Trump says he will meet Putin in Alaska next week
Donald Trump said he plans to meet Vladimir Putin in Alaska next Friday, 15 August. He announced the location in a brief post on his social media site early this evening.
Our recent reporting on the latest developments:
Key events
Summary
That’s all the live coverage for the day, thanks for following along. Some key links and developments from our reporting today:
Preet Bharara, the former US attorney, said in a statement he was representing US senator Adam Schiff, following reports that the Department of Justice had appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the Democrat from California.
Ed Martin, a rightwing activist who served as interim US attorney for Washington DC, was tapped by attorney general Pam Bondi for the job, according to NBC News.
Donald Trump has previously accused Schiff of mortgage fraud, a claim that the senator has forcefully denied. In a July video responding to the claims, Schiff said: “The basis of his accusation is that I own a home in Maryland, and I own my home in California. Big surprise – members of Congress, almost all of them, own more than one home or rent more than one home because we’re required to be on both coasts … Donald Trump [is] trying to bring about political retribution, retaliation.”
In a statement published by a Politico reporter this evening, Bharara said, “The allegations against Senator Schiff are transparently false, state, and long debunked.” Bharara said the “bias” of Martin’s appointment was “glaring”, giving that Schiff had placed a hold on his nomination to be US attorney: “Any supposed investigation led by him would be the very definition of weaponization of the justice process.”
Martin has defended January 6 rioters, and his US attorney nomination ultimately failed.
California lawmakers prepare ballot measure to counter Texas GOP
Lauren Gambino
On Friday, the Democratic leaders of the California state legislature said they were prepared to move forward with a ballot measure asking voters to redraw the state’s house map should Texas follow through with its proposed redistricting plan.
“We don’t move unless they move,” California governor Gavin Newsom said during a news conference in Sacramento, where he was joined by a delegation of Democratic state representatives from Texas. “But we’re not going to unilaterally disarm.”
US congresswoman Zoe Lofgren said every Democratic member of the state’s congressional delegation supported the California ballot initiative.
“We cannot stand here and just shrug as Trump and the Republicans try and rig the rules so they can avoid responsibility for the damage that they have done to this country,” she said. “We need a break on them, and we can get it in the midterm elections.”
Judge blocks Beto O’Rourke from assisting Texas Democrats
A Texas judge has ruled that Beto O’Rourke, the former congressman, cannot provide financial assistance to the state Democratic lawmakers who have left the state to block Republicans’ gerrymandering, the Texas Tribune reports.
O’Rourke, a former presidential candidate, was sued by the state’s GOP attorney general, Ken Paxton, who claimed the Democrat and his group, Powered by People, were unlawfully helping the Democratic lawmakers and engaged in deceptive fundraising. Paxton has been pursuing an array of aggressive tactics to punish the legislators who are breaking quorum in an effort to stop Republicans from redrawing the congressional map.
The Tarrant county district judge, Megan Fahey, issued an injunction against O’Rourke less than four hours after Paxton filed his claim, according to the Tribune, which noted that Fahey was appointed by GOP governor Greg Abbott in 2019. O’Rourke earlier filed a separate lawsuit against Paxton to try to block his attacks on his group.
The Democrat condemned the attorney general and the injunction in a social media post this evening, writing:
They want to make examples out of those who fight so that others won’t. Paxton is trying to shut down Powered by People, one of the largest voter registration organizations in the country, because our volunteers fight for voting rights and free elections… the kind of work that threatens the hold that Paxton, Trump and Abbott have on power in Texas.
Paxton said in a statement: “The Beto Bribe buyouts that were bankrolling the runaway Democrats have been officially stopped.”
Vladimir Putin’s trip to Alaska next week to meet with Donald Trump will be the first time the Russian president has been to the US in a decade, the Associated Press notes.
His last US visit was a meeting with Barack Obama for the UN general assembly in New York in September 2015, which was his seventh visit to the US as Russia’s leader. He first met with Bill Clinton at a UN event in 2000.
Trump announced this evening on his social media site that the meeting would take place in Alaska next Friday, 15 August. The two are slated to discuss an end to the three-and-a-half-year war, which Trump said Friday would have to involve “some swapping of territories”.
As we reported earlier this week, finding a neutral venue to host the summit would have been difficult, given that the Russian president was indicted for war crimes in 2023 by the international criminal court, and so is subject to arrest in 125 countries.
Anti-Ice protesters arrested in New York City
Coral Murphy Marcos
Several protesters outside New York City’s 26 Federal Plaza government building were arrested on Friday for disorderly conduct, with demonstrators accusing the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency of operating a covert detention facility there, according to several reports.
