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Sarah Sanders to stand down as Trump's press secretary – as it happened

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Trump confirms Sanders leaving to ‘go home to the Great State of Arkansas’ – follow the latest live

 Updated 
in San Francisco (now) and in New York (earlier)
Thu 13 Jun 2019 20.26 EDTFirst published on Thu 13 Jun 2019 09.05 EDT
Sarah Sanders with Trump at the White House on Thursday. Trump suggested Sanders should run for governor of Arkansas.
Sarah Sanders with Trump at the White House on Thursday. Trump suggested Sanders should run for governor of Arkansas. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Sarah Sanders with Trump at the White House on Thursday. Trump suggested Sanders should run for governor of Arkansas. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

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Key events

Kari Paul here, signing off for the day. The top events of this afternoon:

  • Biden can’t decide if he supports the Hyde Amendment and said in 2006 he does not think abortion is a right, a newly surfaced video shows.
  • A lot of Democratic candidates will be joining the first primary debate, the DNC announced today.
  • The Federal Election Commission chair Ellen Weintraub would like to remind our President and other 2020 candidates that they cannot accept help from foreign governments to beat their opponents.

That’s all! See you next time.

Federal Election Commission chair Ellen Weintraub clarified on Thursday candidates for American office are not allowed to solicit or accept help from foreign governments in connection to US campaigns after president Donald Trump stated he would welcome it.

“I would not have thought that I needed to say this,” she said in a tweet accompanying the statement.

On Wednesday, Trump told ABC News he would be open to accepting damaging information on his opponents in the 2020 election if it was offered by another country and would feel no obligation to tell the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

This comes after a report from special counsel Robert Mueller found Russia meddled in the 2016 US presidential election with the aim of helping Trump win.

Weintraub said any political campaign that receives an offer from a foreign government should report that offer to the FBI.

Elizabeth Warren, who is running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, renewed her calls to impeach Trump in light of these statements.

“A foreign government attacked our 2016 elections to support Trump, Trump welcomed that help, and Trump obstructed the investigation,” she said. “Now, he said he’d do it all over again. It’s time to impeach Donald Trump.”

A teen mom and her premature baby were neglected in a border patrol facility for a week, lawyers who visited an immigration processing station in McAllen, Texas said on Wednesday.

The baby was “listless” and the mother was in a wheelchair after complications from an emergency C-section, the immigration and human rights lawyers said.

“I looked at that baby and said ‘Who does this to babies?’” lawyer Hope Frye said, according to the Huffington Post. “They were being sadistically ignored.”

The incident underscored ongoing human rights concerns with immigration processing centers on the border, where minors are often separated from family members and kept in cages. Five children have died in Border Patrol custody since December.

The legal team is working to get the mother and her child released from the facility.

A federal court declared Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raid tactics unconstitutional on Thursday.

A Los Angeles court ruled that an raid at a Van Nuys factory violated Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Enforcement officials had warrants for fewer than 10 people working there but detained more than 130 people, forcing them to undergo interrogations without attorneys. Dozens of those illegally interrogated were held without food or water for more than 18 hours, according to the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California, which brought represented one of the workers interrogated in the case.

“Today’s ruling sends a powerful message: everyone has the right to be free from unlawful searches and seizures,” Ahilan Arulanantham, senior counsel at the ACLU SoCal said.

The Democratic National Convention announced on Thursday nearly 20 Democratic candidates have been invited to participate in the June 26 and 27 initial primary debates.

Here are the candidates who have been invited. Those marked by asterisks qualified through both polling and grassroots fundraising thresholds and others qualified through polling only.

Sen. Michael Bennet

Vice President Joe Biden*

Sen. Cory Booker*

Mayor Pete Buttigieg*

Sec. Julian Castro*

Mayor Bill de Blasio

Rep. John Delaney

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard*

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand*

Sen. Kamala Harris*

Gov. John Hickenlooper

Gov. Jay Inslee*

Sen. Amy Klobuchar*

Rep. Beto O’Rourke*

Rep. Tim Ryan

Sen. Bernie Sanders*

Rep. Eric Swalwell

Sen. Elizabeth Warren*

Ms. Marianne Williamson*

Mr. Andrew Yang*

The debates will take place at 9 pm ET on June 26 and 27 in Miami, Florida and will be broadcast on NBC, MSNBC, and Telemundo.

Betsy Sweet, a former Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Maine, said Thursday she will challenge Republican Susan Collins for her seat in the Senate, according to the Hill.

Sweet, who has been endorsed by progressive political group Democracy for America, will join other Democrats likely to challenge Collins including State House Speaker Sarah Gideon.

Collins is on her fourth term as a Senator in the state and is seen as a moderate, but came under fire for voting to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh despite concerns about past sexual misconduct.

“Our division isn’t between our neighbors on the left and right,” Sweet said in her announcement. “The division is between us and them – between working people and the rich and powerful elite who are lining the pockets of politicians and putting the needs of Maine families at the bottom of the list.”

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A 2006 video of Joe Biden unearthed by CNN on Thursday shows the Democratic presidential candidate saying he does not view abortion as “a choice and a right.”

“I do not view abortion as a choice and a right. I think it’s always a tragedy,” Biden said in a videotaped interview with Texas Monthly. “I think it should be rare and safe,” he added. “I think we should be focusing on how to limit the number of abortions.”

