The 35-minute meeting at the Great Hall of the People had been expected and was seen as key to the success of the trip, but neither side confirmed it would happen until a State Department official announced it just an hour beforehand.

In footage of the meeting released by state broadcaster CCTV, Xi is heard to say “The two sides have agreed to follow through on the common understandings President Biden and I have reached in Bali.”

In earlier meetings between Blinken and senior Chinese officials, the two sides expressed willingness to talk but showed little inclination to bend from hardened positions on disagreements ranging from trade, to Taiwan, to human rights conditions in China and Hong Kong, to Chinese military assertiveness in the South China Sea, to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Xi said that they had made progress and reached agreements on “some specific issues” without elaborating. “This is very good,” Xi said.

“I hope that through this visit, Mr. Secretary, you will make more positive contributions to stabilizing China-US relation,” Xi added.

Despite Blinken’s presence in China, he and other U.S. officials had played down the prospects for any significant breakthroughs on the most vexing issues facing the planet’s two largest economies.

Instead, these officials have emphasized the importance of the two countries establishing and maintaining better lines of communication.

Blinken is the highest-level U.S. official to visit China since President Joe Biden took office, and the first secretary of state to make the trip in five years. His visit is expected to usher in a new round of visits by senior U.S. and Chinese officials, possibly including a meeting between Xi and Biden in the coming months.

Blinken met earlier Monday with China’s top diplomat Wang Yi for about three hours, according to a U.S. official.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote in a statement that Blinken’s visit “coincides with a critical juncture in China-U.S. relations, and it is necessary to make a choice between dialogue or confrontation, cooperation or conflict,” and blamed the “U.S. side’s erroneous perception of China, leading to incorrect policies towards China” for the current “low point” in relations.

It said the U.S. had a responsibility to halt “the spiraling decline of China-U.S. relations to push it back to a healthy and stable track” and that Wang had “demanded that the U.S. stop hyping up the ‘China threat theory’, lift illegal unilateral sanctions against China, abandon suppression of China’s technological development, and refrain from arbitrary interference in China’s internal affairs.”

The State Department said Blinken “underscored the importance of responsibly managing the competition between the United States and the PRC through open channels of communication to ensure competition does not veer into conflict.”

In the first round of talks on Sunday, Blinken met for nearly six hours with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang after which both countries said they had agreed to continue high-level discussions. However, there was no sign that any of the most fractious issues between them were closer to resolution.

Both the U.S. and China said Qin had accepted an invitation from Blinken to visit Washington but Beijing made clear that “the China-U.S. relationship is at the lowest point since its establishment.” That sentiment is widely shared by U.S. officials.

Blinken’s visit comes after his initial plans to travel to China were postponed in February after the shootdown of a Chinese surveillance balloon over the U.S.

A snub by the Chinese leader would have been a major setback to the effort to restore and maintain communications at senior levels.

Biden and Xi had made commitments to improve communications“precisely so that we can make sure we are communicating as clearly as possible to avoid possible misunderstandings and miscommunications,” Blinken said before leaving for Beijing.

And Biden said over the weekend that he hoped to be able to meet with Xi in the coming months to take up the plethora of differences that divide them.

In his meetings on Sunday, Blinken also pressed the Chinese to release detained American citizens and to take steps to curb the production and export of fentanyl precursors that are fueling the opioid crisis in the United States.

Xi offered a hint of a possible willingness to reduce tensions on Friday, saying in a meeting with Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates that the United States and China can cooperate to “benefit our two countries.”

Since the cancellation of Blinken’s trip in February, there have been some high-level engagements. CIA chief William Burns traveled to China in May, while China’s commerce minister traveled to the U.S. And Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with senior Chinese foreign policy adviser Wang Yi in Vienna in May.

But those have been punctuated by bursts of angry rhetoric from both countries over the Taiwan Strait, their broader intentions in the Indo-Pacific, China’s refusal to condemn Russia for its war against Ukraine, and U.S. allegations from Washington that Beijing is attempting to boost its worldwide surveillance capabilities, including in Cuba.

And, earlier this month, China’s defense minister rebuffed a request from U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for a meeting on the sidelines of a security symposium in Singapore, a sign of continuing discontent.

His campaign says Biden, who will appear at the Philadelphia Convention Center, will “lay out the core principles of his economic message” in his remarks. Biden also plans to talk about how a sweeping climate, tax and health care package he signed into law last year has cut the cost of prescription drugs and lowered insurance premiums, as his administration focuses on his achievements his first two years the centerpiece argument for his reelection.

Ahead of the event, several of the nation’s most powerful unions — including the AFL-CIO, American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — officially endorsed Biden’s campaign. The first-of-its-kind joint endorsement among the unions and the backdrop of hundreds of workers are all part of a meticulously choreographed effort to show the support of labor behind what Biden himself calls the most pro-union president in history.

“Every major labor union in the country is endorsing me” on Saturday, Biden told reporters ahead of a fundraiser in Connecticut on Friday evening. “I’m saying that my philosophy about building from the middle out and the bottom up is working.”

The campaign event also comes amid some encouraging economic news for Biden, with inflation cooling last month, continuing a steady decline in consumer prices primarily driven by lower gas prices, a smaller rise in grocery costs than in previous months and less expensive furniture, air fares and appliances.

Philadelphia and the state of Pennsylvania have long been at the heart of Biden’s political efforts, as he headquartered his 2020 campaign in the city and the state was one of a handful that had voted for Donald Trump in 2016 but flipped back to Democrats four years later.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said some union members supported Trump in the past because “there is a lot of grievance in this country and there is a lot of unhappiness. And what Trump was a master at was being able to exploit fear and exploit grievance.”

She said part of the reason the AFT and other top unions endorsed Biden nearly 18 months before Election Day 2024 was to promote Biden’s economic record against Republican-championed culture war issues.

Biden is “going to feel very, very comfortable when he’s in Philadelphia. He’s going to be among friends,” added Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. He pushed for a coordinated endorsement of Biden’s reelection campaign from top unions early in the cycle.

Until now, Biden’s primary campaign activity has been fundraising. He raised cash at a private home in Greenwich, Connecticut, on Friday and will head to fundraisers in California, Maryland, Illinois and New York ahead of the second quarter fundraising deadline on June 30.

Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and Dr. Beverly Gray, a Duke University OB-GYN, are asking a federal judge to block numerous provisions they argue are unclear and unconstitutional, or to place an injunction on the law to prevent it from being enforced.

Though the law may be commonly referred to as a 12-week abortion ban, the plaintiffs argue that it actually includes additional restrictions that many patients are not aware of — hurdles that will “impede health care professionals from providing quality care,” according to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court.

“Many of these provisions are going to constrain an already very constrained abortion ecosystem in this state,” Planned Parenthood South Atlantic CEO Jenny Black told The Associated Press on Friday. “And so we really thought it was important that we challenged the elements of the law that do that.”

North Carolina has been one of the few remaining Southern states with relatively easy access to abortions in the wake of last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision to strip away constitutional protections for abortion. With the new restrictions set to take effect July 1, many out-of-state patients who had once viewed North Carolina as a refuge for care will soon have to travel even further up the coast to access abortions later in pregnancy.

The lawsuit comes one month after the Republican supermajority in the state’s General Assembly fast-tracked the measure through both chambers and overrode a veto from Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who called it “an egregious, unacceptable attack on the women of our state.”

He and other abortion-rights supporters have raised concerns about several provisions addressed in the complaint, including one that the plaintiffs argue could prevent providers from performing a medication abortion after 10 weeks of pregnancy, despite another provision stating it’s lawful through 12 weeks.

That is one example of the contradictory and confusing nature of the law, said lead attorney Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. “The lack of clarity and vagueness run through,” she said.

Among the named defendants are North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, state Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kody Kinsley and the district attorneys who represent every county in the state where Gray and Planned Parenthood provide abortions.

Kinsley’s office and Stein’s office said they are reviewing the lawsuit. Stein, a Democratic candidate for governor in 2024, is an outspoken abortion-rights supporter but is named in the lawsuit because it’s his job as attorney general to defend state laws in court.

Spokespeople for the Republican legislative leaders, Senate leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore, did not immediately respond Friday to phone messages seeking comment.

In the lead-up to July 1, Black said Planned Parenthood staff members have been coming in early and working through lunch to treat as many patients as possible, while stressing to others that “time is of the essence.”

Republicans had pitched the 47-page measure as a middle-ground change to an existing state law banning nearly all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, without exceptions for rape or incest. The new law adds exceptions, extending the limit through 20 weeks for rape and incest and through 24 weeks for “life-limiting” fetal anomalies, including certain physical or genetic disorders that can be diagnosed prenatally.

But abortion-rights advocates say limits on those exceptions, as well as new hurdles for patients and providers, make the law much more restrictive than the headline-grabbing 12-week limit conveys.

The lawsuit challenges a requirement that sexual assault survivors obtain abortions at a hospital after 12 weeks of pregnancy, rather than at one of the many clinics Planned Parenthood and other providers operate around the state.

Gray, an OB-GYN who provides care in a hospital setting, told the AP there is no procedural or medical difference between the unrestricted care she is able to provide miscarriage patients and the newly restricted care she provides abortion patients.

Similarly, Planned Parenthood clinics will be able to continue treating miscarriage patients after 12 weeks in cases where the fetus has already died but will be prohibited from providing identical care to rape and incest survivors in the context of an abortion.

“It’s the same care, and there’s zero regulations about caring for patients with miscarriages,” Gray said. “This is not about safety. This is about limiting access to abortion.”

Their complaint also seeks clarity on a provision that prohibits providers from advising how a person can access an abortion after 12 weeks, which Amiri said could violate the First Amendment if the court interprets it as preventing providers from helping patients access care in other states where it remains legal.

Amiri also raised concern about what she said was likely “a doozy of a drafting error” related to the state’s existing fetal homicide statute, which considers it homicide to willfully cause the death of an unborn child. That law contains exceptions for lawful abortions, but Amiri said when legislators replaced the abortion law, they removed the statutory reference for those exceptions.

“It leaves open the question of whether lawful abortion could be prosecuted under the fetal homicide statutes,” she said. “And that’s very concerning for everybody.”

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Hannah Schoenbaum is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

Unlike the last two people to serve as head of the nation’s top federal public health agency, Cohen has prior experience running a government agency: She was secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services from 2017 until last year. Before that, she held health-related jobs at two federal agencies.

“Dr. Cohen is one of the nation’s top physicians and health leaders with experience leading large and complex organizations, and a proven track-record protecting Americans’ health and safety,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.

She succeeds Dr. Rochelle Walensky, 54, who last month announced she was leaving at the end of June. Cohen’s starting date has not been announced. Her appointment does not require Senate confirmation.

Walensky, a former infectious disease expert at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, took over at the CDC in 2021 — about a year after the pandemic began.

Cohen, 44, will take over after some rough years at the CDC, whose 12,000-plus employees are charged with protecting Americans from disease outbreaks and other public health threats.

The Atlanta-based federal agency had long been seen as a global leader on disease control and a reliable source of health information. But polls showed the public trust eroded, partly as a result of the CDC’s missteps in dealing with COVID-19 and partly due to political attacks and misinformation campaigns.

Walensky started a reorganization effort that is designed to make the agency more nimble and to improve its communications.

Cohen was raised on Long Island, New York. Her mom was a nurse practitioner. Cohen has a medical degree from Yale and a master’s in public health from Harvard.

She also has been an advocate. She was a founding member and former executive director of Doctors for America, which pushes to expand health insurance coverage and address racial and ethnic disparities. Another founder was Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general. The group formed in the midst of an effort to organize doctors into political action and support Barack Obama’s candidacy for president.

Cohen started working for the federal government in 2008 at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, where she served as deputy director for women’s health services. She later held a series of federal jobs, many of them with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, rising to chief operating officer.

In 2017, she took the health and human services job in North Carolina. A top adviser to Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, Cohen was the face of her state’s response to the coronavirus, explaining risks and precautions while wearing a gold chain adorned with a charm of the Hebrew word for “life.”

Some residents dubbed her the “3 W’s lady” for her constant reminders to wear a mask, wash hands frequently, and watch the distance from other people. One man even wrote a country-rock ballad praising her with the refrain: “Hang on Mandy, Mandy hang on.”

In 2020, Cohen refused to support President Donald Trump’s demands for a full-capacity Republican convention in Charlotte with no mask wearing. Her office later said it would accommodate the GOP by relaxing the state’s 10-person indoor gathering limit, but it remained adamant about masks and social distancing. Trump ultimately moved the main events from Charlotte.

Cohen resigned the state post in late 2021, saying she wanted to spend more time with her family and pursue new opportunities. She then took a leadership post at Aledade Inc., a Maryland-based consulting company.

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Former AP writers Bryan Anderson and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Mason Joel Courson, 27, of Tamarac, Florida, was sentenced in District of Columbia federal court, according to court records. He pleaded guilty in November to assaulting, resisting or impeding a law enforcement officer with a dangerous weapon. The judge also ordered three years of supervised release and restitution of $2,000.

Courson was arrested in South Florida in December 2021.

According to court documents, Courson joined with others objecting to Democratic President Joe Biden’s election victory over former Republican President Donald Trump. A mob attacked the Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying election results, authorities said. Five people died in the violence.

According to an indictment, Courson participated in an assault of a Metropolitan Police Department officer who was beaten by a group armed with a baton, flagpole and crutch. Earlier that afternoon, Courson participated in “heave-ho” efforts to advance into the Capitol in the area of the Lower West Terrace tunnel leading into the building, officials said.

More than 1,000 people have been arrested in nearly all 50 states for alleged crimes related to the Capitol breach, officials said. More than 350 people have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement.

After speaking to the group of gun safety advocates and survivors of gun violence for about 30 minutes in Lincoln Theater on campus, the president wrapped up by saying he would usually come down into the crowd to shake hands. He said he had been told storms were approaching and that he wouldn’t be able to shake hands, but that he would take photos from the stage in front of each section of the audience before departing.

It was then that he ended his speech.

“Alright? God save the queen, man,” Biden said.

His critics were quick to pounce on the phrase and “God Save the Queen” was soon trending on Twitter.

Others on Twitter pointed out it’s a phrase Biden has used before to end speeches.

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The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling on the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan this month. That decision will play a role in shaping the financial futures of 40 million Americans.

If the justices greenlight President Joe Biden’s relief, many borrowers will immediately get $20,000 of their student debt cancelled – if they’d received a Pell Grant in college, a type of aid available to low-income families – and as much as $10,000 if they didn’t.

Some 14 million people would emerge student debt-free from the plan, potentially making it easier for them to buy a first home, for example, start a family, or open a business.

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“The decision would be potentially life changing,” said Corey Shirey, 28, who’s studying to be a pastor in Oklahoma and owes around $25,000.

Richelle Brooks, a single mother in Los Angeles who had a monthly student loan payment as high as $1,200 at one point, said she’s been tied to her phone all of June.

“Waiting to hear whether or not it will pass is nerve-wracking at best, debilitating at worst,” said Brooks, 35.

Here’s what we know about the Supreme Court’s deliberation over the plan, as of now.

1. Decision is expected before July

Borrowers shouldn’t be stuck waiting on the justices too much longer.

A ruling from the high court should come by early July, before their term ends for summer recess, said higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz.

“The court is likely to issue a decision before the end of June, probably on a Thursday,” Kantrowitz said, noting that that was the day of the week the justices had recently been publishing their opinions.

You’ll be able to read the ruling on the Supreme Court’s website, likely some time in the morning of decision day.

2. Presidential power to cancel debt in question

At an estimated cost of about $400 billion, Biden’s plan to forgive student debt is one of the most expensive executive actions in history. The justices are likely examining whether or not the president has the power to implement such a sweeping policy.

The Biden administration insists that it’s acting within the law, pointing out that the Heroes Act of 2003 grants the U.S. secretary of education the authority to make changes to the federal student loan system during national emergencies. The country was operating under an emergency declaration due to Covid-19 when the president rolled out his plan.

Opponents of the debt jubilee say the administration is incorrectly using the law, which was passed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and granted relief to impacted borrowers.

“It is not an across-the-board, get-out-of-debt provision that an administration can invoke at will,” six Republican-led states wrote in their lawsuit against the plan.

Despite the large scale of the president’s policy, the lawyer who argued on behalf of the Biden administration at the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, was adamant he was acting squarely within the law’s scope to avoid borrower distress during national emergencies.  

 “There hasn’t been a national emergency like this in the time that the Heroes Act has been on the books that’s affected this many borrowers,” Prelogar said during oral arguments at the end of February. “And so I think it’s not surprising to see in response to this once-in-a-century pandemic.”

A top Education Department official recently warned that resuming student loan bills without Biden’s loan cancellation could trigger a historic rise in delinquencies and defaults. Those payments remain on hold from a pandemic-era policy that began in March 2020.

3. Issue of ‘legal standing’ could save plan

The Biden administration’s forgiveness application had been open for less than a month when a slew of legal changes forced them to shut it. Biden’s plan has now faced at least six lawsuits from Republican-backed states and conservative groups.

Two of those legal challenges made it to the Supreme Court: one brought by six GOP-led states — Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina – and another backed by the Job Creators Network Foundation, a conservative advocacy organization.

Some experts believe the justices could reject the lawsuits against the president’s plan because the plaintiffs failed to prove they’d be harmed by the policy, which is typically a requirement to gain the right to sue.

