Trump unable to make $464m bond in civil fraud case, say his lawyers – live | US Congress

Martin Pengelly

House speaker Mike Johnson asked fractious fellow Republicans to “cool it” and stop fighting each other in displays of “member-on-member action” during primary elections as he seeks to maintain some sort of control over a caucus at the mercy of the far right, controlling the chamber by a mere two votes.

“I’ve asked them all to cool it,” Johnson told CNN in remarks published Sunday.

I am vehemently opposed to member-on-member action in primaries because it’s not productive. And it causes division for obvious reasons, and we should not be engaging in that. So I’m telling everyone who’s doing that to knock it off. And both sides, they’ll say, ‘Well, we didn’t start it, they started it.’

Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, the far-right Trumpist firebrand pursuing such fights, effectively told the same outlet: “They started it.”

“I would love nothing more than to just go after Democrats,” said Gaetz, who was last year the prime mover behind the historic ejection of Johnson’s predecessor as speaker, Kevin McCarthy, and who is now going after two more Republicans, Tony Gonzales of Texas and Mike Bost of Illinois.

“If Republicans are going to dress up like Democrats in drag, I’m going to go after them too,” Gaetz said.

Because at the end of the day, we’re not judged by how many Republicans we have in Congress. We’re judged on whether or not we save the country.

Gonzales is under attack over a vote for gun safety reform, after the Uvalde elementary school massacre; over his positions on immigration reform; and for voting in favour of same-sex marriage.

Donald Trump has been unable to get a bond to secure the $464m New York civil fraud judgment against him, his lawyers said in a court filing.

The filing on Monday states that obtaining a bond has proven to be “a practical impossibility”, adding that “diligent” efforts made to secure a bond have included “approaching about 30 surety companies through 4 separate brokers” and “countless hours negotiating with one of the largest insurance companies in the world.”

These efforts have proven that “obtaining an appeal bond in the full amount” of the judgment “is not possible under the circumstances presented,” the filing states.

Trump calls for Liz Cheney to be jailed for investigating him over Capitol attack

Adam Gabbatt

Donald Trump has renewed calls for Liz Cheney – his most prominent Republican critic – to be jailed for her role in investigating his actions during the January 6 Capitol attack launched by his supporters in 2021, a move that is bound to raise further fears that the former president could persecute his political opponents if given another White House term.

In posts on Sunday on his Truth Social platform, Trump said other members of the congressional committee that investigated the Capitol attack – and concluded he had plotted to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat to Joe Biden – should be imprisoned. Those statements followed Trump’s previous comments that he would act like a “dictator” on the first day of a second presidency if given one by voters.

On Sunday, Trump wrote that Cheney should “go to jail along with the rest” of the select January 6 House committee, which he sought to insult in his post on Truth Social by calling it the “unselect committee”.

Cheney, who served as vice-chair of the January 6 committee and was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over the attack, responded later on Sunday, saying her fellow Republican Trump is “afraid of the truth”.

Donald Trump’s continuing lavish praise and support for Vladimir Putin are fueling alarm among former intelligence officials and other experts who fear another Trump presidency would benefit Moscow and harm American democracy and interests overseas.

Trump praised the Russian president as a “genius” and “pretty savvy” when Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022. Trump also recently greenlit Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to Nato members who don’t pay enough to the alliance. More recently, instead of criticizing Putin for the death of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s leading opposition figure, who the Kremlin once tried to kill with poison, and who died suddenly last month in an Arctic penal colony, Trump weirdly equated the four criminal prosecutions he faces with Navalny’s fate.

“Trump views Putin as a strongman,” said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution and a national security official in the first two years of Trump’s administration.

In a way they’re working in parallel because they’re both trying to weaken the US, but for very different reasons.

Read the full story: Putin bromance has US intelligence officials fearing second Trump term

A large majority of Americans surveyed in a new poll reject Donald Trump’s argument that presidents should be immune from criminal prosecution for crimes committed while in office.

The Politico/Ipsos poll, released today, found that 70% of respondents rejected this position, including 48% of Republicans. Only 11% of respondents agreed with Trump’s position that presidents should have criminal immunity for conduct while in office.

It comes after the supreme court decided late last month to take up the claim that Trump has absolute immunity from prosecution in the criminal case over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

The survey found that about half of the country does not trust the supreme court to issue a fair and nonpartisan ruling on the question of whether Trump is immune from prosecution. The court’s public standing has taken a major hit since Trump and his Republican allies installed a conservative supermajority in the court that, most notably, overturned Roe v Wade.

A dispute over border security funding threatens to force a shutdown of swaths of the federal government, with lawmakers racing to reach a deal on long-term spending legislation to meet a Friday deadline.

Disagreements over immigration at the US-Mexico border have stymied the talks, the Washington Post reported, while part of the dispute is that Democrats are pressing for more funding for pay equity for the transportation security administration (TSA) while Republicans want more funding for US immigration and customs enforcement’s (ICE) detention and enforcement efforts, the Hill reported.

GOP negotiators were prepared to offer the homeland security department roughly the same level of funding for the rest of the 2024 fiscal year, but due to inflation, that would represent a significant funding cut in real terms.

On Sunday, the White House accused Republicans of “playing politics” with appropriations for the homeland security department, telling Politico that the GOP want to “sow chaos on the border ahead of November” after rejecting an offer from Democrats for an extra $1.56bn in funding for border security.

The supreme court will hear oral arguments on Monday in Murthy v Missouri, a case with the potential to radically redefine how the US government interacts with social media companies.

Central to the case is whether the White House violated free speech protections during the Covid-19 pandemic, when government officials requested that Twitter, Facebook and other social networks remove misinformation about the coronavirus.

The lawsuit accuses the government of “coercing” tech platforms to change their policies, block content and suspend users. The complaint was filed by attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri as well as rightwing individuals such as the conspiracy theory site founder Jim Hoft. If the courts decide in their favor, the White House would be blocked from contacting social media companies, as happened when a lower court sided with the plaintiffs.

The Biden administration has argued that officials did not coerce or threaten social media platforms. It also argues that federal agencies have routinely communicated with social media platforms about terrorist group organizing or foreign influence campaigns, which has prompted tech companies to voluntarily enforce their own policies that ban such content.

The suit is the culmination of years of a Republican-backed legal campaign arguing that efforts by federal agencies and Joe Biden’s White House to reduce misinformation online constitute censorship.

Here’s what you need to know about the case.

Congress is once again running up on yet another critical government funding deadline, as lawmakers scramble to avert a shutdown by midnight on Friday, when funding runs out for six big annual spending bills that cover some 70% of all federal discretionary spending. As recently as Friday, negotiators were nearing an agreement to complete a spending bill but disagreements over funding for the department of homeland security have since derailed the talks.

Meanwhile, the US supreme court is expected to hear oral arguments over whether the White House violated free speech protections during the Covid-19 pandemic, when government officials requested that Twitter, Facebook and other social networks remove misinformation about the coronavirus. The case of Murthy v Missouri – the culmination of years of a Republican-backed legal campaign – has the potential to radically redefine how the US government interacts with social media companies.

Here’s what else we’re watching:

• 11.30am. Joe Biden, first lady Jill Biden and Kamala Harris will speak at a Women’s History Month reception.

• 1.30pm. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and national security adviser Jake Sullivan will brief.