Mitch McConnell statement suggests he considers Bill Pulte unfit for national intelligence director role –as it happened

Key events

Closing summary

This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:

• The US House of Representatives delivered a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump over his war on Iran on Wednesday, as representatives backed a move to force him to seek approval from Congress or withdraw US forces.

• Before signing an executive order related to customs in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump took seven minutes to reassure an anxious public, beset by worries about a protracted war with Iran, surging gasoline prices and rising inflation, that progress has been made on at least one front: the resurfacing of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is nearly complete.

• The president also took time to once again attack the CNN host Kaitlan Collins for not smiling in his presence and blamed her network for the suicides of four January 6 defendants.

• The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, refused to say whether Trump, his family and his businesses would still get immunity from IRS audits after the administration yesterday abandoned plans for a $1.8bn fund that would have benefited the president’s allies.

• Bessent did confirm that he threatened to beat up a fellow administration member, Bill Pulte, last summer.

With just 37 days to go until California certifies primary results, Steve Hilton, immigrant Fox News host, holds early lead in governor's race

As California counties continue to count votes and report partial results, a reminder on the secretary of state’s website notes that there are just 37 days left until the 10 July deadline for the state to certify the results. In each of those races, the top-two vote getters will then face off in the November general election.

As things stand in the two biggest elections, for California governor and Los Angeles mayor, it looks likely that at least one Democrat will advance to the final round.

Elections analysts at VoteHub project that Xavier Beccera, the former state attorney general and US congressman and Joe Biden’s health secretary, appears to be on track to make the run-off for governor. His most likely opponent looks to be Republican Steve Hilton, an immigrant from the UK who started his career as a political adviser to former prime minister David Cameron in his native London and is now a Trump-backed former Fox News host. The billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer, who is in third place so far, has what some experts call a narrow shot at overtaking Hilton, depending on the partisan make-up of the votes still to be counted.

The Associated Press has already projected that Democrat Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, will advance to the run-off and get a chance to keep her job in November. A Republican reality TV star, Spencer Pratt, is currently in second place in the primary, but another Democrat, Nithya Raman, could still overtake him.

One race still holds the potential to be a catastrophe for Democrats. In the primary for the newly redrawn sixth congressional district, a Republican congressman, Kevin Kiley, who is running as an independent, currently leads the count but a number of Democrats split the vote, and another Republican, Michael Stansfield, an unknown 50-year-old tech support worker, currently has a 1,108-vote lead over the top Democrat, Richard Pan.

Enraged Trump once again attacks CNN host Kaitlan Collins for not smiling before she can even ask a question

In the Oval Office on Wednesday, before the CNN host Kaitlan Collins could even ask Donald Trump a question, he launched into a tirade against her for not smiling in his presence, and went on to accuse her network of being responsible for the suicides of a number of his supporters who took part in the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

The rant began when the president was asked, by another reporter, to explain why he had apparently “decided to drop” the $1.8bn “anti-weaponization” fund his Department of Justice created to funnel taxpayer money to people indicted for committing crimes on his behalf.

Trump began by saying that he was strongly in favor of the fund, which he claimed he had no hand in creating, but that it had been blocked by “a radical left judge”.

“I love it. I think it’s so important,” the president said. He then bemoaned what he said were the injustices committed against “great American people” who were prosecuted by the justice department during the Biden administration, without pointing out that many of his supporters who joined the January 6 riot either pleaded guilty to committing crimes or were convicted by juries of their peers.

As his monologue went on, Trump insisted that all of those indicted for the January 6 riot were innocent victims, himself included.

“These people, their lives have been destroyed. Their families have been destroyed. Many of them. And actually, I’m not just talking about a few people. Many of them,” the president said. “I’m one of them,” he added, calling the FBI raid on his beach club in Mar-a-Lago, where he illegally retained and tried to hide boxes of classified records, “fake and corrupt”.

It was then, entirely unprompted, that Trump turned his attention to attacking Collins, who was standing in the room.

