Trump news: Michael Flynn case dropped as president claims protesters want to tear down statues of Jesus

Trump is ‘undeniably’ the worst criminal in history, Noam Chomsky says

Going one better than Cohen is the celebrated public intellectual, who calls the president a "gangster" and a "tin-pot dictator" in the latest issue of the socialist quarterly Jacobin, saying so in a fairly fruity hat.

Justin Vallejo has more.

Trump's brother joins fight to stop publication of tell-all book revealing family secrets

The president's seldom-seen sibling is asking a New York City judge to prevent his niece from publishing a tell-all book, which is expected to be released later this month.

In court papers, Robert Trump's lawyers argue that Mary Trump and others had signed a settlement agreement in the late 1990s that included a confidentially clause explicitly saying they would not "publish any account concerning the litigation or their relationship," unless they all agreed.

The settlement agreement related to the will of Donald Trump's father, New York real estate developer Fred Trump. "Confidentiality was at the essence of the Settlement agreement," the court papers say.

Robert Trump argues the publication of the book is prohibited by the settlement agreement reached in 2001 and he never consented to it being published. Mary Trump is the daughter of Fred Trump Jr, the president's older brother, who died in 1981.

A description of the book - entitled Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man - on Amazon says it describes "a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse."

"She explains how specific events and general family patterns created the damaged man who currently occupies the Oval Office, including the strange and harmful relationship between Fred Trump and his two oldest sons, Fred Jr and Donald," the blurb reads

The motion seeks an injunction to prevent Mary Trump and the book's publisher, Simon & Schuster, from releasing it.

"President Trump and his siblings are seeking to suppress a book that will discuss matters of utmost public importance," attorney Theodore Boutrous Jr, a representative for Mary Trump, said in a statement. "They are pursuing this unlawful prior restraint because they do not want the American people to know the truth. The courts will not tolerate this brazen and baseless effort to squelch speech in violation of the First Amendment."

A Simon & Schuster official said in a statement he was confident the attempt to block publication would fail.

"Mary Trump has written a compelling personal story of worldwide significance, and we look forward to helping her tell her story," said Adam Rothberg, spokesman for the publishing house.

AP

'John Bolton's book revealed one major truth - Trump needs to fire Mike Pompeo'

For Indy Voices, Negar Mortazavi argues the memoir released by the president's ex-national security adviser makes the position of his secretary of state untenable - and his removal is essential if better relations with Iran are ever to be achieved by this administration.

Bolton's 577-page tome includes an anecdote about Pompeo - previously thought to be a loyal lapdog - passing a note in a Cabinet meeting while Trump was speaking that read: "He's so full of s***."

Iran's president Hassan Rouhani, incidentally, said today he would be open to resuming talks with the US if Washington apologises for exiting a 2015 nuclear deal and compensates Tehran, an unlikely scenario as things stand as Rouhani knows, also expressing wariness of American "words and lies".

'Trump's re-election strategy is all wrong - and his staffers know it full well'

Also for Voices, Andrew Feinberg has this inside track on the president's re-election bid following the debacle that was Tulsa.

Yesterday Trump announced on Twitter he was moving spokesman Hogan Gidley to be his national press secretary, the latest upheaval since Mark Meadows came in as chief of staff.

“Trump is Tony Soprano: He's ultimately only gonna trust the family, and they have no idea what they’re doing,” says veteran strategist Stuart Stevens of the president's reliance on those he knows, not least his inexperienced son-in-law Jared Kushner. “The whole campaign reminds me of somebody goes to a cocktail party, has some drinks, drives home safely, and decides that alcohol helps you drive.”

John Bolton tells Stephen Colbert he hadn’t realised how ‘bad’ Trump would be

The ex-national security adviser has been talking to the late night host on the publicity trail for his explosive new book and says he was shocked at quite how awful it was working at the White House.

Bolton dropped treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin in it but also received a serious grilling from the host on his impeachment no-show.

Gino Spocchia has more details.

Barack Obama accuses Trump of 'actively promoting division' at Biden campaign's largest virtual fundraiser yet

The 44th president Barack Obama has warned Democrats not be to complacent about Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and to do more to ensure he wins the White House, even as Trump struggles to erode his challenger's dominating lead in the polls.

Speaking during a Tuesday fundraiser that drew in millions of dollars for his former veep's campaign, Obama said: “We can’t be complacent or smug or sense that somehow it’s so obvious that this president hasn’t done a good job, because look, [Trump] won once."

Obama was speaking to a virtual crowd of some 120,000 people; the event raised a total of $7.6m (£6.1m), according to the Biden campaign, with around 175,000 individual donors – even though no livestream was made public. It is one of the Biden campaign’s best single nights of fundraising so far.

Andrew Naughtie has more below.

Trump’s relationship with Roger Stone influenced lenient prison sentence, says prosecutor

Senior law enforcement officials intervened to seek a more lenient prison sentence for Donald Trump’s friend and ally Roger Stone for political reasons, a former prosecutor on the case is expected to testify before Congress today, citing his supervisor’s account of the matter.

“What I heard - repeatedly - was that Roger Stone was being treated differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the president,” the prosecutor, Aaron Zelinsky, said in a written opening statement submitted on Tuesday to the House Judiciary Committee ahead of Wednesday’s hearing.

Zelinsky is expected to be joined by another current Justice Department employee, John Elias, a senior career official in the antitrust division, who will tell the committee that under William Barr’s leadership as attorney general, the division was forced for political reasons to pursue unjustified investigations of the fledgling legal marijuana industry and an anti-pollution pact between California and several car manufacturers.

Trump facing Republican revolt over order to withdraw troops from Germany

“This is not the time to take any action that might cause the [Vladimir] Putin regime to question the credibility of the Nato deterrent or might lead our Nato allies and partners to doubt the US commitment to our collective security,” six GOP members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee wrote to Trump yesterday, led by Michael McCaul and Adam Kinzinger. 

Trump administration places restrictions on four more Chinese news organisations

State Department officials said they were taking the action to make it clear to American citizens that the organisations - China Central Television, China News Service, People’s Daily and Global Times - are viewed by the US government as propaganda organs for a foreign government.

The groups will be asked to send to the department a complete roster of employees in the United States and a list of their real estate holdings.

China can be relied up to retaliate.

Biden ahead of Trump by 14 points with strong advantage among women and minority voters, new poll shows

Gino Spocchia has the latest polling update, with The New York Times's latest making even bleaker reading for the president than last week's Fox survey.