Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of California, and House Rep. Jim Clyburn, of South Carolina, both Democrats, said Tuesday it is fair to raise concerns about President Joe Biden’s fitness after he stumbled through his first debate with former President Donald Trump on Thursday.

“I think it’s a legitimate question to say, ‘Is this an episode or is this a condition?'” Pelosi said in an MSNBC interview, noting that the question should be asked of both Biden and Trump.

In a separate MSNBC interview shortly after, Clyburn echoed that it is reasonable to wonder whether Biden’s debate performance is a signal of a larger medical issue: “I’ll have to wait on the experts in medicine to give their opinion, because I’m not a doctor, so I have no idea the extent to which all of this may have occurred.”

Clyburn added he has a phone call with Biden scheduled for later Tuesday.

In response to Pelosi and Clyburn’s comments, the White House said questioning the president’s cognitive abilities is “fair” but that the administration has been transparent enough about his medical records.

“I get the question. It is a fair question to ask,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a Tuesday press briefing when asked about Pelosi’s comments. “As it relates to his medical records, we have been transparent, we have released thorough reports from his medical team every year.”

She added that Biden’s medical team does not find further cognitive testing warranted, despite his poor debate showing.

Jean-Pierre also said that Biden’s doctor, Kevin O’Connor, did not have any concerns about the president’s medical status after the debate: “Not at all.”

Pelosi’s and Clyburn’s comments come as Democrats monitor the scale of damage from Biden’s difficult debate. Several polls so far have found that the Biden-Trump rematch remains a near dead heat.

A new CNN poll published Tuesday found Trump with a 6-point lead on Biden in a head-to-head matchup, unchanged from the survey’s April results. The margin of error for that question was plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

The poll surveyed 1,045 registered voters from June 28 to 30, the three days following the debate, which means it represents respondents’ immediate reactions.

Both Democrats reiterated their support for Biden for as long as he stays in the presidential race.

“I want this ticket to continue to be Biden-Harris, and then we’ll see what happens after the next election,” Clyburn said.

Clyburn and Pelosi are two of Biden’s closest allies. Clyburn in particular was pivotal to Biden’s 2020 victory after his endorsement delivered a key boost and helped the president secure support among Black voters.

But their comments Tuesday marked some of the first from high-profile Democrats to publicly validate recent anxieties about the president’s ability to wage a winning campaign against Trump.

Several hours after Pelosi’s MSNBC appearance, her spokesperson, Ian Krager, redoubled her support for the president.

“Speaker Pelosi has full confidence in President Biden and looks forward to attending his inauguration on January 20, 2025,” Krager said in a statement to CNBC.

Despite Pelosi’s efforts to highlight her support for Biden, her earlier acknowledgment that there are concerns about the president opens the door for other party members to do the same.

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, on Tuesday became the first Democrat to officially call on Biden to withdraw from the presidential race.

“Recognizing that, unlike Trump, President Biden’s first commitment has always been to our country, not himself, I am hopeful that he will make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw,” Doggett said in a press release. “I respectfully call on him to do so.”

A Biden campaign official responded in a statement to NBC News that the president is “staying in” the race.

Later Tuesday, Adam Frisch, the Democratic contender who came just short of defeating Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert in Colorado last election cycle, followed suit: “We deserve better. President Biden should do what’s best for the country and withdraw from the race.”

The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Pelosi’s and Clyburn’s television appearances.

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign debuted an official account on TikTok on Saturday night, the social media platform facing a potential ban in the U.S.

“It’s my honor,” Trump said in his first TikTok post under the handle “@realdonaldtrump,” followed by a montage of him waving to crowds at a Saturday Ultimate Fighting Championship show. That post received 1.5 million likes within 10 hours of going online.

Trump’s TikTok rollout came as his own social media company, Trump Media, took a financial tumble in the wake of the historic verdict that convicted the former president on 34 felony counts in his Manhattan hush money trial.

Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social trading under the DJT ticker, was down over 5% at market close on Friday, the day after Trump’s conviction, with shares priced at $49. Immediately following Trump’s conviction on Thursday, the stock was down roughly 15% in extended trading hours.

