Liz Cheney refuses to endorse Ron DeSantis for the Republican presidential nomination – live | US debt ceiling

White House blasts Republicans for ‘silly FBI stunt’

Martin Pengelly

The White House has slammed congressional Republicans for demanding that the FBI hand over a document related to Joe Biden, a spokesperson deriding what he called “a silly stunt”.

Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, and the Kentucky congressman James Comer demanded the document last month, saying it concerned an unspecified “alleged criminal scheme” involving Biden when he was vice-president to Barack Obama.

The FBI did not comply. After threats of congressional action, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, reportedly offered to let the Republicans see the document.

According to CNN, the document is connected to work done by Rudy Giuliani for then president Donald Trump in 2020.

Trump’s first impeachment arose from the former New York mayor’s attempts to find dirt on Biden in Ukraine.

As CNN pointed out, in 2020 Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, told reporters: “We can’t take anything we received from Ukraine at face value.”

In comments to Fox News earlier today, Grassley said: “It’s a non-classified document, [Wray] admits it exists.

“We aren’t interested in whether or not the accusations against Vice-President Biden are accurate or not. We’re responsible for making sure the FBI does its job and that’s what we want to know.”

Asked if he’d read the document, Grassley, 89, said he had but would not “characterise it” on air.

A White House spokesperson, Ian Sams, tweeted video of Grassley’s remarks and said: “Wow. Chuck Grassley admits the truth of his and James Comer’s silly FBI form stunt.”

Comer is chair of the House oversight committee, one of the Republican-led panels seeking to dig up dirt on the president, his son Hunter Biden and other Democratic targets.

In a statement, Sams added: “By congressional Republicans’ own admission, this clearly is not an exercise to get to the truth or uncover facts.

“Instead, they are simply staging sad political stunts to push thin innuendo and spread insinuations to attack the president and get themselves booked on Fox News.”

Joe Biden has just wrapped up a lengthy commencement address to graduating cadets at the air force academy in Colorado Springs. He made no mention of the debt ceiling bill currently working its way through Congress, but touched on other political flashpoints including the war in Ukraine, cooperation with China and the threat posed by artificial intelligence.

The president’s remarks included a renewed promise to Ukraine that the US would always stand beside the country, and continue to send military and humanitarian aid as it continues to fight against Russia’s invasion:

Support for Ukraine will not waver. We always stand up for democracies. Always. I ask you to contemplate what happens if it wavers and Ukraine goes down. What about Belarus? What about the rest of eastern Europe?

It was an upbeat, inspirational speech from the commander in chief, welcoming graduates to their future careers in the air and space forces:

The world you graduate into, it is not only changing rapidly, the pace of change is accelerating as well. We’re seeing proliferating global challenges from Russia’s aggression and brutality in Europe, to competition with China, and a whole hell of a lot in between, growing instability, to food insecurity and natural disasters, all of which are being made worse by the existential threat of climate change.

The threat from the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), Biden said, could not be underestimated:

We’re seeing emerging technologies, from AI and 3D printing, that can change the character of conflict itself. I met in the Oval Office with with leading scientists in the area of AI. Some are very worried that AI can actually overtake human thinking and planning. So we’ve got a lot to deal with, a lot to do.

From Colorado, Biden is heading back to the White House, hopeful of white smoke later from the Senate after it debates the debt ceiling bill that would stave off a national default.

Liz Cheney says she won’t support Ron DeSantis’s presidential run

Martin Pengelly

The former Republican congresswoman turned avowed Trump foe Liz Cheney declined to rule out a presidential run of her own earlier, telling a policy conference in Michigan: “I am really focused on making sure that Donald Trump isn’t anywhere close to the Oval Office again.”

Cheney also said she would not support Trump’s closest challenger in the Republican primary, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.

The daughter of the former congressman, defense secretary and vice-president Dick Cheney is an arch-conservative who nonetheless turned against Trump over his attempted election subversion and incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.

Defeated by a Trump-endorsed opponent in her Wyoming primary last year, Cheney emerged as a leader of anti-Trump Republicans, playing a prominent role as the House January 6 committee made criminal referrals regarding Trump to the US Department of Justice.

Despite his unparalleled legal jeopardy, Trump leads Republican primary polling by around 30 points, with DeSantis a distant second. Cheney has not declared a run but generally scores in the low single figures, with most other candidates, declared or not.

