Former FBI director James Comey expected to be indicted on criminal charges, reports say

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Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.

James Comey, the former director of the FBI, is reportedly facing imminent criminal charges, which are expected to be filed in federal court in Virginia, according to a report by MSNBC on Wednesday.

Comey has long been a focus of criticism from former President Donald Trump, who dismissed him from his role as FBI chief during the early months of his first term.

The news of a possible indictment surfaced just days after Erik Siebert, who had been serving as the acting US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, resigned under political pressure from Trump. Siebert had reportedly opposed pursuing charges against Comey in that jurisdiction.

On Monday, Lindsey Halligan, an attorney who has previously represented Trump in personal legal matters, was appointed as Siebert’s replacement.

In a social media post over the weekend, Trump expressed his outrage over the lack of charges against Comey, labelling him “guilty as hell.”

MSNBC journalist Ken Dilanian posted on X on Wednesday, stating that “the full extent of the charges being prepared against Comey is unclear.”

In other developments:

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.
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”.
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.
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.
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”.

Key events

Donald Trump will welcome the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to the White House today for a bilateral meeting.

He’ll welcome the Turkish leader at 11am EST, where we’ll get the opportunity to cover his arrival.

As of now, both the metting with Erdoğan and the lunch following will be closed press. But we’ll let you know if the press pool ends up getting access at any point.

Later, Trump will sign executive orders, and have a meeting with the prime minister of Pakistan, from the Oval Office.

The White House asked federal agencies on Wednesday to prepare plans for mass firings during a possible government shutdown next week, marking a sharp departure from the temporary furloughs of workers typically seen during past shutdowns, Reuters reports.

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) sent the memo to federal agencies and asked them to identify programs, projects and activities where discretionary funding will lapse on 1 October if the U.S. Congress does not pass legislation to keep the federal government open.

“Programs that did not benefit from an infusion of mandatory appropriations will bear the brunt of a shutdown,” the OMB said in the memo, which the White House provided.

It was not clear whether the White House was trying to take advantage of a possible shutdown to advance President Donald Trump’s push to slash the federal workforce, or whether it was a negotiating tactic to force Democrats to agree to pass the Republicans’ funding legislation.

“This is an attempt at intimidation,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement late Wednesday. “Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since Day One – not to govern, but to scare.”

He predicted any firings will be overturned in court, as others have been.

Agencies were told to submit their proposed reduction-in-force plans to the OMB and to issue notices to employees.

One element of the possible indictment against the former FBI director James Comey is expected to accuse him of lying to Congress during testimony.

MSNBC’s justice and intelligence correspondent Ken Dilanian posted on X that Comey could be accused of lying about whether he authorized a leak of information during his testimony on 30 September 2020.

The testimony related to his handling of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.

He wrote:

Former FBI Director James Comey, for years the target of President Trump’s ire, is expected to be indicted in the coming days in the Eastern District of Virginia, where a prosecutor who opposed bringing the case was recently fired, three sources familiar with the matter told MSNBC.

The full extent of the charges being prepared against Comey is unclear, but the sources believe that at least one element of the indictment – if it goes forward – will accuse him of lying to Congress during his testimony on September 30, 2020 about whether he authorized a leak of information.

The five year statute of limitations on that charge would lapse on Tuesday.

Trump’s CDC cuts could threaten chronic illness and national security, experts warn

Melody Schreiber

Donald Trump’s budget would cut funding for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by 53%, eliminating 61 programs and laying off another 16% of health agency staff, according to a new report – moves that would drastically reduce disease prevention and fuel more chronic illness, public health leaders say.

“We cannot lose this,” said Joseph Kanter, CEO of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO). “This is crucial to the health of every person in every community across this country, whether they realize it or not.”

Federal cuts are already reverberating throughout the US. The Trump administration has clawed back more than $12bn from public health budgets.

There have been delays in releasing funds already appropriated by Congress, which means local programs have had to shutter even when they were supposed to be funded. More than 20,000 employees have left health agencies in the past eight months because of layoffs, firings and resignations.

“We’re facing really significant threats to our ability to invest in chronic disease prevention with what’s been happening these last few months,” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials (Naccho).

The public health system in the US is fragmented by state, but it is underpinned by funding and support from the CDC. Some 80% of the CDC’s funding flows to state, local, territorial, and tribal health departments.

Timothy Pratt

Rodney Taylor, a Liberia-born man who is a double amputee and is missing three fingers on one hand has filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court seeking release from Georgia’s Stewart detention center, after being held there by Ice for eight months.

“What is at stake in this case … is one of the most profound individual interests recognized by our legal system: whether Ice may unilaterally take away – without a lawful basis – his physical freedom, ie, his ‘constitutionally protected interest in avoiding physical restraint,’” the petition says.

