Pence will not endorse Trump as Biden inches ahead in new 2024 election poll: Latest

Former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro has asked the Supreme Court to help him stave off his jail sentence.

Navarro was found guilty of contempt of Congress for defying the January 6 select committee’s subpoena and must report to federal prison in Miami by Tuesday to serve four months in jail.

Former vice president Mike Pence announced that he would not endorse former president and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump in 2024 in an interview with Fox News on Friday.

Mr Pence’s words come after Mr Trump secured enough delegates to become the Republican nominee for president. Host Martha MacCaullum asked Mr Pence about how other Republican candidates for president backed the former president and whether Mr Pence would.

Eric Garcia reports from Washington, DC:

The Supreme Court on Friday rejected an emergency appeal from a student group that has been blocked from staging a drag show at a public university in Texas.

The justices did not comment Friday in refusing to issue an order that would have allowed Spectrum WT — a group for LGBTQ+ students and allies — to put on a charity show on March 22 on the campus of West Texas A&M University in Canyon, located just south of Amarillo.

The high court had previously refused to allow Florida to enforce its law targeting drag shows, while lower federal courts in a Montana, Tennessee and Texas blocked state bans from being implemented.

In an appearance on Fox News this afternoon, Donald Trump’s former vice president Mike Pence said he could not be endorsing his one-time boss.

“It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year,” he told Martha MacCallum.

While Mr Pence said he was proud of the record of the Trump administration, he said there were fundamental differences between him and the former president, not just over his constitutional role on 6 January 2021.

The former vice president then listed a litany of reasons in which Mr Trump had lost his vote — namely he was no longer pursuing a conservative agenda.

Mr Pence then declined to say who he would vote for in November but clarified it would not be for Joe Biden.

While many of Harris’s biggest defenders say she faces additional scrutiny because she is the first Black and South Asian woman to be vice president, that actually might help her communicate better with Democratic voters. Harris is 22 years younger than Biden and more comfortable discussing abortion rights than someone who came up in a time when white men still dominated both parties and many Democrats opposed abortion rights.

The White House is calling for an end to the six-month-old impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden and his family, citing Republican investigators’ failure to turn up any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the president.

In a scathing letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson, White House Counsel Ed Siskel said it had become “clear” that the “House Republican impeachment is over,” citing reporting by ABC News, Punchbowl News and Fox News in which members of the Republican majority admitted to reporters that the inquiry is “falling apart,” has found “nothing anywhere close to an impeachable offence” and has failed to “identify a particular crime” that they can use to justify impeaching Mr Biden.

The letter, which was obtained by The Independent, also cites the imminent departure of Colorado Republican Ken Buck, who said his decision to resign from the House effective next week stems in part from his colleagues decision to “[take] impeachment and [make] it a social media issue as opposed to a constitutional concept”.

Consumers became slightly less optimistic about the economy this month, though they continue to expect inflation to cool further, a potential sign that price increases will keep slowing.

“I have said many times, I believe, I think we all at this table believe, nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed.”

The United States has drafted a resolution for the United Nations Security Council calling for an “immediate and sustained ceasefire” in the Israel-Hamas war, a new report reveals.

The latest draft of the US resolution, as of Thursday, “unequivocally supports international diplomatic efforts to establish an immediate and sustained cease-fire as part of a deal that releases the hostages, and that allows the basis for a more durable peace to alleviate humanitarian suffering,” the AP reports. The initial draft used the phrase “temporary,” which has now been removed, according to the AP. The draft, however, is still subject to change.

Katie Hawkinson has more details…