The clip is the latest bit of evidence of Biden’s inconsistent record on the issue of abortion. Last week, he flip flopped on his position on the Hyde amendment, a measure that prohibits the use of federal funding for abortions. One day after saying he supported the Hyde amendment, following backlash from Democrats, he said he can no longer support the ban.

“If I believe healthcare is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s zip code,” he told an audience at the Democratic National Committee’s African American Leadership Council Summit in Atlanta on Thursday, June 6.

Kim Kardashian spoke at the White House on Thursday afternoon about criminal justice reform and announced a ride-share partnership so formerly incarcerated people can get rides to and from job interviews.

“I want to thank the president for standing behind this issue,” she said. “Seeing the compassion he has for this issue has just been really remarkable.”

Kim Kardashian West announces a ride-share partnership for formerly incarcerated people to get rides to-and-from job interviews https://t.co/0N5qjhbdMB pic.twitter.com/gd5v2bfeVX

— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 13, 2019

In June 2018, President Trump commuted the life sentence of 63-year-old Alice Marie Johnson who was convicted of cocaine trafficking in 1996.

“My whole journey with criminal justice reform started about a year ago when I came to see the President after speaking to Ivanka and Jared, who really fought for me to get here,” she said.

Kim Kardashian at the White
House as Donald Trump looks on.
Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner applaud as Kim Kardashian is introduced.
Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
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Afternoon summary

  • White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders will leave the administration at the end of June. Trump tweeted he hoped she would run for governor of Arkansas, and also wrongly tweeted her tenure. She served for less than two years as press secretary, and two and a half in the administration.
  • The US Office of Special Counsel (*a watchdog agency not to be confused with special counsel Robert Mueller) said the Trump administration should remove Kellyanne Conway from office because of her repeated violations of the Hatch Act. The act works to keep certain functions of the government nonpartisan. The office called her a “repeat offender”.
  • Trump said he would accept opposition research from foreign governments. Democrats in the Senate tried to expedite a bill to require campaigns to disclose foreign contacts to law enforcement – namely the FBI – which was thwarted by Republicans.
  • Democratic 2020 candidates are hitting out against former Vice President Joe Biden, who can’t seem to stop making jokes about young women.
  • Maine expanded access to abortion rights, in the face of new restrictions from states like Alabama, Ohio and Missouri.
  • Michigan starts Flint investigations anew. The state attorney general said they would dismiss charges in the investigation of Flint’s lead-tainted water, and would re-investigate the contamination crisis which roiled the city for years.
Trump stands with Sanders in the East Room of the White House on Thursday. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
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Here are some highlights from our past reporting on Sarah Sanders.

Sarah Sanders tweeted a doctored video of CNN reporter

Sanders eagerly placed herself at the centre of a media storm last week when she defended the White House’s decision to revoke CNN’s Jim Acosta’s press pass by claiming that in a press briefing Acosta placed “his hands on a young woman”. Of course, as everyone who watched the briefing on TV could see, what actually happened was that the female intern, encouraged by Trump, tried to grab the microphone away from Acosta when he started to ask a second question. To back up her blatant lie, Sanders retweeted a clearly doctored video, originally tweeted by conspiracist blog InfoWars, in which two seconds of tape were sped up to make it look like Acosta somehow karate chopped the female intern. “This conduct is absolutely unacceptable,” tweeted Sanders, apparently unaware that she works for a man who bragged about grabbing women by the vulva during his campaign.

Sarah Sanders admitted to lying to reporters about FBI director firing

After Trump fired James Comey, the White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders repeatedly claimed in live press briefings that the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in the FBI director, and that “we’ve heard from countless members of the FBI” who did not support him.

Those statements had no basis in fact, Sanders later admitted in interviews with special counsel Robert Mueller’s office.

Sarah Sanders reiterates Comey claims despite admitting to lying

Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, has defended claims she repeatedly made to reporters in 2017 regarding Donald Trump’s firing of then FBI director James Comey – despite admitting to investigators for the special counsel Robert Mueller that they had no basis in fact.

Sanders admitted in statements to the special counsel that her repeated claims that the president fired Comey because the rank-and-file of the FBI had lost confidence in him as FBI director were “a slip of the tongue” and “not founded on anything”.

Rumors have swirled for months that Sanders would leave the White House. Trump did not name a replacement.

Sarah Sanders has been widely criticized for her performance as White House press secretary. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Trump’s tweet wrongly asserts Sanders’ time in the White House. She has been in the administration for two and a half – not three and a half – years. Sanders has not held a White House press briefing in 94 days, according to Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Epstein.

also she's only been at the White House for 2.5 years ... (though I guess you get to 3.5 if you add her time on the Trump campaign) https://t.co/N1BojlhOsU

— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) June 13, 2019

White House press secretary will leave at end of June

....She is a very special person with extraordinary talents, who has done an incredible job! I hope she decides to run for Governor of Arkansas - she would be fantastic. Sarah, thank you for a job well done!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2019

The Michigan attorney general has dropped all charges in the Flint water case, opting to start a new investigation. The office said it would not respond to any media inquiries until after a “community conversation” in Flint – two weeks from now.

🚨 Michigan Attorney General’s office has dismissed ALL pending criminal cases from the #FlintWaterCrisis charges brought by @SchuetteOnDuty and his former special prosecutor. pic.twitter.com/jpYKRI21vq

— Chad Livengood (@ChadLivengood) June 13, 2019

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