Speaking at the Mackinac Policy Conference on Thursday, Cheney added: “People who are willing to deny elections and people who are embracing this cult of personality around Donald Trump … have to be resisted at every stage.”

Martin Pengelly

Ron DeSantis “lashed out” at a reporter who asked why he did not take questions from the audience at a campaign event in New Hampshire.

The awkward exchange seems bound to add to reports and observations that the Florida governor, a clear but distant second to Donald Trump in Republican primary polling, lacks the warmth and interpersonal skills necessary for retail politicking, the staple of primary season.

DeSantis was appearing at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Laconia. Video tweeted by Jonathan Allen of NBC News showed the governor posing for selfies with audience members, a broad smile fixed in place.

The reporter – identified by NBC as Steve Peoples of the Associated Press – asked: “Why not take any questions from voters, governor? Governor, how come you’re not taking questions from voters?”

DeSantis said: “People are coming up to me, talking to me. What are you talking about? I’m not here talking to people? Are you blind? Are you blind? People are coming up to me and talking whatever they want to talk about.”

Here it is:

NBC quoted Vikram Mansharamani, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for Senate in New Hampshire last year, as calling the decision not to take audience questions “very disappointing”.

“We like to hear from candidates and we have questions of our own [as] citizens here in the state,” Mansharamani said.

It’s been a mixed bag so far today in US politics.

The senate will later on Thursday take up the debt ceiling bill passed on a bipartisan vote in the House last night. Joe Biden is hopeful the measure averting a national default will be on his desk for signing before Monday.

Meanwhile, the supreme court has handed down only a smattering of more minor opinions on the opening day of its June “decisions season”. A ruling weakening labor unions’ rights of where and when to call strikes; and another bolstering individuals’ rights to sue pharmacies who overcharge government programs for prescription drugs, came today.

Here’s what else is happening:

• Twitter boss Elon Musk is facing a class action lawsuit for insider trading, investors accusing the billionaire of manipulating the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, costing them billions of dollars.
• Biden has marked the beginning of Pride Month with a tweet denouncing “cruel attacks” on LGBTQ+ rights by Republican legislatures and politicians around the country.
• “Months of distrust” inside Donald Trump’s legal team led to the departure of one of the former president’s top lawyers, and weakens his defense against claims he illegally retained classified documents after leaving office.
• Former vice-president Mike Pence will join the crowded race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination next week. Trump, his former boss, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis are among those already declared. Chris Christie, the ex-governor of New Jersey, will also announce his run next week, reports say.

There’s plenty more to come. Please stick with us.

Twitter boss Elon Musk is facing a class action lawsuit for insider trading, investors accusing the billionaire of manipulating the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, costing them billions of dollars.

According to Reuters, the Manhattan federal court lawsuit filed on Wednesday night says Musk, also chief of SpaceX and Tesla, used Twitter posts, paid online influencers, his 2021 appearance on NBC’s Saturday Night Live and other “publicity stunts” to trade profitably at their expense through several Dogecoin wallets that he or Tesla controls.

Investors say this included when Musk sold about $124m of Dogecoin in April after he replaced Twitter’s blue bird logo with Dogecoin’s Shiba Inu dog logo, leading to a 30% jump in Dogecoin’s price. Musk bought Twitter in October.

A “deliberate course of carnival barking, market manipulation and insider trading” enabled Musk to defraud investors, promote himself and his companies, the filing said.

Reuters said that Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk, declined to comment on the action. A lawyer for Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The investors’ lawyer did not immediately respond to a separate request.

Musk was the host of Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s glitchy campaign launch for his party’s 2024 presidential nomination on Twitter Spaces last week.

It’s not been a good week for Musk, the world’s second richest man. On Wednesday, it was reported the value of Twitter had plummeted two thirds since he bought the social media platform.

Read more:

Supreme court justices on Thursday took aim at pharmacies who overcharge the government for prescription drugs, their unanimous ruling reopening a pathway for legal action by individuals seeking to protect taxpayers’ money.

The case involves “whistleblowers” ostensibly acting for the government, whom a lower court said could not sue pharmacies claiming their own “objectively reasonable” reading of the law allowed them to overbill federal health programs including Medicare and Medicaid.

The 9-0 decision, written by conservative justice Clarence Thomas in a case brought by two such individuals against pharmacies controlled by Safeway Inc and SuperValu Inc, overturns the 7th circuit ruling and allows them to seek monetary damages from the providers offering drugs at discounts to customers paying out of pocket, while improperly charging higher rates to the government.

