ACLU calls James Comey indictment ‘a grotesque abuse of presidential power’ – live updates

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Donald Trump’s long public campaign to get someone in his administration to bring criminal charges against James Comey, the former FBI director he fired in 2017, finally succeeded on Thursday.

But the president has been so public about his loathing of the indicted man, and his desire to see him jailed, that it might be hard for prosecutors to convince a jury that the case was not brought for political reasons.

Comey was fired by Trump in 2017 after he reportedly refused a request to pledge his loyalty to the newly elected president, and then publicly confirmed to Congress that the FBI was conducting a counterintelligence investigation of Russian efforts to help Trump get elected in 2016.

Trump’s firing of Comey backfired, however, because it helped convince then deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel, former FBI director Robert Mueller, to, in his words, “oversee the previously confirmed FBI investigation of Russian government efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election and related matters”.

Although Mueller’s report, issued in 2019, concluded that his team “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”, the investigation unearthed evidence that a Russian effort did take place and, in Mueller’s words, “established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome”.

Mueller added that the Trump campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts”.

The indictment of Comey comes as Trump seeks to use the power of the justice department to punish a man he sees as a central figure in the Russia investigation he has continually described as “a witch-hunt” and “a hoax”.

Ahead of government funding expiring, House Democrats hold caucus meeting

The House Democratic caucus will meet virtually today at 2pm EST, ahead of a looming government shutdown just five days away.

Congressional Democrats have so far been united in their push-back on the Republican-written resolution to extend government funding until 21 November. For the president’s part, he cancelled a meeting with Democratic leadership that was scheduled for this week.

Democrats have also called the memo by the office of management and budget (OMB) – which told federal agencies to prepare for a reduction in force in the event of a shutdown – an intimidation tactic.

The House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, called Russ Vought, the director of the OMB, a “malignant political hack” earlier this week, and told him to “get lost”.

“We will not be intimidated by your threat to engage in mass firings,” Jeffries added.

ACLU calls Comey indictment 'a grotesque abuse of presidential power'

In a statement, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said that the indictment of former FBI director James Comey “represents a grotesque abuse of presidential power”.

“By firing his previously appointed U.S. Attorney and installing someone who would do his bidding and bring criminal charges at his direction. President Trump has yet again proven his disdain for the principles that have actually made America great,” said Mike Zamore, the ACLU’s national director of policy and government affairs. “The president and his administration have corrupted our system of justice to turn his campaign of retribution into reality.”

Donald Trump will leave the White House at about 9:50am EST to attend the Ryder Cup golf tournament in Bethpage, New York. We’ll keep an eye out for the president if he speaks to reporters en route.

He’ll spend the day at the competition before heading back to DC at 3:30pm EST.

President Donald Trump insisted South Korea will provide billions of dollars in investments “upfront”, despite Seoul’s assertion that it would suffer a financial crisis if it meets the US demands without safeguards.

In July, South Korea pledged $350bn toward US projects, but has balked at US demands for control over the funds and South Korean officials say talks to formalise their trade deal are at a deadlock.

Earlier this month, Trump formalised a trade deal with Japan, lowering tariffs on Japanese automobile imports and other products in return for $550bn of Japanese investment in US projects, and US officials have pressed Seoul to follow suit.

“We have in Japan it’s $550bn, South Korea’s $350bn. That’s upfront,” Trump told reporters on Thursday in the Oval Office as he touted the amount of money he said his sweeping tariffs have brought in.

South Korea, however, says it cannot afford to structure its investments in the same way as Japan, and president Lee Jae Myung told Reuters last week that without safeguards such as a currency swap, South Korea’s economy could be plunged into crisis.

Well, the president is awake.

Donald Trump has posted the following on his Truth Social social media network:

JAMES COMEY IS A DIRTY COP. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

That outburst came shortly a more detailed post in which he called former FBI director James Comey “corrupt".

Trump wrote:

Whether you like Corrupt James Comey or not, and I can’t imagine too many people liking him, HE LIED! It is not a complex lie, it’s a very simple, but IMPORTANT one. There is no way he can explain his way out of it. He is a Dirty Cop, and always has been, but he was just assigned a Crooked Joe Biden appointed Judge, so he’s off to a very good start. Nevertheless, words are words, and he wasn’t hedging or in dispute. He was very positive, there was no doubt in his mind about what he said, or meant by saying it. He left himself ZERO margin of error on a big and important answer to a question. He just got unexpectedly caught. James “Dirty Cop” Comey was a destroyer of lives. He knew exactly what he was saying, and that it was a very serious and far reaching lie for which a very big price must be paid! President DJT

Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan said he and President Donald Trump had made “meaningful progress” on a range of regional and bilateral issues at their first meeting in the White House in six years, where they discussed defence cooperation and trade.