The six GOP-led states argued that Biden’s loan forgiveness plan would be a financial setback for them because of a reduction in business among the companies that service federal student loans in their states.

They said the decreased revenue for MOHELA, or the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, could leave the agency unable to meet its financial obligations to Missouri.

However, consumer advocates and legal experts said that charge was based on “false facts” and pointed out that MOHELA’s revenue was actually expected to increase because of some student loan servicers recently leaving the space and it picking up extra accounts. 

The justices also were perplexed as to why the servicers weren’t bringing their own challenges, and how the states could claim harm on their behalf.

“Do you want to address why MOHELA’s not here?” Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked during the oral arguments.

“MOHELA doesn’t need to be here because the state has the authority to speak for them,” Nebraska Solicitor General James A. Campbell said.

Barrett wasn’t satisfied by that answer.

“Why didn’t the state just make MOHELA come then?” she asked. “If MOHELA is really an arm of the state…why didn’t you just strong-arm MOHELA and say you’ve got to pursue this suit?”

A request from CNBC for comment from the Nebraska attorney general was not immediately answered.

In the second legal challenge backed by the Job Creators Network Foundation, the lawyers argued that two plaintiffs, Myra Brown and Alexander Taylor, were deprived of their “procedural rights” by the Biden administration because it didn’t allow the public to formally weigh in on the shape of its plan before it rolled it out. As a result, the lawyers say, Brown and Taylor were either partially or fully excluded from the relief.

Elaine Parker, president of Job Creators Network Foundation, insisted their plaintiffs suffered harm from the policy.

“If the administration had gone through notice-and-comment as the law requires, they each could have made their case,” Parker said. “The program is a clear act of executive overreach.”

The Heroes Act, however, exempts the need for a notice-and-comment period during national emergencies, Kantrowitz said. Also, not getting loan forgiveness or not getting as much as others is not the same as being harmed, he added.

“The Supreme Court is likely to be very critical of the circular arguments made by the plaintiffs in the JCN case,” Kantrowitz said. “You have to look at the law cross-eyed to argue for legal standing.”

The Federal Assistance to Initiate Repayment (FAIR) Act, led by Republicans from the House Education and Workforce Committee,  would provide “targeted” student loan relief for borrowers who “already paid back more than they originally owed taxpayers in principal and interest,” streamline several existing income-driven repayment plans into one system and give defaulted borrowers another chance to rehabilitate their loans.

“This Republican solution takes important steps to fix the broken student loan system, provide borrowers with clear guidance on repayment, and protect taxpayers from the economic fallout caused by the administration’s radical free college agenda,” Reps. Burgess Owens, R-Utah, Lisa McClain, R-Mich., and Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., who chairs the committee, said in a statement.

The trio, who are the lead sponsors of the legislation, were also critical of Biden’s approach. “With extension after extension, the Biden administration turned a short-term payment pause on student loans during the height of the pandemic into a three-year-long pause that cost American taxpayers billions to prop up,” they added.

Federal student loan payments are set to resume at the end of August under an agreement in the debt ceiling law Biden signed earlier this month. Payments have been paused since March 2020 when former President Donald Trump signed the CARES Act into law; he and Biden both extended the pause.

Owens, McClain and Foxx said the extensions “left schools, servicers, and students uncertain about the future,” adding that borrowers need guidance. The new legislation would require the Department of Education to notify student loan borrowers at least 12 times before repayments resume.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

The civil rights attorney was nominated by President Joe Biden to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York in January and was confirmed to the life-tenured position with a narrow margin of 50-49 votes.

Most recently, Choudhury served as the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and, according to her online bio, has a track record of advancing criminal justice reform, immigrants rights and reproductive care access. She was previous deputy director of the ACLU Racial Justice program.

“Congratulations to Nusrat Choudhury, legal director of the ACLU of Illinois, on her confirmation to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York,” the ACLU tweeted in response to her confirmation. “Nusrat is a trailblazing civil rights lawyer and her confirmation will be an asset to our nation’s legal system.”

On Wednesday, West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin released a statement opposing Choudhury’s nomination given her support for criminal justice reform.

“Law enforcement officers in West Virginia and across the country go above and beyond the call of duty to protect our communities, and I am incredibly grateful for their service,” his statement read. “Some of Ms. Choudhury’s previous statements call into question her ability to be unbiased towards the work of our brave law enforcement.”

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

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There were 40 migrants who arrived, including children, who traveled more than 23 hours without food before arriving in Los Angeles, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights told NBC4.

It’s the latest in a tactic employed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has sent unannounced busloads of migrants to other so-called sanctuary cities like Philadelphia. The tactic has been decried as a political stunt.

“Los Angeles is a major city that migrants seek to go to, particularly now that its city leaders approved its self-declared sanctuary city status,” Abbott said in a press release. “Our border communities are on the frontlines of President Biden’s border crisis, and Texas will continue providing this much-needed relief until he steps up to do his job and secure the border.”

The migrants were receiving help at St. Anthony’s Croatian Catholic Church in Chinatown. The Los Angeles Fire Department said shortly after 5 p.m. that it received a “medical need” request for a number of people at the church. Those people’s medical condition was not immediately known.

Other cities have criticized a lack of prior notice about arriving migrants, which at times has led to confusion and a scramble to house and provide resources for the migrants.

CHIRLA Executive Director Angélica Salas said her group had heard rumors about the possibility of a migrant arrival. They mobilized other community-based organizations and worked with the city and county of Los Angeles to prepare for the arrival, Salas said.

She added that Abbott made a “politicized choice” that put people’s lives at risk.

“We make choices, leaders make choices. And the choice that can be made is to receive individuals with humanity, to understand their very desperate plight, and to offer them the solutions and the support that they need,” Salas said.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass similarly issued a statement sharply criticizing Abbott.

She noted that shortly after she took office, she directed city departments to make plans in case Los Angeles “was on the receiving end of a despicable stunt that Republican Governors have grown so fond of.”

“This did not catch us off guard, nor will it intimidate us. Now, it’s time to execute our plan. Our emergency management, police, fire and other departments were able to find out about the incoming arrival while the bus was on its way and were already mobilized along with nonprofit partners before the bus arrived,” Bass said.

Salas said the migrants were receiving information about their legal case, as well as being connected to family members and sponsors.

If he enters the race, the Miami mayor would be challenging former President Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence for the GOP nomination.

The 45-year-old mayor, who would be the only Hispanic candidate in the race, is expected to make a “big speech” Thursday at the Reagan Library in California. He told NBC6’s sister station Telemundo 51 that he’s not officially announcing he’s running, but he will announce the creation of an exploratory committee that will evaluate the possibility of him running.

The mayor told NBC6 anchor Jackie Nespral in a recent interview that he was “strongly considering” entering the race.

Before Trump arrived at the courthouse Tuesday, Suarez toured the media encampment wearing a T-shirt with a police logo, as his city’s police force had jurisdiction over the downtown area.

“If I do decide to run,” he told CNN, “it’s starting a new chapter, a new conversation of a new kind of leader who maybe looks a little different, speaks a little different, had a little bit of a different experience, but can inspire people.”

NBC6 political analyst Mike Hernandez says Suarez would be entering the race late in the game, but believes the mayor may have another goal other than president.

“Presidential candidates just don’t decide in June before the January Caucus in Iowa,” Hernandez said. “I think Mayor Suarez is making this decision because he feels it’s a good opportunity for him to become a cabinet secretary should the Republican nominee win the White House in 2024.”

Florida Congressman and former Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez blasted Suarez on Fox News Wednesday afternoon.

“I will never support Francis Suarez, I think he is a complete fraud,” Gimenez said. “He voted for Hilary Clinton, Andrew Gillum and Biden, and in what universe will a person who have voted that way in the past is going to get the Republican nomination?”

Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison put out a statement saying Suarez used his position as mayor to benefit himself.

“Francis Suarez is yet another contender in the race for the MAGA base who has supported key pieces of Donald Trump’s agenda. As mayor of Miami, Suarez has repeatedly used his position to benefit himself, prioritizing pay raises for himself, accepting lavish gifts, and taking shady payments – all while ignoring the biggest challenges facing the people he was elected to serve,” Harrison said. “As the MAGA field keeps growing, we’ll keep reminding the American people that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between these extreme, self-serving candidates.”

Suarez, the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, is the son of Miami’s first Cuban-born mayor. He has gained national attention in recent years for his efforts to lure companies to Miami, with an eye toward turning the city into a crypto hub and the next Silicon Valley.

Suarez, who is vying to become the first sitting mayor elected president, joins a GOP primary fight that also includes Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Despite having a candidate field in the double digits, the race is largely seen as a two-person contest between Trump and DeSantis.

But the other competitors are hoping for an opening, which Trump has provided with his myriad legal vulnerabilities — none more serious than his federal indictment on charges of mishandling sensitive documents and refusing to give them back. He pleaded not guilty Tuesday in Miami federal court to 37 felony counts.

Suarez has said he didn’t support Trump in either the 2016 or 2020 presidential elections, instead writing in the names of U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio and then-Vice President Pence. In 2018, Suarez publicly condemned Trump after reports came out that he had questioned why the United States would accept more immigrants from Haiti and “shithole countries” in Africa.

But times have changed, with Trump advisers now praising Suarez’s work and helping him promote what he calls “the Miami success story.” Trump’s former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway has even floated Suarez’s name as a possible vice presidential pick.

Suarez, who is married with two young children, is a corporate and real estate attorney who previously served as a city of Miami commissioner. He has also positioned himself as someone who can help the party further connect with Hispanics. In recent months, he has made visits to early GOP voting states as he weighed a possible 2024 campaign.

He is more moderate than DeSantis and Trump, but has threaded the needle carefully on cultural issues that have become popular among GOP politicians.

Suarez has been critical of DeSantis, dismissing some of the state laws he has signed on immigration as “headline grabbers” lacking in substance. He has said immigration is an issue that “screams for a national solution” at a time when many Republicans back hard-line policies.

The two-term mayor previously expressed support for a Florida law championed by DeSantis and dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” that bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, but he has not specified whether he supported the expansion of the policy to all grades. Like other Republicans, Suarez has criticized DeSantis’ feud with Disney over the same law, saying it looks like a “personal vendetta.”

Further ingratiating himself with the Trump team, Suarez has echoed Trump’s attacks on DeSantis’ demeanor, saying the governor doesn’t make eye contact and struggles with personal relationships with other politicians.

“Mayor Suarez will probably need to present himself as a new generation of Republican leadership that has had some kind of success in a major American city,” Hernandez said. “It’s 99% unlikely that he will win the nomination.”

In 2020, the mayor made a play to attract tech companies to Florida after the state relaxed its COVID-19 restrictions. He met with Big Tech players and investors such as PayPal founder Peter Thiel and tech magnate Marcelo Claure, began appearing on national television and was profiled by magazines.

Suarez, who has said he takes his salary in Bitcoin, has also hosted Bitcoin conferences and started heavily promoting a cryptocurrency project named Miami Coin, created by a group called City Coins.

But the hype dissipated as virus restrictions eased elsewhere, eliminating Miami’s advantage on the COVID-19 front. Suarez’s vision also hit roadblocks with the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which was set to move its U.S. headquarters to Miami’s financial district before its founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas last December.

The only cryptocurrency exchange that traded Miami Coin suspended its trading, citing liquidity problems, not living up to its promise to generate enough money to eliminate city taxes.

Miami also ranks among the worst big U.S. cities for income inequality and has one of the least affordable housing markets.

David Walls-Kaufman of the Capitol Hill Chiropractic Center was arrested in June 2022 and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of “parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building,” in January.

Walls-Kaufman was originally scheduled to be sentenced in May, but Cobb delayed it after receiving letters from family members of the late Jeffrey Smith, a Metropolitan Police Department officer who died by suicide shortly after Jan. 6.

Smith’s widow filed a lawsuit against Walls-Kaufman and another man, Taylor Taranto, shortly after they were identified by online sleuths, accusing them of assaulting and playing a role in her husband’s death. 

For more on this story, go to NBC News.

Here’s a look at the charges, the special counsel’s investigation and how Trump’s case differs from those of other politicians known to be in possession of classified documents:

What happened in court?

Trump’s lawyer entered a not-guilty plea for him, and the former president was released on his own recognizance without no bail. He will not have to surrender his passport or have his personal travel restricted.

He scowled at times during the 50-minute hearing, but was otherwise expressionless. He folded his arms, fiddled with a pen and crossed his fingers back and forth as he listened.

Trump leaned over to whisper to his attorneys before the hearing began but did not speak during the proceedings. He remained seated while his lawyer Todd Blanche stood up and entered the plea on his behalf. “We most certainly enter a plea of not guilty,” the lawyer told the judge.

Blanche objected to barring the former president from talking to witnesses, including his co-defendant, valet Walt Nauta, saying that they work for him and he needs to be able to communicate with them. After some back and forth, Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman said Trump cannot talk to them about the case except through his lawyers, but he can talk to them about their jobs.

Nauta was granted bond with the same conditions as Trump. He did not enter a plea because he does not have a local attorney. He will be arraigned June 27 before Chief Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres, but he does not have to be present.

Court records don’t indicate when the next hearing in Trump’s case will be.

Unlike Trump’s arraignment in New York, no photographs were taken because cameras aren’t allowed in federal court. There were, however, sketch artists, and theirs will be the only images from the actual courtroom appearance.

Security remained tight outside the building, but there were no signs of significant disruptions despite the presence of hundreds of protesters. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said on Fox News that there were no arrests or “major incidents.”

What happened after court?

Before heading to the airport, Trump’s motorcade took a detour to Versailles Restaurant in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, where a small crowd of supporters awaited him. Posing for photos and saying “food for everyone,” Trump commented briefly on his case.

“I think it’s going great,” he said. “We have a rigged country. We have a country that’s corrupt.”

Several religious leaders at the restaurant prayed over him for a moment.

Afterward, Trump flew back to his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, where he gave a speech to hundreds of cheering supporters, many clad in red “Make America Great Again” hats.

“This day will go down in infamy,” Trump said, describing the federal prosecution against him as “the most evil and heinous abuse of power in the history of our country.”

What are the charges?

Trump faces 37 counts related to the mishandling of classified documents, including 31 counts under an Espionage Act statute pertaining to the willful retention of national defense information. The charges also include counts of obstructing justice and making false statements, among other crimes.

Trump is accused of keeping documents related to “nuclear weaponry in the United States” and the “nuclear capabilities of a foreign country,” along with documents from White House intelligence briefings, including some that detail the military capabilities of the U.S. and other countries, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors allege Trump showed off the documents to people who did not have security clearances to review them and later tried to conceal documents from his own lawyers as they sought to comply with federal demands to find and return documents.

The top charges carry penalties of up to 20 years in prison.

How did the case against Trump come about?

Officials with the National Archives and Records Administration reached out to representatives for Trump in spring 2021 when they realized that important material from his time in office was missing.

According to the Presidential Records Act, White House documents are considered property of the U.S. government and must be preserved.

A Trump representative told the National Archives in December 2021 that presidential records had been found at Mar-a-Lago. In January 2022, the National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of documents from Trump’s Florida home, later telling Justice Department officials that they contained “a lot” of classified material.

That May, the FBI and Justice Department issued a subpoena for remaining classified documents in Trump’s possession. Investigators who went to visit the property weeks later to collect the records were given roughly three dozen documents and a sworn statement from Trump’s lawyers attesting that the requested information had been returned.

But that assertion turned out to be false. With a search warrant, federal officials returned to Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and seized more than 33 boxes and containers totaling 11,000 documents from a storage room and an office, including 100 classified documents.

In all, roughly 300 documents with classification markings — including some at the top secret level — have been recovered from Trump since he left office in January 2021.

More Trump indictment coverage:

Donald Trump Jun 10

From Mar-A-Lago to the courthouse: A timeline of events leading to Donald Trump's 2nd indictment

news Jan 10

Biden Classified Docs vs. Trump Classified Docs: Here Are the Key Differences

Didn’t President Joe Biden and Former Vice President Mike Pence have classified documents, too?

Yes, but the circumstances of their cases are vastly different from those involving Trump.

After classified documents were found at Biden’s think tank and Pence’s Indiana home, their lawyers notified authorities and quickly arranged for them to be handed over. They also authorized other searches by federal authorities to search for additional documents.

There is no indication either was aware of the existence of the records before they were found, and no evidence has so far emerged that Biden or Pence sought to conceal the discoveries. That’s important because the Justice Department historically looks for willfulness in deciding whether to bring criminal charges.

A special counsel was appointed earlier this year to probe how classified materials ended up at Biden’s Delaware home and former office. But even if the Justice Department were to find Biden’s case prosecutable on the evidence, its Office of Legal Counsel has concluded that a president is immune from prosecution during his time in office.

As for Pence, the Justice Department informed his legal team earlier this month that it would not be pursuing criminal charges against him over his handling of the documents.

What about Hillary Clinton’s emails?

In claiming that Trump is the target of a politically motivated prosecution, some fellow Republicans have cited the Justice Department’s decision in 2016 not to bring charges against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent in that year’s presidential race, over her handling of classified information.

Clinton relied on a private email system for the sake of convenience during her time as the Obama administration’s top diplomat. That decision came back to haunt her when, in 2015, the intelligence agencies’ internal watchdog alerted the FBI to the presence of potentially hundreds of emails containing classified information.

