Donald Trump’s poll numbers tumble as criticism intensifies – live

Trump sent a tweet celebrating the “great” appeals court ruling for Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser.

The president similarly celebrated last month, when the justice department filed a motion to dismiss the criminal charges against Flynn.

A three-judge panel of the DC circuit court of appeals issued a 2-1 decision to overrule judge Emmet Sullivan and order him to dismiss the criminal charges against Michael Flynn.

However, that is likely not the end of the former national security adviser’s legal saga. Sullivan could still ask for the full bench of the appeals court to review the issue, which could result in a different ruling.

The justice department’s motion to dismiss the charges against Michael Flynn came after Trump repeatedly accused federal investigators of unfairly targeting his former adviser.

Flynn had become a cause celebre among the far right, with many of the president’s most ardent supporters arguing the former national security adviser had been a victim of the “deep state.”

However, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contact with the former Russian ambassador to the US, and he became a cooperating witness in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

After the justice department filed its motion to dismiss the charges against Flynn, critics accused the president and attorney general William Barr of politicizing the department and undermining the rule of law.

Judge Emmet Sullivan previously appointed a former federal judge, John Gleeson, to review the justice department’s motion to dismiss the criminal charges against Michael Flynn.

Gleeson submitted a court filing on his findings earlier this month, accusing the justice department of engaging in “highly irregular conduct to benefit a political ally of the president.”

Gleeson argued the motion to dismiss should be denied because there was “clear evidence of a gross abuse of prosecutorial power” on the part of the justice department.

However, an appeals court has now overruled Sullivan and ordered him to accept the justice department’s motion to dismiss.

The DC circuit court of appeals has overruled district judge Emmet Sullivan and has ordered him to accept the justice department’s motion to dismiss the criminal case against Michael Flynn.

Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in 2017, but the justice department filed a motion last month to dismiss the criminal charges against him, prompting accusations of political bias.

The Senate is holding a procedural vote this morning on Republican senator Tim Scott’s police reform bill, which is expected to fail.

Republicans need seven of their Democratic colleagues to support opening debate on the bill, and Senate Democrats have already signaled they will block the bill from being taken up.

Three Democratic senators sent a letter yesterday to majority leader Mitch McConnell saying the Scott bill was “not salvageable” because it does not go far enough to address police brutality.

House Democrats are expected to pass their own police reform bill this week, but McConnell has already said the legislation is a non-starter in the Senate.

All of that leaves Congress with no current path forward on how to pass police reform, despite the nationwide protests against police brutality in the weeks since the killing of George Floyd.

The coronavirus crisis is deepening in dozens of US states, and the country reported more than 36,000 new cases yesterday, its highest single-day total since mid-April.

Seven US states — Arizona, Arkansas, California, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — also reported record-high levels of coronavirus hospitalizations yesterday.

Testifying before the House energy and commerce committee yesterday, Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, warned of a “disturbing surge” in coronavirus in some parts of the country.

This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam.

The New York Times/Siena College poll released this morning shows Joe Biden with a commanding 14-point lead over Trump as the two candidates prepare for the November election.

Biden continues to attract strong levels of support from women, voters of color and young people, but the former vice president is also chipping away at some of Trump’s base, as his numbers rise among men and older voters.

Biden’s position appears to be getting stronger as Trump continues to attract criticism for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the police brutality protests that have swept across the country.

This week, the US coronavirus death toll surpassed 120,000, and Congress is now in a standoff over police reform legislation.

More than four months remain until the general election, but Trump will need to start turning things around fast to have a chance against Biden in November.

Governor Tony Evers has issued a statement about the incidents in Madison, Wisconsin last night. He says the state is “prepared to activate the Wisconsin National Guard to protect state buildings and infrastructure”.

Evers said his “thoughts are with Tim Carpenter”, the Democrat Senator who was attacked during the unrest, and wished him a quick recovery.

The statement also says:

We also cannot allow ourselves to forget the reason why these protests began: because of the murder of George Floyd, of Breonna Taylor, of the many Black lives taken before them, and because racism and structural inequality still pervade this country. Our cause and our purpose must continue to be the pursuit of the promise of an equitable, just, and fair state and country, and we cannot delay delivering on these promises any longer.

NBC have some footage of the statues being damaged last night.

Governor Evers says that both the Lady Forward and Col. Hans Christian Heg statues have been recovered.

