The Guardian89%
Senate committee delays vote on Todd Blanche attorney general nomination – as it happened 20%
By Tom Ambrose49% Rachel Leingang48% Jo Walters32% Robert Mackey51% Lucy Campbell63% Adam Fulton35% Anna Betts60% Sam Levine4% Joseph Gedeon36% Gaya Gupta39% Peter Beaumont59% Jessica Glenza32% Martin Pengelly32% Roque Planas46% Uwa Ede-Osifo49%
7/29/2026, 6:56:41 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 24 faulty reasoning types, including Post Hoc (False Cause), Pessimism Bias, and Politically Left Leaning Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 10.1% saturation with 218 hits. Analysis detected 1,542 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,167 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 29.8% and a BS Rank of 20% (20,336 of 25,292 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 80.40% of the article peer group.
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but our colleagues in Australia will continue providing updates on the US-Israel war on Iran.
Here are the latest developments in US politics: The Senate judiciary committee has postponed a vote, scheduled for Thursday, on the nomination of Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, to be attorney general.
Senate Republicans voted on Wednesday to advance as a bloc the nominations of 71 of Donald Trump’s picks to serve in a variety of roles requiring confirmation, including as ambassadors, US attorneys, judges and senior staff at federal agencies.
Among the nominees soon to be confirmed this way is P.
Wells Griffith, a former Republican campaign operative and Trump aide who was the senior director for international energy and environment on the National Security Council in 2019.
During the impeachment inquiry over Trump’s pressure campaign against Ukraine that year, Fiona Hill, the NSC’s Russia expert during Trump’s first term, testified that Griffith was present at a July 2019 meeting with Ukrainian officials in which John Bolton, then Trump’s national security adviser, discovered that other US officials had secretly pressed Ukraine to open a sham investigation of Joe Biden.
Griffith is in line to be an ambassador, representing the United States at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
The IAEA played a key role in verifying Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal negotiated during the Obama administration, which Trump withdrew from during his first term, and could be similarly important should a new nuclear deal with Iran be struck by the Trump administration after the US-Israeli war on Iran finally ends.
The Senate judiciary committee has postponed a vote, scheduled for Thursday, on the nomination of Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, to be attorney general.
Blanche, who holds the role on an acting basis, apparently lacks the votes of two Republican senators who want him to confirm in writing that the Department of Justice will not proceed with a $1.776bn fund to compensate Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 2021, or a pledge to forever bar the IRS from investigating the tax returns of the president and his family.
The two senators, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, both lost their re-election bids this year in Republican primaries in which Trump backed their opponents.
A spokesperson for the committee, which is chaired by Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley said in a statement:
“Chairman Grassley works to set President Trump’s nominees up for success in committee, not failure.
Senators Cornyn and Tillis want written assurances from the Department of Justice regarding the Trump-IRS settlement.
Tomorrow’s markup is postponed as work continues to secure sufficient support in committee to favorably report Attorney General-nominee Todd Blanche, who is highly qualified for the job.”
In a new ad released on Wednesday, Barack Obama, the former president who installed basketball hoop on the White House tennis court, endorsed the US Senate campaign of Iowa Democrat Josh Turek, a state lawmaker who played wheelchair basketball in four Paralympic Games, winning two gold medals.
The ad shows the two men talking about Obama’s win in the 2008 Iowa caucuses, and Turek’s hope to flip a Republican-held Senate seat in the upcoming midterms as they shoot hoops, playing a modified game of Horse called I-O-W-A.
In the podcast episode, released over the Fourth of July weekend, Trump read, and commented on, an illustreated children’s book called President’s Play, about the sporting activities of presidents through the years.
When he came to a part of the book that showed Jimmy Carter playing on the White House tennis court, and the text on the next page read, “President Barack Obama used the same court for basketball”, Trump said instead: “Barack Hussein Obama, he used the same court for basketball”.
“There’s a picture of each,” he added.
“Jimmy as a tennis player.
Barack Hussein Obama as a basketball player.
I don’t know if he’s a good basketball player.
I tend to doubt it.
Actually, his favorite sport is golf.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Maga congresswoman, announced on Wednesday that she was married on Tuesday in Las Vegas to another recent exile from Donald Trump’s good graces, Brian Glenn, the self-described “Maga mouthpiece” who quit his job as White House correspondent for the far-right network Real America’s Voice after his fiancee was cast out by the president for supporting the release of the Epstein files and criticizing his bombing of Iran in 2025.
Glenn, who announced his resignation on the air in May, had previously been an openly partisan supporter of Trump, even on the job, mixing praise for the president into his questions for him, which were often phrased to help Trump push his talking points.
Before Trump’s rift with Greene, he had eagerly called on Glenn at Oval Office events, using him as a lifeline to avoid potentially awkward or challenging questions from non-partisan reporters.
Glenn’s most memorable intervention was his decision to ramp up the pressure on Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during a tension-filled Oval Office meeting with Trump last year by asking the visiting wartime president why he was in military attire rather than a suit.
“Why don’t you wear a suit?
You’re at the highest level in this country’s office and you refuse to wear a suit,” Glenn asked Zelenskyy.
While Glenn is no longer in the White House press pack, he has been replaced by a group of similarly partisan rightwing correspondents Trump can call on in the Oval Office for help in pursuing his political agenda.
Todd Blanche’s hopes of becoming US attorney general seemed to be in jeopardy on Wednesday after the Department of Justice did not provide written assurances to a key Republican senator that a $1.8bn slush fund was dead.
The US Senate judiciary committee will hold a vote on Thursday on whether to advance Blanche’s nomination.
Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, is already serving as acting US attorney general.
He needs the vote of every Republican on the Senate judiciary panel to advance his nomination to land the role on a permanent basis.
But a swing vote on the committee, John Cornyn of Texas, told reporters on Wednesday he would not support Blanche’s nomination until he received written confirmation that the fund was not moving ahead.
Cornyn also wants to clarify that a provision giving the president, his sons and related businesses blanket immunity from tax audits for all matters up until this year could not be applied to future matters, or to people who were not parties to the settlement.
Near the end of his Oval Office exchange with reporters on Wednesday, Donald Trump was asked by Jacqui Heinrich of Fox News if he wants the House to come back before 31 August “to act on the Russian and Iran sanctions bill” named for the late Lindsey Graham that advanced in the Senate on Tuesday.
Trump said he wanted one change in the Senate bill.
“I’d like them to add Iran as tariffs, not just as sanctions.
I think it’s important, that’s what Lindsey wanted, because I heard that they have tariffs on Russia but not on … countries with, having to do with Iran.
I’d like to see tariffs on Iran.
That would make it much stronger,” Trump said.
“Perhaps, you’re very good at this, you can maybe tell them,” Trump added, openly suggesting that the correspondent for the rightwing network, who is also married to a Republican congressman, might be willing to lobby lawmakers on his behalf.
As we reported on Tuesday, a number of Democrats are alarmed that the Senate legislation, as currently written, gives the president vast new authority to impose sanctions on any nation he deems to have facilitated the purchase of Russian oil.
One of them, senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, explained last night that she voted against advancing the Senate bill because “today’s bill gives the President new authority to impose tariffs, even on our allies.
I do not think tariffs, which are paid for by American businesses and consumers, will help Ukraine win this war.
And over the last year, it’s become more clear that President Trump will use any legal — or illegal — mechanism to make families pay his reckless tariffs.”
“I fully support the goal of sanctioning Russia and its enablers and hope that we can have a meaningful amendment process so that I can support the final bill,” Hassan added.
Trump also said that Britain’s new prime minister Andy Burnham told him he planned to open up the North Sea to oil development, a move that would mark a shift in the country’s energy policy.
The US president rambled through his usual criticisms of the UK, from immigration to windmills, before concluding that the UK will “be a rich country again” if it opens up the North Sea to oil exploration.
Speaking in the Oval Office just now, Trump reiterated his threat that the United States would hit Iran very hard.
He said he was briefed on a drone attack on tankers off Egypt.
“It’s a little more of the same, but it’s going to be straightening out,” Trump said.
“In the meantime, we’re going to be hitting them very hard, because it’s our turn to hit them,” Trump told reporters.
“They know it’s coming.”
He said Washington would see if there was an agreement at some point, “but we’re going to hit them very hard”.
Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu explored all possible paths to curb Iran’s nuclear program in their White House meeting yesterday, including diplomacy, economic pressure and force, a senior Israeli official has told Reuters.
Netanyahu did not tell Trump that Israel’s preference now was for further attacks on Iran, the official said in briefings with reporters after the meeting.
“In the end, it’s his decision,” the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of Trump.
The US president has three options and all were discussed at length, said the official, listing them as “a [negotiated] deal, continuing the blockade and economic pressures, and a massive strike.”
Netanyahu also added unspecified new ideas to the mix, the official added.
Trump had voiced irritation with the Israeli prime minister ahead of their meeting, complaining that details had surfaced publicly about Netanyahu’s plans to talk about new intelligence on Pickaxe Mountain, a deep-underground, nuclear-linked facility that Trump has threatened to bomb.
Pushing back against any notion of tensions over the issue, the official said the two allies readily share intelligence, denied that Netanyahu had pushed Trump to escalate militarily against Iran and left open the possibility of a diplomatic solution.
At the same time, the Israeli official acknowledged that Trump is the “senior partner” while Netanyahu is the “junior partner” in the allies’ conflict with Iran.
Donald Trump and the justice department are asking the US supreme court to toss an $83m defamation verdict won by writer E Jean Carroll after she accused him of sexual assault, saying he cannot be sued for comments he made while he was president.
It is the second time Trump has asked the justices to nix damages awarded by a jury to Carroll, a longtime New York advice columnist and former talkshow host.
The supreme court refused in June to hear his appeal of another verdict, for $5m, that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation, the Associated Press reports.
The latest case centers on comments Trump made during his first term as US president.
The justice department wants to invoke the Westfall Act, which shields government employees from being sued for doing their jobs.
“Absent this Court’s intervention, the sitting President is facing nearly a hundred million dollars of personal liability for conduct that was well within the scope of his federal office,” federal attorneys wrote.
The US Federal Reserve held interest rates steady today, leaving rates unchanged for the fifth time since December despite Donald Trump’s renewed calls to lower rates.
Cooler inflation data published earlier this month eased expectations for an imminent rate hike.
But the tenuous peace deal between the US and Iran has made energy prices creep up again, strengthening the case for an increase.
The Fed’s federal open market committee voted 9-3 to maintain rates, with three dissenting members who preferred to raise the rate by a quarter-percentage point.
At the Fed’s June meeting – its first under its new chair, Kevin Warsh – half of the central bank’s 18 members predicted at least one rate hike by the end of the year.
Interest rates currently sit at a range of 3.5% to 3.75%.
“Inflation remains elevated relative to the Committee’s 2 percent goal, in part reflecting supply shocks that have driven price increases in certain sectors, including energy,” the Fed’s open market committee said in its statement, which is once again noticeably shorter after Warsh’s recent calls for more streamlined communication.
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