Donald Trump, escalating the feud with members of the press whose fires he stoked at a contentious press conference earlier today, has lashed out at veteran news anchor Katie Couric for “fraudulent editing” in a new documentary about gun violence that she produced, calling her a “third rate reporter” who is “largely forgotten.”

Trump was referring to the apparent selective editing of a scene in Under the Gun, a documentary that aims to explore gun violence in the US.

Couric issued a statement earlier today in which she took responsibility for the “misleading” edit, in which gun rights activists were shown to appear at a loss for words in response to a question posed by Couric.

“I regret that those eight seconds [of pause] were misleading and that I did not raise my initial concerns more vigorously,” Couric wrote. “I hope we can continue to have an important conversation about reducing gun deaths in America, a goal I believe we can all agree on.”

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has become the most high-profile Republican to urge presumptive nominee Donald Trump to release his tax returns, telling Business Insider that every major party nominee of the past four decades can’t be wrong.

“For the last 30 or 40 years, every candidate for president has released their tax returns, and I think Donald Trump should as well,” McConnell said.

The senate majority leader had previously expressed interest in seeing Trump’s tax returns released, but not in such quite strong terms. Two weeks ago, McConnell told McClatchy that “most candidates for president have, and that’s been the tradition… He’ll have to make that decision himself, but that’s certainly been the pattern for quite some time.”

Libertarian presidential nominee and former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson told MSNBC this evening that he has no plans to attack presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump or likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, preferring to confront the two candidates “from a [sic] issues standpoint.”

“I have no intention, neither of us have any intention of attacking Trump or Hillary,” Johnson said during an appearance on MTP Daily with vice presidential candidate Bill Weld. “But, you know, from a issues standpoint, absolutely.”

“The stuff that he’s saying,” Johnson said of Trump, “I think he’s said 100 things that would have tubed any other candidate, but here he is.”

Johnson and Weld are confident that their ticket will be able to reach the 15% support nationally necessary for them to be included on the debate stage during the general election – and recent polling shows them already in the double digits.

Looks like Mitt Romney is feeling the #FrenchRevolution:

I know David French to be an honorable, intelligent and patriotic person. I look forward to following what he has to say.

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) June 1, 2016

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has doubled down on comments made earlier today mocking likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for her limited press availability, urging reporters and voters to “admonish” Clinton for not having held a press conference since December 4 of last year.

In an interview on CNN today, Clinton defended her willingness to speak to the press, telling Jake Tapper that she has done “nearly 300 interviews just in 2016.”

“I believe that it’s important to continue to speak to the press as I’m doing right now,” Clinton said.

The Trumptini, a twist on the classic martini served with flakes of gold and a T-shaped slice of lemon, and 100-odd other Trump trademarks including simply “Donald Trump” are now owned by a company in Delaware – allowing the US presidential candidate to save a fortune in taxes.

Filings at the US Patent and Trademark Office show that the ownership of Trump trademarks have been moved from various states to DTTM Operations LLC, a recently incorporated company registered alongside thousands of others at National Registered Agents office in Dover, Delaware.

Shifting his portfolio of trademarks, also including “Trump Tower” and “Trump National Golf Club”, to Delaware will help Trump in his mission to “pay as little tax as possible”.

The presumptive Republican nominee for president is exploiting the so-called “Delaware loophole”. It allows him to legally avoid paying taxes on royalty fees for use of his trademarks in every other state. It is unclear how much tax Trump will save from the move, but his financial disclosure form states that Trump “deals, brand and branded developments” are worth bn.

Just a reminder…

A federal judge has given the world an unprecedented glimpse into the ruthless business practices Donald Trump used to build his business empire, report the Guardian’s Rupert Neate and Lauren Gambino.

US district court judge Gonzalo Curiel today made public more than 400 pages of Trump University “playbooks” describing how Trump staff should target prospective students’ weaknesses to encourage them to sign up for a ,995 Gold Elite three-day package.

Trump University staff were instructed to get people to pile on credit card debt and to target their financial weaknesses in an attempt to sell them the high-priced real estate courses.

