California Gov Gavin Newsom has called on the Department of Justice to investigate Florida’s transportation of migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard last year.

Mr Newsom, a Democrat and regular antagonist of Gov Ron DeSantis (R-FL), sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland calling on the DOJ to investigate the transportation of migrants that Mr DeSantis touted ahead of his re-election campaign.

Eric Garcia reports.

Donald Trump fumbled his words while speaking at his largest campaign event in Iowa on Friday.

The former president appeared in Council Bluffs in the western part of the state that hosts the first caucus in approximately just over five months.

Speaking about immigration, Mr Trump was relaying a campaign promise to deny entry to leftist ideologues when he accidentally referred to them as “communists and markers” rather than Marxists.

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President Joe Biden leaves on Sunday for Europe, where he will spend four days in three nations tending to alliances that have been tested by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The first stop is London, where Biden will meet with King Charles III for the first time since his ascension to the throne. After that is the centerpiece of the trip, the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. Alliance leaders will debate the war and revise plans for dealing with Russian aggression.

The final stop is in Helsinki, where Biden is expected to celebrate the expanding alliance, with Finland as the newest member of NATO.

His national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said the trip would “showcase the president’s leadership on the world stage.”

A look at Biden’s agenda and the issues he will face:

Three more post-lunch Truth Social missals from Donald Trump on the 2024 campaign trail today, both attacking Ron DeSantis.

In the first, the former president claims DeSantis’s donors have fled “do [sic] to his terrible, and still falling, poll numbers”.

In the second, he says that DeSantis’s top political strategist believes the Florida governor should drop out of the race and then teases that he may — or may not — take part in the Republican Party primary debates.

He adds that he would rather go head-to-head with Mr DeSantis.

Donald Trump took to Truth Social on Saturday afternoon to make it clear that a photo circulating of January 6 defendant Taylor Taranto standing with a cardboard cutout of the former president was indeed a cardboard cutout and not actually him.

Mr Trump linked to a Gateway Pundit article that features the photo prominently at the top. It appears to come from one of Mr Taranto’s social media accounts and is clearly him at an event, holding a glass of red wine and standing with a cardboard cutout of the former president.

While Mr Trump’s former secretary of defence Mark Esper said he thought the former president may have kept the documents to further his own financial well-being in some way, Mr Christie had his own theory to put forward...

Iowa Republicans have voted to hold their first-in-the-nation caucuses on 15 January 2024.

This is the earliest start to the presidential nominating process since 2012, when caucusgoers gathered on 3 January.

The State Central Committee of the Iowa GOP met today and voted unanimously for the date.

Republican Party of Iowa Chairman Jeff Kaufmann issued the following statement in response: “The Republican Party of Iowa is proud to announce that we will officially hold our 2024 First-in-the-Nation Caucus on January 15, 2024.

“After our state legislature and governor took needed action earlier this year to preempt Iowa Democrats’ plans to derail the Iowa Caucus by running a de facto primary election instead, we are also proud to affirm that Iowa will continue to honour our half-century-old promises to the other carve-out states.

“We remain committed to maintaining Iowa’s cherished First-in-the-Nation Caucuses, and look forward to holding a historic caucus in the coming months and defeating Joe Biden come November 2024.”

Maryland Rep Jamie Raskin, a congressman from the suburbs of the nation’s capital, announced Friday he will not run for the US Senate seat that is opening with the retirement of Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland.

Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Reform Committee who is in his fourth term, had been weighing a run for the rarely open Senate seat but said in a statement on Friday evening that he would instead seek reelection in the House.

Raskin announced in April that he had completed chemotherapy for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma with a 90 per cent prognosis of no relapse and that his cancer was in remission. It was the second time Raskin had been diagnosed with cancer. He previously battled colorectal cancer in 2010.

Raskin, 60, played a leading role in recent years as House Democrats twice impeached then-President Donald Trump and investigated Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection. He was the lead impeachment manager when the House impeached Trump one week after the attack.

So far, Rep David Trone and Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks have announced candidacies for the Democratic primary for the Senate seat. Montgomery County council member Will Jawando also is running.

Same vibe right here: