Republican Herschel Walker pledges to sue over report he paid for abortion – live | US politics

Lawyers for former president Donald Trump asked the US supreme court today to step into the legal fight over the classified documents seized during an FBI search of his Florida estate.

The Trump team asked the court to overturn a lower court ruling and permit an independent arbiter, or special master, to review the roughly 100 documents with classified markings that were taken in the 8 August search at his Mar-a-Lago private club, resort and residence in Palm Beach, Florida, The Associated Press reports.

A three-judge panel last month limited the special master’s review to the much larger tranche of non-classified documents.

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are convening the second meeting at the White House of the administration’s Task Force on Reproductive Healthcare Access.

The vice-president condemned the June decision by the right-dominated US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade, as part of the pivotal Mississippi case Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization and tear up half a century of constitutional abortion rights across the US.

“The Dobbs decision created a healthcare crisis in America,” Harris said.

She added: “A woman should have the freedom to make decisions about her own body. The government should not be making these decisions for the women of America.”

Harris noted that if the US Congress could codify the right to abortion previously afforded under Roe, rightwing leaders “could not ban abortion and they could not criminalize providers, so it’s important for everyone to know what’s at stake. To stop these attacks on women, we need to pass this law,” she said.

The vice-president also reminded people that ultra-conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, at the time of the June ruling, appeared to offer a preview of the court’s potential future rulings, and that they may return to the issues of curtailing contraception access and marriage equality, threatening LGBTQ+ rights, on the basis of constitutional privacy rights such as those just ripped up in the overturning of Roe v Wade.

At the same event, the president said that he created the task force in the aftermath of the Scotus decision “which most people would acknowledge is a pretty extreme decision,” in order to take a “whole of government approach” to addressing “the damage” of that ruling.

“The court got Roe right nerarly 50 years ago. Congress should codify the protections of Roe and do it once and for all. But right now we are short a handful of votes, so the only way it’s going to happen is if the American people make it happen.

“Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are doubling down on their extreme position with the proposal for a national ban. Let me be clear what that means. It means that even if you live in a state where extremist Republican officials aren’t running the show, your right to choose will still be at risk.”

National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Rick Scott is still behind Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker amid the scandal that’s blown a new hole in his midterm election campaign.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, last noticed by national and international audiences when the House January 6 committee showed the tape of him fleeing the Trumpist insurrectionists that he had previously publicly egged on, is also still walking the Walker walk.

The mother of the late congresswoman Jackie Walorski told Joe Biden that her daughter was in “heaven with Jesus” after the president apologized for mistakenly calling for Walorski during public remarks last week, despite her death in August.

During a private meeting in the Oval Office with the Walorski family on Friday, Biden apologized, the New York Post first reported, for a gaffe he made during a summit on food insecurity on 28 September, when he called into the audience to see if Walorski was in attendance, as the Republican representative from Indiana had served as co-chairperson of the House Hunger Caucus.

“Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie? She must not be here,” Biden said, seeming to forget, or be unaware, that Walorski had died. The congresswoman was killed in an August car accident in Indiana.

When asked about Biden’s confusion, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, downplayed the president’s mistake, calling his comments “not all that unusual”.

Jean-Pierre added that Biden was acknowledging the congresswoman’s work and keeping her “top of mind” because he would be meeting with her family later that week.

While speaking to the president, the late congresswoman’s mother, Martha “Mert” Walorski, told Biden that her daughter was in heaven when he asked for her.

Jackie’s father Keith Walorski said Biden and his staff were “very, very good” to his family but they do not plan on voting for him in 2024 because they strongly disagree with his policy.

“Most of the Biden agenda is not what you would call a conservative Christian agenda,” Keith Walorski said. “That’s who we are.” The rest of that article is here.

Martin Pengelly

At an Oval Office meeting in July 2020, Donald Trump asked aides if Ghislaine Maxwell, the former girlfriend of the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein who had been arrested on sex trafficking charges, had named him among influential contacts she might count upon to protect her.

According to a new book by Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, Trump asked “campaign advisers … ‘You see that article in the [New York] Post today that mentioned me?’

“He kept going, to silence. ‘She say anything about me?’”

Epstein was convicted and sentenced in Florida in 2008, on state prostitution charges. He was arrested again in July 2019, on sex-trafficking charges. He killed himself in prison in New York a month later.

Links between Epstein, Maxwell and prominent associates including Trump and Prince Andrew have stoked press speculation ever since.

Maxwell, the daughter of the British press baron Robert Maxwell, was arrested in New Hampshire on 2 July 2020.

The story which seemed to worry Trump, according to Haberman, appeared in the celebrity-focused Page Six section of the New York tabloid on 4 July 2020.

It quoted Steve Hoffenberg, an Epstein associate, as saying: “Ghislaine thought she was untouchable – that she’d be protected by the intelligence communities she and Jeffrey helped with information: the Israeli intelligence services, and Les Wexner, who has given millions to Israel; by Prince Andrew, President Clinton and even by President Trump, who was well-known to be an acquaintance of her and Epstein’s.”

Maxwell was ultimately convicted in New York in December 2021, on five of six charges relating to the sex-trafficking of minors. In July 2022, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Haberman’s eagerly awaited book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, is published in the US on Tuesday. Check out the whole report here.

In February this year, Prince Andrew settled a civil case brought by an Epstein victim who alleged she was forced to have sex with the royal. Andrew vehemently denies wrongdoing but has suffered a collapse of his standing in public and private.

The US supreme court today has been hearing a hugely important case that could ultimately gut one of the most powerful remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law that is one of America’s most powerful anti-discrimination measures.

The case deals with the seven new congressional districts that Alabama adopted last year. Six of those districts are represented by a Republican in Congress and one is represented by a Democrat. That Democratic district is 55% Black, the only Black majority district in the state.

The plaintiffs in the case argue that Alabama Republicans who control the state legislature packed as many Black voters as possible into the one Democratic district to weaken the influence of Black voters overall in the state. Black people make up about a quarter of Alabama’s population, but only are a majority in one district.

The central question in the case is how much mapmakers are required to take race into account when drawing districts. The plaintiffs argue that the Voting Rights Act requires Alabama to draw a second district where Black people make up a majority.

But Alabama argues that doing so would require the state to sort voters based on race, which is unconstitutional.

If the court, which has been extremely hostile to voting rights and the Voting Rights Act in particular, were to embrace that latter view, it would make it enormously difficult to challenge districts in the future.

A three judge panel agreed with the plaintiffs and ordered the state to redraw the map. But the US supreme court stepped in earlier this year and halted that order.

Hello US politics live blog readers, it’s a lively day for news and there’s much more to come in the next few hours, but here’s where things stand right now:

• Joe Biden told Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy earlier today that Washington will provide Kyiv with $625 million in new security assistance, including High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers, the White House said.

• Giant tents for temporarily housing asylum seekers arriving in New York City after crossing the US-Mexico border are being moved to an island off Manhattan from a remote corner of the Bronx, after storms raised concerns over flooding at the original site.

• There is no sign of a lawsuit (yet) from Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker against the Daily Beast following the latest chapter of Walker’s tumultuous campaign for the Senate unfolded last night.

• US climate envoy John Kerry said today some western government ministers avoided a so-called “family photo” of participants at climate talks in Kinshasa because they were uncomfortable with the presence of Russia’s representative.

• Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign is in crisis in Georgia after the latest twist in the abortion row became very personal and turns the heat up further in the furious midterms battle for control of the US Senate.