Donald Trump has entered pleas of not guilty to new charges federal prosecutors brought against him last week in the case of the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, CNN reports:

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Donald Trump has pleaded not guilty for the second time in 24 hours, this time for the additional charges leveled against him in the documents case. He waives his right to appear for the arraignment on those charges, per a new court filing.

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) August 4, 2023

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Special counsel Jack Smith last week added charges to the indictment against Trump claiming he tried to erase surveillance footage that prosecutors subpoenaed, which showed boxes of classified documents being removed from a storage room at his South Florida resort. Smith also indicted property manager Carlos De Oliveira, who allegedly worked with Trump to destroy the footage.

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De Oliveira made an initial court appearance this week, but did not enter a plea as he was still looking for a lawyer to represent him in Florida.

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A day after pleading not guilty to federal charges related to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection, Donald Trump is calling on the US supreme court to intercede in the legal battles he is facing.

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Trump, in a Truth Social post earlier today, repeated accusations that the legal troubles he brought upon himself amount to “election interference” from President Joe Biden.

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He said Biden “hit me with a barrage of weak lawsuits” that will “require massive amounts of my time [and] money to adjudicate”, resources that he claimed would have been used for advertising and rallies.

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Trump added:

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I am leading in all Polls, including against Crooked Joe, but this is not a level playing field. It is Election Interference, & the Supreme Court must intercede. MAGA!

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Mounting legal fees have forced Trump to drain his campaign’s financial resources ahead of the GOP primary season. In filings with the Federal Election Commission FEC) on Monday, Trump’s political action committee, Save America, said that at the end of June it had less than $4m cash on hand, having paid tens of millions of dollars in legal fees for the former president and associates.

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Supreme court justices are careful about what they say in public, but the calls from Senate Democrats for the nation’s top jurors to adopt a code of ethics clearly have their attention. Liberal justice Elena Kagan weighed in on the matter yesterday, saying that Congress does indeed have the authority to regulate the court, though stopped short of outright endorsing a code of conduct. Her comments came after conservative justice Samuel Alito said he felt otherwise, which caused Democrats to call for him to recuse himself from ethics cases.

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Here’s what else has happened today so far:

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• The federal judge handling Donald Trump’s trial over the Mar-a-Lago documents made errors when she presided over another criminal case earlier this year, Reuters found.

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• Hiring remained steady in July, newly released government data indicates, but there were signs the labor market may be slowing down.

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• Trump’s attorneys have dropped a long-shot effort to block his potential indictment in Georgia over his attempt to overturn the state’s 2020 election result.

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Joe Biden has issued an upbeat statement on the jobs data the labor department released this morning, even though the report brought hints that hiring and employment may be slowing down.

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The president is counting on a strong economy to propel him to a second term in office in next year’s presidential election, and data has lately broken his way, with inflation dropping and hiring remaining resilient even as the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates to cut into the wave of price increases that began shortly after Biden took office.

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But today’s jobs report contained signs that hot streak may be ending. As the Guardian’s Lauren Aratani reported, the past two months saw the weakest employment gains in the past two-and-a-half years:

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US employers added 187,000 jobs in July, less than expected and a sign that the labor market is cooling after a series of interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve have driven rates to their highest level in 22 years.

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The jobs market has continued to add at least 200,000 new jobs each month this year, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). But that compares to an average monthly gain of 400,000 in 2022.

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July’s gains were just 2,000 more than the jobs added in June. The BLS revised June’s job gain down to 185,000, a cut of 24,000 jobs. It also cut May’s jobs number. Together, June and July represent the two weakest monthly gains in two and a half years.

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While the jobs market remains robust, July’s gains represent a considerable dip compared to January of this year, when 472,000 jobs were added. The unemployment rate has remained stable at 3.5%, the same rate seen in June and close to the historically low rates seen before 2020.

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Healthcare and social assistance accounted for the most new positions in July, adding 87,000 new jobs. The government added 15,000 new jobs.