Protesters marched to the largest federal immigration courthouse in Manhattan on Friday morning and chanted outside the building. Demonstrators demanded access to the site, which was denied, and they later held a sit-in outside the courthouse, according to ABC7.
Within a few minutes the New York City police department moved in to arrest some of the protesters for disorderly conduct, according to reports, as activists could be seen blocking the street.
Trump’s announcement that he will be meeting Putin next week in Alaska comes after the US president suggested at a briefing that an end to the Ukraine invasion might involve “swapping of territories”.
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Putin has presented the Trump administration with a proposal for a ceasefire in Ukraine if Kyiv makes major territorial concessions. The newspaper’s report, citing European and Ukrainian officials, said the proposal would require Ukraine hand over the Donbas in the east of the country, which has led European officials to express serious reservations.
Bloomberg, meanwhile, reported that the deal could cement some of Putin’s territorial gains in Ukraine, effectively freezing the battle lines in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. Putin has claimed four Ukrainian regions in their entirety, although much of their territory remains under Ukrainian control, as the Guardian reported Friday.
The last US-Russia summit was in 2021, when Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva.
Zelenskyy has been speaking with European leaders including the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron. More details here:
Trump says he will meet Putin in Alaska next week
Donald Trump said he plans to meet Vladimir Putin in Alaska next Friday, 15 August. He announced the location in a brief post on his social media site early this evening.
Our recent reporting on the latest developments:
California lawmakers defend Texas Democrats: ‘We will fight fire with fire’
California Democratic legislators are holding an afternoon briefing about their proposal to counter Republican’s gerrymandering in Texas with a ballot measure.
Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren said all members of the California delegation supported a plan to redraw the state’s districts to eliminate five Republican seats – if Texas moves forward with its gerrymandering plan that would add five GOP seats.
“When we saw that Texas was going to create the most segregated map in Texas since the 60s, to eliminate all of the minority districts that they could, so that they could create five Republican districts, we said, could we create a map that eliminated five Republican districts, but that was true to the Voting Rights Act? And we found that we could,” Lofgren said.
Governor Gavin Newsom has floated a statewide ballot measure that would allow voters to weigh the proposal to adjust the state’s congressional map if the Texas GOP executes its plan.
Robert Rivas, the Democratic speaker of the California state assembly, said, “We will fight fire with fire. And we will do whatever it takes to defend our democracy.”
California is hosting Texas Democratic lawmakers who have left the state to break quorum and block gerrymandering.
Texas Democrats say they are ‘undeterred’ by Ken Paxton lawsuit
The Texas Democratic party chairman has responded to the lawsuit filed by Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general, seeking to remove 13 Democratic lawmakers from office, saying in a statement:
Texas Democrats are exercising a long-standing, constitutionally protected right of the minority party to block extreme agendas – in this case, gerrymandering to keep Trump in power. These lawmakers have taken significant risks and sacrifices to stop Trump’s agenda, and despite all the threats they face, they remain undeterred, just like the rest of us. If Ken Paxton wants a fight, we will give him one.”
Paxton has sought to enforce arrest warrants against the Democratic lawmakers who left Texas to stop Republicans from gerrymandering the congressional map in a manner that would add five more GOP seats.
Some more background on what happened at the Texas house today:
Billy Long, who is stepping down as the Internal Revenue Service commissioner only two months after he was appointed, has said he will be serving as ambassador to Iceland.
The New York Times reported earlier today that Trump had Long removed, and that Long had clashed with Scott Bessent, treasury secretary, who will now serve as acting commissioner.
Long is a former congressman from Missouri and close ally to the president who previously pushed false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
The IRS has been run by six different people this year so far.
Vladimir Putin has presented the Trump administration with a proposal for a ceasefire in Ukraine if Kyiv makes major territorial concessions, according to a new Wall Street Journal report that cites European and Ukrainian officials.
The proposal would require Ukraine that hand over the Donbas in the east of the country, which has led European officials to express serious reservations, the Journal reported.
“European and Ukrainian officials, who were briefed by President Trump and Witkoff in a series of calls this week, said they worry Putin is simply using the offer as a ploy to avoid punishing new US sanctions and tariffs while continuing the war,” the Journal reported.
The report was published as Trump, in a briefing with the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, suggested there would “be some swapping of territories” to end the Ukraine invasion. The president spent a significant portion of the event discussing Russia, suggesting he would have more to announce soon and that he and Putin would be meeting “very shortly”.