Trump told reporters after Thursday’s meeting with Erdogan that he believed Nato member Turkey would agree to his request to stop purchasing Russian oil and said that he may lift US sanctions on Ankara so it can buy advanced American F-35 jets, Reuters reported.

In comments to reporters on his flight home from Washington, Erdogan said the two leaders had exchanged views on steps to boost trade, including the revision of customs duties to achieve their target of $100bn trade volume.

“It’s certainly impossible to resolve every issue in a single meeting. However, this meeting has led to meaningful progress on many issues,” Erdogan said, according to a transcript of his comments shared by his office on Friday.

Erdogan added that he had left the meeting with Trump “happy”.

A group of Disney investors is asking the company to turn over documents related to the company’s decision to temporarily suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, amid charges the media company may have been “complicit in succumbing” to media censorship.

The investors, composed of lawyers for the American Federation of Teachers and Reporters Without Borders, noted that Disney’s stock “suffered significant declines in response to the company’s abrupt decision to suspend Mr. Kimmel and his show”, it said in a letter to Disney.

“The fallout from suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live! sparked criticism as an attack on free speech, triggered boycotts and union support for Mr. Kimmel, and caused Disney’s stock to plummet amid fears of brand damage and concerns that Disney was complicit in succumbing to the government overreach and media censorship,” the letter said.

The lawyers are demanding “copies of any meeting minutes, meeting agenda and written materials provided to the [company’s] board or presented at any meeting of the board” regarding Kimmel’s decision. It cites a law in Delaware, where Disney is incorporated, that says shareholders can receive materials around board discussion “to investigate potential wrongdoing, mismanagement and breach of fiduciary duty by members [of the board]”.

Disney did not immediately respond to requests for comments.

Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday outlining the terms of a deal to transfer TikTok to a US owner.

Trump said he and China’s president Xi Jinping had come to an agreement to allow TikTok to continue operating in the US, separating the social media platform from its Chinese owner ByteDance. Trump said the deal complies with a law that would have forced the shutdown of the app for American users had it not been divested and sold to a US owner.

“I spoke with President Xi and he said, ‘Go ahead with it,’” Trump said at a press conference. “This is going to be American-operated all the way.”

Under the plan, US investors will take over the majority of TikTok’s operations and take charge of a licensed copy of the app’s powerful recommendation algorithm. American companies are expected to own about 65% of the US version of the spun-off company, while ByteDance and Chinese investors will own less than 20%. The new version of TikTok will be controlled by a seven-member board of directors made up of cybersecurity and national security experts, six of them Americans, according to the White House.

The new US company will be valued at $14bn, according to JD Vance, who also spoke at the press conference, a number far lower than the valuation for ByteDance overall, which is estimated to be around $330bn. By comparison, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is valued at $1.8tn.

The group of American TikTok investors is led by the US software giant Oracle, which will oversee TikTok’s US operations, provide cloud service for user data storage and get a license to take control of the app’s algorithm. White House officials have said ByteDance and Chinese officials will not have access to US user data.

The Open Society Foundations (OSF), the major philanthropic group funded by George Soros, has criticized the Trump administration for “politically motivated attacks on civil society” after a report that the justice department had instructed federal prosecutors to come up with plans to investigate the charity.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that a lawyer in the office of Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, sent a memo to several federal prosecutors in attorney’s offices in California, New York, Washington DC, Chicago and Detroit, offering a range of charges to consider against the group. Those charges included racketeering, arson, wire fraud and material support for terrorism, the newspaper reported.

The push comes as Trump has ramped up efforts to deploy the justice department to target his enemies. He has pledged to crack down on leftwing groups in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing and has repeatedly singled out Soros, a major funder of liberal groups, as a target. “We’re going to look into Soros, because I think it’s a Rico case against him and other people,” Trump said on 12 September, using an acronym to refer to racketeering charges. “Because this is more than like protests. This is real agitation.”

In a statement, the OSF described the effort as “meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with and undermine the first amendment right to free speech”.