FBI investigators would ultimately conclude that Clinton sent and received emails containing classified information on that unclassified system, including information classified at the top secret level. Of the roughly 30,000 emails turned over by Clinton’s representatives, the FBI has said, 110 emails in 52 email chains were found to have classified information, including some top secret.

After a roughly yearlong inquiry, the FBI closed the investigation in July 2016, finding that Clinton did not intend to break the law. The bureau reopened the inquiry months later, 11 days before the presidential election, after discovering a new batch of emails. After reviewing those communications, the FBI again opted against recommending charges.

At the time, then-FBI Director James Comey condemned Clinton’s email practices as “extremely careless,” but noted that there was no evidence that Clinton had violated factors including efforts to obstruct justice, willful mishandling of classified documents and indications of disloyalty to the U.S.

Does a federal indictment prevent Trump from running for president?

No. Neither the charges nor a conviction would prevent Trump from running for or winning the presidency in 2024.

The ruling by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan gave new life to a defamation lawsuit by writer E. Jean Carroll that was stalled by appeals after the U.S. Justice Department supported a request by Trump’s attorneys to substitute the United States for him as the defendant on the grounds that he cannot be held personally liable for comments made while carrying out presidential duties.

The 2020 defamation lawsuit was originally filed after Carroll wrote in a 2019 book that Trump raped her in a midtown Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman store after he turned a friendly and flirtatious chance encounter between the pair into a violent encounter once behind a closed dressing room door.

Trump, she maintained, disparaged her afterward, spoiling her career and reputation, as he denied ever meeting her at the store located across the street from Trump Tower, where Trump resided before assuming the presidency as a Republican in January 2017.

The Associated Press typically does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done.

Nine jurors agreed in a civil trial last month that Carroll had failed to prove that she was raped in the spring 1996 encounter, but they agreed there was sufficient evidence to conclude Trump had sexually abused her. They also agreed he defamed her by making false statements last October in a deposition and in public comments that damaged her reputation.

news May 22

Trump Faces $10 Million Defamation Claim by E. Jean Carroll After CNN Town Hall Remarks

news Jun 8

Trump Asks Judge to Hold Retrial Or Reduce $5 Million Damages in E. Jean Carroll Sexual Assault Case

Since the jury awarded $5 million in damages, Trump’s attorneys have filed arguments asking to reduce the award to less than $1 million or grant a new trial on damages. They say the jury proved Trump was not lying when they rejected Carroll’s rape claim.

Trump, 76, who did not attend the trial, has continued to insist he didn’t really know Carroll, 79. In his fall deposition, he misidentified her in a photograph as his ex-wife Marla Maples.

The day after the verdict at a CNN town hall, Trump repeated his longstanding claims that he didn’t know Carroll, called her a “whack job” and repeated his claims that she made up the story that he attacked her.

Days later, Carroll’s lawyers asked the judge if she could amend her defamation lawsuit to add Trump’s latest comments and demand at least $10 million and “very substantial” punitive damages.

In his two-page order Tuesday, Kaplan noted that Justice Department lawyers say they’ll have to reevaluate whether the United States should be substituted for Trump as a defendant based on new events affecting the lawsuit, including the new claims made by Carroll that are based on statements he made while no longer president. He’s allowed submissions to be made on the issue through Aug. 3.

Trump’s attorney did not immediately comment.

Attorney Roberta Kaplan, who represents Carroll and is not related to the judge, said in a statement: “We look forward to moving ahead expeditiously on E Jean Carroll’s remaining claims.”

Police Scotland said a 52-year-old woman was detained Sunday morning “as a suspect in connection with the ongoing investigation into the funding and finances of the Scottish National Party.”

She was “released without charge pending further investigation” about six hours later, the force said. British police do not identify suspects until they are charged.

Sturgeon said after her release that her arrest had been “both a shock and deeply distressing.”

“Obviously, given the nature of this process, I cannot go into detail,” she said in a statement on social media. “However, I do wish to say this, and to do so in the strongest possible terms. Innocence is not just a presumption I am entitled to in law. I know beyond doubt that I am in fact innocent of any wrongdoing.”

The SNP said the party had been “cooperating fully with this investigation and will continue to do so. However, it is not appropriate to publicly address any issues while that investigation is ongoing.”

Scottish police opened an investigation in 2021 into how more than 600,000 pounds ($754,000) designated for a Scottish independence campaign was spent.

Two former SNP officials, Colin Beattie, who was treasurer, and Peter Murrell, who was chief executive, were previously arrested and questioned as part of the investigation. Like Sturgeon, both were released pending further inquiries.

Murrell is Sturgeon’s husband, and police searched the couple’s home in Glasgow after his arrest in April.

It is highly unusual for a leader or former leader of a UK political party to be arrested. The last such case also concerned the Scottish Nationalists: Sturgeon’s predecessor as first minister, Alex Salmond, was arrested in 2019 and charged with a series of sexual offenses, including attempted rape. He was acquitted on all 13 charges after a trial in January 2020.

Before that, in 1979, the former Liberal party leader, Jeremy Thorpe, went on trial, accused of conspiracy and incitement to murder. The man he was charged with trying to kill claimed they had a sexual relationship at a time when homosexuality was illegal. Thorpe denied his claim and was acquitted.

Sturgeon unexpectedly resigned in February after eight years as Scottish National Party leader and first minister of Scotland’s semi-autonomous government. She said then that she knew “in my head and in my heart” that it was the right time for her, her party and her country to make way for someone else.

The first female leader of Scotland’s devolved government, Sturgeon led her party to dominance in Scottish politics and refashioned the SNP from a largely one-issue party into a dominant governing force with liberal social positions.

She guided her party during three U.K.-wide elections and two Scottish elections, and led Scotland through the coronavirus pandemic, winning praise for her clear, measured communication style.

But Sturgeon left office amid divisions in the SNP and with her main goal — independence from the U.K. for the nation of 5.5 million people — unmet.

Scottish voters backed remaining in the U.K. in a 2014 referendum that was billed as a once-in-a-generation decision. The party wants a new vote, but the U.K. Supreme Court has ruled that Scotland can’t hold one without London’s consent. The central government has refused to authorize another referendum.

Sturgeon’s departure unleashed a tussle for the future of the SNP amid recriminations over the party’s declining membership and divisions over the best path towards independence. Opinion polls suggest support for the party has sagged, though it remains the most popular in Scotland.

An acrimonious leadership contest to replace her saw contenders feud over tactics and Sturgeon’s legacy, particularly a bill she introduced to make it easier for people to legally change gender. It was hailed as a landmark piece of legislation by transgender rights activists, but faced opposition from some SNP members who said it ignored the need to protect single-sex spaces for women

First Minister Humza Yousaf, who won the party contest in March, told the BBC before Sturgeon’s arrest that the SNP had been through “some of the most difficult weeks our party has probably faced, certainly in the modern era.”

“I know there will be people, be it our opposition, be it the media, that have somehow written the SNP off already,” he said. “They do that at their own peril.”

Inside the courtroom, Trump, seated with his hands crossed, sat at the same table as Walt Nauta, his personal aide who is charged as his co-conspirator. Trump wore a red tie and sat stone-faced through the proceeding.

The history-making arraignment, centering on charges that Trump mishandled government secrets that as commander-in-chief he was entrusted to protect, kickstarts a legal process that will unfold at the height of the 2024 presidential campaign and carry profound consequences not only for his political future but also for his own personal liberty.

Trump approached his arraignment with characteristic bravado, posting social media broadsides against the prosecution from inside his motorcade and insisting as he has through years of legal woes that he has done nothing wrong and was being persecuted for political purposes. He sat inside the courtroom with his arms crossed as a lawyer entered a not guilty plea on his behalf in a brief arraignment that ended without him having to surrender his passport or otherwise restrict his travel.

But the gravity of the moment was unmistakable as he answered to 37 felony counts that accuse him of willfully retaining classified records that prosecutors say could have jeopardized national security if exposed, and the trying to hide them from investigators who demanded them back.

Trump delivered remarks Tuesday evening after flying to his Bedminster, New Jersey, resort. He called the federal charges against him “election interference.” Trump made a similar argument when he was indicted in Manhattan over hush-money payments.

The remarks, with live coverage only from his favored cable channel, were rife with errors and falsehoods that went unchallenged in the moment.

It’s the second criminal case Trump is facing as he seeks to reclaim the White House in 2024. He’s also accused in New York state court of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments made during the 2016 campaign.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in both cases and slammed the prosecutions as politically motivated.

Supporters arrive at courthouse, but not in large numbers

Security was tight outside the Wilkie D. Ferguson federal courthouse Tuesday ahead of the former president’s court appearance.

But Trump supporters were noticeably few hours before the appearance — far outnumbered by the hundreds of journalists from the U.S. and around the world who have converged on downtown Miami for the historic occasion.

That recalled the scene in New York, where Trump was arraigned in April on a separate criminal case involving hush money he’s accused of paying during the 2016 presidential campaign. Then, there were far more reporters than demonstrators for and against the former president.

Among those who arrived early Tuesday in Miami were father and son Florencio and Kevin Rodriguez, who came to the U.S. 15 years ago as asylum seekers fleeing Cuba. Wearing a shirt bearing the slogan “Jesus is my savior, Trump my president,” the younger Rodriguez, Kevin, said it is possible that Trump is guilty of illegally retaining classified documents.

But he questioned the fairness of the proceedings in light of what he said was prosecutors’ lax attitude toward President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. They’ve both been accused of mishandling classified intelligence and not appeared in court, though they also have not faced accusations of intentionally hiding their actions, like Trump has.

“Even if he’s guilty, we will still support him,” Rodriguez said, noting the Trump administration’s staunch opposition to Cuba’s government, “We never abandon our amigos — those who love this country and our liberty.”

Implications for the former president

The case is laden with political implications for the 76-year-old Trump, who currently holds the dominant spot in the early days of the 2024 Republican presidential primary. But it also poses profound legal impact given the prospect of a years-long prison sentence. Even for a defendant whose post-presidential life has been dominated by investigations, the documents probe has stood out for both the apparent volume of evidence amassed by prosecutors and the severity of the allegations.

It's also a watershed moment for a Justice Department that until last week had never before brought charges against a former president. Attorney General Merrick Garland, an appointee of President Joe Biden, sought to insulate the department from political attacks by handing ownership of the case last year to a special counsel, Jack Smith, who on Friday declared, “We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.”

The arraignment, though largely procedural in nature, is the latest in an unprecedented public reckoning this year for Trump, who faces charges in New York arising from hush money payments during his 2016 presidential campaign as well as ongoing investigations in Washington and Atlanta into efforts to undo the results of the 2020 race. He's sought to project confidence in the face of unmistakable legal peril, attacking Smith as “a Trump hater,” pledging to stay in the race and scheduling a speech and fundraiser for Tuesday night at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club.

“They’re using this because they can’t win the election fairly and squarely,” Trump said Monday in an interview with Americano Media.

A federal grand jury in Washington had heard testimony for months in the documents case, but the Justice Department filed it in Florida, where Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort is located and where many of the alleged acts of obstruction occurred. Though Trump is set to appear Tuesday before a federal magistrate, the case has been assigned to a District Court judge he appointed, Aileen Cannon, who ruled in his favor last year in a dispute over whether an outside special master could be appointed to review the seized classified documents. A federal appeals panel ultimately overturned her ruling.

It's unclear what defenses Trump is likely to cite as the case moves forward. Two of his lead lawyers announced their resignation on the morning after his indictment, and the notes and recollections of another attorney, M. Evan Corcoran, are cited repeatedly throughout the 49-page charging document, suggesting that prosecutors may see him as a key witness.

More: Trump Indictment

Donald Trump Jun 12

Who is Aileen Cannon, the Colombian-born judge raised in Miami that will oversee Trump's documents case?

Donald Trump Jun 9

What's in Trump's indictment? Read the 49-page document

Trump has said he's looking to add to his legal team though no announcements were made Monday. But that matters because, under the rules of the district, defendants are required to have a local lawyer for an arraignment to proceed.

The Justice Department unsealed Friday an indictment charging Trump with 37 felony counts, 31 relating to the willful retention of national defense information. Other charges include conspiracy to commit obstruction and false statements.

The indictment alleges Trump intentionally retained hundreds of classified documents that he took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the presidency in January 2021. The material he stored, including in a bathroom, ballroom, bedroom and shower, included material on nuclear programs, defense and weapons capabilities of the U.S. and foreign governments and a Pentagon “attack plan,” the indictment says. The information, if exposed, could have put at risk members of the military, confidential human sources and intelligence collection methods, prosecutors said.

Beyond that, prosecutors say, he sought to obstruct government efforts to recover the documents, including by directing personal aide Walt Nauta — who was charged alongside Trump — to move boxes to conceal them and also suggesting to his own lawyer that he hide or destroy documents sought by a Justice Department subpoena.

Tucker reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in New York, Adriana Gomez Licon in Miami and Terry Spencer in Doral, Florida, contributed to this report.

This story uses functionality that may not work in our app. Click here to open the story in your web browser.

Trump arrived at Miami International Airport on Monday afternoon before spending the night at his golf resort in Doral.

Here’s what you can expect on Tuesday, and what else we know so far:

What will this process look like?

Sometime around mid-day Tuesday, Trump will be taken from Doral to the federal courthouse in downtown Miami where he has a scheduled 3 p.m. appearance before a federal magistrate to hear the charges against him.

Trump is expected to enter the federal courthouse in Miami through an underground tunnel, where he will be processed and fingerprinted by federal Marshals and the FBI.

He won’t be handcuffed and it is not known yet if a mugshot will be taken.

Trump is expected to waive the reading of the indictment, and magistrate judge Jonathan Goodman will set conditions of release.

Trump could be let go on his own recognizance with an unsecured personal surety — a promise to pay a hefty sum set by the judge in the event he doesn’t show up for court.

Other accused criminals often have to surrender their passports in federal court, but we don’t know if that will apply to the former president.

It’s possible that Trump will also be arraigned and enter his not-guilty plea Tuesday.

This would usually require a local attorney admitted in the district, and so far he has not hired one. However, the judge could let it go forward anyway.

What will be happening outside the courthouse?

There will be a large law enforcement presence at and around the Wilkie D. Ferguson, Jr. Courthouse on Northeast 1st Avenue.

Miami Police said Northeast 1st Avenue wil be shut down between 3rd and 5th streets, with traffic delays expected.

Authorities have been preparing for the hearing and for protests at the courthouse. By Tuesday morning, some protesters had gathered.

Who is the judge presiding over this case?

Judge Aileen Cannon will be the trial judge overseeing the case, however, she will not be involved in this stage.

Instead, magistrate judge Jonathan Goodman will preside over the arraignment of the former president on Tuesday.

Cannon will, however, have the authority to review the magistrate’s ruling upon motion by either side.

Cannon was nominated to the federal bench in 2019 by then-President Trump and confirmed by the Senate in 2020. She was randomly selected amongst four federal judges in South Florida.

The Colombian-born, Miami-raised judge will handle the case as it goes forward.

What happens after Tuesday’s hearing?

The whole process on Tuesday — from processing to release — could take around 90 minutes or so.

After that, Trump is expected to travel back to New Jersey after the hearing, where he will attend a fundraiser for the 2024 Presidential campaign.

In New Jersey, Trump is expected to deliver remarks.

He will also celebrate his 77th birthday on Wednesday.

Joshua Abate and Dodge Dale Hellonen are scheduled to be sentenced in September by U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes. Both pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building, according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia.

Many Capitol rioters are military veterans, but only a few were actively serving in the armed forces when they joined a mob’s attack on Jan. 6, 2021.

A third active-duty Marine, Micah Coomer, also was charged with Abate and Hellonen. Coomer pleaded guilty to the same misdemeanor charge in May and is scheduled to be sentenced by Reyes on Aug. 30.

All three men face a maximum sentence of six months of imprisonment.

As of May 19, the Marines were still in the service. No additional information was available Monday.

David Dischley, an attorney for Abate, declined to comment on his client’s guilty plea. An assistant public defender who represents Hellonen didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Authorities arrested the three men in January: Abate at Fort Meade, Maryland; Coomer in Oceanside, California; and Hellonen in Jacksonville, North Carolina.

Witnesses stationed with Coomer at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia and with Hellonen at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina identified them in videos of the Jan. 6 riot, according to the FBI. A third witness — also a Marine — identified Abate from footage captured inside the Capitol, the FBI said.

During a June 2022 for his security clearance, Abate said he and two “buddies” had walked through the Capitol on Jan. 6 “and tried not to get hit with tear gas,” according to an FBI special agent.

“Abate also admitted he heard how the event was being portrayed negatively and decided that he should not tell anybody about going into the U.S. Capitol Building,” the agent wrote in an affidavit.

After the riot, Coomer posted photos on Instagram with the caption “Glad to be (a part) of history.” The angles of the photos and the caption indicated he had been inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, the FBI said. The phone number listed for Coomer in his military personal file matched the Instagram account.

Coomer drove to Washington on the morning of Jan. 6 from his military post in Virginia. He attended then-President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally with Abate and Hellonen before they entered the Capitol. Inside the Rotunda, they placed a red “Make America Great Again” hat on a statute before taking photos of it, prosecutors said. The three men spent nearly an hour inside the Capitol before leaving.