“CNN’s a very corrupt organization, with a corrupt reporter standing right there,” the president said. “Never smiles. She never – she’s a young, beautiful woman, never smiles. I never see a smile off her face [sic]. I see her standing with hatred in her eyes.”

Fifteen minutes later, when Collins finally got to ask Trump a question, she brought the president back to the topic he had been ranting about when he attacked her.

“Excuse me, Mr President, just to clarify: is the $1.8bn DoJ fund dead or on hold?” Collins asked.

“I’d have to ask the lawyers,” Trump said, before heading off on another tangent, in which he suggested that the people he held responsible for persecuting his supporters, and him, were not Biden administration prosecutors, but journalists like Collins who had reported on the crimes committed on January 6.

“The weaponization fund as far as I’m concerned was a beautiful thing,” Trump said.

He then launched into a strident defense of the January 6 rioters who breached the Capitol and beat police officers, suggesting that they somehow deserved to be compensated with taxpayer funds for having been the victims of unflattering reporting.

“I thought that was the greatest thing because people like you have abused our people so badly,” Trump said to Collins. “The fake news, like CNN, like the New York Times, and like others have abused our people.”

As Collins tried to respond, Trump appeared to become even more irate that he was being questioned by a former reporter for the Daily Caller, a partisan conservative website.

“Wait a minute, be quiet,” the president said. “And you should be ashamed of yourself. You used to be a conservative. She was a conservative from Alabama, can you believe it?

“But CNN, in particular, CNN does such false reporting. But now they have new ownership, so maybe it’ll straighten it out,” Trump continued, referring to the looming takeover of the network’s parent company by David Ellison, a Trump supporter who is currently overseeing the destruction of CBS News as a nonpartisan news organization.

“It’s hard to straighten garbage out. But CNN has abused, and others have abused so badly, people, these are people that are great people that were destroyed. Their families have been destroyed. Many suicides. They committed suicide. People that went there to with love. They went there with love,” Trump went on.

“You know, when I made that speech early in the day,” Trump added, before a digression about the size of the crowd for his speech urging his supporters to go to the Capitol on 6 January 2021. “There was so much love and and friendship. It was the most amazing thing. People were crying.”

When Collins again tried to interject, Trump refused to give way. “Wait a minute. Let me finish,” he said. “Those people have been abused by you.”

“There’s something wrong with you,” the president added after another long digression attacking his political rivals. “It’s a shame.”

He then called on a reliably pro-Trump correspondent, Iris Tao of the Epoch Times’ television channel, NTD, who praised the president’s “stirring words” in a Truth Social post attacking communism. The Epoch Times is owned by members of the dissident Chinese Falun Gong spiritual movement that the Chinese Communist party has banned as a cult.

Trump's treasury secretary confirms he threatened to beat up Trump's pick to lead intelligence agencies

During a hearing in the US Senate on Wednesday, Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, confirmed that he threatened to beat the pulp out of Bill Pulte, the federal housing official Donald Trump intends to make his director of national intelligence.

Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who is retiring at the end of his term, began his questioning of Bessent by asking whether reports of the threat last year, from Politico and the New York Times, were accurate.

“Did you actually tell Pulte you were going to punch him in the face?” Tillis asked.

“No, sir,” Bessent replied. “I actually said I was going to kick his ass.”

“I share the emotion,” the senator replied.

The secretary went on to downplay the importance of the threat of physical violence. “As I’ve said, that was last summer, the summer of 25,” Bessent said. “And many teams have fights in the locker room and then go out and win for the team on the field.”

“I was just curious,” Tillis said, before adding that he had made it clear that he would not support Pulte assuming office as acting director of national intelligence after the departure of Tulsi Gabbard at the end of June.

In getting Bessent on the record, Tillis ensured that reports about Pulte assuming the job of intelligence director, without any prior experience, will note the treasury secretary’s distaste for him.

“He lost me when he went after Powell,” Tillis added, referring to Pulte’s role in agitating for the firing or criminal investigation of former Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell.

After passing Iran war powers resolution, House Democrats call on Senate Republicans to 'do the right thing'

The three top Democrats in the US House on Wednesday called for the Senate’s Republican leadership to pass the war powers resolution adopted by the House, which directs the president “to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities with Iran”.