“The Open Society Foundations unequivocally condemn terrorism and do not fund terrorism. Our activities are peaceful and lawful, and our grantees are expected to abide by human rights principles and comply with the law,” it said in a statement.

Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook urged the US supreme court on Thursday to reject Donald Trump’s attempt to fire her, telling the justices the Republican president’s unprecedented move would destroy the central bank’s independence and disrupt financial markets.

Lawyers for Cook filed a written response opposing the justice department’s 18 September emergency request to lift a federal judge’s order that blocked Trump from immediately removing Cook, an appointee of Democratic former president Joe Biden, while her legal challenge continues.

Granting Trump’s request, her lawyers told the supreme court, “would dramatically alter the status quo, ignore centuries of history and transform the Federal Reserve into a body subservient to the president’s will”.

Washington-based US district judge Jia Cobb ruled on 9 September that Trump’s claims that Cook committed mortgage fraud before taking office – allegations that Cook denies – likely were not sufficient grounds for removal under the 1913 law that created the Fed.

The US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit in a 2-1 ruling on 15 September denied the administration’s request to put Cobb’s order on hold, ruling that Cook likely was denied due process in violation of the US constitution’s fifth amendment.

In Thursday’s filing, Cook’s lawyers said the Fed’s “unique history of independence” has helped make the US economy the strongest in the world. Siding with Trump, they wrote, “would signal to the financial markets that the Federal Reserve no longer enjoys its traditional independence, risking chaos and disruption”.

Cook, the first Black woman to serve as a Fed governor, sued Trump in August after the president announced he would remove her. Cook has said the claims made by Trump against her did not give him the legal authority to remove her and were a pretext to fire her for her monetary policy stance.

The White House is telling federal agencies to prepare large-scale firings of workers if the government shuts down next week in a partisan fight over spending plans – prompting the Democrats to accuse Donald Trump of intimidation tactics.

In a memo released on Wednesday night, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said agencies should consider a reduction in force for federal programs whose funding would lapse next week, is not otherwise funded and is “not consistent with the president’s priorities”.

That would be a much more aggressive step than in previous shutdowns, when federal workers not deemed essential were furloughed but returned to their jobs once the US Congress approved a new financial plan.

A mass firing would eliminate employees positions, which would trigger yet another massive upheaval in a federal workforce that has already faced major rounds of cuts this year, leading with the dramatic intervention by Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) early in the second Trump administration.

When asked by reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon about the possibility of a government shutdown, Trump said: “Could be, yeah, because the Democrats are crazed. They don’t know what they’re doing.”

Asked whether he would agree to a request from Democrats for an extension of subsidies for the costs of healthcare plans under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, on which millions of Americans depend for health insurance – which has become the sticking point in negotiations over the government funding bill – Trump simply repeated his false claim that Democrats are insisting on funding “to give the money to illegal aliens”.

Trump signs memo targeting ‘domestic terrorism’ amid fears of crackdown on the left

Donald Trump issued a presidential memorandum on Thursday aimed at reining in what he has called a radical leftwing domestic “terror network” but which seemed likely to meet fierce legal pushback from critics depicting it as a licence for a broad crackdown on his political opponents.

Prompted by journalists, Trump suggested that George Soros, the billionaire Hungarian-born philanthropist who funds the Open Society Foundations, could be in his sights. He also identified Reid Hoffman, a billionaire venture capitalist, adding: “I hear about him. Maybe it could be him. It could be a lot of people.”

Earlier, the Open Society Foundations had hit back at reports that the justice department was planning to target the group and criticized the Trump administration for “politically motivated attacks on civil society”.

Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a statement: “After one of the most harrowing weeks for our first amendment rights, the president is invoking political violence, which we all condemn, as an excuse to target non-profits and activists with the false and stigmatizing label of ‘domestic terrorism’. This is a shameful and dangerous move.”

At a signing ceremony in the Oval Office, the memorandum was presented as aimed at “establishing a comprehensive strategy to investigate, disrupt and dismantle all stages of organized political violence and domestic terrorism”.

It was said to be part of an administration-wide response that would include the FBI’s joint terrorism taskforces, the Department of Justice and the Department of Treasury.

Trump says US will impose new tariffs on heavy trucks, drugs and kitchen cabinets

Donald Trump on Thursday announced a new round of punishing tariffs, saying the United States will impose a 100% tariffs on imported branded drugs, 25% tariff on imports of all heavy-duty trucks and 50% tariffs on kitchen cabinets.