Trump launched Truth Social in early 2022 as an alternative, “non-woke” social media platform after he was banned from sites like Twitter and Facebook following the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. Since then, Trump Media has gone public and the former president now holds a 65% stake in the company.

Truth Social did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment about Trump’s move to TikTok.

Trump is several months later than his Democratic opponent, President Joe Biden, whose reelection campaign launched on TikTok in February. But the presumptive Republican presidential nominee already had over 2 million followers on Sunday, outpacing the Biden campaign’s near 340,000.

The disparity in those follower counts is typical for social media accounts directly attached to a specific candidate, which generally tend to outperform accounts associated with a campaign. For example, as of Sunday, Trump’s direct Truth Social account, “@realDonaldTrump” had over 7 million followers, while his campaign account, “@TeamTrump” had 427,000.

“We refuse to cede any ground to Biden and the Democrats,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to NBC News on Sunday. “We will get President Trump’s winning message to every voter possible. He has already gained significant ground with young voters and this is another way to reach them.”

Both candidates joined TikTok despite previously vocalizing national security concerns about the app.

In April, Biden signed into law a foreign aid package with a clause to force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app or else the platform would face a national ban in the U.S.

During his administration, Trump also said he would try to ban TikTok, though he has since flipped that stance. Still, he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in a March interview that he believes TikTok could threaten U.S. national security.

The evidence in the criminal hush money case against former president Donald Trump is “literally overwhelming,” a prosecutor told jurors Tuesday.

“Focus on the evidence and the logical inferences that can be drawn from that evidence,” Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Joshua Steinglass said at the end of his closing argument for the trial.

“In the interest of justice, and in the name of the people of the state of New York, I ask you to find the defendant guilty,” Steinglass said. “Thank you.”

Steinglass spent nearly five hours methodically reminding jurors of the testimony they had heard and evidence they had been shown.

All of it, the prosecutor argued, painted a picture of Trump directing and benefiting from a scheme to protect his presidential campaign from negative information about him becoming public during the 2016 election.

“Everything Mr. Trump and his cohorts did in this case was cloaked in lies,” Steinglass said.

“The name of the game was concealment, and all roads lead to the man who benefited the most, Donald Trump.”

Judge Juan Merchan told jurors to return to court at 10 a.m. Wednesday to receive about an hour’s worth of instructions on the law in the case.

Unlike most of the days of Trump’s five-week trial, the former president did not stop to speak to reporters Tuesday night.

Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a 2016 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels by his then-lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen.

The 12-member jury then will begin deliberations later Wednesday.

Trump is the first former U.S. president ever to be tried in a criminal case.

If convicted, the statutory maximum sentence he could receive is four years in prison for each felony count.

Trump, who is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, faces three other pending criminal cases, and three civil judgments holding him liable for more than $500 million in damages to the state of New York and the writer E. Jean Carroll.

Steinglass earlier Tuesday argued that the value of a “corrupt bargain” between the publisher of the National Enquirer, Trump and Cohen to suppress negative stories about Trump cannot be overstated, and might have been one of the most valuable political contributions ever.

“This scheme, cooked up by these men … could very well be what got President Trump elected,” Steinglass said in Manhattan Supreme Court.

David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, testified at trial about his agreement with Trump and Cohen to alert them to possibly damaging stories about the then-Republican presidential nominee, and his publication of negative stories about Trump’s political opponents, among them 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Pecker testified about how his company paid $150,000 to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, to buy her silence before the 2016 election about her alleged sexual affair with Trump.

Pecker’s company also paid a Trump World Tower doorman, Dino Sajudin, $30,000 for his claim that Trump had a child out of wedlock with a housekeeper, a story the National Enquirer never ran.

“This was really catch and kill,” Steinglass said.

“Keep in mind Mr. Pecker has no reason to lie, no bias toward the defendant and thinks Mr. Trump is still a friend and a mentor,” Steinglass said, distinguishing the publisher and Cohen, a former pit bull for Trump who is now his bitter enemy.