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Biden nonetheless struck an upbeat tone in a statement released by the White House:

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Unemployment near a record low and the share of working age Americans who have jobs at a 20-year high: that’s Bidenomics. Our economy added 187,000 jobs last month, and we’ve added 13.4 million jobs since I took office — more jobs added in two and a half years than during any president’s four-year term. The unemployment rate is 3.5%, marking a full year and half below 4%. This follows recent news that our economy continues to grow, while inflation has fallen by nearly two thirds and is at its lowest level in more than two years. We’re growing the economy from the middle out and bottom up, lowering costs for hardworking families, and making smart investments in America.

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For more on today’s data, check out our story:

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Senate Democrats have asked supreme court chief justice John Roberts to ensure that Samuel Alito recuses himself from cases involving the panel’s ethics, citing comments he made in a recent interview.

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The letter sent on Thursday and signed by 10 Democratic senators on the judiciary committee cites Alito’s comments to the Wall Street Journal’s right-leaning editorial board, in which he said of Congress, “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period.”

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The comments from Alito, one of the most prominent of the six conservative justices who form a majority block on the court, came after the judiciary committee approved legislation that would require the court to adopt an ethics code, in response to media reports recently that showed ties between the justices and parties with interests in their decisions.

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“By opining on the constitutionality of legislation under consideration by the U.S. Senate and agreeing to sit for interviews conducted in part by an attorney with a case currently pending before the Court, Justice Alito violated a key tenet of the Statement on Ethics Principles and Practices … to which all Supreme Court Justices purport to subscribe as well as the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges,” the senators wrote.

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“We therefore urge you to take appropriate steps to ensure that Justice Alito will recuse himself in any future cases concerning legislation that regulates the Court.”

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They also request that he recuse himself from Moore v United States, a pending case that challenges that constitutionality of wealth taxes, which are supported by some progressive Democrats. Attorney David Rivkin is representing the plaintiffs in that case, and also took part in the Journal’s interview with Alito.

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Good morning, US politics blog readers. Donald Trump came and went from Washington DC yesterday after pleading not guilty to charges related to trying to overturn the election, but the legacy of his presidency can be found all across the capital, particularly at the supreme court. He decisively shifted its ideological makeup to the right by appointing three conservative justices to the bench, and in the years since, they’ve handed down decisions with major implications for American life, including by overturning Roe v Wade last year and allowing states to fully ban abortion.

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But a series of media reports this year have revealed questionable ties between some of the justices and people with interests in their decisions. Senate Democrats are now trying to pass legislation that would require the justices to adopt a code of ethics, and that, too, appears to have been caught up in the court’s ideological split. Last week, conservative justice Samuel Alito said in an interview that Congress has no authority to impose such rules on the court. But at an event yesterday, liberal justice Elena Kagan indicated that she believed lawmakers did indeed have that power.

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Kagan told the audiences of judges and lawyers in Portland, Oregon: “It just can’t be that the court is the only institution that somehow is not subject to checks and balances from anybody else. We’re not imperial.”

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Politico also quotes her as saying:

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“Can Congress do various things to regulate the Supreme Court? I think the answer is: yes.”

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We’ll keep an eye out to see if lawmakers have anything to say about these comments today.

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Here’s what else is going on:

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• Employment data released just now indicates the US labor market remains strong, which is good news for both Joe Biden and the Federal Reserve’s campaign to curb inflation. Follow our live blog for more.

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• A new poll of Iowa Republicans shows Trump is the presidential frontrunner there, but he’s not quite as popular in the early voting state as he is nationwide.

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• Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy again made clear he remains in Trump’s camp, including when it comes to the latest federal charges leveled against the former president.

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Key events

A group of House Democrats called on the body overseeing federal courts to allow Donald Trump’s election fraud trial be publicly televised live.

In a letter led by Representative Adam Schiff, who served on the House select committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection, the group of 38 House Democrats asked that the judicial conference “explicitly authorize the broadcasting of court proceedings in the cases of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump”.