We are unlikely to know the outcome of the race between Amy McGrath and Charles Booker in Kentucky until next week. The early vote tallies give McGrath a 9 point lead out of 58,000 reported votes, but we will not see anything like a true picture until Jefferson and Fayette counties announce their results next week.

The two largest counties in the state had greatly reduced in-person polling, and have said that they will only release results when they’ve counted the absentee ballots.

Booker, who we interviewed last week, is almost certain to do well in Louisville, where he has been an active participant in the Black Lives Matter protests over the police killing of Breonna Taylor.

Booker was also active last night in the moves to keep voting open, after the doors were shut early on polling places in the state.

I mentioned earlier that Democrats were looking at an attempt to introduce legislation to force the re-naming of bases that bear the names of those who fought for the Confederacy and against the US during the civil war.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley very much has other ideas – and has announced on Twitter that he will be proposing Republican legislation to protect the names, criticising “woke mob cancel culture” and claiming that he wants to “stop this madness”.

Robert Williams, a 42 year old black man from Detroit who says he was unjustly arrested because facial recognition technology mistakenly identified him as a suspected shoplifter is calling for a public apology from the police.

The Associated Press reports that the complaint filed on Williams’ behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union alleges that his Michigan driver license photo was kept in a statewide image repository and then incorrectly flagged as a likely match to a shoplifting suspect.

That led to what Williams describes as a humiliating arrest in front of his wife and young daughters on their front lawn in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills.

“I can’t really even put it into words,” Williams said in a video announcement describing the daytime arrest that left his daughters weeping. “It was one of the most shocking things that I ever had happen to me.”

Williams has written an opinion piece for the Washington Post about his experience: “I was wrongly arrested because of facial recognition. Why are police allowed to use this technology”.

The automotive worker is demanding a public apology, final dismissal of his case and for Detroit police to scrap its use of facial recognition technology. Several cities, led by San Francisco last year, have banned the use of facial recognition by municipal agencies.

Studies have shown that current face-recognition systems are more likely to err when identifying people with darker skin. The ACLU complaint said Detroit police “unthinkingly relied on flawed and racist facial recognition technology without taking reasonable measures to verify the information being provided.”

It called the resulting investigation “shoddy and incomplete,” the officers involved “rude and threatening,” and said the department has dragged its feet responding to public-information requests for relevant records.

Concerns about bias and growing scrutiny of policing practices following Geroge Floyd’s death led tech giants IBM, Amazon and Microsoft to announce earlier this month they would stop selling face recognition software to police, at least until Congress can establish guidelines for its use.

The New York Times is reporting that Joe Biden has taken a “commanding” lead over Donald Trump in November’s race for the White House.

Polling by the paper in conjunction with Siena College puts Biden’s support at 50%, with Trump lagging behind on 36%. The paper describes it as “among the most dismal showings of Mr. Trump’s presidency, and a sign that he is the clear underdog right now in his fight for a second term”. They find that:

Among a striking cross-section of voters, the distaste for Mr. Trump has deepened as his administration failed to stop a deadly disease that crippled the economy and then as he responded to a wave of racial-justice protests with angry bluster and militaristic threats. The dominant picture that emerges from the poll is of a country ready to reject a president whom a strong majority of voters regard as failing the greatest tests confronting his administration.

Biden leads in nearly every demographic, with only white voters without a college education giving Trump a 19 point margin in his favour. The paper says that what will be particularly worrying for the long-term prospects of the Republican party is the exodus of white voters under the age of 45 from supporting their nominee.

You can read it here: New York Times – Biden takes dominant lead as voters reject Trump on virus and race

The debate over whether military bases should carry the names of men who fought for the Confederacy is going to continue.

There’ll be a further development today with Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats unveiling legislative plans to force them to change. She’s still – remember – in with a chance of being Joe Biden’s running mate in November.

The legislation is expected to “require removal, within one year of the law’s enactment, of any Confederate names, symbols, displays, monuments and paraphernalia from any Defense Department asset.”

John M. Donnelly has more on the plans over on Roll Call this morning.