Joe Biden’s administration had backed the whistleblowers in their appeal.

Joe Biden has marked the beginning of Pride Month with a tweet denouncing “cruel attacks” on LGBTQ+ rights by Republican legislatures and politicians around the country.

“We celebrate the LGBTQI+ Americans who are fiercely and unapologetically fighting for freedom and equality – and reaffirm that their rights are human rights,” the president wrote.

Biden will be speaking shortly in Colorado when he delivers the commencement address to graduates of the US air force academy in El Paso county. His speech is scheduled to begin at 11.40am ET, and you can watch it here.

“Months of distrust” inside Donald Trump’s legal team led to the departure of one of the former president’s top lawyers, and weakens his defense against claims he illegally retained classified documents after leaving office, my colleague Hugo Lowell reports.

It comes just a day after details emerged of a recording of Trump “regretting” he didn’t declassify a secret military paper, contradicting his often voiced assertion that he declassified every paper he took with him from the White House.

The justice department is currently investigating Trump on two fronts, his efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden, and his hoarding of hundreds of classified documents found by the FBI at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last year.

The frontrunner for the Republican 2024 presidential nomination is in Iowa today for a two-day trip, featuring a campaign rally at which he is all but certain to rail against what he calls a “witch hunt” against him by federal authorities.

He has already been indicted in New York over illicit payments to adult movie star Stormy Daniels

Read more:

In a decision seen as a setback to labor unions, the supreme court on Thursday made it easier for employers to pursue lawsuits against striking workers.

The opinion, written by justice Amy Coney Barrett and backed by conservative colleagues on the 6-3 bench, sided with a concrete business in Washington state that sued the union representing its truck drivers after a work stoppage.

Ketanji Brown Jackson, the panel’s most recent confirmation, by Joe Biden, was the lone dissenter.

As reported by Reuters, the decision in the case of Glacier Northwest Inc against a local affiliate of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters overturned a lower court’s ruling in the union’s favor.

Glacier had accused the union of intentional property destruction during a 2017 strike when a group of drivers went on strike while their mixing trucks were filled with concrete. The company had to force to discard the unused product at a financial loss.

The supreme court overruled the Washington state supreme court that the loss was incidental to a strike that could be considered arguably protected under federal labor law.

Biden’s administration urged the justices to reverse the lower court’s decision, Reuters reports. The decision allows Glacier’s lawsuit to proceed.

It also extends the panel’s recent trend of curtailing the power of labor unions. In 2021, justices struck down a California agricultural regulation aimed at helping unions organize workers, the agency said.

And in 2018 it ruled that non-members cannot be forced, as they are in certain states, to pay fees to unions representing public employees such as police and teachers that negotiate collective bargaining agreements with employers.

Here’s the full ruling on the Glacier v Teamsters case.

As we noted earlier, none of the bigger decisions we are expecting from the supreme court this decisions season came today. Those, covering affirmative action, LGBTQ+ equality and the future of Native American tribes, are now expected later this month.

The US supreme court has handed down a small number of opinions this morning, one of which appears to weaken unions’ rights to decide how and where to strike.

The ruling in the case of Glacier NW v International Brotherhood is “a massive change in labor law,” according to the high court analyst scotusblog.com.

“Unions just got defanged in a big way,” it said of the decision written by justice Amy Coney Barrett.

We’ll have more in depth analysis of the decision coming up shortly, but overall it seems to have been a quiet day for the court, with none of the bigger decisions we are expecting coming today.

Those, covering affirmative action, LGBTQ+ equality and the future of Native American tribes, are now expected later this month.

The race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is about to get even more crowded. Mike Pence, the former vice-president, and ex-New Jersey governor Chris Christie are both planning to launch their campaigns next week.

Pence is, of course, the man supporters of Donald Trump infamously wanted to hang during the January 6 riots when they overran the US Capitol attempting to keep the former president in office. Trump has said “maybe they were right” to do so.

Pence will announce his candidacy in Des Moines, Iowa, on 7 June, also his 64th birthday, two sources told the Associated Press.

He is also expected to release a video message that morning as part of the launch that, interestingly, is taking place in an early voting state rather than his home state of Indiana.