The group wrote:

It is imperative the [court] ensures timely access to accurate and reliable information surrounding these cases and all of their proceedings, given the extraordinary national importance to our democratic institutions and need for transparency.

Trump was arraigned at a federal courthouse in Washington on Thursday and charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.

The arraignment was not televised publicly, as cameras are generally not allowed in federal courtrooms. Trump’s next court hearing in the case is set for 28 August.

The letter’s signatories included other members who served on the January 6 committee which concluded with a recommendation that the justice department pursue a criminal investigation of Trump over his involvement in the insurrection.

It continued:

Given the historic nature of the charges brought forth in these cases, it is hard to imagine a more powerful circumstance for televised proceedings. If the public is to fully accept the outcome, it will be vitally important for it to witness, as directly as possible, how the trials are conducted, the strength of the evidence adduced and the credibility of witnesses.

As we reported earlier, Donald Trump pleaded not guilty on Friday to new charges brought against him by special counsel Jack Smith in his classified documents criminal case.

Trump, who just a day ago pleaded not guilty in a Washington federal courtroom to federal charges over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, officially entered a plea of “not guilty” to the 40-count superseding indictment in a separate case against him in the Southern District of Florida.

The former president did not appear in court on Friday. He also waived his right to be present in court for his arraignment on the three additional charges, scheduled for Thursday 10 August before a US magistrate judge in Fort Pierce, Florida.

Federal prosecutors filed the new charges last week against Trump and two of his employees, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, in the criminal case over the retention of sensitive government records at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump now faces 40 charges in the case, after originally being indicted on 37 counts last month.

Trump’s co-defendants, De Oliveira and Nauta, have not indicated in court filings their plans for the arraignment, according to CNN.

After months of waffling, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appeared to finally reject Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, the New York Times reports.

“All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” DeSantis said in response to a question from a reporter during a campaign stop in Iowa, a day after Trump appeared in a Washington DC federal court to answer charges related to his failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

The governor has previously been vague about whether he adhered to Trump’s disproven claims that fraud caused him to lose re-election, though DeSantis has characterized the state and federal charges filed against the former president as politically motivated.

The comments come amid a pronounced drop in DeSantis’s recent poll numbers, who is otherwise in second place to Trump among Republican primary voters.

Trump pleads not guilty to new charges in Mar-a-Lago documents case

Donald Trump has entered pleas of not guilty to new charges federal prosecutors brought against him last week in the case of the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, CNN reports:

Special counsel Jack Smith last week added charges to the indictment against Trump claiming he tried to erase surveillance footage that prosecutors subpoenaed, which showed boxes of classified documents being removed from a storage room at his South Florida resort. Smith also indicted property manager Carlos De Oliveira, who allegedly worked with Trump to destroy the footage.

De Oliveira made an initial court appearance this week, but did not enter a plea as he was still looking for a lawyer to represent him in Florida.

Iowa is the first state to vote in the Republican presidential nomination process, and New York Times/Siena College polling of the state released today shows Donald Trump with a commanding lead:

However, he’s underperforming his national poll numbers in Iowa, potentially giving rivals like Ron DeSantis an opening to catch up. From the Times’s story on the data:

Even Iowa Republicans who say they favor other candidates could still swing Mr. Trump’s way.

“Each indictment gets me leaning toward Trump,” said John-Charles Fish, 45, a Waukon, Iowa, social media consultant who said he still supported Mr. DeSantis, but barely. “It wouldn’t take much for me to change my mind,” he said.

For Mr. DeSantis and other competitors, the Iowa survey yielded glimmers of bright spots. About 47 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters said they would consider other candidates. Among Republicans with at least a college degree, Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis are tied at 26 percent when the whole field is under consideration.

In a head-to-head match between the front-runner and his closest rival, Mr. Trump leads Iowa handily, 55 percent to 39 percent, but he is well behind Mr. DeSantis among college-educated Republicans, 38 percent to 53 percent.

