WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday took up Donald Trump’s bid to avoid prosecution over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump’s lawyers argue that former presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for their official acts. Otherwise, they say, politically motivated prosecutions of former occupants of the Oval Office would become routine and presidents couldn’t function as the commander in chief if they had to worry about criminal charges.

Lower courts have rejected those arguments, including a unanimous three-judge panel on an appeals court in Washington. And even if the high court resoundingly follows suit, the timing of its decision may be as important as the outcome.

That’s because Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, has been pushing to delay the trial until after the November election, and the later the justices issue their decision, the more likely he is to succeed.

The court typically issues its last opinions by the end of June, which is roughly four months before the election.

Currently:

What to listen for during Supreme Court arguments on Donald Trump and presidential immunity

The Supreme Court will decide whether Trump is immune from federal prosecution. Here’s what’s next

What to know in the Supreme Court case about immunity for former President Trump

Trump is in New York for the hush money trial while the Supreme Court hears his immunity case in DC

Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court

Here’s the latest:

First up on Thursday was D. John Sauer, making Donald Trump’s argument that he’s immune from criminal prosecution. A former Missouri solicitor general and onetime Supreme Court clerk, Sauer also represented Trump at the appeals court level.

Trump went to those arguments even though he wasn’t required to be there, but he won’t be in the audience at the Supreme Court today. He’s required to be in New York for his hush money trial.

About 30 demonstrators gathered outside the Supreme Court before arguments, some wearing judicial robes with kangaroo masks and others holding signs like “Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied.” That’s an apparent reference to the the timing of the high court’s ultimate decision in the case, which could determine whether a trial can be held before the election in November.

Shortly before arguments were slated to begin, Trump fired off a few posts Thursday on his social media network.

In one, he declared in all caps, “WITHOUT PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY, IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR A PRESIDENT TO PROPERLY FUNCTION, PUTTING THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IN GREAT AND EVERLASTING DANGER!”

Trump also said that without immunity, a president would just be “ceremonial” and the opposing political party “can extort and blackmail the President by saying that, ‘if you don’t give us everything we want, we will Indict you for things you did while in Office,’ even if everything done was totally Legal and Appropriate.”

Of the nine justices hearing the case, three were nominated by Trump — Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. But it’s the presence of a justice confirmed decades before Trump’s presidency, Justice Clarence Thomas, that’s generated the most controversy.

Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, urged the reversal of the 2020 election results and then attended the rally that preceded the Capitol riot. That has prompted calls for the justice to step aside from several court cases involving Trump and Jan. 6.

But Thomas has ignored the calls, taking part in the unanimous court decision that found states cannot kick Trump off the ballot as well as last week’s arguments over whether prosecutors can use a particular obstruction charge against Capitol riot defendants.

The justices will probably meet in private a short time after arguments to take a preliminary vote on the outcome. Chief Justice John Roberts would be a prime candidate to take on the opinion for the court, assuming he is in the majority.

They could simply reject Trump’s immunity claim outright, permitting the prosecution to move forward and returning the case to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to set a trial date.

They could also reverse the lower courts by declaring for the first time that former presidents may not be prosecuted for conduct related to official acts during their time in office. Such a decision would stop the prosecution in its tracks.

There are other options, too, including ruling that former presidents do retain some immunity for their official actions but that, wherever that line is drawn, Trump’s actions fall way beyond it.

Yet another possibility is that the court sends the case back to Chutkan with an assignment to decide whether the actions Trump is alleged to have taken to stay in power constitute official acts.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The nation’s economy slowed sharply last quarter to a 1.6% annual pace in the face of high interest rates, but consumers — the main driver of economic growth — kept spending at a solid pace.

Thursday’s report from the Commerce Department said the gross domestic product — the economy’s total output of goods and services — decelerated in the January-March quarter from its brisk 3.4% growth rate in the final three months of 2023.

A surge in imports, which are subtracted from GDP, reduced first-quarter growth by nearly 1 percentage point. Growth was also held back by businesses reducing their inventories. Both those categories tend to fluctuate sharply from quarter to quarter.

By contrast, the core components of the economy still appear sturdy. Along with households, businesses helped drive the economy last quarter with a strong pace of investment.

The import and inventory numbers can be volatile, so “there is still a lot of positive underlying momentum,” said Paul Ashworth, chief North America economist at Capital Economics.