The prosecutor also noted the timing of Cohen paying Daniels $130,000, at what Cohen has said was Trump’s direction, shortly before the 2016 election to keep her quiet about an alleged sexual tryst that occurred a full decade earlier.

“It’s no coincidence that the sex happened in 2006, but the payoff happened less than two weeks before the 2016 election,” Steinglass said.

And that, the prosecutor argued, is because Trump’s main concern about Daniels going public with her claim the its potential effect on the election that year, not any effect on his family, as defense lawyers have said.

Earlier Tuesday, Judge Merchan blasted the former president’s defense lawyer Todd Blanche for arguing to jurors that “you cannot send someone to prison based on the words of Michael Cohen.”

Jurors in criminal cases are instructed to consider whether a defendant committed a crime, and not to factor in the potential punishment for that crime, such as prison.

After jurors had left the courtroom at the end of Blanche’s own closing argument, Merchan laid into him.

“I think that statement was outrageous, Mr. Blanche,” Merchan said.

“Someone who has been a prosecutor for as long as you have and a defense attorney as long as you have,” the judge said.

“It’s simply not allowed. Period. It’s hard for me to imagine how that was accidental in any way.”

When jurors were brought back into the courtroom after lunch, Merchan told them that Blanche’s comment “is improper and you must disregard it.”

The judge also said that if jurors convict Trump, Merchan would decide the sentence. The judge noted that a prison term is not mandatory upon conviction of the charges Trump faces.

Blanche began his summation Tuesday by telling jurors that Trump “is innocent” of the charges.

Trump “did not commit any crimes, and the district attorney has not met their burden of proof, period,” Blanche said.

The records at issue in the case described as legal expenses are the reimbursements that Trump and his company, the Trump Organization, gave Cohen for paying off Daniels.

Prosecutors said the payment was designed to prevent the adult film actor from damaging Trump’s chances to win the White House in 2016.

Blanche argued that Cohen had believed that Daniels’ efforts to shop her story about Trump to media outlets “was an extortion attempt” against Trump.

“She wrote a book and she has a podcast. And a documentary,” Blanche said of Daniels. “This started out as an extortion, there’s no doubt about that, and ended very well for Ms. Daniels — financially speaking.”

“The story Mr. Cohen told you on that witness stand is not true,” Blanche said. “There is no proof that President Trump knew about the payment before it was made.”

“As I said to you in the opening statement, it doesn’t matter if there was a conspiracy to win the election,” Blanche argued. “Every campaign is a conspiracy to promote a candidate.”

But Steinglass, in his own closing argument, said, “I’m not suggesting [Daniels] wasn’t looking to get paid, but that is a different thing from … extortion.”

“In the end, it doesn’t really matter,” whether Trump was extorted or not, said Steinglass. “You don’t get to commit election fraud or falsify your business records because you think you’ve been victimized.”

Michael Cohen testified Monday he feared there would be a “catastrophic” effect on the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump if porn star Stormy Daniels went public with her claim of having sex with the billionaire real estate mogul a decade earlier.

Cohen said Trump was very angry to learn that Daniels was again shopping around her account, five years after his then-personal lawyer and fixer Cohen first notified Trump about the potential story becoming public.

” ‘I thought you took care of this,’ ” Trump said, Cohen testified Monday in Manhattan Supreme Court at Trump’s criminal hush money trial. ″ ‘I thought this was under control.’ “

Trump then said, ″ ‘This is a disaster, a total disaster. Women will hate me,’ ” the 57-year-old Cohen testified.

” ‘Guys will think it’s cool, but this is going to be a disaster for the campaign!’ ” Trump fumed, according to Cohen.

Cohen noted that at the time that he learned Daniels might sell her story of a one-night stand with Trump, the then-Republican nominee Trump “was polling very poorly with women.”

“And this, coupled with the previous Access Hollywood tape” made Trump upset, Cohen testified, referring to the infamous recording that captured Trump boasting of kissing women and grabbing their genitals without prior consent.

Earlier Monday, Cohen testified that Trump had warned him that “just be prepared, there’s going to be a lot of women coming forward,” once he announced that he was running for president in 2015.

