Trump news today: Republican asks Supreme Court to overturn ‘immunity’ defence ruling and claims he made Nato ‘strong’: Live

Donald Trump has asked the US Supreme Court to block a ruling that struck down his “immunity” defence against prosecution for crimes allegedly committed in office, potentially teeing up the nation’s highest court to weigh in on another huge question hanging over his campaign.

Trump’s attorneys filed their request following last week’s appellate court ruling that rejected his “immunity” claim against charges connected to the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

“This threat will hang like a millstone around every future president’s neck, distorting presidential decisionmaking, undermining the president’s independence, and clouding the president’s ability ‘to deal fearlessly and impartially with’ the duties of his office,’” the Republican’s attorneys claimed.

“Without immunity from criminal prosecution, the presidency as we know it will cease to exist,”

The court met last week to hear opening arguments in another case to determine whether states have the power to exclude Trump from ballot papers under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which bars insurrectionists from returning to public office.

Alex Woodward has this report.

Donald Trump’s suggestion that the US would not protect Nato allies failing to spend enough on defence was “not a sensible approach”, the UK Foreign Secretary has said.

Lord David Cameron became the first Cabinet minister to explicitly criticise the remarks made by the Republican presidential frontrunner on Saturday.

Downing Street later insisted the Prime Minister is confident the US will continue to be a dependable ally regardless of who wins the country’s election later this year.

Of course we want all countries, like us, to spend 2% (of GDP), but I think what was said was not a sensible approach.

In 2012, Romney, then the Republican presidential nominee, famously called Russia “without question, our number one geopolitical foe.” Democrats dismissed him as daft in a world with al-Qaeda and China on the rise. Barack Obama chided him and said “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Russia’s annexation of Crimea, its meddling in the 2016 presidential election and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 vindicated Romney and showed the threat of President Vladimir Putin. But by that point, the GOP had moved on from the Reagan-Bush-Romney worldview and embraced another businessman-turned-politician in Donald Trump.

This weekend, when he held a rally in South Carolina, Trump all but goaded Putin into invading European countries when he recalled that he told a head of state of a Nato country talking about Russia during his presidency that if the country did not pay its obligations “I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.”

Mr Romney, now a Utah Senator after being the 2012 Republican presidential nominee and serving as the governor of Massachusetts, told The Independent on Monday: “He says outrageous things to get people riled up. It works at the rallies. Unfortunately, it also has an impact around the world where our friends wonder whether they can rely on America.”

This comes after reports regarding Mr Trump telling top European Union officials that the US would never help Europe if it was attacked.

Thierry Breton, a French EU commissioner, said during a roundtable discussion in Brussels early last month that Mr Trump made the comments in January 2020 when speaking to the president of the commission, Ursula Von Der Leyen, a former German defence minister.

“You need to understand that if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you,” Mr Trump said, according to Mr Breton. “By the way, NATO is dead, and we will leave, we will quit NATO.”

“And by the way, you owe me $400bn, because you didn’t pay, you Germans, what you had to pay for defence,” Mr Trump added at the time, Mr Breton said.

A series of witnesses in the House Republican impeachment probe into President Joe Biden told investigators they were unaware of any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the president and said they did not know of any evidence that Mr Biden had any involvement in his family’s overseas or domestic business ventures, according to a Democratic staff memorandum obtained by The Independent.

The memorandum, which was prepared by staff on the House Oversight and Judiciary committees, said the series of seven witness interviews conducted over the last two months turned up nothing in the way of derogatory evidence in the long-running probe, which Republicans opened shortly after taking control of the House last year.

Although prominent members of the GOP such as Oversight Committee chairman James Comer have intimated that their investigation has uncovered evidence of criminality by Mr Biden and members of his family, the memorandum flatly states that each of the seven witnesses said “they were not aware of any evidence of any wrongdoing by President Biden or of President Biden being involved in, profiting from, or taking official actions in relation to family members’ business ventures”.

“Further, not one of these witnesses indicated they ever had any expectation of receiving or ever did receive any political favors from President Biden or his Administration,” it continued.

“Far from yielding any evidence of misconduct by President Biden, these efforts have served only to add to the mountain of evidence rebutting the Chairmen’s false claims about the President and proving that their so-called ‘impeachment inquiry’ rests on nothing but distorted and cherry-picked facts and long debunked conspiracy theories.”

The attorney and Covid-19 conspiracy theorist claimed he had not been consulted on the advert, though it remained pinned to the top of his profile on X/Twitter on Monday.

The 30-second clip that appeared on Sunday, during one of the biggest night’s in the US sporting calendar, appeared to closely resemble a commercial put out by his late uncle, former president John F Kennedy, during his own 1960 presidential campaign.

Mr Kennedy’s apology came in response to a post by Bobby Shriver, former mayor of Santa Monica and also a nephew of JFK, who called out the presidential hopeful on his “deadly health care views”.

“My cousin’s Super Bowl ad used our uncle’s faces – and my Mother’s,” Mr Shriver wrote on X.

“She would be appalled by his deadly health care views. Respect for science, vaccines, & health care equity were in her DNA. She strongly supported my health care work at @ONECampaign & @RED which he opposes.”

The incumbent president is trusted less than his likely 2024 opponent on the issues of the economy generally and inflation specifically; that’s despite his party’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and some consumer prices beginning to drop. Democrats are losing on the issue because some of the most noticeable expenses for Americans — food, housing, and energy — remain stubbornly high. The Biden administration’s crowing about wage increases and low unemployment have not convinced Americans that the economy is in a good place, not while homelessness is at its highest-ever-recorded level in the United States and affording basic essentials remains difficult.

A glimmer of hope for Mr Biden in the poll could be found, however. A clear majority of Americans — 66 per cent — oppose the idea of Donald Trump having immunity from prosecution for crimes allegedly committed during his presidency, a result that suggests voters remain open-minded about the potential verdicts in his four criminal prosecutions.