The economy, though, is still creating price pressures, a continuing source of concern for the Federal Reserve. A measure of inflation in Friday’s report accelerated to a 3.4% annual rate from January through March, up from 1.8% in the last three months of 2023 and the biggest increase in a year. Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core inflation rose at a 3.7% rate, up from 2% in fourth-quarter 2023.

From January through March, consumer spending rose at a 2.5% annual rate, a solid pace though down from a rate of more than 3% in each of the previous two quarters. Americans’ spending on services — everything from movie tickets and restaurant meals to airline fares and doctors’ visits — rose 4%, the fastest such pace since mid-2021.

But they cut back spending on goods such as appliances and furniture. Spending on that category fell 0.1%, the first such drop since the summer of 2022.

Gregory Daco, chief economist at the tax and consulting firm EY, noted that the underlying economy looks solid, though it’s slowing from last year’s unexpectedly fast pace. The rise in imports that accounted for much of the drop in first-quarter growth, he noted, is “a sign of solid demand” by American consumers for foreign goods.

Still, Daco said that the economy’s “momentum is cooling.”

“It’s unlikely to be a major retrenchment,” he said, “but we are likely to see cooler economic momentum as a result of consumers exercising more scrutiny with their outlays.’’

The state of the U.S. economy has seized Americans’ attention as the election season has intensified. Although inflation has slowed sharply from a peak of 9.1% in 2022, prices remain well above their pre-pandemic levels.

Republican critics of President Joe Biden have sought to pin responsibility for high prices on Biden and use it as a cudgel to derail his re-election bid. And polls show that despite the healthy job market, a near-record-high stock market and the sharp pullback in inflation, many Americans blame Biden for high prices.

Last quarter’s GDP snapped a streak of six straight quarters of at least 2% annual growth. The 1.6% rate of expansion was also the slowest since the economy actually shrank in the first and second quarters of 2022.

The economy’s gradual slowdown reflects, in large part, the much higher borrowing rates for home and auto loans, credit cards and many business loans that have resulted from the 11 interest rate hikes the Fed imposed in its drive to tame inflation.

Even so, the United States has continued to outpace the rest of the world’s advanced economies. The International Monetary Fund has projected that the world’s largest economy will grow 2.7% for all of 2024, up from 2.5% last year and more than double the growth the IMF expects this year for Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and Canada.

Businesses have been pouring money into factories, warehouses and other buildings, encouraged by federal incentives to manufacture computer chips and green technology in the United States. On the other hand, their spending on equipment has been weak. And as imports outpace exports, international trade is also thought to have been a drag on the economy’s first-quarter growth.

Kristalina Georgieva, the IMF’s managing director, cautioned last week that the “flipside″ of strong U.S. economic growth was that it was ”taking longer than expected” for inflation to reach the Fed’s 2% target, although price pressures have sharply slowed from their mid-2022 peak.

Inflation flared up in the spring of 2021 as the economy rebounded with unexpected speed from the COVID-19 recession, causing severe supply shortages. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 made things significantly worse by inflating prices for the energy and grains the world depends on.

The Fed responded by aggressively raising its benchmark rate between March 2022 and July 2023. Despite widespread predictions of a recession, the economy has proved unexpectedly durable. Hiring so far this year is even stronger than it was in 2023. And unemployment has remained below 4% for 26 straight months, the longest such streak since the 1960s.

Inflation, the main source of Americans’ discontent about the economy, has slowed from 9.1% in June 2022 to 3.5%. But progress has stalled lately.

Though the Fed’s policymakers signaled last month that they expect to cut rates three times this year, they have lately signaled that they’re in no hurry to reduce rates in the face of continued inflationary pressure. Now, a majority of Wall Street traders don’t expect them to start until the Fed’s September meeting, according to the CME FedWatch tool.

NEW YORK (AP) — New York’s highest court on Thursday overturned Harvey Weinstein ’s 2020 rape conviction, finding the judge at the landmark #MeToo trial prejudiced the ex-movie mogul with “egregious” improper rulings, including a decision to let women testify about allegations that weren’t part of the case.

“We conclude that the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes,” the court’s 4-3 decision said. “The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”

The state Court of Appeals ruling reopens a painful chapter in America’s reckoning with sexual misconduct by powerful figures — an era that began in 2017 with a flood of allegations against Weinstein. His accusers could again be forced to retell their stories on the witness stand.