Christie, a former Trump advisor turned vocal critic, is set to launch his run the day before, as we reported yesterday. It will be the 60-year-old’s second attempt to win the nomination.

Trump, who is campaigning in Iowa today, dominates Republican primary polling, leading his closest challenger, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, by more than 30 points in most polling averages.

DeSantis, who has also been in Iowa in recent days, announced his candidacy in a glitch-filled livestream event on Twitter last week.

Joe Biden’s status as “an apostle of bipartisanship” has been well and truly enhanced by the passage of the debt ceiling bill in the House, argues the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief David Smith in his analysis of this week’s developments.

The president, Smith says, can “claim vindication for the underlying theory of his presidency: that in the age of polarisation it takes an apostle of bipartisanship and a 36-year veteran of the Senate to reach across the aisle and make deals with his opponents”.

The bill that passed the House, he says, “could hardly have been more Bidenesque in hitting the sweet spot between left and right… Biden continues to exceed low expectations by finding common ground in the disappearing middle”.

Read the story:

Late-night votes, Republican holdouts, warnings from the US treasury about an impending national default, and games of brinkmanship between the White House and politicians from both parties in Washington DC haven’t exactly made developments in the debt ceiling story easy to follow.

What’s in the bill? What’s out? And who’s said what about whether they’re voting for or against it, and why?

Thankfully, we’ve got you. Here’s out handy explainer, with key takeaways, from the debt ceiling bill as it heads to the senate for approval:

Senators are facing time pressure Thursday as they pick up the debt ceiling bill that passed the House last night.

Chuck Schumer, the Democratic senate majority leader, was at his desk preparing its pathway soon after Wednesday’s 314-117 bipartisan House vote, and is warning any potential troublemakers to stand aside in order to get the measure approved swiftly and on to Joe Biden’s desk for signature to avoid a national default.

He told chamber colleagues on Wednesday:

Any needless delay, any last-minute brinkmanship at this point would be an unacceptable risk.

Moving quickly, working together to avoid default is the responsible and necessary thing to do.

In the House, McCarthy staved off a potential revolt by Republican colleagues to get the bill passed. In the senate, however, it’s Democrats who could yet throw a spanner in the works.

Progressives including Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, have indicated they plan to oppose the debt ceiling proposal, but the bill still appears likely to become law, my colleague Joan E Greve reports.

Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat and frequent thorn in Biden’s side during the early months of his administration, was another potential holdout. But he appears to have been appeased by a provision in the deal speeding up a controversial gas pipeline.

With senate Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell indicating he plans to support the proposal, and encourage colleagues to do so, it probably won’t matter if a small number of Democrats do decide to withhold their backing.

Treasury secretary Janet Yellen says the US will run out of money next week, meaning Biden must sign the bill raising the debt ceiling by Monday to keep paying the bills. Schumer says he wants it out of the chamber by tomorrow night.

Here’s a quick explainer of what to expect next, courtesy of ABC News.

Read more on the “dirty” pipeline deal:

Good morning US politics blog readers. Thursday’s going to be a busy day: The debt ceiling bill that passed the House on a bipartisan vote last night heads for the Senate, where it faces time pressure to get it approved and on to Joe Biden’s desk for signature to avoid a national default.

Republicans and the White House are both claiming Wednesday night’s 314-117 vote as a victory, to a degree. “This budget agreement is a bipartisan compromise. Neither side got everything it wanted,” the president said.

Kevin McCarthy, the Republican speaker, was exuberant after staving off a revolt by rightwing colleagues. “I wanted to do something no other Congress has done. Tonight, we all made history,” he said.

You can read my colleague Joan E Greve’s report, including what happens next, here.

Here’s what else we’re watching today:

• It’s potentially a huge day in the supreme court, where opinions on one or more cases of huge consequence to the nation could come as early as 10am. Justices have heard arguments covering affirmative action, LGBTQ+ equality and the future of Native American tribes. We’ll bring you the latest as the decision(s) come down.
• We have details on the months of distrust inside Donald Trump’s legal team that threatens the former president’s defense against allegations he illegally stored classified material at his Florida home.
• Challengers to Trump for the Republican party’s 2024 presidential nomination are coming thick and fast with reports that former vice president Mike Pence and the former New Jersey governor (and fierce Trump critic) Chris Christie are poised to enter the race next week.
• Joe Biden is in Colorado, where he is scheduled to deliver the commencement address at the US air force academy later this morning.