Key events
Opening summary
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John Bolton, former national security adviser to Donald Trump, is expected to plead guilty on Friday to charges that he unlawfully retained sensitive national security information.
The agreement with federal prosecutors includes a $2.25m fine, according to sources familiar with the deal.
Bolton is expected to plead guilty to one count of retaining classified information, which is specifically related to diary entries about his work during Trump’s first term. The former adviser, who is now a prominent critic of Trump, was accused of transmitting some of these materials to two relatives.
The trial is scheduled to take place in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Friday – and a possible sentence could range from no jail time to five years.
In October, Bolton pleaded not guilty to charges of mishandling classified information when he worked in the Trump White House.
“This was a very difficult decision for him,” the source close to Bolton said to NBC, in relation to his expected guilty plea. “Most importantly, he is doing what leaders do and taking responsibility.
“He understands that if he went to trial what that would mean, which essentially would be the disclosure of many, many more classified documents that he would need to reveal to defend himself. And given the Ukraine and the Middle East, he didn’t want to do that.”
Elsewhere, the supreme court conservative majority passed two new rulings on Thursday that allowed the Trump administration to strip certain immigration protection and fundamentally reshape the asylum system in the United States.
This means that the court has allowed the administration to move forward with policies that could remove more than 1 million people from the US, and could also possibly prevent others from entering.
Dozens of groups, advocates and members of Congress called the court’s decisions “disastrous” and “cruel”, while the Trump administration, Republican lawmakers and anti-immigrant groups celebrated the rulings.
In case after case, the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has green-lighted Donald Trump’s policies targeting both legal and illegal immigration with few exceptions, while its three liberal justices have objected to most of his actions.
This will mostly impact Haitian and Syrian immigrants, with hundreds of thousands expected to be stripped of their Temporary Protected Status.
“The Trump administration has turned the immigration system into a deportation machine,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School in New York.
“In most cases, the supreme court has been a rubber stamp for Trump’s mass deportation agenda,” Mukherjee added.
Here’s what else is happening:
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The supreme court also expanded the constitution’s second amendment right “to keep and bear arms”. This includes a ruling that will remove a Hawaii law that required gun owners to get an owner’s permission before bringing a handgun on to private property open to the public – such as shops and restaurants.
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In Texas, it is expected that a new law will be put into place which would require almost 5 million school pupils to compulsorily study the Bible. This comes as part of a wider effort to put more Christian teachings into schools.
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Advisers to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will soon hold a meeting about whether to ease restrictions on access to some research peptides, a group of drugs with a zealous after and thin evidence to support them
