Trump news today: DeSantis under fire for anti-Trump ad as ex-aide airs new classified documents claims

President Joe Biden will head to Europe at week’s end for a three-country trip intended to bolster the international coalition against Russian aggression as the war in Ukraine extends well into its second year.

The main focus of Biden’s five-day visit will be the annual NATO summit, held this year in Vilnius, Lithuania. Also planned are stops in Helsinki, Finland, to commemorate the Nordic country’s entrance into the 31-nation military alliance in April, and Britain, the White House announced Sunday.

Biden will begin his trip next Sunday in London, meeting with King Charles III. The president did not attend Charles’s coronation in May, sending first lady Jill Biden to represent the United States. In June, Biden hosted British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the White House, where the two leaders pledged continued cooperation in defending Ukraine.

The NATO meeting comes at the latest critical point in the war. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, says counteroffensive and defensive actions against Russian forces are underway as Ukrainian troops start to recapture territory in the southeastern part of the country, according to its military leaders.

Thousands of Iranian dissidents crowded the streets of a Paris neighbourhood on Saturday while western opponents of the government in Tehran gathered for a politically star-studded event aimed at poking a finger in the eye of the Ayatollah’s supporters.

Despite warnings from French authorities and the US Embassy in Paris that alleged threats of a terror attack made a large outdoor event unwise, there were no incidents over the weekend as Iranian dissident activists mingled with prominent current and former officials from the US, UK and other European nations. If that threat of a terror attack was real, it was hard to spot the concern of French authorities on Saturday, given that police did not provide more than a handful of officers to patrol the area, those on the scene told The Independent.

Stephanie Grisham served as Donald Trump’s press secretary and communications director and was also the top spokesperson and chief of staff to former first lady Melania Trump.

Ms Grisham, who has become a fervent critic of her former boss, appeared on MSNBC on Sunday to discuss the former president’s legal situation following his indictment on federal charges over his alleged unlawful retention of national defence information and obstruction of justice.

She said that Mr Trump never exhibited any reverence for how the nation protects important information.

Asked about a report indicating that a top Trump campaign aide, Susie Wiles, has been speaking to prosecutors and could be a witness against Mr Trump, Ms Grisham said she regularly saw him disregard best practices for handling sensitive documents and classified information, including at Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach mansion turned private club where he spent winter weekends as president before making it his primary home post-White House.

President Joe Biden has long struggled to neatly summarize his sprawling economic vision.

It’s been hard for voters to digest the mix of roads-and-bridges spending, tax hikes on big companies, tax credits for parents, tax breaks for renewable energy, grants to build computer chip factories, insulin price caps and slogans like “Build Back Better.”

And that barely covers the full breadth of what the administration is doing and trying to do.

Last week, the president gave a speech on “Bidenomics” in hopes that the term will lodge in voters’ minds ahead of the 2024 elections. But what is Bidenomics? Let’s just say the White House definition is different from the Republican one — evidence that catchphrases can be double-edged.

Biden says his economic philosophy is the opposite of a Republican approach that favors broad tax cuts to spur growth. He sees the government as using the tax code in a more targeted fashion and fashioning other programs to foster investment in new technologies, create jobs and boost upward mobility. He wants to do more to educate workers and foster competition within the U.S. economy in hopes of reducing prices.

Former President Donald Trump on Saturday marked a return to the large-scale rallies of his previous presidential campaigns, speaking to thousands gathered in the streets of a small South Carolina city on a blazing day ahead of the July 4 holiday.

“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be to kick off the Fourth of July weekend than right here on Main St., with thousands of hardworking South Carolina patriots who believe in God, family and country,” Trump said to a roaring crowd standing on asphalt as temperatures climbed into the 90s.

It wasn’t immediately clear how many people had gathered in the streets of downtown Pickens, a small city in South Carolina’s conservative Upstate of around 3,400 residents. Law enforcement officials told some media outlets that around 15,000 people had gathered by 11 a.m., two hours before Trump’s remarks.

The heavily Republican area is a popular one for GOP hopefuls as they aim to attract support for South Carolina’s first-in-the-South presidential primary. In recent months, other candidates including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have all held events in the Upstate, as well as the two South Carolinians in the race: former Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott.