The documents contained an undated “personal message” from Trump to new enrollees at the school: “Only doers get rich. I know that in these three packed days, you will learn everything to make a million dollars within the next 12 months.”

The courses are now subject to legal proceedings from unhappy clients.

Judge Curiel released the documents, which are central to a class-action lawsuit against Trump University in California, despite sustaining repeated public attacks from Trump, who had fought to keep the details secret.

Curiel ruled that the documents were in the public interest now that Trump is “the front-runner in the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential race, and has placed the integrity of these court proceedings at issue”.

Trump hit back calling Curiel a “hater”, a “total disgrace” and “biased”. “I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump. A hater. He’s a hater,” Trump said at a rally near the courthouse in San Diego. “His name is Gonzalo Curiel. And he is not doing the right thing … [He] happens to be, we believe, Mexican.”

Curiel, who is Hispanic, is American and was born in Indiana.

#FrenchRevolution.

A federal prosecutor and former colleague of Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge presiding over the Trump University fraud case whom Donald Trump has accused of bias because of his Latino heritage, has written Talking Points Memo in response to the candidate’s attacks, calling them “offensive and wrong”:

These attacks say far less about Judge Curiel than they do about Trump and what he thinks of his own legal case in the Trump University scam (and that’s what it was). Trump knows that he is bound to lose some important decisions in the case and he has decided to preemptively inoculate himself by calling into question the integrity of the umpire. It’s an old trick and for someone who won’t accept responsibility for anything, entirely predictable. He’s giving his supporters a counter-narrative to be able to explain away a lot of bad facts that I expect to emerge in the course of this litigation. Frankly, this case should draw the interest of federal prosecutors to investigate the case as mail and wire fraud, but given the toxic political environment they will probably lay off at least until after the election.

Conservative columnist, talking head and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol has apparently found a potential seat-filler for his Quixotic third-party candidacy aimed at stopping Donald Trump from winning the White House: David French, a staff writer at the conservative (and anti-Trump) National Review.

Bloomberg Politics, citing sources close to Kristol, reports that French “is open to launching a bid, but that he has not made a final decision.”

In an article penned for the June 6 issue of Weekly Standard, Kristol urges conservatives to “resist” the three remaining presidential candidates, and pressing that “resistance means finding a serious and credible independent candidate.”

“I happen to know David French,” Kristol writes, after floating his name as a potential candidate. “To say that he would be a better and a more responsible president than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is to state a truth that would become self-evident as more Americans got to know him. There are others like him. There are thousands of Americans who – despite a relative lack of fame or fortune – would be manifestly superior to our current choices. And there are many, many others who stand ready to help whoever emerges to have the basic resources, assistance, and infrastructure to mount a credible effort.”

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton leads presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump by a mere four points in New Jersey, according to a Monmouth University poll that shows 15% of Garden State voters say they are not sure who they plan on voting for.

According to the poll, released this afternoon, Clinton wins 38% of the state’s general-election voters, while Trump wins the support of 34%, with Clinton barely edging out the 3.7% margin of error. When the race is expanded to include third-party candidates, Clinton wins a slightly larger 6% lead over Trump, 37% to 31%.

“Based on historical precedent, these undecided minority voters should break strongly for the Democratic nominee,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute. “On the other hand, not much about the 2016 race has followed historical precedent.”

In a state that has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988, Clinton leads among women 44% to 28%, while Trump leads among men 40% to 31%. Voters under 35 prefer Clinton (41% to 27%), while voters age 35 to 54, 36% support Clinton and 32% support Trump. Among those age 55 or older, 40% support Trump and 37% support Clinton.

Former New Mexico governor and Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson told C-SPAN today that he agrees with the policies of self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders 73% of the time.

“Of course I side with myself 100% of the time, but interestingly, of all the presidential candidates, I next side with Bernie Sanders at 73 percent,” Johnson said.