Less than a month after the riot, Coomer told another Instagram user that he believed “everything in this country is corrupt.”

“We honestly need a fresh restart. I’m waiting for the boogaloo,” he wrote, according to the FBI.

When the other user asked what that term meant, Coomer wrote, “Civil war 2.”

“Boogaloo” movement supporters use the term as slang for a second civil war or collapse of civilization. They frequently show up at protests armed with rifles and wearing Hawaiian shirts under body armor.

Over 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes for their conduct at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Approximately 600 of them have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors punishable by maximum terms of imprisonment of six months or one year.

___ Associated Press writer Lolita Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.

Daniel “D.J. ” Rodriquez pleaded guilty in February, admitting that he battled law enforcement officers on the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6 and tased former D.C. Metropolitan Police officer Mike Fanone in the neck before storming the building and smashing out a window.

The government, in a sentencing memo filed late Friday, sought 168 months in federal prison along with restitution in the amount of $98,927, saying that Rodriguez’s crimes were acts of terrorism that deserve an upward departure from the sentencing guidelines. Judge Amy Berman Jackson will sentence Rodriguez on June 21.

For more on this story, go to NBC News.

To press their case, Trump’s backers are citing the Justice Department’s decision in 2016 not to bring charges against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent in that year’s presidential race, over her handling of classified information. His supporters also are invoking a separate classified documents investigation concerning President Joe Biden to allege a two-tier system of justice that is punishing Trump, the undisputed early front-runner for the GOP’s 2024 White House nomination, for conduct that Democrats have engaged in.

“Is there a different standard for a Democratic secretary of state versus a former Republican president?” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump primary rival. “I think there needs to be one standard of justice in this country.”

But those arguments overlook abundant factual and legal differences — chiefly relating to intent, state of mind and deliberate acts of obstruction — that limit the value of any such comparisons.

A look at the Clinton, Biden and Trump investigations and what separates them:

WHAT DID CLINTON DO?

Clinton relied on a private email system for the sake of convenience during her time as the Obama administration’s top diplomat. That decision came back to haunt her when, in 2015, the intelligence agencies’ internal watchdog alerted the FBI to the presence of potentially hundreds of emails containing classified information.

FBI investigators would ultimately conclude that Clinton sent and received emails containing classified information on that unclassified system, including information classified at the top-secret level.

Of the roughly 30,000 emails turned over by Clinton’s representatives, the FBI has said, 110 emails in 52 email chains were found to have classified information, including some at the top-secret level.

After a roughly yearlong inquiry, the FBI closed out the investigation in July 2016, finding that Clinton did not intend to break the law. The bureau reopened the inquiry months later, 11 days before the presidential election, after discovering a new batch of emails. After reviewing those communications, the FBI again opted against recommending charges.

Donald Trump Jun 10

From Mar-A-Lago to the courthouse: A timeline of events leading to Donald Trump's 2nd indictment

Donald Trump Jun 9

What's in Trump's indictment? Read the 49-page document

WHAT IS TRUMP ACCUSED OF DOING?

The indictment filed by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith alleges that when Trump left the White House after his term ended in January 2021, he took hundreds of classified documents with him to his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago — and then repeatedly impeded efforts by the government he once oversaw to get the records back.

The material that Trump retained, prosecutors say, related to American nuclear programs, weapons and defense capabilities of the United States and foreign countries and potential vulnerabilities to an attack — information that, if exposed, could jeopardize the safety of the military and human sources.

Beyond just the hoarding of documents — in locations including a bathroom, ballroom, shower and his bedroom — the Justice Department says Trump showed highly sensitive material to visitors without security clearances and obstructed the FBI by, among other things, directing a personal aide who was charged alongside him to move boxes around Mar-a-Lago to conceal them from investigators.

Though Trump and his allies have claimed he could do with the documents as he pleased under the Presidential Records Act, the indictment makes short shrift of that argument and does not once reference that statute.

All told, the indictment includes 37 felony counts against Trump, most under an Espionage Act statute pertaining to the willful retention of national defense information.

WHAT SEPARATES THE CLINTON AND TRUMP CASES?

A lot, but two important differences are in willfulness and obstruction.

In an otherwise harshly critical assessment in which he condemned Clinton’s email practices as “extremely careless,” then-FBI Director James Comey announced that investigators had found no clear evidence that Clinton or her aides had intended to break laws governing classified information.

As a result, he said, “no reasonable prosecutor” would move forward with a case. The relevant Espionage Act cases brought by the Justice Department over the past century, Comey said, all involved factors including efforts to obstruct justice, willful mishandling of classified documents and indications of disloyalty to the U.S. None of those factors existed in the Clinton investigation, he said.

That’s in contrast to the allegations against Trump, who prosecutors say was involved in the packing of boxes to go to Mar-a-Lago and then actively took steps to conceal classified documents from investigators.

The indictment accuses him, for instance, of suggesting that a lawyer hide documents demanded by a Justice Department subpoena or falsely represent that all requested records had been turned over, even though more than 100 remained in the house.

The indictment repeatedly cites Trump’s own words against him to make the case that he understood what he was doing and what the law did and did not permit him to do. It describes a July 2021 meeting at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, which he showed off a Pentagon “plan of attack” to people without security clearances to view the material and proclaimed that “as president, I could have declassified it.”

“Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” the indictment quotes him as saying.

That conversation, captured by an audio recording, is likely to be a powerful piece of evidence to the extent that it undercuts Trump’s oft-repeated claims that he had declassified the documents he brought with him to Mar-a-Lago.

WHERE DOES BIDEN FIT IN?

The White House disclosed in January that, two months earlier, a lawyer for Biden had located what it said was a “small number” of classified documents from his time as vice president during a search of the Washington office space of Biden’s former institute. The documents were turned over to the Justice Department.

Lawyers for Biden subsequently located an additional batch of classified documents at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, and the FBI found even more during a voluntary search of the property.

The revelations were a humbling setback for Biden’s efforts to draw a clear contrast between his handling of sensitive information and Trump’s. Even so, as with Clinton, there are significant differences in the matters.

Though Attorney General Merrick Garland in January named a second special counsel to investigate the Biden documents, no charges have been brought and, so far at least, no evidence has emerged to suggest that anyone intentionally moved classified documents or tried to impede the FBI from recovering them.

While the FBI obtained a search warrant last August to recover additional classified documents, each of the Biden searches has been done voluntarily with his team’s consent.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, notified Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, earlier this month that it would not bring charges after the discovery of classified documents in his Indiana home. That case also involved no allegations of willful retention or obstruction.

_____

To anti-hate researchers, it’s a well-connected extremist group that attacks inclusion in schools.

And to Republicans vying for the presidency, it has become a potential key partner in the fight for the 2024 nomination.

Moms for Liberty didn’t exist during the last presidential campaign, but the Florida-based nonprofit that champions “ parental rights ” in education has rapidly become a major player for 2024, boosted in part by GOP operatives, politicians and donors.

The group that has been at the forefront of the conservative movement targeting books that reference race and gender identity and electing right-wing candidates to local school boards nationwide is hosting one of the next major gatherings for Republican presidential primary contenders. At least four are listed as speakers at the Moms for Liberty annual summit in Philadelphia later this month.

Former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and biotech entrepreneur and “anti-woke” activist Vivek Ramaswamy have announced they will speak at the meeting at the end of June.

The group said it is in talks to bring others to the conference, including Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a fringe Democrat known for pushing anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.

The high interest in the event underscores how fights surrounding gender and race have become core issues for Republican voters. It also spotlights Republicans’ eagerness to embrace a group that has drawn backlash for spreading anti-LGBTQ+ ideas and stripping libraries and classrooms of diverse material.

The group was founded in 2021 by Tiffany Justice, Tina Descovich and Bridget Ziegler, all current and former school board members in Florida who were unhappy with student mask and quarantine policies during the pandemic.

In two years, the organization has ballooned to 285 chapters across 44 states, Justice said. The group claims 120,000 active members.

It has expanded its activism in local school districts to target books it says are inappropriate or “anti-American,” ban instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, require teachers to disclose students’ pronouns to parents, and remove diversity, equity and inclusion programs from schools.

The group also has sought to elect like-minded candidates to school boards. In 2022, just over half the 500 candidates it endorsed for school boards nationwide won their races, Justice said.

Moms for Liberty pitches itself as a nonpartisan, grassroots effort started by passionate parents who call themselves “joyful warriors.” Yet the group’s close ties to Republican organizations, donors and politicians raise questions about partisanship and doubts over how grassroots it really is.

Co-founder Ziegler, who stepped down from the board in late 2021 but remains supportive of the group, is married to the chairman of the Florida Republican Party. Still a school board member in Sarasota County, she also is a director at the Leadership Institute, a conservative organization that regularly trains Moms for Liberty members.

Marie Rogerson, who took Ziegler’s place on the Moms for Liberty board, is an experienced political strategist who had previously managed the 2018 campaign of Florida state Rep. Randy Fine, a Republican.

The group also has quickly gained a close ally in DeSantis. In 2021, he signed Florida’s “Parents Bill of Rights,” which identified parents’ rights to direct their kids’ education and health care and was used to fight local student mask mandates. In 2022, he signed a law barring instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through the third grade, a ban opponents had labeled the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and which has since been extended through 12th grade. Moms for Liberty had loudly advocated both pieces of legislation.

Ziegler appeared behind DeSantis in photographs of the latter bill’s signing ceremony. When the group held its inaugural summit in Tampa last year, it hosted speeches by DeSantis and his wife, Casey, presenting the governor with a “liberty sword.”

And though the group is a 501(c)4 nonprofit that doesn’t have to disclose its donors, there are other glimpses of how powerful Republicans have helped fuel its rise.

Its summit sponsors, which paid tens of thousands of dollars for those slots, include the Leadership Institute, the conservative Heritage Foundation and Patriot Mobile, a far-right Christian cellphone company whose PAC has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to take over Texas school boards.

Maurice Cunningham, a former political science professor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston who has tracked Moms for Liberty’s growth and relationships, said its ability to draw so many top Republican candidates to its second annual summit is a testament to its establishment support.

“Yes, there are certainly moms that live in their communities and so forth who are active,” Cunningham said. “But this is a top down, centrally controlled operation with big-money people at the top and political professionals working for them.”

Justice said the group’s work with conservative organizations and DeSantis shows they take interest in the group’s cause, but doesn’t mean it isn’t grassroots.

Even as Moms for Liberty has aligned with establishment Republicans, researchers say its activism is part of a new wave of far-right anti-student inclusion efforts around the country.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate and extremism around the country, designated Moms for Liberty as an “anti-government extremist” group in its annual report released last week, along with 11 other groups it said use parents’ rights as a vehicle to attack public education and make schools less welcoming for minority and LGBTQ+ students.

The label comes after some of the group’s leaders and chapter chairs have been accused of harassing community members and amplifying false claims related to gender controversies.

Justice said calling Moms for Liberty’s activities extremist is “alarming” and that the group’s efforts to fund and endorse school board races show it is not anti-government.

She said the group removes chapter chairs who break its code of conduct and that it has members and leaders who are gay, including one member of its national leadership team.

A growing coalition of local organizations that promote inclusivity in education has begun to mobilize against Moms for Liberty and are petitioning Marriott to stop the upcoming conference. Defense of Democracy, a New York organization founded in direct opposition to Moms for Liberty, plans to bring members to Philadelphia to protest in person.

“They’re so loud and so aggressive that people are kind of scared into silence,” Defense of Democracy founder Karen Svoboda said of Moms for Liberty. “You know, if you see bigotry and homophobia, there is a civic responsibility to speak out against it.”

Moms for Liberty, in turn, said it will increase security for its meeting. Marriott hasn’t responded to the petition, and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “extremist” designation hasn’t deterred any Republican candidate who plans to speak.

Haley responded by tweeting, “If @Moms4Liberty is a ‘hate group,’ add me to the list.” Ramaswamy went onstage for a Thursday town hall with Justice and tweeted that SPLC stands for “Selling Political Lies to Corporations.”

Those responses are unsurprising to Cunningham, who said in today’s climate, the “extremist” label is “almost a badge of honor” within the GOP.

Moms for Liberty, for its part, is fundraising off it. After the SPLC report was public, Justice said the group quickly raised $45,000, an amount a larger donor has agreed to match.

___

The Air Defender 23 exercise that is set to run through June 23 was long-planned but serves to showcase the alliance’s capabilities amid high tensions with Russia.

Some 10,000 participants and 250 aircraft from 25 nations will respond to a simulated attack on a NATO member. The United States alone is sending 2,000 U.S. Air National Guard personnel and about 100 aircraft.

“The exercise is a signal — a signal above all to us, a signal to us, the NATO countries, but also to our population that we are in a position to react very quickly … that we would be able to defend the alliance in case of attack,” German air force chief Lt. Gen. Ingo Gerhartz told ZDF television.

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Gerhartz said he proposed the exercise in 2018, reasoning that Russia’s annexation of Crimea underlined the need to be able to defend NATO.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has jolted NATO into preparing in earnest for the possibility of an attack on its territory. Sweden, which is hoping to join the alliance, and Japan are also taking part in the exercise.

Assessments of the extent to which the exercise will disrupt civilian flights have varied widely. Matthias Maas, the head of a German air traffic controllers’ union, GdF, has said that it “will of course have massive effects on the operation of civilian aviation.”

Gerhartz disputed that. He said that Germany’s air traffic control authority has worked with the air force to keep disruption “as small as possible.” He noted that the exercise is limited to three areas which won’t all be used at the same time, and that it will be over before school vacations start in any German state.

“I hope that there we will be no cancellations; there may be delays in the order of minutes here and there,” he said, insisting that a study cited by the air traffic controllers’ union assumes a worst-case scenario in bad weather in which the military wouldn’t fly anyway.

___

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

Democrat Brandon Presley is a second cousin of Elvis Presley, born a few days before the rock ’n’ roll legend died. While campaigning, Brandon Presley talks frequently about government corruption, focusing on a multimillion-dollar welfare scandal that developed when Reeves was lieutenant governor.

Presley, an elected member of the Mississippi Public Service Commission, is unopposed for the Democratic nomination for governor. He is pushing for Medicaid expansion to help financially strapped hospitals while telling voters about his own difficult childhood.

“I understand what working families in this state go through,” Presley told about 75 people at a restaurant in Grenada, a town on the edge of the Mississippi Delta.

The 45-year-old said he was just starting third grade when his father was murdered. Presley’s mother raised him and his brother and sister in the small town of Nettleton, earning modest wages from a garment factory. In his childhood home, “you could see straight through the floors into the dirt,” he said, and his mother struggled to pay for water and electricity.

“And let me say this to you clearly: When my name goes on the ballot in November, the names of families who have had their electricity cut off, who are getting up every day working for all they can to help their kids, to small business owners — your name goes on that ballot in November,” he said.

Mississippi is one of just three states with a governor’s race this year, joining Kentucky and Louisiana. All are places that historically have supported Republicans for statewide office, though Kentucky’s Democratic governor is seeking a second term.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, described the three contests as “away games” but said Mississippi may be “the sleeper” — a state where the right Democrat could win. That’s despite voters twice heavily backing Donald Trump for president, the GOP holding all statewide offices and a supermajority in the Legislature and a Democrat not winning a Mississippi governor’s race so far this century.

Reeves, who faces two underfunded opponents in the Aug. 8 primary, has the advantage of incumbency: 31 governors of U.S. states or territories sought reelection last year, and only one lost. Reeves had about $9.4 million in his campaign fund at the end of May, far more than the $1.7 million Presley reported. Republicans also say national Democrats’ enthusiasm for Presley’s bid could be a liability.

Reeves, 49, was a banker from a Jackson suburb before winning his first statewide office 20 years ago. He is campaigning on a record of reducing the state income tax, increasing teachers’ pay, restricting abortion access and banning gender-affirming medical care for people younger than age 18. He also is casting this as an “us-versus-them” election, portraying Presley as part of a national Democratic operation far removed from the realities of life in Mississippi.

“My friends, this is a different governor’s campaign than we have ever seen before in our state because we are not up against a local yokel, Mississippi Democrat. We are up against a national liberal machine,” Reeves told more than 200 supporters at a campaign event in the Jackson suburb of Richland. “They are extreme. They are radical and vicious.”

Reeves said outsiders look at Mississippi with “scorn,” but the state has momentum.

“Are we going to let them stop us?” Reeves asked, and the crowd responded: “No!”

“Are we going to let them make Mississippi conform to California values?” Reeves asked. Again, the response was “No!”

Presley was 23 when he was elected mayor of Nettleton in 2001. During his second term leading the town of 2,000, he won the northern district seat on the Mississippi Public Service Commission, a three-member group that regulates utilities. He is completing his fourth term this year.

As Presley campaigns, he combines blunt criticism of Reeves with gospel and bluegrass songs that affirm the connection to his famous cousin without leaving the impression that he has chosen the wrong line of work.

In Grenada, Presley said a $100 million financial package that legislators and Reeves approved for hospitals this year was a “cheap, dollar store clearance-aisle Band-Aid” when Medicaid expansion could bring the state about $1 billion a year from the federal government.

Murphy said Presley’s style has been winning over donors. At an event Presley attended in New Jersey with Murphy, they exceeded their fundraising goal.