Mr Biden will meet King Charles and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the White House said in a brief statement on Sunday. Buckingham Palace confirmed the news.

“President Biden is scheduled to travel to the United Kingdom, Lithuania, and Finland from July 9-13. President Biden will first travel to London, United Kingdom for engagements with King Charles III and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to further strengthen the close relationship between our nations,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

She added: “The President will then travel to Vilnius, Lithuania from July 11-12 to attend the 74th NATO Summit. On July 13, President Biden will visit Helsinki, Finland for a U.S.-Nordic Leaders Summit. More details about the trip will be announced soon.”

Mr Biden’s first meeting with King Charles comes soon after the coronation of the British monarch, which he did not attend. First Lady Jill Biden and granddaughter Finnegan represented the US at the historic event. The US president last was in Europe in mid-April to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, and met with Ireland’s prime minister. He and the first lady travelled to London for the funeral of the late Queen last September.

South Carolina and Nevada are on board but face stiff Republican pushback. Michigan’s compliance may mean having to cut the state legislative session short, despite Democrats controlling both chambers and the governor’s mansion.

Then there’s Iowa, which is looking for ways to still go first without violating party rules.

Months after the Democratic Party approved President Joe Biden‘s plan to overhaul its primary order to better reflect a deeply diverse voter base, implementing the revamped order has proven anything but simple. Party officials now expect the process to continue through the end of the year — even as the 2024 presidential race heats up all around it.

“Despite the fact that it looked like relatively smooth sailing for the president when he proposed it … the kind of backlash you’re hearing, the reactions, are exactly what we would have expected,” said David Redlawsk, chair of the political science department at the University of Delaware and co-author of the book “Why Iowa? How Caucuses and Sequential Elections Improve the Presidential Nominating Process.”

The lawsuit, alleging widespread discrimination at the college in violation of the Civil Rights Act, is the latest challenge to the practice of prioritising university admissions for the children of alumni.

“There’s no birthright to Harvard. As the Supreme Court recently noted, ‘eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.’ There should be no way to identify who your parents are in the college application process,” said Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Boston-based Lawyers for Civil Rights, which filed the complaint on 3 July.

“Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations?” he said in a statement. “Your family’s last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process.”

The group filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Chica Project, the African Community Economic Development of New England and the Greater Boston Latino Network.

When a draft of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v Jackson opinion that would overturn Roe v Wade leaked in May of last year, US Senator Tina Smith had only three words.

“This is bulls***,” the Minnesota Democrat tweeted. She had similar words when Walgreens announced in March of this year it would not dispense abortion pills in states where abortion remained legal.

Ms Smith told The Independent in a phone interview that she knew the consequences of overturning the enshrined constitutional right to seek an abortion from her time working at Planned Parenthood as the Minnesota branch’s executive vice president for external affairs. She said her time working there taught her about the effects restrictions have on women’s lives.

“The first thing I realized is that for women facing a decision about what to do about an unplanned pregnancy, a pregnancy that they don’t want, this is a purely personal decision for them,” she said. “As a policymaker, why do Republicans in the Senate and in state legislators around the country think that they know better than those women whose stories they’ll never know? Why do they think that they should be the ones who decide? It’s those women’s decisions.”

As the Biden administration prepared to launch speedy asylum screenings at Border Patrol holding facilities this spring , authorities pledged a key difference from a Trump-era version of the policy: Migrants would be guaranteed access to legal counsel.

Nearly three months and thousands of screenings later, the promise of attorney access appears largely unfulfilled, based on advocacy group reports and interviews with people directly involved, some of whom spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the effort publicly.

A coterie of involved attorneys estimate that perhaps 100 migrants have secured formal representation, and only hundreds more have received informal advice through one-time phone calls ahead of the expedited screenings.

Jones Day, one of the world’s largest law firms, has partnered with the administration to provide free legal advice to migrants. Its phone bank handled 460 informal phone consultations, each one typically lasting about two hours, as of June 21, according to one of the people who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity. Jones Day itself had only two formal clients, the person said.

Four other advocacy groups that offer free advice and whose names are posted on the immigration court system’s website have handled far fewer phone consultations, partly because they started much later, the person said.