Swift appeal likely as judge blocks Trump mail voting order – US politics live

Donald Trump’s administration is facing calls to launch an investigation into allegations that Michael Boren, a senior official who oversees the US Forest Service, pressed agency staff to deploy additional resources to fight a fire burning near his Idaho ranch.

Three Democratic senators accused Boren of “inappropriate interference” in a letter seen by the Guardian, demanding answers from Brooke Rollins, US agricultural secretary. Boren serves as undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and environment.

Senators Ron Wyden, Amy Klobuchar and Martin Heinrich expressed “serious concern” over reports that Boren used his federal government position in July to remove firefighting personnel and resources from active fires elsewhere to tackle a fire near his private ranch in Idaho.

“We request a full investigation into the nature and extent of Boren’s involvement in response to the Cabin Creek Fire and a detailed accounting of the safeguards the agency has implemented or plans to implement to prevent political interference and conflicts of interest in wildfire response,” they wrote.

Their letter follows a report from the Washington Post earlier this month, in which several forest service officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Boren – who reportedly owns a ۴۸۰-acre ranch in the Sawtooth national recreation area – contacted forest service officials multiple times in mid-July to question why more aircraft were not being used to fight the Cabin Creek fire in Idaho, which spread across several acres in Idaho’s Sawtooth national forest.

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A federal judge has halted, at least temporarily, attempts to implement Donald Trump’s executive order limiting mail voting.

The president’s directive stalled for a second time about a week before the first mail ballots are due to be sent out for the rapidly approaching midterm elections.

In the US district court, judge Indira Talwani placed a ۱۴-day hold on the government implementing the order in a case that could be headed back to the supreme court, which on Monday overturned an earlier ruling of hers that had blocked Trump’s order from taking effect.

Talwani wrote in her ruling:

Plaintiff states have neither time nor funds to design new mail ballots, seek approval of the new designs, order production of mail ballots, update their own election management systems, train election officials to use the USPS portal and upload citizen data to the portal, all before the midterms.

The latest ruling came in advance of a ۳ September hearing after Democrats and voting rights groups refiled their lawsuits to comply with the recent supreme court decision.

The high court’s conservative majority did not rule on the legality of Trump’s executive order. Still, it said the legal challenges against it that led Talwani to initially freeze it were filed too soon. Since then, the administration has issued a formal rule intended to govern whether the US Postal Service will deliver states’ mail ballots – effectively restarting the legal fight.

The president has long targeted mail voting, which he falsely blames for his ۲۰۲۰ election loss even though he himself uses it to cast his ballot. A report by the Brookings Institution published in ۲۰۲۵ found that mail voting fraud occurred in only about four cases out of every ۱۰ million mail ballots cast.

The legal battle has major ramifications for the midterms. Nearly one-third of Americans vote by mail and election officials contend there is not enough time to revise their systems to comply with the new postal service directives.

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In other developments:

• Documents obtained by the Guardian and interviews with military leadership show the war in Iran has depleted the US Navy’s budget.

• A senior Democratic senator is calling for a criminal investigation into the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, following reporting by the Guardian that indicated he lied during Senate confirmation hearings last year.

• Trump called the media into the Oval Office to watch him sign an executive order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America”.

• “The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is big’, Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney noted. “The name is more than ۴۰۰ years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.”

• Three journalists who were fired by the Pentagon from a US government-funded news outlet sued the US Department of Defense in federal court in Washington DC on Thursday arguing that their dismissals were illegal and violated their first amendment rights to free speech.