“Now, that’s the side of Bernie that has to do with pro-choice, pro-marriage equality, let’s stop with the military interventions, that there is crony capitalism, that government really isn’t fair when it comes to this level playing field, legalize marijuana,” Johnson continued. “Look, 73% of what Bernie says I agree with. We come to a ‘T’ in the road when it comes to economics. I would really argue that if we absolutely had a fair system of economics, that free markets, that we would do a lot better than going down the going down the path of socialism.”

Aligning himself with Sanders is a canny move on the part of the former governor. With disapproval ratings among the two likely major-party nominees at record highs and growing dissatisfaction with the primary process by Sanders supporters, Johnson appears to be positioning himself as a potential alternative to likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who hasn’t found her footing in the bid to unify liberal voters behind her candidacy.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump took aim at the political press at a news conference in New York earlier today, saying they were “among the most dishonest people” he has ever met.

Trump made the comments during a news conference on donations to veterans’ groups. Several journalists questioned Trump’s treatment of them, saying it was their right to ask questions and vet presidential candidates.

First there was Megyn Kelly – and now Judge Gonzalo Curiel?

Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked a new nemesis in the last week, in the form of Curiel, who is presiding over one of two class-action lawsuits accusing Trump University of fraud. The judge has ruled that the lawsuit can go forward.

Curiel was born in Indiana to Mexican parents, but Trump has referred to him as “Mexican”.

Trump explained today that he calls Curiel Mexican “because I’m a man of principle.”

Trump said he could settle the case but he would not because the judge had been “very, very unfair”:

Read further here.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a union challenge seeking to restore health and pension benefits for more than 1,000 workers at the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, the AP reports:

The justices let stand lower court rulings in favor of the former Trump Entertainment Resorts, once run by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

But the union indicated it will continue to picket the casino, which is now owned by billionaire investor Carl Icahn.

The company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2014 and a federal bankruptcy judge imposed cost savings sought by the company. They included terminating health insurance and pension benefits for unionized workers.

Sanders pooh-poohs Clinton’s Jerry Brown endorsement, saying he prefers the support of health care workers to political professionals:

Donald Trump has argued that he will be able to turn states that have been falling Democrat in presidential years – New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania – Republican (update: Clinton leads Trump in a new Siena College poll of New York by 21 points, 52-31). So far that’s just a claim by Trump, but we’ll keep reporting and watching the polls.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has her own dreams about swiping a state from the other side – specifically, Texas, which will award 38 electoral votes.

The following passage is from a thorough new Clinton profile by Rebecca Traister:

Donald Trump’s campaign chairman took a “mercenary” approach to lobbying the US government on behalf of international clients accused of killings, rapes and other atrocities, according to one of his former colleagues, writes Guardian Washington correspondent David Smith:

Manafort was a principal at the lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, which had close links to the Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush administrations, as well as senior Republicans in Congress.

In that role, in 1989, he had no qualms about doing business with the “murderous dictator” of Somalia, Washington lobbyist Riva Levinson recalls in a new memoir,Choosing the Hero: My Improbable Journey and the Rise of Africa’s First Woman President, which focuses on her work with Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

“Arrogant, narcissistic, egotistical, brilliant – all of that I can handle in Paul,” Levinson writes. “But it is Paul’s mercenary attitude that puts us at odds.”

Read the full piece here:

At his news conference, Trump called Tom Llamas of ABC News a “sleaze” for Llamas’ having pointed out that Trump lied back in January about having raised m at a charity event for veterans:

The group Veterans against Trump is holding a news conference outside Trump tower, reports Lauren Gambino from the scene:

A Texas road sign was hacked to make fun of Trump:

The Hillary Clinton campaign has released a new installment in its “A message from your possible next president” series highlighting things Donald Trump has said. Today’s edition is on prisoners of war:

Trump’s list of charitable donations to veterans’ groups adds up to .5m. He said donations are still coming and he expects to top m.

