A Fulton county judge has ruled that district attorney Fani Willis can continue to head the prosecution of Donald Trump for trying to undermine the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, as long as special prosecutor Nathan Wade steps down.

You can read Judge Scott McAfee’s decision below:

Joe Biden has defended Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer over comments he made on Thursday calling on Israel to hold new elections and harshly criticizing its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“He made a good speech,” Biden said when asked by reporters about Schumer’s remarks on the Senate floor on Thursday. He added:

He expressed serious concerns, shared not only by him but by many Americans.

Biden added that his staff were notified about the speech in advance by Schumer, who is the highest-ranking Jewish official in the US.

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.

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.

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 conspiracy 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.

Here’s an explainer to the Murthy v Missouri case.

Martin Pengelly

Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who twice ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, introduced a bill to establish a four-day US working week.

Studies and pilot programmes have shown that four-day workweeks can increase productivity and happiness. Given Republican control of the House and a Senate split 51-49 in favour of Democrats, however, the legislation stands little chance of success.

“Moving to a 32-hour workweek with no loss of pay is not a radical idea,” Sanders said on Thursday.

Today, American workers are over 400% more productive than they were in the 1940s. And yet millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages than they were decades ago … It is time to reduce the stress level in our country and allow Americans to enjoy a better quality of life. It is time for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay.

Lauren Aratani

A letter by the White House’s top lawyer to House speaker Mike Johnson urging House Republicans to give up on their impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden is a sign that the White House is taking an increasingly aggressive stance against the impeachment inquiry, which Democrats say is a clear effort to distract voters during an election year.

In the letter, White House counsel Ed Siskel tells Johnson that members of his own party are starting to turn away from him because of the impeachment inquiry. He cites reports that Republicans are looking for an exit strategy after failing to clinch the impeachment.

Siskel also quotes Ken Buck, a Republican representative from Colorado who announced earlier this week that he would resign from his post at the end of March, leaving the GOP with a weaker House majority.

House Republicans over the last six months have been trying to find evidence that Biden benefited from his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business activities. But after making clear their goal of impeaching the president, Republicans are scrambling to determine how to move forward even after they appear to have exhausted witnesses and documented sources.

The House oversight committee is holding a hearing next week with former business partners of Hunter Biden, but it is unclear whether witnesses can deliver the definitive evidence Republicans have been hoping for.

Sam Levine

Scott McAfee, the judge overseeing the racketeering case against Donald Trump and his co-defendants, ruled that the district attorney Fani Willis can continue to head the prosecution of the case, as long as Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor in the case and her top deputy, steps down. He wrote:

The court therefore concludes that the prosecution of this case cannot proceed until the state selects one of two options. The district attorney may choose to step aside, along with the whole of her office, and refer the prosecution to the prosecuting attorneys’ council for reassignment.

He added that, alternatively, Wade can withdraw, “allowing the district attorney, the defendants, and the public to move forward without his presence or remuneration distracting from and potentially compromising the merits of this case”.

Defense lawyers argued that Willis should be disqualified from handling the case because of her romantic relationship with Wade, which was not publicly known at the time. The two eventually admitted their relationship, but said it did not begin until 2022, after Wade was hired to work on the Trump case.

Wade acknowledged that he paid for vacations for the two of them to places such as Napa in California and Aruba, but he and Willis both said she paid him back in cash. McAfee said the arrangement presented the appearance of a conflict of interest, which was enough to warrant at least Wade’s removal.

The judge added:

As the case moves forward, reasonable members of the public could easily be left to wonder whether the financial exchanges have continued resulting in some form of benefit to the district attorney, or even whether the romantic relationship has resumed.

Donald Trump’s lawyer Steve Sadow has responded to the ruling by Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee that Fani Willis can continue to head the Georgia election case.

A statement from Sadow, shared by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, reads:

While respecting the Court’s decision, we believe that the Court did not afford appropriate significance to the prosecutorial misconduct of Willis and Wade, including the financial benefits, testifying untruthfully about when their personal relationship began, as well as Willis’ extrajudicial MLK ‘church speech,’ where she played the race card and falsely accused the defendants and their counsel of racism. We will use all legal options available as we continue to fight to end this case, which should never have been brought in the first place.

