Biden halts coastal oil and gas drilling weeks before Trump’s inauguration: Live

Rudy Giuliani will testify for a second day as he faces the possibility of being held in contempt of court for dodging court orders to hand over his property.

Attorneys for two election workers he defamed have tried unsuccessfully to begin taking possession of a long list of his property following a jury’s $148 million defamation verdict in 2023.

Judge Lewis Liman in Manhattan is overseeing the property transfer case.

On Friday, Trump’s former attorney and the former New York City mayor testified for three hours, claiming that he doesn’t know where some of his possessions are, or if he ever had them to begin with. He admitted to withholding his grandfather’s watch from the election workers and bizarrely claimed he doesn’t use a calendar and did not believe that evidence orders for “all” communications included emails.

Here’s what you need to know:

A deal that would see Elon Musk’s SpaceX take over secure communications for the Italian government is reportedly back on track and nearing final approval after Italy’s prime minister met with Trump this weekend.

Bloomberg reports that the burgeoning agreement “appeared to move forward” after right-wing prime minister Giorgia Meloni met with the president-elect on Saturday at Mar-a-Lago, where the incoming commander-in-chief continues to hold court ahead of his inauguration.

Here’s our political editor David Maddox on what yesterday’s extraordinary attack on Farage by Musk means for the billionaire’s relationship with the president-elect, who has frequently championed by the Brexiteer and is unlikely to be pleased about a broadside that implicitly questions his own political judgement.

The president-elect is facing criticism for premiering a documentary over the weekend at Mar-a-Lago about an allied lawyer who helped him strategize about how to overturn the 2020 election results.

The film, The Eastman Dilemma: Lawfare of Justice, profiles lawyer John Eastman, who helped Trump formulate an unprecedented, illegal plan to use Congress and then-vice president Mike Pence to overturn the certification of the 2020 election results.

The documentary examines “growing evidence that a two-tiered justice system has emerged, where conservative figures face severe penalties,” according to its creators.

Other election-deniers were also at the event, including his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former trade official Peter Navarro, who helped devise a separate plan from Eastman’s to reject the 2020 results and later spent time in prison for being in contempt of the January 6 congressional committee.

President Joe Biden has moved to ban new offshore oil and gas development along most US coastlines, a decision that President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to boost domestic energy production, may find difficult to reverse.

The White House said on Monday that Biden will use his authority under the 70-year-old Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect all federal waters off the East and West coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and portions of the northern Bering Sea in Alaska.

The ban will affect 625 million acres of ocean.

Biden said the move was aligned with both his climate change agenda and his goal to conserve 30 per cent of US lands and waters by 2030.

He also invoked the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, saying the low drilling potential of the areas included in the ban did not justify the public health and economic risks of future leasing.

“My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said in a statement.

“It is not worth the risks.”

The announcement comes as Trump has pledged to reverse Biden’s conservation and climate change policies when he takes office later this month.

During his term, Biden limited new oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters, drawing criticism from drilling states and companies.

But the Lands Act, which allows presidents to withdraw areas from mineral leasing and drilling, does not grant them the legal authority to overturn prior bans, according to a 2019 court ruling.

That order came in response to Trump’s effort to reverse Arctic and Atlantic Ocean withdrawals made by former President Barack Obama at the end of his presidency.

Even Trump used the law to ban sales of offshore drilling rights in the eastern Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida through 2032. Biden’s decision will protect the same area with no expiration.

Trump transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, on X, called Biden’s decision “disgraceful” and reiterated Trump’s campaign pledge to increase US drilling, without offering details.

An oil and gas industry trade group said the decision would harm American energy security and should be reversed by Congress.

Here’s the latest bluster from the president-elect on social media, which finds him keeping the heat under Mike Johnson days after his narrow re-election as House speaker and continuing to stew over Judge Juan Merchan’s plan to sentence him on Friday over May’s hush money conviction.

Reflecting on the events of four years ago in an editorial for the Post this morning, the president tells America its way of life was sorely tested that winter’s day in January 2021 but prevailed.

As Trump plots a mass pardoning for the 1,600 people prosecuted over their roles in the Capitol riot, Biden warns against historical revisionism by writing:

“We should be proud that our democracy withstood this assault. And we should be glad we will not see such a shameful attack again this year.

“But we should not forget. We must remember the wisdom of the adage that any nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it. We cannot accept a repeat of what occurred four years ago.

“An unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite – even erase – the history of that day. To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes. To dismiss concerns about it as some kind of partisan obsession. To explain it away as a protest that just got out of hand.”

Here’s more from Kelly Rissman on what promises to be a pretty galling day for the vice president after she spent her summer and fall denouncing the incoming president as a “petty tyrant” and a “fascist” and now finds herself presiding over the formal recognition of his victory.

Donald Trump’s victory over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in November’s presidential election will be formally certified by a joint-session of Congress on Monday, the occasion coinciding with the fourth anniversary of the Capitol riot of January 6 2021.

One of the darkest days in American history, the date will live in infamy for the violent scenes that erupted between Trump supporters and local law enforcement on the steps of the Capitol, clashes that resulted in the deaths of five people and left many more injured as the legislative complex was invaded and vandalized.

The rioters were fired up by the 45th and soon to be 47th president’s false claims that he had been cheated out of a second term by a nationwide conspiracy to rig the 2020 vote in Joe Biden’s favor, which he continues to insist took place despite failing to produce any evidence.

The states’ electoral vote records will be transported to the House of Representatives, where they will be unsealed at 1pm ET (6pm GMT) today and read aloud in alphabetical order.

Given that the duty of presiding over the process falls to the vice president, Harris will have to formalize her own defeat.

House speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi discussed the ongoing threat of political violence and the dangers posed by Donald Trump’s 2020 misinformation campaign in an interview Sunday on Face the Nation.

The former top Democrat in the lower chamber said that her husband, Paul Pelosi, still faces medical issues resulting from a violent attack he suffered in 2022, when an intruder in their home attacked him with a hammer.

The suspect, David DePape, was convicted of the violent attack and found to have been consumed by far-right conspiracy theories promoted by various figures aligned with MAGA Republicanism, including the 2020 stolen election conspiracies promoted by Trump himself.