Cohen also testified about secretly recording Trump during a meeting about reimbursing the publisher of The National Enquirer for making a $150,000 hush money payment to a Playboy model to buy her silence about an alleged affair with Trump.

Pay with cash,” Trump says on that recording. The publisher ended up not being reimbursed.

Cohen’s revelations came on his first day of testimony at Trump’s New York criminal hush money trial, where he detailed efforts to protect Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 from being harmed by salacious disclosures.

Once slavishly devoted to Trump, Cohen is now his avowed enemy and could be the key witness against him in the case.

Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 shortly before the 2016 presidential election, in exchange for her silence about Trump.

When a prosecutor asked him if he would have paid Daniels without getting a “sign-off” from Trump, Cohen said no.

“Because everything required Mr. Trump’s sign-off,” said Cohen, who also said, “I wanted my money back.”

Trump said, “Good, good,” when Cohen informed him he had paid Daniels, Cohen testified.

“Don’t worry, you will get the money back,” Trump also said, according to Cohen.

Trump’s reimbursement of Cohen for that payoff while he was serving in the White House is the basis for the Manhattan District Attorney’s case against the ex-president.

The Trump Organization reported the Daniels-related reimbursements, which ended up totaling $420,000 over 12 months, to Cohen as legal expenses.

But District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleges that this constituted a crime — falsification of business records — committed by Trump to hide the fact that the hush money had protected his then-wobbling presidential candidate at a key moment.

Trump, who denies having sex with Daniels, says the felony charges are bogus. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee calls them an effort by a Democratic prosecutor to damage his chances to win the upcoming election against President Joe Biden.

Trump’s lawyers have suggested he had Cohen pay off Daniels because he was worried about the effect on his family, particularly his wife Melania, if the adult film actress went public with her story about having sex with Trump months after Melania Trump gave birth to the couple’s son Barron.

Cohen testified that at one point during discussions about the hush money situation he asked Trump “How things gonna go upstairs?” a reference to Melania Trump.

Donald Trump replied, “Don’t worry. How long do you think I’ll be on the market for? Not long,” Cohen testified.

In addition to making the payment to Daniels, Cohen was closely involved in the arrangement of the other hush money payment that is a key element of the case, to Playboy model Karen McDougal by the publisher of the National Enquirer in 2016 in exchange for her story of an affair with Trump.

Cohen testified that as Trump moved to announce in 2015 that he would make a run for the White House, it became clear that the married real estate mogul factored in his secret personal life.

“Did Mr. Trump express any concerns about negative stories about his personal life?” assistant District Attorney Susan Hoffinger asked Cohen, as Trump sat at the defense table.

Cohen replied, “Yes.”

“What did he say?” Hoffinger asked.

Cohen answered that Trump said, ” ‘You know that when this comes out, meaning the announcement, just be prepared, there’s going to be a lot of women coming forward.’ ” 

As Cohen began testifying Monday, telling jurors about his personal and professional background, Trump listened with his eyes closed, in the same way that he had done when other witnesses in the case took the stand.

“During the time you worked there for Mr. Trump, how often would you say you met with him or spoke with him,” Hoffinger asked Cohen.

Cohen replied, “Every single day, and multiple times a day.”   

He told the prosecutor that working for Trump over a decade “was an amazing experience in many ways.”

“There were great times and some not great times, but for the most part, I enjoyed the responsibilities given to me, I enjoyed my colleagues, the Trump children,” Cohen said, as Trump’s son Eric Trump stared intently at him from the courtroom gallery.

“It was a big family.”

Cohen later detailed how he used to encryption app Signal to communicate with David Pecker, the then-CEO of American Media, the publisher of the National Enquirer, and Pecker’s lieutenant Dylan Howard.

Cohen said he used Signal when it “was a sensitive matter we wanted to keep private.”

He testified that in August 2015, Trump and Pecker met, and “What was discussed was the power of the National Enquirer being at the cash register of so many supermarkets and bodegas that if we could place positive stories about Trump that would be beneficial and if we could place negative stories about some of the other candidates, that could be beneficial.”

