’s name appears instead of his official portrait.
Video posted on X by Martin showed off the transformation of an exterior wall of the White House into a meme, amplifying the rightwing conspiracy theory that Biden, who defeated Trump by more than 7 million votes in 2020, was not even aware of some orders authorized by his signature.
A White House official, who insisted on anonymity, told Reuters that the alternative Biden portrait was Trump’s own idea.
The autopen is a device used to replicate a person’s signature with precision, typically for high-volume or ceremonial documents. In recent years, the device has been employed by presidents of both parties, including Trump, to sign letters and proclamations.
Trump rushes to blame Democrats for shooting at Ice office in Dallas
Donald Trump has followed his vice-president by instantly politicizing the shooting of three detainees at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Dallas on Wednesday, claiming in a social media post that the attack “is the result of the Radical Left Democrats constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to ‘Nazis.’”
Although the investigation into the shooting is not yet complete, Trump insisted that it was politically motivated, based his FBI director’s claim that one bullet found near the gunman, who died of a self-inflicted wound, had the words “Anti-Ice” written on it.
David Smith
Vice-president JD Vance has denied that the White House is targeting late night TV comedy or other forms of free speech.
“I’m pretty sure that Jimmy Kimmel was back on the air last night, and to the extent that he’s not back on the air, it’s because he’s not funny and has terrible ratings,” Vance said at an event in Concord, North Carolina. “This is not a federal government problem.”
Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, last week threatened to take action against Disney’s ABC network after Kimmel made remarks about Republicans’ response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Kimmel was suspended for a week.
Vance played down the controversy on Wednesday, insisting: “What people will say is, well, you know, didn’t the FCC commissioner put a tweet out that said something bad? Well, compare the FCC commissioner making a joke on social media – what is the government action that the Trump administration has engaged in to kick Jimmy Kimmel or anybody else off the air? Zero.”
“What government pressure have we brought to bear to tell people that they’re not allowed to speak their mind? Zero. We believe in free speech in the Trump administration. We are fighting every single day to protect it.”
In fact, Carr took much more direct action than making a joke on social media: he went on a popular rightwing podcast and urged the owners of ABC-affiliated local TV stations to press ABC to remove Kimmel. “There’s actions we can take on licensed broadcasters,” Carr said. “Frankly I think it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, ‘Listen, we are going to preempt, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out because we licensed broadcasters are running the possibility of fines or licensed revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.”
“Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr added. “These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” After those comments, two owners of local stations announced that they would not air Kimmel’s show, and ABC decided to suspend him.
Vance himself also argued last week that anyone caught celebrating Kirk’s murder should be named and shamed, urging: “Hell, call their employer.” Donald Trump suggested that regulators should consider revoking licenses for networks that “give me only bad publicity”.
At Wednesday’s event, Vance was also questioned about Trump’s sudden shift on the Ukraine war in which he said the country can win back all its territory from Russia.
“I believe the president is growing incredibly impatient with the Russians right now because he doesn’t feel like they’re putting enough on the table to end the war,” he said. “The war is bad for Russia. It’s bad for Ukraine. It’s bad for America. We want the killing to stop.”
Officials correct death toll in Ice shooting to say one person killed, two in critical condition
The Department of Homeland Security just issued a correction related to the number of people killed and injured in the shooting at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Dallas, Texas.
One detainee was killed and two others were in critical condition, the department said in a statement. Previously, the department said two detainees had been killed.
The department has not yet corrected or removed an earlier post on its X account which said that two Ice detainees were killed.
Republicans call out ‘unprecedented violence’ against Ice officers, following shooting
In the wake of today’s shooting at the Dallas Ice field office, several other Republicans have expressed their support with immigration enforcement, and expressed concern at violence directed towards Ice agents in recent months.
A reminder that authorities, including the Department of Homeland security, said no law enforcement officials were wounded. Rather, two detainees were killed, and another was severely injured.
In a post on X, House majority leader Steve Scalise, said : “Our brave ICE officers put their lives on the line every day to make this country safer, but they continue to face unprecedented violence. It MUST STOP.”
Meanwhile, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, shared a graphic with the words “I stand with Ice” on social media. She added that “Democrats must stop demonizing the heroic men and women of ICE”.
In a statement, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Richard Hudson, said that today’s shooting was “a direct result of Democrats’ long pattern of dangerous anti-ICE rhetoric, consistently putting criminal illegal immigrants first and demonizing law enforcement”.
David Smith
in Concord, North Carolina
JD Vance, the vice-president, has claimed that a gunman who opened fire at an Ice facility in Dallas on Wednesday, killing two detainees and wounding another before taking his own life, was a “violent leftwing extremist”.
Vance was speaking at a law and order event inside an airport hangar in Concord, North Carolina, flanked by officers in uniform and against a backdrop of armoured police vehicles and giant US flags.
“What we know is that in Dallas, Texas, an Ice facility – an Immigration Customs and Enforcement facility – was opened fire upen by a violent leftwing extremist, a person who wrote anti-Ice messaging on their bullets,” the vice-president told a crowd of around 200 people.
“These’s some evidence we have that’s not yet public but we know this person was politically motivated. They were politically motivated to go after law enforcement. They were politically motivated to go after people who are enforcing our border and I think that is the most disgusting thing.”
Trump and his allies have sometimes been over-hasty in ascribing political motives to high profile offenders only for a more complex truth to emerge.
Speaking from a podium branded “Honor. Valor. Justice”, Vance reflected on the fatal shooting of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk but did not reference a deadly attack on Democrat state politicians in Minnesota.
“If you look at the political violence in our country over the last couple of months, the last couple of years, it is not a both sides’ problem,” he claimed. “It is primarily on one side of the political aisle.”