“We’ve got a great candidate. This guy’s the real deal,” Murphy said. “When you listen to what he would do on Day One as governor, you say, ‘You know what? That’s exactly what Mississippi needs.’”

Four years ago, Reeves won the governorship by defeating four-term Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood by 52% to 47%, with two lesser-known candidates in the race.

This year, one independent will be on the general election ballot. Republicans like their chances, given the state’s politics and Reeves’ history of five statewide wins: two for state treasurer, starting when he was 29; two for lieutenant governor; and one for governor.

“Democrats are desperately trying to create a mirage when it comes to Mississippi,” said Republican Governors Association spokesperson Courtney Alexander. “The reality is that Brandon Presley is bought and paid for by national Democrats, while Gov. Reeves’ record of historically low unemployment, historically high graduation rates, and substantial pay raises for Mississippi educators speaks for itself.”

About 38% of Mississippi residents are Black — the highest percentage of any state — and Black voters are vital for Democrats to have any chance of winning statewide.

Janie Houston, a retired kindergarten teacher who attended Presley’s event in Grenada, said some Black voters might not bother to show up in November because Republicans drew legislative districts specifically to protect wide majorities in the Legislature.

“That’s the point of doing all that gerrymandering,” Houston said.

Democrats, she added, are not putting enough support behind down-ballot candidates to offset that advantage.

“They need to come face-to-face with Black voters and any other voter,” she said. “That’s just the way it is. I just don’t think they’re putting enough money behind the candidates to get people to come out in the communities.”

The most influential Black politician in Mississippi, Democratic U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, did not endorse Hood in the 2019 governor’s race because he said Hood never asked him to. But Thompson endorsed Presley at the outset of this year’s campaign, and the congressman said he will provide any support Presley requests in the coming months.

Thompson said Presley worked with him to help the tiny rural community of Schlater get safe drinking water after the pump for a water well broke, and that Presley has helped other needy areas get reliable electricity. After a tornado devastated the small town of Rolling Fork this spring, Thompson said, “one of the first calls I got was from Brandon Presley asking me what could he do?”

Thompson said Presley found generators in Louisiana to provide electricity for an armory in Rolling Fork that became a disaster relief spot.

“That’s the kind of person, the Brandon Presley that I know,” Thompson said in an interview. “It’s easy to support somebody who demonstrates that they care about people.”

The Reeves campaign event in Richland was in a large, air-conditioned warehouse for a construction equipment dealership. One of the spectators was Terry Felder, a retired offshore oil rig worker who said he voted for Reeves in 2019 and will again this year because he believes Republicans do a better job of controlling government spending.

Felder acknowledged Mississippi has problems but said he thinks the state is in “pretty good shape.”

“Every survey they have, if it’s a bad survey we’re at the top of the list. If it’s a good survey, we’re at the bottom,” Felder said. “But when you’re here, it doesn’t seem that way.”

____

Burnett reported from Chicago.

The Florida governor sought to project strength by campaigning in one of the more than a dozen states scheduled to hold GOP primaries on Super Tuesday next March, weeks after the earliest states vote. He also notched the endorsement of Republican Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, the first governor to formally announce his support for DeSantis.

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Donald Trump Jun 9

Donald Trump stored, showed off and refused to return classified documents, indictment says

DeSantis says his record has put him at the cutting edge of the next generation of Republicans. But addressing a sweat-soaked audience fanning themselves with yard signs, the governor introduced a loftier theme, asking Americans to embrace his call for new national leadership.

“Our duty is to preserve what the founders of the country called the sacred fire of liberty,” a cowboy boot-clad DeSantis told the audience in an event hall on the outskirts of Tulsa, the state’s second largest city.

He ticked through the Declaration of Independence, the battle of Gettysburg and the Normandy invasion during World War II as moments Americans rallied during times of crisis.

“Our generation now is called upon to carry this torch. It’s not a responsibility we should shy away from,” DeSantis said. “It’s a responsibility we should welcome. We have to stand firm for the truth, and we have to remain resolute in the defense of core American and enduring principles.”

Later, DeSantis stopped at a rodeo in Ponca, about 75 miles northwest of Tulsa, and posed for pictures with his wife, Casey, and his 3-year-old daughter, Mamie, who wore a pink cowboy hat.

“Freedom is one generation away from extinction,” he said at the rodeo whose stands were draped in red, white and blue.

Trump’s legal drama presents both an opportunity and challenge for DeSantis and other campaign rivals of the former president. Multiple criminal cases — while initially lifting Trump’s polling numbers and fundraising efforts — could ultimately undermine Trump’s argument that he’s the best general election candidate against President Joe Biden.

But direct criticism of Trump over the criminal indictment might alienate the former president’s core supporters, voters his rivals are out to convert. That is especially true for DeSantis, who is continuing to criticize Trump on policy — but also has opted to slam the case against the former president rather than overtly trying to capitalize on it.

The governor bemoaned Saturday what he called “the increasing weaponization of these federal agencies against people they don’t like.”

“On day one, you’ll have a new director of the FBI. We’re going to use our authority to hold people accountable,” DeSantis told the audience outside Tulsa, igniting a burst of cheers.

His super PAC also released a video of DeSantis going even further when he appeared Friday night at the North Carolina Republican Party Convention.

“I think there needs to be one standard of justice in this country,” he said in the clip. “We need to have a president that’s going to do something about it.”

Indictment aside, DeSantis has gradually ramped up criticism of Trump, though not directly by name, for rejecting the idea of changes to Social Security and Medicare spending. The former president has rejected the idea of cuts to the programs.

The Florida governor also has suggested that Trump is less-than-devout in his opposition to abortion rights, in light of his criticism as “harsh” of DeSantis for signing a ban on most abortions before six weeks of pregnancy.

Trump himself campaigned Saturday at the Republican state conventions in North Carolina and Georgia, where he called the case against him “ridiculous” and “baseless.” He’s urged his supporters to rally ahead of a Tuesday court appearance in South Florida — ensuring that his case is likely to garner more attention than the 2024 GOP primary for at least several more days.

The Justice Department case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that also could lead to more criminal charges. But among the various investigations he has faced, legal experts — as well as Trump’s own aides — had long seen the Mar-a-Lago probe as the most perilous legal threat.

Stitt’s endorsement, meanwhile, is important for projecting strength far from Florida. DeSantis opened his campaign last month by visiting Iowa, then traveled to New Hampshire and South Carolina, all states that vote early on the primary calendar and have absorbed the majority of the candidates’ attention. Yet the early Oklahoma stop lets DeSantis show he plans to be in the race for the long haul.

And, though he’s the governor of Florida — known more for its beaches and theme parks than calf-roping or bull riding — DeSantis’ stop in Ponca wasn’t, as they say, his first rodeo.

His wife was runner-up in the NCAA equestrian national championships at College of Charleston. In March, before formally entering the presidential race, DeSantis skipped the Conservative Political Action Conference to instead address a Republican Party dinner in Houston — but not before hitting the rodeo there with his family.

The event, which the administration described as the largest Pride event hosted at the White House, was initially scheduled for Thursday, but was postponed because of poor air quality from hazardous air flowing in from Canadian wildfires. But the haze that blanketed a huge swath of the East Coast this past week had lifted over the nation’s capital, allowing the president and first lady Jill Biden to hold their South Lawn party.

“So today, I want to send a message to the entire community — especially to transgender children: You are loved. You are heard. You’re understood. And you belong,” Biden said.

Pride Month is being celebrated this year as state lawmakers have introduced at least 525 bills and enacted 78 bills that whittle away at LGBTQ+ rights, according to the Human Rights Campaign, a group that advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer rights.

That tally includes a recent flurry of bills that affect transgender people, including legislation recently passed by Republican governors vying for the 2024 presidential nomination.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed a bill into that bans gender-affirming medical care such as puberty blockers or hormone therapy for transgender youths. Earlier in the week, a federal judge temporarily blocked portions of a law that DeSantis signed shortly before announcing that he was running for president.

In North Dakota, Gov. Doug Burgum last month signed a bill that prohibits public schools and government entities from requiring teachers and employees to refer to transgender people by the pronouns they use. Burgum, who like DeSantis has made culture issues a central part of his tenure as governor, joined the White House primary field.

Josh Helfgott, an LGBTQ+ activist and social media influencer from New York City, said marking Pride Month at the White House felt like one of the most important moments of his life. But he said the tide of legislation added another layer to this year’s celebrations.

“Pride this year is so important because we cannot be silent when faced with hate and bigotry,” Helfgott said “The other side is so loud, incredibly loud. ”

Anjali Rimi of San Francisco attended the White House event with her mother, who recently immigrated from India.

Rimi came to the United States more than 20 years ago because, she said, she was shunned by family and society as a transgender person.

Times were tough in the United States, too, she said. She was pushed out of a job after she came out, was homeless for a time, and took asylum in Canada for about a decade before returning to the United States.

“It’s a moment that we are going to cherish for a lifetime,” said Rimi, an activist in San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ community. “This is a joyful moment, but it’s also one that reminds us that we have so much work to do.”

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Trump, who remains the front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination despite his mounting legal woes, is expected to use speeches at two state party conventions to rail against the charges and amplify his assertions that he is the victim of a politically motivated “witch hunt” by Democratic President Joe Biden’s Justice Department.

The indictment unsealed Friday charged him with 37 felony counts in connection with his hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Trump is accused of willfully defying Justice Department demands to return classified documents, enlisting aides in his efforts to hide the records and even telling his lawyers that he wanted to defy a subpoena for the materials stored at his residence. The indictment includes allegations that he stored documents in a ballroom and bathroom at his resort, among other places.

The most serious charges carry potential prison sentences of up to 20 years each, but first-time offenders rarely get anywhere near the maximum sentence and the decision would ultimately be up to the judge.

For all that, Trump can expect a hero’s welcome this weekend as he rallies his fiercest partisans and aims to cement his status as his party’s leading presidential candidate.

“Trump is a fighter, and the kinds of people that attend these conventions love a fighter,” said Jack Kingston, a former Georgia congressman who supported Trump’s White House campaigns in 2016 and 2020.

Former Vice President Mike Pence also plans to address North Carolina Republicans, making it the first time that he and his former boss would have appeared at the same venue since Pence announced his own campaign this past week.

Trump has insisted he committed no wrongdoing, saying, “There was no crime, except for what the DOJ and FBI have been doing against me for years.”

The indictment arrives at a time when Trump is continuing to dominate the primary race. Other candidates have largely attacked the Justice Department — rather than Trump — for the investigation. But the indictment’s breadth of allegations and scope could make it harder for Republicans to rail against these charges compared with an earlier New York criminal case that many legal analysts had derided as weak.

A Trump campaign official described the former president’s mood as “defiant” before the state visits. But aides were notably more reserved after the indictment’s unsealing as they reckoned with the gravity of the legal charges and the threat they pose to Trump beyond the potential short-term political gain.

The federal charging document alleges that Trump not only intentionally possessed classified documents but also boastfully showed them off to visitors and aides. The indictment is built on Trump’s own words and actions as recounted to prosecutors by lawyers, close aides and other witnesses, including his professing to respect and know procedures related to the handling of classified information.

The indictment includes 37 counts, 31 of which pertain to the willful retention of national defense information, with the balance relating to alleged conspiracy, obstruction and false statements. It could result in a yearslong prison sentence.

Trump is due to make his first federal court appearance Tuesday in Miami. He was charged alongside Walt Nauta, a personal aide whom prosecutors say moved boxes from a storage room to Trump’s residence for him to review and later lied to investigators about the movement. A photograph included in the indictment shows several dozen file boxes stacked in a storage area.

The case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump. In March, he was indicted in New York in a hush money scheme stemming from payouts made to a porn actor during his 2016 campaign, and he faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that also could lead to criminal charges.

But among the various investigations he has faced, the documents case has long been considered the most perilous threat and the one most ripe for prosecution.

Trump’s continued popularity among Republican voters is evident in how gingerly his primary rivals have treated the federal indictment.

Pence, campaigning in New Hampshire on Friday, said he was “deeply troubled” that Trump had been federally indicted because he believes it will further divide the nation. Pence urged his audience to pray for Trump, his family and all Americans, and promised that if he were elected president, he would uphold the rule of law and “clean house at the highest level” of the Department of Justice.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s leading GOP rival, decried the “weaponization of federal law enforcement” and “an uneven application of the law.” Without offering any specific allegation, DeSantis took aim at two favorite Republican targets — Hillary Clinton and Biden’s son, Hunter — and suggested they have escaped federal accountability because of such “political bias.”

In remarks at the North Carolina GOP convention on Friday night, DeSantis didn’t mention Trump by name but again made the comparison to Clinton.

“Is there a different standard for a Democratic secretary of state versus a former Republican president?” DeSantis asked. “I think there needs to be one standard of justice in this country. … At the end of the day, we will once and for all end the weaponization of government under my administration.”

Kari Lake, a Trump loyalist who lost the governor’s race in Arizona last year, used her speech to Georgia Republicans on Friday night to repeat Trump’s false claims of a rigged 2020 election and she suggested that the indictment was another way to deny him the presidency.

“He’s doing so well in the polls that they decided they can’t stop him. So what do they do? They indict him on completely bogus charges,” Lake said. “The illegitimate Biden administration wants to lock our beloved President Trump for more than 200 years. Wow.”

Among the declared Republican contenders, only Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson had explicitly called for Trump to end his candidacy.

On Friday, Republicans and Democrats on the House Transportation Committee released a 773-page proposal to reauthorize FAA programs for the next five years.

Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., described the proposal as a compromise and said many issues could still be fought out when congressional committees begin considering changes in the legislation next week.

The FAA is under fire for a shortage of air traffic controllers, aging technology and close calls between planes. The agency has a new acting administrator with no aviation experience. It has lacked a Senate-confirmed leader for more than a year, since the last one resigned halfway through his term.

One provision of the House bill would let airlines advertise the “base airfare” — excluding taxes and fees — as long as they include a link to the all-in price or disclose it some other way. That would weaken an Obama administration rule that airlines have long fought to kill, and consumer advocates are unhappy about the House move.

“These protections were hard fought and took years to enact,” said William McGee, an aviation expert at the American Economic Liberties Project. “Any consumer can tell you that online airline bookings are confusing enough. The last thing we need is to roll back an existing protection that provides effective transparency.”

The House committee leaders also propose to let people become airline pilots with less time in the cockpit. The bill would not change the requirement for 1,500 hours of training, but it would allow 250 hours — up from the current 100 hours — to occur in simulators rather than flying a plane.

Airlines, particularly the smaller ones that operate regional flights, have long fought against the 1,500-hour rule, which already has exemptions that let military pilots and graduates of some aviation schools qualify with fewer hours. The rule was put in after a 2009 crash that killed 50 people.

Garth Thompson, head of the Air Line Pilots Association unit at United Airlines, said it is “a horrible idea” to weaken the rule.

“That rule, like so many federal aviation regulations, is written in blood, literally,” Thompson said. “That regulation came about because of the Colgan Air crash and other crashes that involved experience issues.”

Asked about changes in airfare advertising and pilot training, Larsen said, “It’s something we can live with.” The change in pilot training rules, he said, is a priority of the Transportation Committee’s Republican chairman, Sam Graves of Missouri, and both sides had to compromise during drafting of the bill.

Elsewhere in the bill, Larsen said, Democrats were able to include provisions they wanted, such as those covering wheelchair accessibility.

The bill also includes provisions aimed at improving airport infrastructure and the supply of sustainable aviation fuel. It would require airline planes to be outfitted with better cockpit voice recorders and, for the first time, cockpit video recorders to improve accident investigations. Pilots have opposed the video recorders.

Some other contentious topics were left out, including raising the mandatory retirement age of 65 for pilots and easing restrictions on flights from Reagan Washington National Airport in northern Virginia.

The “clean slate” legislation would automatically seal most recent convictions — three years after serving time or parole for a misdemeanor, and eight years for felony convictions. Sex crimes and most Class A felonies, such as murder, will not be eligible for sealing.

The state Assembly debated the bill for almost five hours before passing it on a party-line vote, garnering applause and cheers. The state Senate is expected to follow and pass the measure, according to state legislative leaders.

Some liberal lawmakers and unions who support the bill say it would give New Yorkers a path forward that is not encumbered by past mistakes. They say a criminal record often means difficulty obtaining secure work and housing.

That’s the case for Ismael Diaz Jr., of Long Island, who was released from prison seven years ago and is still struggling to find secure employment.

Diaz, who served almost 10 years in prison for manslaughter, said he went through three rounds of interviews for a janitorial position at a supermarket before being told he was “unemployable” because of his criminal record.

“I was stressed out because I was trying to get a job and you can’t because of having a record,” said Diaz, 52. “I want to earn a salary and take care of my family and start building up my life where it is supposed to be.”

Other states including Utah and Michigan have passed similar measures. California passed legislation last year that would automatically seal conviction and arrest records for most ex-offenders who are not convicted of another felony for four years.

Business groups including big companies like JPMorgan Chase and Verizon have also endorsed the New York legislation. They say increasing the labor pool would boost the state’s economy and make the state more competitive.

Under New York state law, employers can ask about conviction records at any point in the hiring process, but they must consider factors such as whether the conviction has any bearing on the person’s ability to do the job. But advocates for the legislation say that despite that, those with criminal records face huge barriers to stable employment.