The action is “a canary in the coalmine for what’s about to happen” nationwide, said Sarah Owings, Taylor’s immigration attorney. “[T]housands of habeas claims are going to be filed across the country,” she said, after a Board of Immigration Appeals decision on 5 September dramatically curtailed the immigration system’s ability to release detainees while awaiting decisions on their status.

This is making immigration attorneys turn to federal district courts, observers told the Guardian.

Taylor’s continued detention despite his extensive medical needs is “yet another stark example of the cruelty of this administration”, said Helen L Parsonage, the attorney who filed the petition.

Brought to the US by his mother on a medical visa when he was a child, Taylor had 16 operations for his medical conditions. Now 46, he has lived in the US nearly his entire life and works as a barber.

He got engaged only 10 days before Ice detained him in January – due to a burglary conviction from when he was a teenager and for which the state of Georgia pardoned him in 2010, according to Owings, who shared some of Taylor’s paperwork with the Guardian.

Lauren Gambino

Donald Trump alleged “triple sabotage” at the United Nations, after the US president was plagued by a series of unfortunate events surrounding his address to the global body.

“A REAL DISGRACE took place at the United Nations yesterday,” Trump wrote Wednesday in a 357-word social media chronicle of “Not one, not two, but three very sinister events!”

According to Trump, his smooth arrival at the summit in New York on Tuesday was disrupted when the escalator ferrying him and the first lady, Melania Trump, “stopped on a dime”. He expressed relief that the first couple “didn’t fall forward onto the sharp edges of these steel steps, face first”.

Then, when he took the green marble podium, his teleprompter went “stone cold dark”.

“I immediately thought to myself, “Wow, first the escalator event, and now a bad teleprompter. What kind of a place is this?’” Trump wrote. Adding insult to injury, he recounted a third alleged offense. After being forced to improvise part of his speech to the general assembly, he asked his wife how he had done, and she replied: “I couldn’t hear a word you said.”

“This wasn’t a coincidence, this was triple sabotage at the UN,” Trump declared, demanding an “immediate” investigation into the matter, a diplomatic incident so Trumpian it has earned the name “escalatorgate”.

Trump hangs autopen photo instead of Biden portrait in new presidential gallery

President Donald Trump has added a “Presidential Walk of Fame” to the exterior of the White House, featuring portraits of each of the previous commanders-in-chief – except for one.

Instead of a headshot of Joe Biden, the Republican incumbent instead placed a photo of an autopen signing the Democrat’s name – a reference to Trump’s frequent allegation that the former president was addled by the end of his term in office and not really the one making decisions.

The snub is the latest attempt by Trump to delegitimise a predecessor he routinely belittles, including in front of more than 100 world leaders on Tuesday at the UN general assembly gathering. Trump has never acknowledged his own defeat to Biden in the 2020 election, instead falsely chalking up the outcome to voter fraud.

Trump had previously signalled he would represent Biden with an autopen on the walkway. Trump has alleged without evidence that Biden administration officials may have forged their boss’s signature by using the autopen and taken broad actions he was not aware of.

He has also cast doubt on the validity of pardons and other documents that Biden signed with an autopen, even though other presidents before him have also relied on the device to sign key papers. A Republican-led House committee is investigating the Biden administration’s autopen use.

Gunman wrote ‘ANTI-ICE’ on unused bullet in fatal attack on Dallas immigration office

A gunman, who wrote “ANTI-ICE” on an unused bullet, fired on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Dallas from a nearby rooftop on Wednesday, killing a detainee and badly wounding two others before taking his own life, officials said.

President Donald Trump and members of his administration seized on the attack as the latest instance of what they characterized as an escalation of politically motivated violence incited by the left.

They accused California governor Gavin Newsom and other Democrats of stirring hate by unfairly vilifying law enforcement and conservative political figures, Reuters reported.

FBI director Kash Patel posted a photo on X showing what he said was the suspect’s unused ammunition. The shell casing of one round was inscribed with “ANTI-ICE.”

“While the investigation is ongoing, an initial review of the evidence shows an ideological motive behind this attack,” Patel wrote. US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem later said in a Fox News interview that the gunman “was targeting ICE,” based on “evidence so far in this case.”

On his Truth Social platform, Trump accused “Radical Left Democrats” of stoking anti-ICE violence by “constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to Nazis.”

Invoking the recent assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, Trump said that “radical left terrorists” pose a “grave threat” to law enforcement and “must be stopped.”

Trump said he would sign an executive order this week to “dismantle these domestic terrorism networks.” He offered no evidence to support the notion that “networks,” rather than individuals, were behind recent acts of political violence, or that left-wing perpetrators were any more prevalent than those on the right in recent years.

In a statement about the Texas shooting, the Department of Homeland Security said the suspect fired “indiscriminately” at the ICE facility, including at a van in the building’s secured entryway where the victims were shot. DHS said one detainee was killed and two others were in critical condition.

Officials have not disclosed the identities of the victims.

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