After the House voted 215 to 208 to approve the resolution, the Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, whip Katherine Clark and caucus chair Pete Aguilar said in a statement:

double quotation markMore than three months ago, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth plunged America into a reckless and costly war of choice in the Middle East without clear objectives, an exit strategy, public support or the authorization required by the United States Congress. Republicans have since spent billions in taxpayer dollars and carelessly put our brave men and women in uniform into harm’s way while causing gas prices at home to skyrocket out of control.

Following repeated attempts to get sycophants in the Republican-controlled House to join us, House Democrats successfully passed our War Powers Resolution today to stand up for the American people and hold Donald Trump accountable. It is now time for Senate Republicans to do the right thing.

'Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers,' Trump assures an anxious nation

Before signing an executive order related to customs in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Donald Trump took seven minutes to reassure an anxious public, beset by worries about a protracted war with Iran, surging gasoline prices and rising inflation, that progress has been made on at least one front: the resurfacing of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is nearly complete.

The pool, he added, is extremely long.

“We’ll have it open before July 4th,” the president announced, after once again holding up a series of renderings of what he assured the nation would be a beautified “reflecting pond, or the reflecting pool, as some people call it.”

To date, the only person to call it “the reflecting pond” appears to be the current president.

“It’ll last for 50 to 100 years before you have to do anything,” Trump said, pointing to the “very strong, powerful substance” the company he gave a no-bid contract to used to temporarily seal its base.

During his seven-minute monologue on the renovation, the president again made the point he seems fixated on: that the 2,028ft-long reflecting pool is so long that even some of the tallest buildings on the world would be shorter, if, for some reason, they were laid on their side.

He then called on an aide to hand him a poster comparing the length of the pool to three American skyscrapers: Chicago’s Willis (Sears) Tower, New York’s Empire State Building and One World Trade Center.

“I just had this done,” the president told reporters as he held up the poster he apparently commissioned using an image he has posted repeatedly on social media despite a huge and obvious error in the graph scale. (The distance on the graph’s X-axis from 0-1,000 is the same as that from 1,000 to 1,500.)

As he explained the quite self-evident poster to the assembled White House press corps, the president was apparently dissatisfied with one element: the poster includes an accurate measurement of the reflecting pool’s length, slightly rounded up to 2,030ft.

The pool, the president insisted without explanation, is “actually much more than 2,000, close to, including everything its about 2,500ft, in length, to the end”.

The president did not explain what the “everything” was that he was including to reach the higher figure.

US House passes war powers resolution to curb Trump’s authority in Iran

The US House of Representatives delivered a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump over his war on Iran on Wednesday, as representatives backed a move to force him to seek approval from Congress or withdraw US forces.

The House voted 215 to 208 in favor of the war powers resolution, as four Republicans voted with Democrats.

Wednesday’s vote came nearly two weeks after House Republicans cancelled an earlier scheduled vote, on the grounds that they lacked the votes to defeat it.

The Senate voted last month to advance a resolution forcing Trump to seek congressional approval after four Republican senators rebelled and voted with the Democrats.

Trump tells blatant lies about Iran nuclear deal struck during Obama administration, claiming it 'gave them a nuclear weapon'

While bragging about how great his deal with Iran will be, once he manages to close it, Donald Trump just told reporters a blatant lie about the 2015 Iran nuclear deal he withdrew from in 2018.

His deal, Trump said, will be “the exact opposite of the Obama deal. The Obama deal was a disgrace, it gave them a nuclear weapon.”

In fact, the very first paragraph of the deal sealed in July 2015 said the exact opposite.

Here is the full text of the agreement’s first words, negotiated by the US, the EU and five other nations:

double quotation markThe E3/EU+3 (China, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States, with the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy) and the Islamic Republic of Iran welcome this historic Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which will ensure that Iran’s nuclear programme will be exclusively peaceful, and mark a fundamental shift in their approach to this issue. They anticipate that full implementation of this JCPOA will positively contribute to regional and international peace and security. Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.