The court’s majority said “it is an abuse of judicial discretion to permit untested allegations of nothing more than bad behavior that destroys a defendant’s character but sheds no light on their credibility as related to the criminal charges lodged against them.”

In a stinging dissent, Judge Madeline Singas wrote that the majority was “whitewashing the facts to conform to a he-said/she-said narrative,” and said the Court of Appeals was continuing a “disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence.”

“The majority’s determination perpetuates outdated notions of sexual violence and allows predators to escape accountability,” Singas wrote.

Weinstein, 72, has been serving a 23-year sentence in a New York prison following his conviction on charges of criminal sex act for forcibly performing oral sex on a TV and film production assistant in 2006 and rape in the third degree for an attack on an aspiring actress in 2013.

He will remain imprisoned because he was convicted in Los Angeles in 2022 of another rape and sentenced to 16 years in prison. Weinstein was acquitted in Los Angeles on charges involving one of the women who testified in New York.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday appointed Lise Grande as the new special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues, the State Department said in a statement.

Grande, who replaces David Satterfield, is currently head of the independent U.S. Institute of Peace. She previously worked for the United Nations for more than 25 years, a career that included running aid operations in Yemen, Iraq and South Sudan.

(Reporting by David Ljunggren; writing by Paul Grant)

By Lucia Mutikani

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. economy grew at its slowest pace in nearly two years as a jump in imports to meet still-strong consumer spending widened the trade deficit, but an acceleration in inflation reinforced expectations that the Federal Reserve would not cut interest rates before September.

The slowdown in growth reported by the Commerce Department in a snapshot of first-quarter gross domestic product on Thursday also reflected a slower pace of inventory accumulation by businesses and downshift in government spending. Domestic demand remained strong last quarter.

“This report comes in with mixed messages,” said Olu Sonola, head of economic research at Fitch. “If growth continues to slowly decelerate, but inflation strongly takes off again in the wrong direction, the expectation of a Fed interest rate cut in 2024 is starting to look increasingly more out of reach.”

Gross domestic product increased at a 1.6% annualized rate last quarter, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis said. Growth was largely supported by consumer spending. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast GDP rising at a 2.4% rate, with estimates ranging from a 1.0% pace to a 3.1% rate.

The economy grew at a 3.4% rate in the fourth quarter. The first quarter growth’s pace was below what U.S. central bank officials regard as the non-inflationary growth rate of 1.8%.

Inflation surged, with the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index excluding food and energy increasing at a 3.7% rate after rising at 2.0% pace in the fourth quarter.

The so-called core PCE price index is one of the inflation measures tracked by the Fed for its 2% target. The central bank has kept its policy rate in the 5.25%-5.50% range since July. It has raised the benchmark overnight interest rate by 525 basis points since March of 2022.

Consumer spending grew at a still-solid 2.5% rate, slowing from the 3.3% growth pace rate notched in the fourth quarter.

Economists worry that lower-income households have depleted their pandemic savings and are largely relying on debt to fund purchases. Recent data and comments from bank executives indicated that lower-income borrowers were increasingly struggling to keep up with their loan payments.

Business inventories increased at a $35.4 billion rate after rising at a $54.9 billion pace in the fourth quarter. Inventories subtracted 0.35 percentage point from GDP growth.

The trade deficit chopped off 0.86 percentage point from GDP growth. Excluding inventories, government spending and trade, the economy grew at a 3.1% rate after expanding at a 3.3% rate in the fourth quarter.

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Andrea Ricci)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawyers for an American believed to be held by the Taliban for nearly two years are asking a United Nations human rights investigator to intervene, citing what they say is cruel and inhumane treatment.

Ryan Corbett was abducted Aug. 10, 2022, after returning to Afghanistan, where he and his family had been living at the time of the collapse of the U.S.-based government there a year earlier. He arrived on a valid 12-month visa to pay and train staff as part of a business venture he led aimed at promoting Afghanistan’s private sector through consulting services and lending.

Corbett has since been shuttled between multiple prisons, though his lawyers say he has not been seen since last December by anyone other than the people with whom he was detained.

In a petition sent Thursday, lawyers for Corbett say that he’s been threatened with physical violence and torture and has been malnourished and deprived of medical care. He’s been held in solitary confinement, including in a basement cell with almost no sunlight and exercise, and his physical and mental health have significantly deteriorated, the lawyers say.

