Closing summary
The ranks of challengers to Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in 2024 are growing, with his former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley announcing her candidacy today and other Republicans like former vice-president Mike Pence, senator Tim Scott and Florida governor Ron DeSantis expected to throw their hats in the ring in the weeks or months to come. Meanwhile, a somber Washington is marking five years since the deaths of 17 adults and children in the Parkland, Florida mass shooting, with Democrats reiterating their calls for more stringent gun control.
Here’s what else happened today:
Senator Dianne Feinstein said she will not stand for re-election in 2024. The 89-year-old Democrat is the oldest sitting lawmaker in Congress, and several candidates have already emerged for her seat.
Pence plans to challenge a subpoena from special counsel Jack Smith with an unusual legal strategy that, if successful, could shield him from having to cooperate with the investigation into Trump’s campaign to undo the 2020 election.
Senators received a classified briefing on the UFOs shot down over North American airspace, but no big revelations emerged.
George Santos insisted (again) that he won’t be going anywhere.
Trump will have to pay $110,000 for defying a subpoena from the New York attorney general, after a judge turned down his challenge to the penalty.
Meanwhile, national security council spokesperson John Kirby has said the objects downed over North America could be “benign” after all, the Guardian’s Julia Carrie Wong reports:
Three unidentified objects shot down by US fighter jets since Friday may turn out to be balloons connected to “benign” commercial or research efforts, a White House official said on Tuesday.
The US has not found any evidence to connect the objects to China’s balloon surveillance program nor to any other country’s spy program, national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, told reporters.
“We haven’t seen any indication or anything that points specifically to the idea that these three objects were part of the [People’s Republic of China’s] spying program, or that they were definitively involved in external intelligence collection efforts,” he said.
Instead, a “leading explanation” may be that the objects were operated privately for commercial or research purposes, Kirby said, though no one has stepped forward to claim ownership.
The unidentified object shot down by a US fighter jet over northern Canada on Saturday was a “small, metallic balloon with a tethered payload below it”, according to a Pentagon memo to US lawmakers obtained by CNN.