Nearly 2.2 million people in New York have criminal convictions, according to a study by the Data Collaborative for Justice, a research center at John Jay College. The study is based on New Yorkers who had convictions from 1980 to 2021.

But Republican lawmakers and victim advocacy groups have criticized the legislation, warning it will take away accountability for those who have committed crimes.

“I’m sorry, you committed it, you’re convicted of it, and unfortunately you have a debt to pay to society, and some aspects of those will be with you forever, just like you did to your victim,” said Republican state Assemblymember Anthony Palumbo, also a former prosecutor, before floor deliberations. “I think this is completely disregarding the victims of those crimes and disregarding society as a whole.”

Palumbo said he favors an existing sealing statute in New York through which people can apply to seal their records depending on the type of conviction and whether they’re a repeat offender. But advocates for the state’s “clean slate” bill said the application process is cumbersome and expensive.

Less than 1% of New Yorkers eligible for sealing criminal records through that statute have successfully done so, according to a study conducted by Santa Clara University.

The automatic sealing would not apply to a person who has a pending felony charge in another state.

The state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, in coordination with the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, will be tasked to provide data to state administrative agencies so that they can seal eligible convictions.

Those sealed convictions could be later accessed by any court, prosecutors and defense attorneys under certain conditions, as well as by federal and state law enforcement agencies. Gun licensing agencies, law enforcement employers, and employers for work with vulnerable populations such as children and older adults will still be allowed to access the criminal records.

The original version of the bill excluded only sex crimes from automatic sealing and required seven years to pass until a felony conviction could be sealed.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she wants to make sure the bill would not have “any negative, unintended consequences” while also giving those with criminal records a second chance.

“It’s not a simple answer. These are complicated issues, far more than people may realize at first glance,” Hochul told reporters at an unrelated event earlier in the week. “My goal as governor is to make sure we have forward thinking, progressive policies that actually work.”

The bill would go into effect one year after it is signed into law.

In a statement announcing Owens’ promotion, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said, “Chief Owens is a talented, selfless, and inspiring leader who is dedicated to the Border Patrol’s law enforcement mission, the men and women who fulfill it, and the country that we all serve.”

“I am inspired by his commitment to the mission, and am grateful to him for his continued service in this new leadership role,” Mayorkas added.

The New York Times reported that Owens has been with the Border Patrol for more than 20 years, most recently as the head of the Del Rio division in Texas.

US-Mexico Border

migrants Jun 8

String of large buoys to deter migrants from crossing the Rio Grande into Texas

Immigration Jun 2

US Adds More Slots on Asylum-Claim App as Demand on US-Mexico Border Remains High

Ortiz said last month in a note to staff that was obtained by The Associated Press that he will leave June 30.

Ortiz managed the Border Patrol and its roughly 20,000 agents through the COVID-19 pandemic and Title 42 emergency health restrictions that began in March 2020 and allowed agents to quickly return migrants over the southern border.

He also oversaw the rollout of new policies on May 11 meant to discourage migrants from crossing illegally while opening up other legal pathways. The number of crossings has dropped, and the border has not seen the high numbers of crossings or chaos anticipated by even President Joe Biden with the end of the restrictions.

Nauta was hit with six charges including conspiracy to obstruct, withholding a document or record and scheme to conceal, according to the federal indictment that was unsealed Friday afternoon.

Nauta, Trump’s butler and body man — whose legal bills are being paid by a Trump political organization — had come under scrutiny by investigators over his shifting accounts of whether he moved boxes of documents at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida at his urging.

For more on this story, go to NBC News.

In the indictment, prosecutors spell out the types of classified material the Republican presidential candidate is accused of keeping at his Florida beach club after he left office in 2021, along with where he is said to have kept them and what he did with them.

A look at key moments as described in the indictment:

FLAUNTING DOCUMENTS

In July 2021 at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf course, the former president showed a writer, a publisher and two of his staff members — none of whom had a security clearance — a “plan of attack” that had been prepared by the Defense Department and a senior military official. In the meeting, which prosecutors said was recorded on audio, Trump told them the plan was “highly confidential.” “As president, I could have declassified it,” he said. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

In August or September 2021, more than six months after he was no longer president, Trump showed a classified map of a military operation in a foreign country to someone working for his political action committee who also did not have a security clearance. Trump acknowledged that he should not be showing the staffer the map and warned the staffer not to get too close.

DOCUMENTS STORED IN BATHROOM AND SHOWER

Trump, known for keeping mementos, kept hundreds of classified documents, along with newspapers, press clippings, notes and cards in cardboard boxes at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, according to the indictment.

Although “tens of thousands of members and guests” visited the club between the time that Trump left office and that federal agents retrieved the documents in August 2022, Trump had documents stored in various places around the resort, including a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom and a storage room.

The documents included “information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries, United States nuclear programs, potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack, and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack,” the indictment said.

‘I DON’T WANT ANYBODY LOOKING THROUGH MY BOXES’

When a grand jury in May 2022 issued a subpoena for classified records at Mar-a-Lago, Trump sought to defy the order, telling his attorneys, “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes,” according to notes from a lawyer detailed in the indictment. The former president asked his attorneys if it would be better “if we just told them we don’t have anything here,” according to the lawyer’s recollection.

DIRECTING LAWYERS TO ‘PLUCK IT OUT’

One of Trump’s lawyers in June 2022 identified 38 documents with “classified” markings and put them in a folder, which he sealed with duct tape. He then went to see Trump, who asked the attorney: “Did you find anything? Is it bad? … Is it good?”

The attorney told federal investigators that he discussed the folder with Trump and the former president made a gesture that suggested he wanted the attorney to identify “anything really bad” and “you know, pluck it out.” The attorney clarified that Trump did not articulate such instructions beyond making that “plucking motion.” The attorney said he did not “pluck” anything from the folder but instead immediately contacted the FBI and another Trump attorney.

More: Trump Indictment

Donald Trump Jun 9

What's in Trump's indictment? Read the 49-page document

Donald Trump Jun 9

Donald Trump stored, showed off and refused to return classified documents, indictment says

KEEPING DOCUMENTS FROM HIS LAWYERS

Trump told his valet Walt Nauta “to move boxes of documents to conceal them” from the FBI, the grand jury and one of his own lawyers, according to the indictment.

The former president agreed at a May 23, 2022, meeting with his lawyers that one of them would return at a later date to look through storage boxes at Mar-a-Lago for classified documents. Before the lawyer could return, prosecutors said, Trump directed Nauta to remove 64 boxes from the storage room and bring them to his residence. He had Nauta return 30 boxes just before the lawyer showed up to look for documents, the indictment said.

Trump’s lawyers turned over some records to authorities on June 3, 2022. Trump told his attorneys that he was “an open book,” even though earlier in the day, Nauta had loaded “several of Trump’s boxes … on aircraft that flew Trump and his family north for summer,” the indictment said.

Associated Press writers Bill Barrow in Atlanta, Michael R. Sisak in New York, Meg Kinnard in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Gary Fields in Washington contributed to this report.

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Johnson resigned after receiving the results of an investigation by lawmakers into misleading statements he made to Parliament about “partygate,” a series of rule-breaking government parties during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a lengthy resignation statement, Johnson accused opponents of trying to drive him out — and hinted that his rollercoaster political career might not be over yet.

“It is very sad to be leaving Parliament — at least for now,” he said.

Johnson, 58, said he had “received a letter from the Privileges Committee making it clear — much to my amazement — that they are determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of Parliament.”

He called the committee investigating him — which has members from both government and opposition parties — a “kangaroo court.”

“Their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts,” Johnson said.

The resignation will trigger a special election to replace Johnson as a lawmaker for a suburban London seat in the House of Commons.

Johnson, whose career has seen a series of scandals and comebacks, led the Conservatives to a landslide victory in 2019 but was forced out by his own party less than three years later.

He had been awaiting the outcome of an investigation by a House of Commons standards committee over misleading statements he made to Parliament about a slew of gatherings in government buildings in 2020 and 2021 that breached pandemic lockdown rules.

Police eventually issued 126 fines over the late-night soirees, boozy parties and “wine time Fridays,” including one to Johnson, and the scandal helped hasten the end of his premiership.

Johnson has acknowledged misleading Parliament when he assured lawmakers that no rules had been broken, but he said he didn’t do so deliberately.

He told the committee he “honestly believed” the five events he attended, including a send-off for a staffer and his own surprise birthday party, were “lawful work gatherings” intended to boost morale among overworked staff members coping with a deadly pandemic.

The committee had been expected to publish its report in the next few weeks, and Johnson could have faced suspension from the House of Commons if he was found to have lied deliberately.

By quitting, he avoids a suspension that could have seen him ousted from his Commons seat by his constituents, leaving him free to run for Parliament again in future. His resignation statement suggested he was mulling that option. It was highly critical of Sunak, who served as Treasury chief in Johnson’s government before jumping ship with many other colleagues in July 2022 — resignations that forced Johnson out.

Johnson took aim at Sunak, who was chosen by the Conservatives in October to steady the government after the terms of Johnson and his briefly serving successor Liz Truss, who stepped down after six weeks when her tax-slashing policies caused financial turmoil.

Johnson claimed that “when I left office last year the government was only a handful of points behind in the polls. That gap has now massively widened.”

Conservative poll ratings went into decline during the turbulent final months of Johnson’s term and have not recovered. Opinion polls regularly put the opposition Labour Party 20 points or more ahead. A national election must be held by the end of 2024.

“Just a few years after winning the biggest majority in almost half a century, that majority is now clearly at risk,” Johnson said. “Our party needs urgently to recapture its sense of momentum and its belief in what this country can do.”

Johnson resigned hours after King Charles III rewarded dozens of his loyal aides and allies with knighthoods and other honors, a political tradition for former prime ministers that drew cries of cronyism from opponents of the ousted leader.

Johnson’s dramatic exit is the latest — but maybe not the last — chapter in a career of extremes. The rumpled, Latin-spouting populist with a mop of blond hair had held major offices, including London mayor, but also spent periods on the political sidelines before Britain’s exit from the European Union propelled him to the top.

Johnson’s bullish boosterism helped persuade 52% of Britons to vote to leave the EU, and he was elected prime minister in 2019 on a vow to “get Brexit done.”

He was less suited to the hard work of governing, and the pandemic — which landed Johnson in intensive care with COVID-19 — was a major challenge. Johnson’s government won plaudits for its rapid vaccine rollout, but the U.K. also had one of the highest coronavirus death tolls in Europe, and some of the longest lockdowns.

The final straw came when details emerged of parties held in Johnson’s Downing Street office and home while the country was in lockdown. “Partygate” caused outrage and finally pushed the Conservative Party to oust its election-winning but erratic leader.

Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the opposition Labour Party, responded to Johnson’s resignation with: “enough is enough.”

“The British public are sick to the back teeth of this never ending Tory soap opera played out at their expense,” she said.

“We want to make sure we are looking at slavery and its legacies,” said state Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages before the floor debate. “This is about beginning the process of healing our communities. There still is generational trauma that people are experiencing. This is just one step forward.”

The state Assembly passed the bill about three hours after spirited debate on Thursday. The state Senate passed the measure hours later, and the bill will be sent to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul for consideration.

politics Jun 8

NY lawmakers vote on bill that considers reparations for slavery

California May 6

California Panel OKs Plan to Distribute $800 BIllion in Reparations to Black Residents

New York is following the lead of California, which became the first state to form a reparations task force in 2020. That group recommended a formal apology from the state on its legacy of racism and discriminatory policies and the creation of an agency to provide a wide range of services for Black residents. They did not recommend specific payments amounts for reparations.

The New York legislation would create a commission that would examine the extent to which the federal and state government supported the institution of slavery. It would also address persistent economic, political and educational disparities experienced by Black people in the state today.

According to the New York bill, the first enslaved Africans arrived at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, then a Dutch settlement, around the 1620s and helped build the infrastructure of New York City. While the state Legislature enacted a statute that gave freedom to enslaved Africans in New York in 1817, it wasn’t implemented until 10 years later.

“I’m concerned we’re opening a door that was closed in New York State almost 200 years ago,” said Republican state Assemblymember Andy Gooddell during floor debates on the bill. Gooddell, who voted against the bill, said he supports existing efforts to bring equal opportunity to all and would like to “continue on that path rather than focus on reparations.”

In California, the reparations task force said in their report that the state is estimated to be responsible for more than $500 billion due to decades of over-policing, mass incarceration and redlining that kept Black families from receiving loans and living in certain neighborhoods. California’s state budget last year was $308 billion. Reparations in New York could also come with a hefty price tag.

The commission would be required to deliver a report one year after their first meeting. Their recommendations, which could potentially include monetary compensation for Black people, would be non-binding. The legislature would not be required to take the recommendations up for a vote.

New York Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who is the first Black person to hold the position, called the legislation “historic.”

Heastie along with the governor and legislative leader in the state Senate would each appoint three qualified members to the commission.

Other state legislatures that have considered studying reparations include New Jersey and Vermont, but none have yet passed legislation. A Chicago suburb in Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to make reparations available to Black residents through a $10 million housing project in 2021.

On the federal level, a decades-old proposal to create a commission studying reparations has stalled in Congress.

Some critics of reparations by states say that while the idea is well-intentioned, it can be misguided.

William Darity, a professor of public policy and African and African American Studies at Duke University said even calling them reparations is “presumptuous,” since it’s virtually impossible for states to meet the potentially hefty payouts.

He said the federal government has the financial capacity to pay true reparations and that they should be the ones responsible.

“My deeper fear with all of these piecemeal projects is that they actually will become a block against federal action because there will be a number of people who will say there’s no need for a federal program,” Darity said. “If you end up settling for state and local initiatives, you settle for much less than what is owed.”

New York’s 2020 Democratic presidential primary was held on June 23. There was no Republican presidential primary.

The bill was sponsored by the Democratic leaders in state Senate and Assembly and approved in both houses late Thursday.

Under the Democratic Party rules, New York could send additional delegates to the national convention if two neighboring states have their primaries on the same day.

There are proposals in neighboring Pennsylvania and Connecticut to set April 2 as the presidential primary date. However, the state Senate in Connecticut adjourned this week without voting on that state’s proposal.

The New York measure will be sent to Gov. Kathy Hochul for her consideration.

The document was unsealed Friday and the charges include willful retention of national defense information — a crime under the Espionage Act — and obstruction of justice. Trump said he has been ordered to appear in court in Miami on Tuesday.

Read the 49-page indictment below:

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The conduct alleged in the historic indictment — the first federal case against a former president — cuts to the heart of any president’s responsibility to safeguard the government’s most valuable secrets. Prosecutors say the documents he stowed, refused to return and in some cases showed to visitors risked jeopardizing not only relations with foreign nations but also the safety of troops and confidential sources.

“Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced,” Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel who filed the case, said in his first public statements. “Violations of those laws put our country at risk.”

Trump, currently the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is due to make his first court appearance Tuesday afternoon in Miami. In a rare bit of welcome news for the former president, the judge initially assigned to the case is someone he appointed and who drew criticism for rulings in his favor during a dispute last year over a special master assigned to review the seized classified documents. Meanwhile, two lawyers who worked the case for months announced Friday that they had resigned from Trump’s legal team.

All told, Trump faces 37 felony counts — 31 pertaining to the willful retention of national defense information, the balance relating to alleged conspiracy, obstruction and false statements — that could result in a substantial prison sentence in the event of a conviction. A Trump aide who prosecutors said moved dozens of boxes at his Florida estate at his direction, and then lied to investigators about it, was charged in the same indictment with conspiracy and other crimes.

Trump responded to the indictment Friday by falsely conflating his case with a separate classified documents investigation concerning President Joe Biden. Though classified records were found in a Biden home and office, there has been no indication that the president, unlike Trump, sought to conceal them or knew they were there.

“Nobody said I wasn’t allowed to look at the personal records that I brought with me from the White House. There’s nothing wrong with that,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.

The case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that also could lead to criminal charges. But among the various investigations he has faced, legal experts — as well as Trump’s own aides — had long seen the Mar-a-Lago probe as the most perilous threat and the one most ripe for prosecution. Campaign aides had been bracing for the fallout since Trump’s attorneys were notified that he was the target of the investigation, assuming it was not a matter of if charges would be brought, but when.

The indictment arrives at a time when Trump is continuing to dominate the Republican presidential primary. A Trump campaign official described the former president’s mood as “defiant” and he is expected to deliver a full-throated rebuke of the filing during a speech before Republican Party officials in Georgia Saturday afternoon and will also speak in North Carolina in the evening

Aides were notably more reserved after the indictment’s unsealing as they reckoned with the gravity of the legal charges and the threat they pose to Trump beyond the potential short-term political gain.

The document’s startling scope and breadth of allegations, including a reliance on surveillance video and an audio recording, will almost certainly make it harder for Republicans to rail against than an earlier New York criminal case that many legal analysts had derided as weak.

The documents case is a milestone for a Justice Department that had investigated Trump for years — as president and private citizen — but had never before charged him with a crime. The most notable investigation was an earlier special counsel probe into ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, but prosecutors in that probe cited Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Once he left office, though, he lost that protection.

The inquiry took a major step forward last November when Attorney General Merrick Garland, a soft-spoken former federal judge who has long stated that no person should be regarded as above the law, appointed Smith, a war crimes prosecutor with an aggressive, hard-charging reputation, to lead both the documents probe as well as a separate investigation into efforts to subvert the 2020 election. That investigation remains pending.