Corbett has been able to speak with his family by phone five times since his arrest, including last month. His family has not been able to see him — his only visits have been two check-ins from a third-party government — and their characterizations of his mistreatment are based on accounts from recently released prisoners who were with him and his openly dispirited tone in conversations.

“During Mr. Corbett’s most recent call with his wife and children, Mr. Corbett indicated that the mental torture and anguish have caused him to lose all hope,” said the petition, signed by the Corbett family attorneys, Ryan Fayhee and Kate Gibson.

The petition is addressed to Alice Edwards, an independent human rights investigator and the special rapporteur for torture in the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the U.N. It asks Edwards, who was appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council, to “urgently reach out to the Taliban to secure Mr. Corbett’s immediate release and freedom from torture, as guaranteed by international law.”

“This situation is just dragging on, and I’m increasingly concerned and taking steps that I hope will make a difference and help the situation — just increasingly concerned and panicking about Ryan’s deteriorating health and physical and mental health,” Corbett’s wife, Anna, said in an interview. “And that was leading me to take this next step.”

The U.S. government is separately working to get Corbett home and has designated him as wrongfully detained. A State Department spokesman told reporters last month that officials had continually pressed for Corbett’s release and were “using every lever we can to try to bring Ryan and these other wrongfully detained Americans home from Afghanistan.”

A spokesperson for the Interior Ministry in Afghanistan said this week that it had no knowledge of Corbett’s case.

Corbett, of Dansville, New York, first visited Afghanistan in 2006 and relocated there with his family in 2010, supervising several non-governmental organizations.

The family was forced to leave Afghanistan in August 2021 when the Taliban captured Kabul, but he returned the following January so that he could renew his business visa. Given the instability on the ground, the family discussed the trip and “we were all pretty nervous,” Corbett’s wife said.

But after that first uneventful trip, he returned to the country in August 2022 to train and pay his staff and resume a business venture that involved consulting services, microfinance lending and evaluating international development projects.

While on a trip to the northern Jawzjan province, Corbett and a Western colleague were confronted by armed members of the Taliban and were taken first to a police station and later to an underground prison.

Anna Corbett said that when she learned her husband had been taken to a police station, she got “really scared” but that he was optimistic the situation would be quickly resolved.

That, however, did not happen, and Anna Corbett, who has three teenage children and makes regular trips to Washington, said she’s trying to advocate as forcefully as she can while not letting “anxiety take over.”

“I feel like it’s the uncertainty of all of it that just is so difficult because you just don’t know what’s going to come at you — what call, what news,” she said. “And I’m worried about Ryan and the effect of the trauma on him and then also on my kids, just what they’re experiencing. I’ve tried to protect them the best I could, but this is so difficult.”

___

Associated Press writer Riazat Butt in Kabul, Afghanistan, contributed to this report.

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will vote Thursday to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules and assume new regulatory oversight of broadband internet rescinded under former President Donald Trump.

The commission voted 3-2 in October to advance the proposal to reinstate open internet rules adopted in 2015 and re-establish the commission’s authority over broadband internet. The FCC will vote to give final approval Thursday.

Net neutrality refers to the principle that internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites.

“It is time to have broadband oversight, national net neutrality rules and policies that ensure the internet is fast, open, and fair,” said FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel.  

Reinstating the rules has been a priority for President Joe Biden, who signed a July 2021 executive order encouraging the FCC to reinstate net neutrality rules adopted under Democratic President Barack Obama.

Democrats were stymied for nearly three years because they did not take majority control of the five-member FCC until October.

Under Trump, the FCC had argued the net neutrality rules were unnecessary, blocked innovation and resulted in a decline in network investment by internet service providers, a contention disputed by Democrats.

A group of Republican lawmakers including House Energy and Commerce Committee chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Senator Ted Cruz called the plan “an illegal power grab that would expose the broadband industry to an oppressive regulatory regime” giving the agency and states power to impose rate regulation, unbundling obligations and broadband taxing authority.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include Amazon.com, Apple, Alphabet and Meta Platforms, back net neutrality, arguing the rules “must be reinstated to preserve open access to the internet.”

USTelecom, whose members include AT&T, Verizon and others, called reinstating net neutrality effort “entirely counterproductive, unnecessary, and an anti-consumer regulatory distraction.”

Despite the 2017 repeal, a dozen states now have net neutrality laws or regulations in place. Industry groups abandoned legal challenges to those state requirements in May 2022.

