Trump calls for Americans to ‘move on’ from Epstein files – US politics live

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Trump calls for Americans to 'move on' from Epstein files

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President Donald Trump has made a fresh plea for Americans to move on from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, even as it left a prominent British politician facing a criminal probe.

Former British ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson has resigned from the upper house of UK parliament amid allegations he passed market sensitive information to the late sex offender Epstein while in government.

The fallout from the latest release of millions of documents linked to Epstein continued in the US too, where former president Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary will testify in Congress later this month.

Trump insisted once again that he had been cleared by the latest trove of files as he faced renewed questions at the White House over the disgraced financier, AFP reported.

“Nothing came out about me other than it was a conspiracy against me, literally, by Epstein and other people. But I think it’s time now for the country to maybe get on to something else like health care or something that people care about,” Trump said.

Trump added that it was “not a Republican, it’s a Democrat problem,” in a bid to turn the issue back to the Clintons, and away from the mention in the files of allies including his commerce secretary Howard Lutnick and billionaire Elon Musk.

In other developments:

• Donald Trump suggested on a conservative podcast released on Monday that Republican state officials “take over” and “nationalize” elections in 15 states to protect the party from being voted out of office. Trump framed the issue as a means to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting. Claims that noncitizens are voting in numbers that can affect an election are a lie. But it raises concerns about potential efforts by the president to rig the November midterm elections.

• A message from Donald Trump celebrating the 19th-century US invasion of its southern neighbour – and the subsequent loss of more than half its territory – has touched a historical nerve in Mexico, with some seeing it as a veiled threat of future incursions. Reacting to the US president’s statement, which described the invasion as “a legendary victory”, Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president, said during her morning news conference on Tuesday: “We must always defend our sovereignty.”

• Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, is running her own review into the 2020 election with Donald Trump’s approval, working separately from a justice department investigation even as she joined an FBI raid of an election center in Georgia last week.

• The US military says it shot down an Iranian drone that “aggressively” approached the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. The Iranian Shahed-139 drone was flying toward the carrier “with unclear intent” when an F-35 fighter jet shot it down, US Central Command said on Tuesday.

• Donald Trump has announced that his administration is seeking $1bn in damages from Harvard University, the latest step in a long-running battle with the university over allegations of antisemitism. In a Truth Social post late on Monday, Trump accused the Ivy League school of being “strongly antisemitic”, adding that Harvard president Alan Garber “has done a terrible job of rectifying a very bad situation for his institution and, more importantly, America itself”.