According to the poll, Mr. DeSantis is seen as the more moral candidate, and although the Florida governor has been knocked for some awkward moments on the campaign trail, he is seen as considerably more likable than Mr. Trump. More than half of those surveyed said the term “likable” was a better fit for Mr. DeSantis, compared with 38 percent for Mr. Trump.

The poll also suggests that Mr. DeSantis’s argument that he is the more electable Republican may be resonating with voters, at least in Iowa. Just under half of those surveyed said Mr. Trump is the candidate more able to beat Mr. Biden, while 40 percent said Mr. DeSantis is. Nationally, Mr. Trump holds a 30-percentage-point lead on the same question.

Robert Corry, a business consultant in Grinnell, Iowa, praised Mr. DeSantis’s stewardship of Florida’s sprawling economy, his ability to “get things done” and his “exemplary, outstanding life.”

Donald Trump continues to consolidate his support among Republicans, criminal charges be damned.

He just announced endorsements from almost the entirety of Alabama’s congressional lawmakers, including all the Republicans in its House delegation. Perhaps what is more notable is who from the deeply red state did not endorse him.

While Trump picked up the support of Republican senior senator Tommy Tuberville, junior senator Katie Britt has reportedly said she will not be endorsing any candidate for the GOP’s nomination. Republican governor Kay Ivey also has not made an endorsement, though the former president did gain the support of lieutenant governor Will Ainsworth.

And needless to say, the sole Democrat in Alabama’s House delegation, Terri Sewell, did not endorse Trump.

Donald Trump’s detractors have long dreamed of seeing him behind bars, and now that he’s the subject of not one, not two, but three and perhaps even four criminal indictments, it seems like that dream could become a reality.

Or could it?

The Washington Post has a story looking at the practical considerations that would determine whether Trump actually goes to jail if convicted of the state and federal charges he currently stands accused of. That would be an unprecedented situation, and some former government officials the Post spoke to were skeptical of the former president ever actually ending up behind bars:

Could Trump face prison? “Theoretically, yes and practically, no,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former top federal prosecutor and counsel to then-FBI Director James B. Comey. Rosenberg served briefly as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in the Trump administration and notably said the president had “condoned police misconduct” in remarking to officers in Long Island that they need not protect suspects’ heads when loading them into police vehicles.

“Any federal district judge ought to understand it raises enormous and unprecedented logistical issues,” Rosenberg said of the prospect Trump could be incarcerated. “Probation, fines, community service and home confinement are all alternatives.”

And even if he is convicted, there are a range of possibilities for the type of sentence he could receive:

The prospect of potentially decades in prison for Trump is politically loaded, though the charges he faces could carry such a penalty. After entering a not-guilty plea in Miami federal court on June 13, Trump claimed he was being threatened with “400 years in prison,” adding up the statutory maximum penalty for the 37 counts against him. The charges he faces in D.C. related to his alleged efforts to stay in power despite losing the election could add additional decades, based on that math.

Judges almost never apply maximum penalties to first offenders and rarely stack sentences rather than let them run concurrently. However, federal sentencing guidelines are highly technical. Specialists estimate that a first offender convicted of multiple counts of willfully retaining national defense information and obstructing or conspiring to obstruct an investigation by concealing evidence might face a range of anything from 51 to 63 months on the low end — about five years — to 17½ to 22 years on the high end — or about 20 years, given Trump’s alleged leadership role and abuse of trust.

Similarly, Jan. 6 riot defendants convicted at trial of two of the same counts with which Trump is charged — conspiring to or actually obstructing an official proceeding — have faced sentencing guideline ranges as high as seven to 11 years, and as low as less than two years.

But judges always have the final say.

“Without question, if it were anyone else [but Trump], prison would be a certainty,” said Thomas A. Durkin, a former federal prosecutor who teaches national security law at Loyola University Chicago. However, he said, “The Secret Service waiver issue is a novel and complex issue” that could theoretically factor into an exception.