(Reporting by David Shepardson, Editing by William Maclean)

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump returned to court Thursday morning as witness testimony in his hush money trial entered a third day.

The trial resumed at the same time that the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in Washington over whether he should be immune from prosecution for actions he took during his time as president.

At his trial in Manhattan, veteran tabloid publisher David Pecker took the stand earlier in the week, testifying about his longtime friendship with the former president and a pledge he made to be the “eyes and ears” of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Pecker returned to the stand Thursday.

The testimony was sought to bolster prosecutors’ premise that Trump sought to illegally influence the 2016 election through a “catch-and-kill” strategy to buy up and then spike negative stories. Key to that premise are so-called hush money payments that were paid to porn actor Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, along with the doorman.

Prosecutors say Trump obscured the true nature of those payments and falsely recorded them as legal expenses.

He has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

The case is the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president and the first of four prosecutions of Trump to reach a jury.

___

Currently:

— No one is above the law. Supreme Court will decide if that includes Trump while he was president

— Investigator says Trump, allies were uncharged co-conspirators in plot to overturn Michigan election

— Trump trial day 6 highlights: David Pecker testifies on ‘catch-and-kill’ scheme

— Key players: Who’s who at Donald Trump’s hush money criminal trial

— The hush money case is just one of Trump’s legal cases. See the others here

___

Here’s the latest:

Former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker took the stand Thursday in Donald Trump’s hush money trial in New York and recalled receiving a telephone call from Trump during the tabloid’s pursuit of former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s claims of an extramarital affair.

“When I got on the phone, Mr. Trump said to me, ‘Karen is a nice girl. Is it true that a Mexican group is looking to buy her story for $8 million?’” Pecker said. “I said, ‘I absolutely don’t believe there’s a Mexican group out there looking to buy her story for $8 million.’”

Trump then asked Pecker what he should do, the ex-publisher said. Pecker testified that he told Trump, “I think you should buy the story” and keep it quiet.

“I believed the story was true,” Pecker explained. “I thought it would be very embarrassing to himself and to his campaign.”

Prosecutors asked the judge Thursday as former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial resumed to consider whether he violated a gag order four more times with remarks he made outside court this week.

Among others, prosecutor Christopher Conroy flagged comments that Trump made just Thursday morning at an early-morning press event about David Pecker. Pecker, the former National Enquirer publisher who has been testifying as a prosecution witness, returned to the stand Thursday.

Trump had said Pecker has “been very nice,” which Conroy characterized as “a message to Pecker: Be nice.” He argued that it’s also a message to other potential witnesses that Trump has a platform and will use it to attack them if they aren’t kind to him.

The judge hasn’t immediately ruled on Conroy’s request to hold Trump in contempt and levy “appropriate sanctions.”

Donald Trump’s motorcade arrived at the courthouse in lower Manhattan as his criminal hush money trial readied to resume Thursday.

After a morning campaign event in midtown, the former president returned to Trump Tower, then left again in the motorcade.

Addressing reporters in the hallway before court resumed, Trump began by speaking not about the trial, but instead the economy, griping about gas prices and the latest economic numbers.

He again addressed the Supreme Court, which is hearing oral arguments Thursday on whether he’s immune from prosecution in a case charging him with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“I would have loved to have been there,” Trump said.

Donald Trump, visiting construction workers for a campaign stop Thursday before heading to court in his criminal hush money case, was dismissive when asked about prosecutors’ push for the judge to hold him in contempt of violating a gag order because of his social media posts.

“Oh, I have no idea,” Trump said when asked whether he would pay the $1,000 fine for each of 10 posts. He then said, “They’ve taken my constitutional right away with a gag order.”

Trump also briefly remarked on his friendship with tabloid publisher David Pecker, who began testimony Tuesday and is expected to retake the stand again Thursday.

Trump was asked by reporters what he thought of the testimony and when he last spoke to Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, and Trump responded by saying, “David’s been very nice, a nice guy.”

Donald Trump addressed Thursday’s Supreme Court arguments from New York, where he was visiting construction workers for a campaign stop before heading to court in his criminal hush money case.

“A president has to have immunity,” he told reporters as a crowd cheered behind him. If you don’t have immunity, you just have a ceremonial president.”

He again complained that the judge in his case in New York wouldn’t excuse him from court to attend the Supreme Court arguments in person. Criminal defendants are expected to appear in court every day during their trials.