The US president also said he would start charging a 50% tariff on bathroom vanities and a 30% tariff on upholstered furniture next week, with all the new duties to take effect from 1 October.

Drug companies warned earlier this year that Americans would suffer the most if Trump decided to impose tariffs on pharmaceuticals.

In 2024, the US imported nearly $233bn in pharmaceutical and medicinal products, according to the Census Bureau. The prospect of prices doubling for some medicines could send shock waves to voters as healthcare expenses, as well as the costs of Medicare and Medicaid, potentially increase.

Pascal Chan, vice-president for strategic policy and supply chains at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, warned that the tariffs could harm Americans’ health with “immediate price hikes, strained insurance systems, hospital shortages, and the real risk of patients rationing or foregoing essential medicines”.

Opening summary

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

We start with the news that James Comey, the former FBI director and one of Donald Trump’s most frequent targets, was indicted on Thursday on one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding, the latest move in the president’s retribution campaign against his political adversaries.

The indictment, filed in federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia, shows Comey’s charges centred on whether he lied and misled lawmakers during testimony in September 2020 about the Russia investigation.

Comey was expected to surrender and have his initial appearance in federal district court on Friday morning, according to a person familiar with the matter. Comey is expected to be represented by Patrick Fitzgerald, a former US attorney for the northern district of Illinois.

While the precise details were not clear in the sparse, two-page indictment, it appeared to reference Comey’s testimony that he had never authorized someone at the FBI to leak to the news media about the Trump or Hillary Clinton investigations – a claim prosecutors alleged was false.

“No one is above the law. Today’s indictment reflects this Department of Justice’s commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people,” Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, said in a statement on Thursday.

The indictment followed Trump’s instruction to Bondi to “move now” to prosecute Comey and other officials he considers political foes, in an impatient and extraordinarily direct social media post trampling on the justice department’s tradition of independence.

It also came less than a week after Lindsey Halligan was installed as the top federal prosecutor in the eastern district of Virginia, after Trump fired her predecessor, Erik Siebert, after he declined to bring charges against Comey over concerns there was insufficient evidence.

Halligan, most recently a White House aide and former Trump lawyer who has no prosecutorial experience, was also presented with a memo earlier this week laying out why charges should not be brought. But the justice department still pushed it through, people familiar with the matter said.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the US senate intelligence committee, said:

Donald Trump has made clear that he intends to turn our justice system into a weapon for punishing and silencing his critics.

Responding to the indictment, hours after it was filed, Comey said in a video statement posted on Instagram that he was innocent and welcomed a trial.

“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way. We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either,” Comey said.

Read the full story here:

In other developments:

• Authorities said on Thursday that the words of the suspect in the shooting on Wednesday at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facility in Texas were “definitively anti-Ice” but said that they did not find evidence that the suspect was a member of “any specific group or entity, nor did he mention any specific government agency other than Ice”.

• The Open Society Foundations (OSF), the major philanthropic group funded by George Soros, criticized the Trump administration for “politically motivated attacks on civil society” after a report that the justice department had instructed federal prosecutors to come up with plans to investigate the charity.

• Donald Trump issued a presidential memorandum on Thursday aimed at reining in what he has called a radical leftwing domestic “terror network” but which seemed likely to meet fierce legal pushback from critics depicting it as a licence for a broad crackdown on his political opponents.

• Donald Trump on Thursday announced a new round of punishing tariffs, saying the United States will impose a 100% tariffs on imported branded drugs, 25% tariff on imports of all heavy-duty trucks and 50% tariffs on kitchen cabinets. The US president also said he would start charging a 30% tariff on upholstered furniture next week.

• Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday outlining the terms of a deal to transfer TikTok to a US owner. Trump said he and China’s president Xi Jinping had come to an agreement to allow TikTok to continue operating in the US, separating the social media platform from its Chinese owner ByteDance. Trump said the deal complies with a law that would have forced the shutdown of the app for American users had it not been divested and sold to a US owner.

• A group of Disney investors is asking the company to turn over documents related to the company’s decision to temporarily suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, amid charges the media company may have been “complicit in succumbing” to media censorship.

• An impromptu statue of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein holding hands was unceremoniously removed from the National Mall in Washington just a day after a group of anonymous artists erected it there.