Here’s the rest of Trump’s list:

Bob Woodruff Family Foundation Inc: ,000

Central Iowa Shelter and Services: 0,000

Connected Warriors Inc: ,000

Disabled American Veterans Charity: 5,000

Fisher House Foundation: 5,000

Folds of Honor Foundation: 0,000

Foundation for American Veterans: ,000

Freedom Alliance : ,000

Green Beret Foundation: 0,000

Higher Heroes USA: ,000

Homes for our Troops: 0,000

Honoring America’s Warriors: 0,000

Hope for the Warriors: ,000

Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund: 5,000

Canines for Warriors: ,000

Liberty House: 0,00

Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation: .1m (including m from Trump himself, he says)

Navy Seal Foundation: 5,000

Navy Marine Corps Relief Society: ,000

New England Wounded Vets Inc: ,000

Operation Home Front: ,000

Project for Patriots: 0,000 (this “check is check is ready to go” but Trump is still vetting the group, he says, awaiting an “IRS determination letter”. “They have to give us that final document”.

Puppy Jake Foundation: 0,000

Racing for Heroes, Inc: 0,000

Support Siouxland Soldiers: 0,000

Task Force Dagger Foundation: ,000

The Mission Continues: ,000

National Military Families Inc: ,000

Veterans Airlift Command: 0,000

Veterans Count: ,000

Veterans in Command Inc: 0,000

Vietnam Veterans Workshop Inc: ,000

Warriors for Freedom Foundation: ,000

“And I believe we’re going to have some more coming in.”

“These are checks that have been delivered.” He starts reading his list which he says equals .6m. Here’s the top:

22Kill: 0,000.

Achilles International : 0,000

American Hero Adventures: 0,000

Americas for equal living: 0,000

America’s vet dogs: the veteran canine corp Inc: ,000

AmVets: ,000

Armed Services YMCA: ,000

“We’ve started working already on the convention,” Trump says. He wishes LeBron James and the Cavaliers luck in the NBA playoffs – the sooner the series is done, he explains, the sooner plans for the convention can get under way.

He claims more votes than anyone in the history of the Republican primaries “by many millions more than anyone who’s ever run.” That’s hard to nail down right now but probably inaccurate (George W Bush in 2000 got more than 12m votes; Trump currently has fewer than 12m, with five states still to vote).

It appears the Trump news conference is about to start. Yes, it’s starting. Watch live here.

Hello, and welcome to our live-wire coverage of the 2016 race for the White House. A day after Memorial Day, Donald Trump is to announce in an 11am news conference how his campaign has distributed millions of dollars in charitable donations (by his count) to veterans’ groups.

Trump is holding the news conference in part to answer doubts about whether the money he has raised for vets actually lives up to the claims he has made for his magnanimity.

Trump originally said a charity event for veterans in January raised m, but his campaign admitted this month that the actual figure was smaller. The campaign also reversed itself on whether Trump had personally disbursed the m he promised to veterans, saying months ago that the money had already been distributed before Trump, under media pressure, announced last week that the money had in fact been donated just then.

A Bernie Sanders rally in Oakland, California, saw some unusual activity Monday evening, as secret service agents jumped onstage in response to a reported four people in the crowd “rushing” the stage and yelling. They were arrested; Sanders just kept talking.

Hillary Clinton is in New Jersey and New York today before heading later this week for California, which votes in one week.

Speaking of difficulty counting, Trump appeared at the Rolling Thunder Memorial Day bike rally, and spoke to a crowd that spilled down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The Guardian’s Ben Jacobs reports:

Trump repeatedly claimed – falsely – that hundreds of thousands were trying to attend the event, at one point claiming there were “600,000 people trying to get in”.

There were no visible lines or back-ups at any point in or around the mall. Furthermore, according to the United States Census Bureau, the total population of the District of Colombia is just 672,228.

The Libertarian party on Sunday selected Gary Johnson as its nominee for president, on a second ballot.

In his acceptance speech this year, Johnson told delegates his job will be to get the Libertarian platform before the voters at a level the party has not seen.

“I am fiscally conservative in spades and I am socially liberal in spades,” Johnson told the Associated Press. “I would cut back on military interventions that have the unintended consequence of making us less safe in the world.”

Meanwhile, somebody asked Stephen Hawking, the visionary physicist, about Trump, whom Hawking thinks is a “demagogue”:

I can’t. He’s a demagogue who seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Thanks for reading, and as always please join us in the comments.