US politics live: Trump administration releases Martin Luther King Jr. assassination files

As the world sits transfixed on the Jeffery Epstein scandal, the Trump administration has dropped another meaty reveal on Martin Luther King Jr.

Welcome to our live coverage of US politics.

Joe Biden’s scandal-plagued son Hunter has cut loose – very, very loose – in a lengthy interview with YouTuber Andrew Callaghan.

Mr Biden took potshots at the media, prominent Democratic Party strategists and George Clooney, among other targets. He appears to resent the Democrats for forcing his father out of last year’s presidential race after a disastrous mid-year debate against Donald Trump.

“F***ing George Clooney is not a f***ing actor,” he said, for example.

“He is a f***ing – like, I don’t know what he is. He’s a brand. And by the way, and God bless him, you know, he supposedly treats his friends really well. You know what I mean. He buys them things. And he’s got a really great place in Lake Como and he’s great friends with Barack Obama.

“F*** you. What do you have to do with f***ing anything? Why do I have to f***ing listen to you? What right do you have to step on a man who’s given 52 years of his f***ing life to the service of this country and decide that you, George Clooney, are going to take out basically a full page ad in the f***ing New York Times to undermine the president?

“Why do you think the Republicans have an advantage over us? Because they’re unified.”

Hunter Biden speaking to Andrew Callaghan.

Hunter was referring to an opinion piece Mr Clooney wrote after the debate, in which he called for Mr Biden to withdraw as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

“Our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw,” said Mr Clooney.

“This is about age. Nothing more. We are not going to win in November with this president.”

Probably true. Of course, they didn’t win without him either.

During the interview, Hunter also went after David Axelrod, who was Barack Obama’s top political adviser, among other Democratic figures.

Elsewhere, Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has come under fire for seeking the prosecution of prominent Democrats, including Mr Obama.

Ms Gabbard claimed this week to have “revealed overwhelming evidence that demonstrates how, after President Trump won the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, President Obama and his national security cabinet members manufactured and politicised intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump”.

She sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice.

The thrust of Ms Gabbard’s argument is that there was no Russian interference in the 2016 election, and that it was invented by the Democrats to excuse Ms Clinton’s defeat. This goes against the assessment of the intelligence agencies she oversees.

“No new light is shed on this episode by Gabbard’s email disclosures last Friday, which, unsurprisingly, were accompanied by an overwrought and misleading press release rather than an analytical report,” lawyer Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, wrote in the conservative, Trump-friendly magazine National Review today.

“Perhaps that is because Gabbard’s intelligence community peer, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, did issue an analytical report just a few days earlier that contradicts Gabbard’s implication that there was no evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election.”

Read on for the latest updates.

Originally published as US politics live: Trump administration releases Martin Luther King Jr. assassination files