Mike Johnson warns Ukraine-border deal likely ‘dead on arrival’ in House – live | US elections 2024

Victoria Bekiempis

After Donald Trump stormed out of the closing arguments of his defamation trial in New York City, judge Lewis Kaplan remarked: “Excuse me, the record will reflect that Mr Trump just rose and walked out of the courtroom.”
Before the former president’s abrupt departure, Roberta Kaplan, an attorney for E Jean Carroll was providing a chronology of the harm endured by her client due to Trump’s attacks.
“Donald Trump’s denials and vicious accusations were all complete lies. That has already been proven, right in this courtroom, by a jury,” Kaplan said.
“That’s why Donald Trump’s testimony was so short yesterday. He doesn’t get a do-over.”
“This case is also about punishing Donald Trump for what he has done and for what he continues to do,” Kaplan said, adding shortly thereafter, “This trial is about getting him to stop, once and for all.”
Kaplan noted that Trump started to smear Carroll within a day of her last court victory, which found that he had defamed her. “Donald Trump, however, acts as if these rules and laws just don’t apply to him,” and pointed out that he spent “this entire trial” attacking Carroll with nefarious posts.
It was right about this time that Trump walked out of court.
“Excuse me,” judge Kaplan said. “The record will reflect that Mr Trump just rose and walked out of the courtroom.”
Not long after Roberta Kaplan said in her closing: “Trump is required to follow the law, whether he likes it or not.”

In a letter to House Republicans, speaker Mike Johnson warned that the immigration deal under consideration in the Senate may be “dead on arrival” in his chamber, while also vowing to move forward with plans to impeach homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

The Republican leader’s statement bodes ill for the bargaining in the Senate, which is seen as crucial to unlocking GOP support for aid to Ukraine, as well as Israel and Taiwan. Democrats and Republicans in the upper chamber have been negotiating for months on an agreement to restrict immigration policy in a bid to keep undocumented migrants from entering the United States. While no compromise has yet been reached, Johnson said today that “if rumors about the contents of the draft proposal are true, it would have been dead on arrival in the House anyway.”

Johnson said he would support the effort to impeach Mayorkas, who Republicans have accused of mishandling border security.

“When we return next week, by necessity, the House Homeland Security Committee will move forward with Articles of Impeachment against Secretary Mayorkas. A vote on the floor will be held as soon as possible thereafter,” he wrote.

Impeachments of cabinet secretaries are exceedingly rare, and the Senate’s Democratic majority will almost certainly refuse to convict Mayorkas.

Trump quickly departs defamation trial, judges threatens to jail his lawyer

Victoria Bekiempis

As E Jean Carroll’s second defamation trial against Donald Trump neared its final stage Friday morning in New York, proceedings quickly took a turn for the absurd with the judge threatening his lawyer with “lockup” and the ex-president leaving about 10 minutes into closing arguments.

Trump’s abrupt departure came as Carroll’s lead attorney, Roberta Kaplan, was speaking, and shortly after she noted that he had continued to defame the former Elle writer even during this very trial. At that point, Trump left.

After meeting yesterday with their leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Republicans told Politico that earlier comments he had made expressing opposition at Donald Trump’s urging to a deal to arm Ukraine and Israel while enacting conservative immigration policies were misunderstood.

McConnell’s remarks were “flipped around”, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville said, adding “he just tried to get it straight … some of the senators came out and got kind of misconstrued on what he was talking about.”

“McConnell has not changed his point of view,” according to Mississippi’s Roger Wicker, who said McConnell had earlier just been speaking plainly about the political calculations that would go into approving the deal. “And I don’t think anybody disagreed with him. We are at a particular set of crossroads and intersections,” Wicker said.

Yesterday kicked off with the somewhat shocking news that Senate Republicans were, at Donald Trump’s behest, willing to walk away from a deal they had been negotiating with Democrats for months to implement some conservative immigration policies in exchange for approving new aid to Ukraine and Israel’s militaries. The reason, the Senate’s top Republican Mitch McConnell told his lawmakers in a private meeting, was that Trump wanted to be able to attack Joe Biden over immigration on the campaign trail, and passing the deal would undermine that. The comments unsurprisingly sparked outrage from Democrats and some Republicans, and later on Thursday, McConnell seems to have walked them back.

According to Politico, he again convened his party to tell them that he was still behind the deal. That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen – the odds of enacting legislation in an election year dealing with one of the most divisive issues in American politics, immigration, were also going to be long, but the parties seem resolved to at least try. We’ll see what more is revealed about this kerfuffle over the course of the day.

Here’s what else is happening:

• Trump will once again be in a New York City courtroom for author E Jean Carroll’s defamation trial against him, where closing arguments are expected today.

• The top UN court ordered Israel to “take all measures” to prevent genocide during its military campaign in Gaza, but did not order a ceasefire, as the country’s critics had hoped. Follow our live blog for more on this developing story.

• Joe Biden paused all pending natural gas export permits over concerns they’d further fuel climate change.