Donald Trump is accused of falsifying internal Trump Organization records as part of a scheme to bury damaging stories that he feared could hurt his 2016 campaign, particularly as Trump’s reputation was suffering at the time from comments he had made about women.

The allegations focus on payoffs to two women, porn actor Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal, who said they had extramarital sexual encounters with Trump years earlier, as well as to a Trump Tower doorman who claimed to have a story about a child he alleged Trump had out of wedlock. Trump says none of these supposed sexual encounters occurred.

Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 and arranged for the publisher of the National Enquirer supermarket tabloid to pay McDougal $150,000 in a journalistically dubious practice known as “catch-and-kill” in which a publication pays for exclusive rights to someone’s story with no intention of publishing it, either as a favor to a celebrity subject or to gain leverage over the person.

Prosecutors say Trump’s company reimbursed Cohen and paid him bonuses and extra payments, all of which were falsely logged in Trump Organization records as legal expenses. Cohen has separately pleaded guilty to violating federal campaign finance law in connection with the payments.

David Pecker, formerly the publisher of the National Enquirer, took the stand both Monday and Tuesday and testified about how his longtime friendship with the former president culminated in an agreement to warn Donald Trump’s personal lawyer about stories that could damage the White House hopeful’s 2016 campaign and help quash them.

Pecker told the court that the agreement followed an August 2015 meeting with Trump, Michael Cohen and Hope Hicks. He further testified that he told the National Enquirer bureau chiefs to be on the lookout for any stories involving Trump and said he wanted them to verify the stories before alerting Cohen.

“I told him that we are going to try to help the campaign and to do that I want to keep this as quiet as possible,” Pecker testified. “I did not want anyone else to know this agreement I had and what I wanted to do.”

Donald Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records — a charge punishable by up to four years in prison — though it’s not clear if the judge would seek to put him behind bars.

A conviction would not preclude Trump from becoming president again, but because it is a state case, he would not be able to pardon himself if found guilty. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Judge Juan M. Merchan has yet to rule on whether or not Donald Trump violated a gag order barring him from making public statements about witnesses in his hush money case.

Merchan held a hearing Tuesday on prosecutors’ earlier request that Trump be held in contempt of court and fined at least $3,000 for allegedly violating his gag order.

Prosecutors cited 10 posts on Trump’s social media account and campaign website that they said breached the order, which bars him from making public statements about witnesses in the case.

They called the posts a “deliberate flouting” of the court’s order.

In one post, from April 10, Trump described his former lawyer-turned-foe Michael Cohen and porn actor Stormy Daniels as “two sleaze bags who have, with their lies and misrepresentations, cost our Country dearly!”

Prosecutors are seeking a $1,000 fine — the maximum allowed by law — for each of the first three alleged violations.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Coal-fired power plants would be forced to capture smokestack emissions or shut down under a rule issued Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency.

New limits on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired electric plants are the Biden administration’s most ambitious effort yet to roll back planet-warming pollution from the power sector, the nation’s second-largest contributor to climate change. The rules are a key part of President Joe Biden’s pledge to eliminate carbon pollution from the electricity sector by 2035 and economy-wide by 2050.

The rule was among four separate measures targeting coal and natural gas plants that the EPA said would provide “regulatory certainty” to the power industry and encourage them to make investments to transition “to a clean energy economy.” They also include requirements to reduce toxic wastewater pollutants from coal-fired plants and to safely manage coal ash in unlined storage ponds.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the new rules will reduce pollution and improve public health while supporting the reliable, long-term supply of electricity that America needs.

“One of the biggest environmental challenges facing our nation is man-made pollution that damages our air, our water and our land,” Regan said in prepared remarks obtained by The Associated Press ahead of a speech he was giving at Howard University. “Not only is this pollution a major threat to public health — it’s pushing our planet to the brink.”

The plan is likely to be challenged by industry groups and Republican-leaning states. They have repeatedly accused the Democratic administration of overreach on environmental regulations and have warned of a looming reliability crisis for the electric grid. The rules issued Thursday are among at least a half-dozen EPA rules limiting power plant emissions and wastewater pollution.

Environmental groups hailed EPA’s latest action as urgently needed to protect against the devastating harms of climate change.

