Joanna Walters

Evan Corcoran, a longtime lawyer for Donald Trump, has reportedly quit the former president’s legal team and could now become an important witness for the prosecution in the federal criminal case against Trump for hoarding and hiding classified documents after he left office, CNN reported last night.

The report calls it a quiet exit, in recent months, but a significant one, citing unnamed sources familiar with Trump’s legal circle.

The outlet reports:

Corcoran was brought on to help Trump fend off charges in the classified documents investigation, but instead turned into a central witness after Trump allegedly misled him about the whereabouts of the documents at his Mar-a-Lago club and encouraged him to lie to the justice department and withhold those documents.

DNC covered Biden legal bills – report

Joanna Walters

Democratic party election campaign donations were used to pay for Joe Biden’s legal bills when a special counsel was investigating the fact that he hung on to classified documents after his time as US vice-president, Axios reports today, citing two unnamed sources and the outlet’s own analysis of finance records.

Axios immediately points out the bitter irony for Republicans, in that Democrats have been fiercely critical of Donald Trump for spending his election coffers on his massive legal bills, which amounted to more than $50m last year, according to the outlet.

Filings by the Democratic National Committee showed it paid more than $1.5m to lawyers or firms representing Biden during Robert Hur’s investigation, Axios said and the Guardian US now reports here.

Trump was fined and sanctioned in a huge civil fraud case in New York involving his family business empire the Trump Organization, as well as fined in his civil case with writer E Jean Carroll, whom he was found liable to have sexually abused in the past.

The former president is also facing four criminal cases, with the first one going to trial in an unprecedented event for an ex-US president, in New York on Monday.

In a new interview with Forbes Women, the Democratic Arizona US representative Greg Stanton condemned the state’s abortion ban: “It is a dark day in Arizona. A dark day that will hurt women across our state.”

Stanton went on to add:

The Arizona supreme court … [on Tuesday] issued its ruling saying this territorial law that was passed even before Arizona became a state, at a time when women could not even vote, when Native Americans were not considered fully human under law in the United States, a law from that time period is now the law of the land again in the state of Arizona. And that’s why it’s a dark day in our state …

First time in America, we’ve gone backwards on constitutional rights. We’re going restore that right and send a message that in our country, we go forward on civil and constitutional rights, not backwards.

Good morning,

The vice-president, Kamala Harris, is set to travel to Tucson, Arizona, for a campaign event where she is expected to explicitly blame Donald Trump as the “architect” of the abortion rights crisis in the US.

Harris’s trip to Arizona comes after the state’s supreme court ruled on Wednesday that a 1864 law with no exceptions for rape or incest can go into effect.

“Donald Trump is the architect of this healthcare crisis. And that’s not a fact he hides. In fact, he brags about it,” Harris is expected to say, Politico reports. “We all must understand who is to blame. It is the former president, Donald Trump. It is Donald Trump who, during his campaign in 2016, said women should be punished for seeking an abortion.”

With Harris instructing her team to designate the trip as a campaign event, one senior Harris aide told Politico that she is “not subject to the Hatch Act and she can say whatever the heck she wants … we could really be unencumbered in how we tell the story.”

Since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, Harris has repeatedly gone after anti-abortion conservatives as she and Joe Biden cement abortion as a key campaign issue in this year’s presidential election campaign.

Here are other developments in US politics:

• The House Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, will meet with Trump in Mar-a-Lago, where they plan to deliver remarks on “election integrity”, NBC reports.

• The House is set to vote on the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the controversial legislation that failed two days ago in the Republican-led chamber.

• Biden is set to deliver a virtual keynote address at Rev Al Sharpton’s annual racial justice conference in New York.