That said, if he does go to prison, the Post reports that it could actually things easier for his Secret Service details:

Former and current Secret Service agents said that while there is no precedent, they feel certain the agency would insist on providing some form of 24/7 protection to an imprisoned former president. And, they say, the agency is probably planning for that possibility, seeking to match to some degree its normal practice of rotating three daily shifts of at least one or two agents providing close proximity protection.

“This question keeps getting raised, yet no official answers” from the Secret Service, said Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent and now chief operating officer for Teneo Risk, a corporate advisory and communications firm. “However, we can infer how security measures could be implemented based on existing protective protocols. Unless there are changes in legislation or the former president waives protection, the U.S. Secret Service would likely maintain a protective environment around the president in accordance with their current practices.”

Current and former agents said Trump’s detail would coordinate their protection work with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to ensure there was no conflict about duties or about how they would handle emergencies, as well as the former president’s routine movements in a prison — such as heading to exercise or meals. The Secret Service, they said, would maintain a bubble around Trump in any case, keeping him at a distance from other inmates.

“In some ways, protection may be easier — the absence of travel means logistics get easier and confinement means that the former president’s location is always known,” Wackrow said. “Theoretically, the perimeter is well fortified — no one is worried about someone breaking into jail.”

Ron DeSantis is having a rough go of his presidential campaign. His solution? “Start slitting throats”, as the Guardian Martin Pengelly reports:

Rightwing Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis was widely condemned after he said that if elected to the White House, he would “start slitting throats” in the federal bureaucracy on his first day in power.

The president of the National Treasury Employees Union, Tony Reardon, called the hardline Republican’s comment “repulsive and unworthy of the presidential campaign trail”.

The president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), Everett Kelly, said: “Governor DeSantis’ threat to ‘start slitting throats’ of federal employees is dangerous, disgusting, disgraceful and disqualifying.”

Among commentators, the columnist Max Boot called DeSantis’s words “deranged” while Bill Kristol, founder of the Bulwark, a conservative site, said the governor was “making a bold play to dominate the maniacal psychopath lane in the Republican primary”.

DeSantis is a clear second in the Republican primary but more than 30 points behind Donald Trump in most averages, notwithstanding the former president’s proliferating legal jeopardy including 78 criminal charges.

Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie visited Ukraine on Friday and met with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in an attempt to underscore US support for Kyiv by one of the people bidding to be the next Republican president of the US.

The former New Jersey governor met Zelenskiy at the presidential palace after visiting a mass grave in Bucha and touring damage in Iprin. Christie also toured a child protection center in Kyiv.

Other Republican candidates, including frontrunner Donald Trump, have been critical of the cost of supporting Ukraine. Florida governor Ron DeSantis earlier this year suggested that the war was simply a “territorial dispute” before backtracking. Another candidate, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, has called for an immediate end to the war and for Russia to keep its territorial gains.

Former vice-president Mike Pence and US senator Tim Scott of South Carolina are also in the race, and Reuters notes both have argued it remains vital for the US to push back against Russian aggression.

For more updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine, follow our live blog.

Trump calls on supreme court to ‘intercede’ in his criminal cases

A day after pleading not guilty to federal charges related to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection, Donald Trump is calling on the US supreme court to intercede in the legal battles he is facing.

Trump, in a Truth Social post earlier today, repeated accusations that the legal troubles he brought upon himself amount to “election interference” from President Joe Biden.

He said Biden “hit me with a barrage of weak lawsuits” that will “require massive amounts of my time [and] money to adjudicate”, resources that he claimed would have been used for advertising and rallies.

Trump added:

I am leading in all Polls, including against Crooked Joe, but this is not a level playing field. It is Election Interference, & the Supreme Court must intercede. MAGA!

Mounting legal fees have forced Trump to drain his campaign’s financial resources ahead of the GOP primary season. In filings with the Federal Election Commission FEC) on Monday, Trump’s political action committee, Save America, said that at the end of June it had less than $4m cash on hand, having paid tens of millions of dollars in legal fees for the former president and associates.