Read it here: Roll Call – Democrats’ new push: Cleanse Confederacy from military in a year

There had been some chatter that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was going to come under pressure in her New York primary – but early results suggests she has walked it. In a video message she has claimed the margin of victory as a clear mandate for her policy position,

What you all have shown is that a people’s movement here is not an accident. It is a mandate. It is an absolute mandate. This absolutely strengthens us. It’s not just about winning or losing, but so much of this is about how you win. You know there are many votes that have yet to be counted but some of the early results that we’ve seen have us at about 70-72%. To win with that kind of mandate is transformative. And it tells us that our policy positions are not an accident. It’s exactly what our community has been waiting for.

A constant theme of the Trump administration has been the removal or watering down of federal safeguards over the environment. My colleague Emily Holden in Washington is reporting for us today on another move in that direction – a plan to exempt companies from reporting harmful chemical releases:

Federal regulators are crafting an exemption for polluters releasing harmful perfluorinated chemicals (PFAS) into the environment in a way that environmental advocates say circumvents a new law meant to address widespread contamination.

You can read her report in full here: US moves to exempt companies from reporting harmful chemical releases

Also overnight is the news that Senator Tim Carpenter was reportedly attacked by protesters during an unruly night in Madison, Wisconsin.

During the course of the evening two statues were torn down – the Lady Forward statue, and a statue of Col. Hans Christian Heg.

Carpenter told reporters at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “I don’t know what happened. All I did was stop and take a picture and the next thing I’m getting five-six punches, getting kicked in the head.”

The unrest appears to have followed the arrest of a black man by police in the afternoon, who detained him after he allegedly entered a a restaurant with a megaphone and a baseball bat.

Crowds demanding the release of 28 year old Devonere Johnson later gathered, and in the ensuing demonstration the statues were toppled.

The Heg statue was decapitated and thrown into lake Monona. Heg was an anti-slavery campaigner who fought for the Union against the Confederacy.

The Republican leader of the state Assembly, Robin Vos, condemned the events, saying: “This is absolutely despicable. I am saddened at the cowardice of Madison officials to deal with these thugs.”

Overnight the city of Charleston in South Carolina removed the statue from a 100 foot (30m) monument to former vice president and slavery advocate John C. Calhoun. Officials voted unanimously on Tuesday to remove the statue from downtown Marion Square.

Just before midnight on Tuesday the Charleston Police Department tweeted that, “Calhoun Street between Meeting Street and King Street is closed for the removal of the John C. Calhoun statue,” adding that the street will be closed for several hours.

About 1am on Wednesday, workers using massive cranes began to bring the statue down. A few hundred people gathered at the scene, mostly in favour of the removal.

“I believe that we are setting a new chapter, a more equitable chapter, in our city’s history,” mayor John Tecklenburg said, just before the vote. “We are making the right step. It’s just simply the right thing for us to do.”

Council members had heard from dozens of residents for and against the statue’s removal. Councilman Karl L. Brady Jr. said he knew his support may cost him votes but that he was voting his conscience in a move he said shows that, in Charleston, “we place white supremacy and white supremacist thought back where it belongs – on the ash heap of history.”

Calhoun’s support of slavery never wavered. He said in several speeches on the Senate floor in the 1830s that enslaved people in the south were better off than free black people in the north, while calling slavery a “positive good.”

The statue was erected in 1896, 64 years after he left office and 46 years after he died.

Good morning, welcome to our US politics live coverage for the day. Here’s a little of what we can expect from today:

• We won’t know the results of the Kentucky primary for days yet – but as it stands at the moment Amy McGrath looks like holding off the challenge of Charles Booker for the Democratic nomination and a shot at unseating Mitch McConnell in November
• In New York it is looking like progressive challenger Jamaal Bowman is going to oust long-standing Rep. Eliot Engel. Engel had establishment Democrat heavyweights behind him, but Bowman is leading handsomely at the moment.
• 24-year-old Madison Cawthorn gained a surprise victory over Trump-backed Lynda Bennett for a Republican North Carolina congressional seat .
• We’re expecting stalemate in the Senate over proposals to reform policing with federal legislation as Democrats and Republicans fail to find a package they can agree on.
• New cases of coronavirus in the US have surged to their highest level in two months.
• Donald Trump will host Polish president Andrzej Duda at the White House. He’s the first leader to visit since coronavirus travel restrictions were imposed. They’ll do a press conference together later.
• Fresh from raising $11m last night in a fund-raiser he shared with Barack Obama, Joe Biden will attend a virtual Biden for President finance event today.

I’m Martin Belam, you can get in touch with me via email at martin.belam@theguardian.com