Trump makes light of exchange of fire with Iran that led to death in Kuwait

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon, Donald Trump was just asked in the ceasefire with Iran is still on, given the deadly Iranian attack on Kuwait’s international airport, and US strikes on Iran.

The president played down the significance of the Iranian strike that killed at least one person and wounded 63 in the first deadly attack in the Gulf since a ceasefire came into effect on 8 April.

“You know, there’s a reason for everything, and we hit them pretty hard” Trump said, casting Iran’s strike as retaliation. “They did something, not a big deal,” he added. “Some people would say they were slightly provoked because we took a strong action… they were reciprocating.”

He went on to suggest that talks on a peace deal are continuing. “I hear the negotiation is going well, very well.”

“If it happens, might not happen, but it if happens it could happen over the weekend,” the president said, of a deal to end the fighting he has been promising is imminent for months now.

Asked how he defined ‘ceasefire’, the president joked: “I’d say, in that part of the world, ‘ceasefire’ is when you’re shooting in a more moderate manner.”

As some of his aides laughed, Trump turned to them and praised his own quip about an exchange of fire in which at least one person died and dozens were wounded. “That’s not bad,” he said.

The supreme court’s decision allowing Alabama to use a redrawn congressional map that eliminates one of the state’s two majority-Black districts in this year’s midterm elections “cuts off most escape routes from Callais and sends a clear signal that plaintiffs should just lose all claims involving race and redistricting”, said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard who studies elections.

“The district court meticulously explained why it found discriminatory intent and why the revised Section 2 framework was still satisfied. The court reversed all that in a cursory paragraph, which faulted the district court for not applying a presumption of good faith even though it clearly did, and which gullibly accepted Alabama’s purported redistricting goals even though they were just post hoc concoctions,” Stephanopoulos said.

He added: “I think it’s now pretty obvious that, in all but the most exceptional circumstances, like legislators saying they’re drawing lines to harm minority voters, the supreme court will not tolerate any federal judicial regulation of race and redistricting.”

Travis Crum, an election law professor at Washington University in St Louis, said the court had now offered states “a blueprint for identifying certain priorities – incumbent protection or a particular partisan makeup of the congressional delegation – that make it virtually impossible for Section 2 plaintiffs” to win cases.

“There might still be Section 2 litigation at the local level – where many races are non-partisan – or in states that ban partisan gerrymandering. But statewide Section 2 claims are basically non-starters across the south after Callais,” he said.

Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the decision “not only reinforces the virtually impossible standard plaintiffs must face now to bring a Section 2 claim, they’ve practically closed the door on constitutional vote dilution claims as well. The court did so by using a nearly irrebuttable presumption that states are acting in good faith, which a state can meet by coming up with only pretextual reasons for drawing the map as it did.”

Supreme court approves Alabama map that erases majority-Black district

If there was a glimmer of a possibility that the Voting Rights Act survived a body blow of a decision from the US supreme court in Louisiana v Callais in April, the court’s conservative justices extinguished it yesterday evening.

In an unsigned order issued on the court’s emergency “shadow docket”, the court’s six conservative justices allowed Alabama to use a congressional map that gets rid of one of the state’s two majority-Black congressional districts. That map the state will use is one that a three-judge panel ruled was drawn with an intent to discriminate against Black voters.

Even after the supreme court made it nearly impossible to bring Voting Rights Act claims in Callais, there seemed a slim chance that it would uphold Alabama’s map. In Alabama, a lower court had found that the map was drawn with an intent to discriminate, something that wasn’t an issue in the Louisiana case.

But in its Tuesday order, the supreme court said that didn’t matter.

“Under Callais, the District Court was required to deny relief unless the plaintiffs’ alternative map performed ‘just as well’ with respect to all of the State’s constitutionally permissible districting criteria,” the court’s majority wrote. “Yet, the District Court found a violation even though the plaintiffs’ alternative map would not perform just as well as to the State’s constitutionally permissible criteria of keeping together the Gulf Coast community of interest and avoiding the pairing of incumbents.”