In his ruling, Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee wrote that district attorney Fani Willis had demonstrated “tremendous lapse in judgment”, noting that even if the romantic relationship between her and Nathan Wade developed after Wade was appointed as special prosecutor in November 2021, Willis “chose to continue supervising and paying Wade while maintaining such a relationship.”

She further allowed the regular and loose exchange of money between them without any exact or verifiable measure of reconciliation. This lack of a confirmed financial split creates the possibility and appearance that the District Attorney benefited – albeit non-materially – from a contract whose award lay solely within her purview and policing.

Georgia law “does not permit the finding of an actual conflict for simply making bad choices – even repeatedly,” McAfee wrote.

The judge said he found the “allegations and evidence legally insufficient to support a finding of an actual conflict of interest,” but that there remains an “appearance of impropriety”.

This finding is by no means an indication that the Court condones this tremendous lapse in judgment or the unprofessional manner of the District Attorney’s testimony during the evidentiary hearing.

Sam Levine

A judge in Georgia has ruled that the district attorney Fani Willis can continue to head the prosecution of Donald Trump for trying to undermine the 2020 presidential election in the state, as long as a top deputy steps down.

The ruling came after hearings that offered a dramatic deviation from the racketeering case against Trump and 14 remaining co-defendants as it investigated Willis’s romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor in the case.

The question at the heart of the matter was whether Willis had a conflict of interest in the case because of her relationship with Wade. Michael Roman, one of the 14 remaining defendants in the case, filed a motion in January saying Willis should be disqualified from handling the case because of her romantic relationship with Wade, which was not publicly known at the time.

The two eventually admitted their relationship, but said it did not begin until 2022, after Wade was hired to work on the Trump case. Wade acknowledged that he paid for vacations for the two of them to places such as Napa in California and Aruba, but he and Willis both said she paid him back in cash.

The hearing dived deeply into the personal lives of Wade and Willis, and featured dramatic testimony from Willis in which she bluntly accused Roman’s lawyers of lying and sought to regain control over one of the most high-stakes trials in the US.

A judge has ruled that the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, should not be disqualified from prosecuting the racketeering case against Donald Trump and his co-defendants.

Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee ruled that Willis can continue leading the prosecution of Trump and his allies in Georgia, but only if her former romantic partner, Nathan Wade, withdraws as the lead prosecutor of the case.

McAfee found there was no “actual conflict” brought about by the relationship between Willis and Wade, but that the “appearance of impropriety” should result in either Willis and her office leaving the case, or Wade. The judge added:

Without sufficient evidence that the District Attorney acquired a personal stake in the prosecution, or that her financial arrangements had any impact on the case, the Defendants’ claims of an actual conflict must be denied.

Good morning US politics readers. The White House has urged the House speaker, Mike Johnson, to end impeachment efforts against Joe Biden, arguing in a letter that House Republicans’ months-long effort to uncover wrongdoing by the president has come up empty.

Writing to Johnson, White House counsel Ed Siskel said it is “obviously time to move on”, noting that testimony and records turned over to the House oversight and judiciary committees have “turned up evidence that … the president did nothing wrong”. The four-page letter comes as the Republican impeachment drive has come to a near-standstill after the indictment of a key witness on charges of making up allegations against the president’s son, Hunter Biden, and amid a tenuous House Republican majority.

Here’s what else we’re watching:

• 10am. The supreme court will convene for a public non-argument session.

• 10.30am. Joe Biden will host Taoiseach Leo Varadkar of Ireland for a bilateral meeting

• 12pm. Mike Johnson will host Biden and Varadkar for the annual Friends of Ireland luncheon at the Capitol.

• 12.30pm. Biden will deliver remarks at the Friends of Ireland Luncheon at US Capitol.

• 1.25pm. Kamala Harris will convene roundtable conversation about marijuana reform with artist and philanthropist Fat Joe and Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear.

• 2.30pm. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will give a briefing.

• 7.30pm. Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr will attend a private dinner and conversation fundraiser in Austin, Texas.