The 49-page indictment centers on hundreds of classified documents that Trump took with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago upon leaving office in January 2021. Even as “tens of thousands of members and guests” visited Mar-a-Lago between the end of Trump’s presidency and August 2022, when the FBI obtained a search warrant, documents were recklessly stored in spaces including a “ballroom, a bathroom and shower, and office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.”

The indictment claims that, for a two-month period between January and March 15, some of Trump’s boxes were stored in one of Mar-a-Lago’s gilded ballrooms. A picture included in the indictment shows boxes stacked in rows on the ballroom’s stage.

Prosecutors allege that Trump, who claimed without evidence that he had declassified all the documents before leaving office, understood his duty to care for classified information but shirked it anyway. It details a July 2021 meeting in Bedminster in which he boasted about having held onto a classified document prepared by the military about a potential attack on another country.

“Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” the indictment quotes him as saying, citing an audio recording. He also said he could have declassified the document but “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” according to the indictment.

Using Trump’s own words and actions, as recounted to prosecutors by lawyers, aides and other witnesses, the indictment alleges both a refusal to return the documents despite more than a year’s worth of government demands but also steps that he encouraged others around him to take to conceal the records.

For instance, prosecutors say, after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for the records in May 2022, Trump asked his own lawyers if he could defy the request and said words to the effect of, “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” one of his lawyers described him as saying.

But before his own lawyer searched the property for classified records, the indictment says, Trump directed aides to remove from the Mar-a-Lago storage room boxes of documents so that they would not be found during the search and therefore handed over to the government.

Weeks later, when Justice Department officials arrived at Mar-a-Lago to collect the records, they were handed a folder with only 38 documents and an untrue letter attesting that all documents responsive to the subpoena had been turned over. That day, even as Trump assured investigators that he was “an open book,” aides loaded several of Trump’s boxes onto a plane bound for Bedminster, the indictment alleges.

But suspecting that many more remained inside, the FBI obtained a search warrant and returned in August to recover more than 100 additional documents. The Justice Department says Trump held onto more than 300 classified documents, including some at the top secret level.

Walt Nauta, one of the personal aides alleged to have transported the boxes around the complex, lied to the FBI about the movement of the boxes and faces charges that he conspired to hide them, according to the indictment. His lawyer declined to comment.

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Nate Paul, 36, was taken into custody by federal agents and booked into an Austin jail in the afternoon, according to Travis County Sheriff’s Office records. It was not immediately clear what charges led to his arrest, but the records showed he was being held on a federal detainer for a felony.

Paul’s arrest followed a yearslong federal investigation into the Austin real estate developer — a probe that Paxton involved his office in, setting off a chain of events that ultimately led to his impeachment last month.

Lawyers for Paul did not immediately respond to requests for comment. One of Paxton’s defense attorneys, Dan Cogdell, said he had no additional information on the arrest. The FBI declined to comment, and a spokesman for federal prosecutors in West Texas did not respond to inquiries.

FBI agents examining Paul’s troubled real estate empire searched his Austin offices and palatial home in 2019. The next year, eight of Paxton ’s top deputies reported the attorney general to the FBI on allegations of bribery and abusing his office to help Paul, including by hiring an outside lawyer to examine the developer’s claims of wrongdoing by federal agents.

The allegations by Paxton’s staff prompted an FBI investigation, which remains ongoing, and are central to articles of impeachment overwhelmingly approved by the GOP-led state House of Representatives.

On Wednesday, Paxton’s defense team showed a packed room of journalists a bank statement that included a 2020 wire transfer purportedly showing him, and not a donor, paying more than $120,000 for a home renovation.

Ken Paxton May 26

Texas House Votes to Impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton

Ken Paxton May 28

Fight Still Ahead for Texas' Ken Paxton After Historic Impeachment Deepens GOP Divisions

The wire transfer was dated Oct. 1, 2020 — the same day Paxton’s deputies signed a letter informing the head of human resources at the Texas attorney general’s office that they had reported Paxton to the FBI.

The $121,000 payment was to Cupertino Builders, whose manager was an associate of Paul, state corporation and court records show.

The company did not incorporate as a business in Texas until more than three weeks after the transaction took place. A company of the same name was formed in Delaware in April of that year, although public filings there do not make clear who is behind it.

Last year a court-appointed overseer for some of Paul’s companies wrote in a report that Cupertino Builders was used for “fraudulent transfers” from his business to Narsimha Raju Sagiraju, who was convicted of fraud in California in 2016. The report described Sagiraju as Paul’s “friend.”

Paul, who also employed a woman with whom Paxton acknowledged having an extramarital affair, has denied bribing Paxton. In a deposition, Paul described Sagiraju as an “independent contractor” and said he didn’t remember how they first met.

The timing of the payment — and the identity of who was paid for renovations at Paxton’s home in Austin — was not publicly known before his new legal team held a news conference Wednesday in which they put financial documents on a projector screen while criticizing the impeachment. They were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Tony Buzbee, a prominent Houston attorney who was hired by Paxton over the weekend and led the news conference, said by email Thursday that receipts “clearly demonstrate” Paxton paid for the repairs. He did not address questions about the timing of the payments or Cupertino Builders.

“Without any evidence the politicians leading this sham impeachment falsely accused General Paxton of not paying for the repairs to his home. That is a lie,” Buzbee said.

Since becoming just the third sitting official in Texas history to be impeached, Paxton has attacked the proceedings as politically motivated and rushed, saying he was never given the chance to rebut the accusations in the state House.

“We have the receipts,” Buzbee told reporters Wednesday as the documents flashed onscreen. “This is the type of evidence we tried to offer them once we found out this foolishness was going on.”

Paxton is temporarily suspended from office pending the outcome of a trial in the Texas Senate that is set to begin no later than Aug. 28. The jury will be the members of the 31-seat Senate; one of them, Paxton’s wife, Sen. Angela Paxton, has not said whether she will recuse herself.

The Paxtons purchased the Austin house in 2018. When it was remodeled two years later, Paxton’s former staff alleged in court documents, Paul “was involved in” the work.

Among the 20 articles of impeachment are accusations that Paxton used the power of his office to help Paul over unproven claims of an elaborate conspiracy to steal $200 million of the developer’s properties. The FBI searched Paul’s home in 2019, but he has not been charged and his attorneys have denied wrongdoing.

The city has no record of building permits from the time of the renovations. A different Austin contractor — not Cupertino Builders — received a federal grand jury subpoena in 2021 for records related to work on Paxton’s home that started in January 2020.

Cupertino Builders was formed in October 2020 and dissolved less than two years later, according to Texas corporation records. Its manager was Sagiraju, who said in a deposition for an unrelated case that he did “consulting” work for Paul’s business and had an email address with Paul’s company.

Sagiraju acknowledged that he served prison time for securities fraud and grand theft in California before moving to Austin, according to a transcript of the deposition. He said he was first introduced to Paul by a mutual friend before his prison term and they later did “a few projects” together.

A lawyer for Sagiraju did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Paxton was separately indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, though he has yet to stand trial. ___

Bleiberg reported from Dallas. Associated Press journalists Adam Kealoha Causey in Dallas and Derek Karikari in New York contributed.

“It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him. Joe Biden kept classified documents for decades,” tweeted Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., a Trump loyalist. “I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice.

Donald Trump Jun 8

Donald Trump has been indicted in classified documents probe. What that means and what comes next

Donald Trump Jun 8

Donald Trump indicted on 7 charges in classified documents probe

“House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable,” McCarthy wrote.

Thursday’s indictment came out of a probe from Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. Garland has been scrupulous about not getting involved in the probe and said Smith would make his own charging decisions. Biden has also emphasized his distance from the probe and the White House said they learned of the indictment from media reports Thursday evening.

Still, many Republicans allied with Trump echoed the speaker. Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., called it a “sham indictment”: “Let’s be clear about what’s happening: Joe Biden is weaponizing his Department of Justice against his own political rival.”

But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Minority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., and members of the Senate Republican leadership team remained noticeably silent.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

But what does it mean to be indicted and what charges is the former president facing? Here’s what to know.

news Jun 8

Trump Indicted on Seven Criminal Charges in Classified Documents Case

news Jun 8

Trump Indictment Live Updates: Special Counsel Describes Gravity of Alleged Crimes, Experts Call Charges ‘Damning'

Donald Trump Jun 8

Here are the other investigations Donald Trump has to worry about

Indictment vs. arraignment — what’s the difference?

According to the Department of Justice, when a person gets indicted, they “are given formal notice that it is believed that they committed a crime.” That indictment informs them of the charges they face and other basic information.
An arraignment is the accused individual’s first appearance in front of a judge to face the charges.

The person will be fully informed of the charges and what rights they have going forward (rights to a trial, an attorney, etc.). They can then enter a plea of guilty, not guilty or no contest (otherwise known as Nolo Contendere).

Before a plea is entered however, the accused person and the prosecutors can reach a plea agreement to settle the case before a trial starts. Otherwise, the defendant pleads not guilty or no contest, and a trial date will be set.

When will Trump appear in court?

Trump has received a summons to appear in U.S. district court on June 13, NBC News reported.

What has Trump been charged with?

Trump is facing seven criminal charges in connection to more than 100 classified documents that were discovered last year at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

What is a grand jury?

A grand jury is made up of people drawn from the community, similar to a trial jury. But unlike juries that hear trials, grand juries don’t decide whether someone is guilty or innocent. They only decide whether there is sufficient evidence for someone to be charged. Grand juries exist in the federal court system and in many states.

Proceedings are closed to the public, including the media. There is no judge present nor anyone representing the accused.

Prosecutors call and question witnesses, and grand jurors can also ask questions.

Centuries-old rules have kept grand juries under wraps to protect the reputations of people who end up not being charged, to encourage reluctant witnesses to testify, to prevent those about to be indicted from fleeing and to guard against outside pressure.

Grand juries have long been criticized as little more than rubber stamps for prosecutors. Former New York Judge Sol Wachtler famously said that prosecutors could convince a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” Defenders of the process say it is a crucial safeguard against politically motivated prosecutions.

Can a former president be indicted?

In a word, yes. Longstanding Justice Department policy prohibits the federal indictment of a sitting president, but Trump, two years out of office, no longer enjoys that legal shield.

Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury earlier this year over an investigation into hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels. 

The former president was charged with falsifying business records over the payments made to Daniels and another woman near the end of his presidential campaign in 2016.

He’s since pleaded not guilty.

In the New York case, Trump is facing 34 felony counts.

That trial is set to begin March 25, 2024, according to NBC News.

NBC News and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

The White House said Thursday that Polly Trottenberg replaced Billy Nolen, who indicated in April that he planned to leave the FAA.

Trottenberg held a high-ranking job in the Transportation Department during the Obama administration and has most recently been deputy to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. She headed the New York City Transportation Department from 2014 to 2020 and worked as a U.S. Senate aide and at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The FAA, which manages air traffic throughout the nation, has been without a Senate-confirmed leader since March of last year, when Stephen Dickson resigned halfway through his five-year term. Since then, the agency has faced understaffing of air traffic controllers, a technical outage that grounded flights nationwide in January, and several close calls between airline jets.

Biden’s nominee to replace Dickson withdrew this year when it became clear that he would not be confirmed. Republicans said Phil Washington lacked enough aviation experience to run the FAA.

The White House said the administration is conducting a national search for a new nominee.

The former president faces a string of inquiries in various states and venues as he campaigns for a second term in the White House. He’s already been charged in a 34-count indictment in New York in a hush money case. The others include federal and state investigations into his efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election and a civil case that threatens his ability to ever again do business in New York.

Trump, a Republican, has denied any wrongdoing and says he is being targeted by Democrats trying to keep him from reclaiming the presidency in 2024.

news Jun 8

Trump Indictment Live Updates: Special Counsel Describes Gravity of Alleged Crimes, Experts Call Charges ‘Damning'

news Jun 1

Trump Was Recorded Acknowledging He Kept Classified Doc After Leaving White House

Here’s a look at the top probes:

HUSH MONEY SCHEME

Trump became the first former U.S. president in history to face criminal charges when he was indicted in New York in March on state charges stemming from hush money payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign to bury allegations that he had extramarital sexual encounters.

He pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Each count is punishable by up to four years in prison, though it’s not clear if a judge would impose any prison time if Trump is convicted.

The counts are linked to a series of checks that were written to his lawyer Michael Cohen to reimburse him for his role in paying off porn actor Stormy Daniels, who alleged a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, not long after Melania Trump gave birth to their son, Barron. Those payments were recorded in various internal company documents as being for a legal retainer that prosecutors say didn’t exist.

The former president is next set to appear in court on Dec. 4, two months before Republicans begin their nominating process in earnest.

GEORGIA

For over two years, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been investigating whether then-President Donald Trump and his allies illegally meddled in the 2020 election in Georgia.

She wrote in a letter to the county sheriff that she expects to announce any charging decisions between July 11 and Sept. 1. In a separate letter to a county Superior Court judge, she suggested that any indictments would likely come in August.

The Democratic district attorney’s investigation began shortly after the release of a recording of a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which the then-president suggested that Raffensperger could “find 11,780 votes” — just enough to overtake Democrat Joe Biden and overturn Trump’s narrow loss in the state.

But the investigation’s scope broadened considerably after that, and Willis convened a special grand jury to hear testimony from witnesses including high-profile Trump allies, such as attorney Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and high-ranking Georgia officials, such as Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp.

Prosecutors advised Giuliani and Georgia Republicans who served as fake electors that they were at risk of being indicted. The fake electors signed a certificate asserting Trump had won the election and declaring themselves the state’s electors, even though Biden had won the state and Democratic electors had already been certified.

A court filing in early May indicated that Willis had reached immunity deals with at least eight fake electors, suggesting they may be cooperating with authorities.

The foreperson on the special grand jury indicated publicly that the panel had recommended multiple indictments. It’s now up to Willis to decide whether to convene a regular grand jury and pursue criminal charges in the case.

Trump and his allies have denied wrongdoing, and he has repeatedly described his phone call to Raffensperger as “perfect.”

2020 ELECTION AND CAPITOL RIOT

Special counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Trump’s handling of classified documents, has also been leading a team probing efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the election that he falsely claimed was stolen.

Federal prosecutors have been especially focused on a scheme by Trump allies to put forth a slate of fake presidential electors in key battleground states who falsely declared that Trump, not Biden, had won the 2020 election. They have issued subpoenas to a number of state Republican Party chairs.

Federal prosecutors have brought multiple Trump administration officials before that grand jury for questioning, including former Vice President Mike Pence.

In a sign of the wide-ranging nature of the investigation, election officials in multiple states whose results were disputed by Trump have received subpoenas asking for past communications with or involving Trump and his campaign aides.

A House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol recommended that the Justice Department bring criminal charges against Trump and associates who helped him launch a wide-ranging pressure campaign to try to overturn his 2020 election loss.

NEW YORK CIVIL CASES

New York Attorney General Letitia James has sued Trump and the Trump Organization, alleging they misled banks and tax authorities about the value of assets including golf courses and skyscrapers to get loans and tax benefits.

That lawsuit could lead to civil penalties against the company if James, a Democrat, prevails. She is seeking a $250 million fine and a ban on Trump doing business in New York. Manhattan prosecutors investigated the same alleged conduct but did not pursue criminal charges.

A civil trial is scheduled in state court for October.

In a separate civil case in federal court in New York, Trump was found liable in May of sexually abusing and defaming former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s. The jury rejected Carroll’s claim that Trump had raped her in a dressing room.

Trump was ordered to pay $5 million to Carroll. He has appealed and has adamantly denied her accusations.

Syed will be the highest-ranking Muslim official in the U.S. government.

Republicans on the Small Business Committee had blocked his nomination, citing the agency’s payouts to abortion providers and other reasons. President Joe Biden had first nominated the Pakistani-born businessman to the position in March 2021, and he renominated him this year in the new Congress.

Syed was confirmed 54-42.

Sen. Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat who chairs the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, said ahead of the vote that the position of deputy administrator at the SBA has been vacant for nearly five years over two presidential administrations.

“It is about time we get this done,” Cardin said.

Syed’s nomination stalled in committee last Congress after Republicans repeatedly failed to appear for votes. Republicans, led by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul — then the panel’s top Republican — gave several different explanations, including Syed’s affiliation with a Muslim advocacy group, small-business loans he received and, finally, the agency’s loans to branches of Planned Parenthood.

The stalemate led to Democratic charges of anti-Muslim bias and galvanized some Muslim and Jewish organizations to condemn the delay.

Rabbi Jack Moline, then-president of Interfaith Alliance, argued at the time that the inaction was an “excuse for a lot of issues that have nothing to do with suitability for the position.”

With an increased majority this year that gave Democrats an extra vote on the committee, the panel approved Syed’s nomination in March, two years after he was first nominated. Five Republicans voted to confirm him in Thursday’s final vote.

Republicans on the committee still have objections. Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, the new top Republican on the business committee, said she believes Syed was slow to disclose loans he had received and was not forthcoming enough in questioning as the committee has been concerned about potentially fraudulent pandemic loans.

“I’m not convinced Mr. Syed is ready and willing to change the SBA’s culture and bring much-needed accountability to the agency,” Ernst said.