The power plant rule marks the first time the federal government has restricted carbon dioxide emissions from existing coal-fired power plants. The rule also would force future electric plants fueled by coal or gas to control up to 90% of their carbon pollution. The new standards will avoid 1.38 billion metric tons of carbon pollution through 2047, equivalent to the annual emissions of 328 million gas cars, the EPA said, and will provide hundreds of billions of dollars in climate and health benefits, measured in fewer premature deaths, asthma cases and lost work or school days.

Coal plants that plan to stay open beyond 2039 would have to cut or capture 90% of their carbon dioxide emissions by 2032, the EPA said. Plants that expect to retire by 2039 would face a less stringent standard but still would have to capture some emissions. Coal plants that are set to retire by 2032 would not be subject to the new rules.

Rich Nolan, president and CEO of the National Mining Association, said that through the latest rules, “the EPA is systematically dismantling the reliability of the U.S. electric grid.”

He accused Biden, Regan and other officials of “ignoring our energy reality and forcing the closure of well-operating coal plants that repeatedly come to the rescue during times of peak demand. The repercussions of this reckless plan will be felt across the country by all Americans.”

Regan denied that the rules were aimed at shutting down the coal sector, but he acknowledged in proposing the power plant rule last year that, “We will see some coal retirements.”

The proposal relies on technologies to limit carbon pollution that the industry itself has said are viable and available, Regan said. “Multiple power companies have indicated that (carbon capture and storage) is a viable technology for the power sector today, and they are currently pursuing those CCS projects,” he told reporters Wednesday.

Coal provided about 16% of U.S. electricity last year, down from about 45% in 2010. Natural gas provides about 43% of U.S. electricity, with the remainder from nuclear energy and renewables such as wind, solar and hydropower.

The power plant rule “completes a historic grand slam” of major actions by the Biden administration to reduce carbon pollution, said David Doniger, a climate and clean energy expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The first and most important action was passage of the 2022 climate law, officially known as the Inflation Reduction Act, he said, followed by separate EPA rules targeting tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks and methane emissions from oil and gas drilling.

Together, the climate law and the suite of EPA rules “are the biggest reductions in carbon pollution we’ve ever made and will put the country on the pathway to zero out carbon emissions,” Doniger said in an interview.

The nation still faces challenges in eliminating carbon from transportation, heavy industry and more, said Abigail Dillen, president of the environmental group Earthjustice, “but we can’t make progress on any of it without cleaning up the power plants.”

Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, called the EPA rule “unlawful, unrealistic and unachievable,” adding that it faced a certain court challenge. The rule disregards the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision that limited the agency’s ability to regulate carbon pollution under the Clean Air Act, Matheson said. It also relies on technologies “that are promising, but not ready for prime time,″ he said.

“This barrage of new EPA rules ignores our nation’s ongoing electric reliability challenges and is the wrong approach at a critical time for our nation’s energy future,” said Matheson, whose association represents 900 local electric cooperatives across the country.

The EPA rule would not mandate use of equipment to capture and store carbon emissions — a technology that is expensive and still being developed. Instead, the agency would set caps on carbon dioxide pollution that plant operators would have to meet. Some natural gas plants could start blending gas with other fuel sources that do not emit carbon, although specific actions would be left to industry.

Still, the regulation is expected to lead to greater use of carbon capture equipment. Only a handful of projects are operating in the country despite years of research.

The EPA also tightened rules aimed at reducing wastewater pollution from coal-fired power plants and preventing harm from toxic pits of coal ash, a waste byproduct of burning coal.

Coal ash contains cancer-causing substances like arsenic and mercury that can leach into the ground, drinking water and nearby rivers and streams, harming people and killing fish. The waste is commonly stored in ponds near power plants. EPA issued rules in 2015 to regulate active and new ponds at operating facilities, seven years after a disaster in Kingston, Tennessee that flooded two rivers with toxic waste and destroyed property.

Environmental groups challenged that rule, arguing it left a large amount of coal ash waste unregulated by the federal government. The rule issued Thursday forces owners to safely close inactive coal ash ponds and clean up contamination.

A separate rule will reduce toxic wastewater pollution by 660 million pounds annually, according to federal officials. It’s a reversal of the Trump administration’s push to loosen coal plant wastewater standards.

“For the first time, we have seen a comprehensive set of standards that protects the surrounding waterways from the extremely nasty water pollution that comes off these coal-fired sites,” said Frank Holleman, attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

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Associated Press writer Michael Phillis in St. Louis contributed to this story.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the EPA at https://apnews.com/hub/us-environmental-protection-agency.