Democrats pointed out during Syed’s 2021 confirmation hearing that at the time, he was not required to disclose the loans in his nominations paperwork.

Lina Khan, the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, is also Muslim.

Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced the plan Thursday after signing border security legislation passed during the 88th regular legislative session, adding that state lawmakers provided $5.1 billion to pay for the state’s ongoing effort to secure the border.

The governor said the state will continue to employ whatever strategies are effective to prevent migrants from crossing the border and said Thursday that could now include “mile after mile after mile” of an inflatable barrier.

“We’re securing the border at the border,” Abbott said. “What these buoys will allow us to do is prevent people from even getting to the border.”

Texas DPS Director Col. Steve McCraw said the first 1,000 feet of buoys will be strung together in the Rio Grande in Maverick County, near Eagle Pass, on July 7, in an area often used by smugglers.

McCraw said the buoys sit about 4 feet above the water and can be anchored to the riverbed below with webbing to prevent someone from swimming underneath. McCraw said testing done by DPS special operators confirmed it was very difficult to go over or through the buoys and that overcoming the barrier takes great effort, specialized skills and equipment.

“We don’t want anyone to get hurt. In fact, we want to prevent people from getting hurt. We want to prevent people from drowning and this is a proactive way,” said McCraw. “We don’t want people to come across and continue to put themselves at risk when they go between the ports of entry.”

Abbott said the barrier will be deployed strategically, as needed, but did not reveal any other locations where they plan to install the floating barrier.

“One of the goals is to slow down and deter as many of them [migrants] as possible. Some may eventually get to the border where they are going to face that multi-layer razor wire and the full force of Natural Guard and DPS officers which they will not be allowed to pass,” Abbott said. “They both know they have one instruction, do not allow anybody to enter into the state of Texas, period.”

House Democrats are now accusing O’Boyle of lying to the committee and are referring the matter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, according to a letter obtained by NBC News.

Lawmakers learned about the reason for O’Boyle’s suspension, which was previously unreported, in testimony that Jennifer Moore, executive assistant director of the FBI for human resources, provided to the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Portions of her testimony are included in a letter that top Democrats on the Judiciary and Weaponization panels wrote to Garland, alleging that O’Boyle lied to the committee about leaking information prior to his suspension.

In the letter, Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and Del. Stacey Plaskett, D-Virgin Islands, detail several instances of O’Boyle, in interviews with committee staff and in the panel’s public hearing, denying that he had leaked FBI information to the media.

O’Boyle testified that he made Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who chairs the Weaponization subcommittee, aware of his suspension and had provided him with the letter informing him of the FBI’s decision. But O’Boyle described the charge as nothing more than an allegation and claimed that he never provided anyone outside the agency with nonpublic information prior to being suspended. 

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

The Justice Department was expected to make public a seven-count indictment ahead of a historic court appearance next week in the midst of a 2024 presidential campaign punctuated by criminal prosecutions in multiple states.

The charges include false statements and conspiracy to obstruct, two sources briefed on the charges tell NBC News. All charges are related to retaining documents and obstructing justice. One source noted that seven charges don’t necessarily mean seven counts — multiple counts can be associated with each charge.

Appearing Thursday night on CNN, Trump attorney James Trusty said the indictment includes charges of willful retention of national defense information — a crime under the Espionage Act, which polices the handling of government secrets — obstruction, false statements and conspiracy.

The indictment carries unmistakably grave legal consequences, including the possibility of prison if Trump’s convicted.

Donald Trump Jun 1

Prosecutors Have Tape of Trump Discussing Holding Onto Classified Doc After Leaving Office

news Jan 10

Biden Classified Docs vs. Trump Classified Docs: Here Are the Key Differences

But it also has enormous political implications, potentially upending a Republican presidential primary that Trump had been dominating and testing anew the willingness of GOP voters and party leaders to stick with a now twice-indicted candidate who could face still more charges. And it sets the stage for a sensational trial centered on claims that a man once entrusted to safeguard the nation’s most closely guarded secrets willfully, and illegally, hoarded sensitive national security information.

The Justice Department did not immediately confirm the indictment publicly. But two people familiar with the situation who were not authorized to discuss it publicly said that the indictment included seven criminal counts. One of those people said Trump’s lawyers were contacted by prosecutors shortly before he announced Thursday on his Truth Social platform that he had been indicted.

Within minutes of his announcement, Trump, who said he was due in court Tuesday afternoon in Miami, began fundraising off it for his presidential campaign. He declared his innocence in a video and repeated his familiar refrain that the investigation is a “witch hunt.”

The case adds to deepening legal jeopardy for Trump, who has already been indicted in New York and faces additional investigations in Washington and Atlanta that also could lead to criminal charges. But among the various investigations he faces, legal experts — as well as Trump’s own aides — had long seen the Mar-a-Lago probe as the most perilous threat and the one most ripe for prosecution. Campaign aides had been bracing for the fallout since Trump’s attorneys were notified that he was the target of the investigation, assuming it was not a matter of if charges would be brought, but when.

The inquiry took a major step forward last November when Attorney General Merrick Garland, a soft-spoken former federal judge who has long stated that no one person should be regarded as above the law, appointed Jack Smith, a war crimes prosecutor with an aggressive, hard-charging reputation to lead both the documents probe as well as a separate investigation into efforts to subvert the 2020 election.

The case is a milestone for a Justice Department that had investigated Trump for years — as president and private citizen — but had never before charged him with a crime. The most notable investigation was an earlier special counsel probe into ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, but prosecutors in that probe cited Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. Once he left office, though, he lost that protection.

The indictment arises from a monthslong investigation into whether Trump broke the law by holding onto hundreds of documents marked classified at his Palm Beach property, Mar-a-Lago, and whether Trump took steps to obstruct the government’s efforts to recover the records.

Prosecutors have said that Trump took roughly 300 classified documents to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House, including some 100 that were seized by the FBI last August in a search of the home that underscored the gravity of the Justice Department’s investigation. Trump has repeatedly insisted that he was entitled to keep the classified documents when he left the White House, and has also claimed without evidence that he had declassified them.

Trusty claimed in an interview on NBC’s “TODAY” show that the charges against Trump had no criminal basis under the Presidential Records Act, and called the indictment an “overreach,” saying that something that wasn’t criminal for previous presidents has been “weaponized” by the Department of Justice. However, the charges Trump is facing falls under the Espionage Act.

Court records unsealed last year showed federal investigators believed they had probable cause that multiple crimes had been committed, including the retention of national defense information, destruction of government records and obstruction.

Since then, the Justice Department has amassed additional evidence and secured grand jury testimony from people close to Trump, including his own lawyers. The statutes governing the handling of classified records and obstruction are felonies that could carry years in prison in the event of a conviction.

Even so, it remains unclear how much it will damage Trump’s standing given that his first indictment generated millions of dollars in contributions from angry supporters and didn’t weaken him in the polls.

The former president has long sought to use his legal troubles to his political advantage, complaining on social media and at public events that the cases are being driven by Democratic prosecutors out to hurt his 2024 election campaign. He is likely to rely on that playbook again, reviving his longstanding claims that the Justice Department — which, during his presidency, investigated whether his 2016 campaign had colluded with Russia — is somehow weaponized against him.

Trump’s legal troubles extend beyond the New York indictment and classified documents case.

Smith is separately investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. And the district attorney in Georgia’s Fulton County is investigating Trump over alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election in that state.

Signs had mounted for weeks that an indictment was near, including a Monday meeting between Trump’s lawyers and Justice Department officials. His lawyers had also recently been notified that he was the target of the investigation, the clearest sign yet that an indictment was looming.

Though the bulk of the investigative work had been handled in Washington, with a grand jury meeting there for months, it recently emerged that prosecutors were presenting evidence before a separate panel in Florida, where many of the alleged acts of obstruction scrutinized by prosecutors took place.

The Justice Department has said Trump repeatedly resisted efforts by the National Archives and Records Administration to get the documents back. After months of back-and-forth, Trump representatives returned 15 boxes of records in January 2022, including about 184 documents that officials said had classified markings on them.

FBI and Justice Department investigators issued a subpoena in May 2022 for classified documents that remained in Trump’s possession. But after a Trump lawyer provided three dozen records and asserted that a diligent search of the property had been done, officials came to suspect even more documents remained.

The investigation had simmered for months before bursting into front-page news in remarkable fashion last August. That’s when FBI agents served a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago and removed 33 boxes containing classified records, including top-secret documents stashed in a storage room and desk drawer and commingled with personal belongings. Some records were so sensitive that investigators needed upgraded security clearances to review them, the Justice Department has said.

The investigation into Trump had appeared complicated — politically, if not legally — by the discovery of documents with classified markings in the Delaware home and former Washington office of President Joe Biden, as well as in the Indiana home of former Vice President Mike Pence. The Justice Department recently informed Pence that he would not face charges, while a second special counsel continues to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents.

But compared with Trump, there are key differences in the facts and legal issues surrounding Biden’s and Pence’s handling of documents, including that representatives for both men say the documents were voluntarily turned over to investigators as soon as they were found. In contrast, investigators quickly zeroed on whether Trump, who for four years as president expressed disdain for the FBI and Justice Department, had sought to obstruct the inquiry by refusing to turn over all the requested documents.

_____

Tucker reported from Washington. Colvin reported from Des Moines, Iowa.

The concert, to be held June 13, will be on the South Lawn of the White House. During the event, the White House says it will “uplift American art forms that sing to the soul of the American experience” as part of Black Music Month.

Artists that will be featured include Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, singer and talk show host Jennifer Hudson, and Cliff “Method Man” Smith, a member of the legendary hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan.

The list of performers also includes the Hampton University Concert Choir, Morgan State University’s Magnificent Marching Machine, Step Afrika! and “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band,” the White House website says.

Juneteenth Jun 19, 2022

Black Americans Living Abroad Reflect on Juneteenth Holiday

Juneteenth Jun 17, 2022

What Is Juneteenth? The Federal Holiday's History and Meaning, Explained

Juneteenth marks when the last enslaved people in the United States learned they were free — which occurred June 19, 1885, when Union soldiers told enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, news of their freedom. It became a federal holiday in 2021.

“This is a day of profound weight and profound power, a day in which we remember the moral stain, the terrible toll that slavery took on the country and continues to take,” Biden said two years ago as he signed legislation, backed by overwhelming bipartisan margins in Congress, that established Juneteenth as a federal holiday.

Andrea Swalec contributed to this report.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined with the court’s liberals in affirming a lower-court ruling that found a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act in an Alabama congressional map with one majority Black seat out of seven congressional districts in a state where more than one in four residents is Black.

The case had been closely watched for its potential to weaken the landmark voting rights law.

The court had allowed the challenged map to be used for the 2022 elections and at arguments in October, the justices appeared willing to make it harder to use the voting rights law to challenge redistricting plans as racially discriminatory.

The chief justice himself suggested last year that he was open to changes in the way courts weigh discrimination claims under the part of the law known as section 2. But on Thursday, Roberts wrote that the court was declining “to recast our section 2 case law as Alabama requests.”

Roberts was part of conservative high-court majorities in earlier cases that made it harder for racial minorities to use the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in ideologically divided rulings in 2013 and 2021.

The other four conservative justices dissented Thursday. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the decision forces “Alabama to intentionally redraw its longstanding congressional districts so that black voters can control a number of seats roughly proportional to the black share of the State’s population. Section 2 demands no such thing, and, if it did, the Constitution would not permit it.”

The current case stems from challenges to Alabama’s seven-district congressional map, which included one district in which Black voters form a large enough majority that they have the power to elect their preferred candidate. The challengers said that one district is not enough, pointing out that overall, Alabama’s population is more than 25% Black.

A three-judge court, with two appointees of former President Donald Trump, had little trouble concluding that the plan likely violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the votes of Black Alabamians. The panel ordered a new map drawn.

But the state quickly appealed to the Supreme Court, where five conservative justices prevented the lower-court ruling from going forward. They allowed last year’s congressional elections to proceed under the map that the lower court had said is probably illegal.

At the same time, the court decided to hear the Alabama case, and arguments were held in early October.

Louisiana’s congressional map, also identified as probably discriminatory by a lower court, was allowed to remain in effect by the Supreme Court, too.

Partisan politics underlies the case. Republicans who dominate elective office in Alabama have been resistant to creating a second district with a Democratic-leaning Black majority, or close to one, that could send another Democrat to Congress.

The judges found that Alabama concentrated Black voters in one district, while spreading them out among the others to make it impossible for them to elect a candidate of their choice.

Alabama’s Black population is large enough and geographically compact enough to create a second district, the judges found.

Alabama argued that the lower court ruling would have forced it to sort voters by race and the state insisted it is taking a “race neutral” approach to redistricting.

At arguments in October, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson scoffed at the idea that race could not be part of the equation. Jackson, the court’s first Black woman, said that constitutional amendments passed after the Civil War and the Voting Rights Act a century later were intended to do the same thing, make Black Americans “equal to white citizens.”

Jackson and the other two liberals on the court, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, said a decision like the one issued Thursday would result in many fewer districts drawn to give racial minorities the opportunity to elect their candidates of choice.

Rep. James Comer said in a statement that the committee is removing a contempt resolution against Wray from Thursday’s schedule after receiving an accommodation that would give the full committee access to the document.

“Allowing all Oversight Committee members to review this record is an important step toward conducting oversight of the FBI and holding it accountable to the American people,” the Kentucky Republican said.

The action that played out over the last month against Wray reflects a larger breakdown between Republicans and the FBI that has only intensified this year, with some conservatives talking openly about trying to defund the bureau. It’s a rift that first opened during the Russia investigation of then-President Donald Trump and has only widened amid the FBI’s wide-ranging criminal investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, which some Republicans view as overly zealous and politicized.

FBI Jun 2

FBI Agrees to Show House Republican Lawmakers Document in Biden Family Probe

Student Loans Jun 7

President Biden vetoes bill that would have overturned student debt cancellation plan

The FBI made the last-ditch effort to ward off the contempt vote Wednesday, offering to give every lawmaker on the oversight committee access to a redacted version of a confidential document that alleges a bribery scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national. That’s according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

It was unclear until late Wednesday if Comer would accept the offer even as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said that would suffice.

The FBI has called the contempt vote unwarranted considering the bureau had “continuously demonstrated its commitment to accommodate the committee’s request,” while protecting the safety of sources and the integrity of ongoing investigations.

But Comer has consistently said that the only way for the FBI to comply with the subpoena is to provide an unredacted copy of the document.

FBI officials already showed a redacted version of the several-page form to Comer and Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the committee, during a 90-minute briefing Monday. The bureau described that briefing as an “extraordinary accommodation” where both men were able to take notes on the document and ask questions.

Former President Donald Trump has been informed he is a target of the federal criminal probe into his retention of hundreds of classified government records after leaving the White House, NBC News reported Wednesday evening.

Such notification typically occurs before prosecutors decide whether to lodge criminal charges against a target.

Trump’s attorneys were told at a meeting Monday at the Department of Justice with special counsel Jack Smith and other DOJ officials that he is a target of the classified documents investigation, according to two sources briefed on the meeting, NBC reported. It was not clear if they previously had been notified of that status for him.

Targets are people who prosecutors believe committed a crime. Targets often end up being indicted.

DOJ regulations say that a prosecutor, “in appropriate cases, is encouraged to notify such person a reasonable time before seeking an indictment in order to afford him or her an opportunity to testify before the grand jury.”

A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment.

Disclosure of Trump’s status in the investigation came as Taylor Budowich, a top aide of his, testified to a grand jury in U.S. District Court in Miami, which has been gathering evidence for the case.

Smith is probing Trump both for keeping classified records at his residence in his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, and his suspected efforts to hide those documents and keep them from government officials seeking their return. By law, presidents must surrender government records when they leave office.

A raid on Mar-a-Lago last August by the FBI uncovered hundreds of classified documents and other government records.

Trump in a social media post on Wednesday said, “no one has told me I’m being indicted.”

He added that he should not be criminally charged in the case “because I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Trump did not directly answer a New York Times reporter, Maggie Haberman, when she asked him if he had been told he was a target, she reported.

Trump, who is seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, was indicted by a New York state grand jury in March on charges of falsifying business records in connection with a 2016 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels by his then-personal lawyer.

He has pleaded not guilty in that case, which is due to go to trial next year in Manhattan Supreme Court.

Smith separately is overseeing a criminal probe of Trump’s efforts to reverse his loss in the 2020 national presidential election. A state prosecutor in Georgia likewise is investigating him and his allies for such efforts in that state’s presidential election that year.

Trump on Wednesday called the prosecutors in all of those cases “fascists” who were trying to harm him politically.

The measure had been pushed by Republicans, but it garnered a handful of Democratic votes in the Senate as well.

“It is a shame for working families across the country that lawmakers continue to pursue this unprecedented attempt to deny critical relief to millions of their own constituents,” Biden said in a statement when announcing his veto.

Despite the veto, Biden’s plan still isn’t secure. The U.S. Supreme Court, which is dominated by a conservative majority, is reviewing a legal challenge that could eliminate the program. A decision is expected this summer.

If enacted, Biden’s plan would forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt for borrowers making less than $125,000 per year.

Student loan payments were paused at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, they will resume in August for anyone whose debt is not wiped out by Biden’s plan.

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