Cohen said that Pecker offered to alert Trump to any potentially negative stories about Trump so that he could stop them from being published.

In June 2016, Pecker and Howard alerted Cohen to the fact that the Playboy model McDougal was interested in selling her account of an affair with Trump to news outlets, Cohen testified.

Cohen said the impact from McDougal going public with her story could be “significant,” and that he “immediately” notified Trump after hearing from American Media about it.

“She’s really beautiful,” Trump said of McDougal when Cohen told him what Pecker and Howard had said.

“OK, but she’s shopping a story,” Cohen replied, according to his testimony Monday.

Trump then asked his fixer to see that McDougal’s account was not published, Cohen testified.

Cohen then substantiated Pecker’s previous testimony in which he told Trump it would cost $150,000 to “control” McDougal’s story.

“No problem, I’ll take care of it,” Trump told Pecker, according to Cohen.

But Trump did not pay back Pecker, which angered the publisher, Cohen testified.

During one restaurant meeting, Pecker told Cohen, “I need my money back,” Cohen testified.

“I said, ‘Mr. Trump said he will pay you back and he will pay you back,’ ” Cohen testified.

Cohen said he later told Trump he was concerned about a file American Media had on Trump.

“And one of the concerns that I had, that I expressed to Mr. Trump, was that if he [Pecker] goes, there’s a series of papers there that relate to you,” Cohen testified.

Hoffinger asked: “Was Mr. Trump concerned about that?”

“Yes,” Cohen replied.

He then said he recorded a conversation with Trump in September 2016 about buying the rights to McDougal’s life story.

Cohen said he secretly taped Trump “so I could show it to David Pecker, and that way he would hear the conversation, that he was going to be paying — that he was going to be paying him back.”

“And I also wanted him to remain loyal to Mr. Trump,” Cohen testified.

The recording of Cohen and Trump’s conversation was then played for jurors.

“What I was doing, I was doing at the direction of and for the benefit of Mr. Trump,” Cohen said of his involvement in getting Amerian Media to buy McDougal’s story.

Pecker and Howard also ran negative stories in the Enquirer about Trump’s GOP primary opponents, the senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016.

“Some of the negative ones that I received from David or Dylan was Hillary Clinton wearing thick glasses allegations that she had a brain injury, Ted Cruz photo of his father with Lee Harvey Oswald claiming he was involved in the assassination of JFK, articles about Marco Rubio in swimming pool with several men, that he was having a drug binge of some sort,” Cohen testified.

“AMI [American Media] would send over the cover story and I would show it to Mr. Trump and he knew David was loyal and on board and doing everything that he said he would do at the August meeting and he was actually doing it.”

Hoffinger asked Cohen if he recalled Trump’s reaction to those stories.

“That’s fantastic, that’ unbelievable,” Trump said, according to Cohen.

Cohen, who in the past has said he had a “blind loyalty” to Trump while working for him, is expected to testify for several days.

After Hoffinger finishes her first round of questioning, Trump’s defense lawyer Todd Blanche will cross-examine Cohen.

Blanche is expected to hammer away at Cohen’s self-admitted history of lying — often in the service of Trump — and his federal criminal guilty plea to tax crimes and campaign finance violations in connection with the Stormy Daniels hush money payment.

“He’s a convicted felon. And he also is a convicted perjurer. He is an admitted liar,” Blanche said in his opening statement about Cohen at the start of the trial.

A number of prominent Republican supporters showed up at court Monday to support Trump, including two U.S. senators, J.D. Vance of Ohio and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York, and two state attorneys general, Steve Marshall of Alabama and Breanna Bird of Iowa.

“What’s going on inside that courtroom is a threat to American democracy,” Vance told reporters

On Friday, Blanche asked Judge Juan Merchan to slap a gag order on Cohen, who has been an outspoken critic of Trump. The former president is subject to a gag order about witnesses in the case.

Merchan did not agree to gag Cohen, but he did tell Bragg’s prosecution team to let Cohen know that the judge wanted him to stop making public statements about Trump or anything else in the case.

This is developing news. Check back for updates.

A full jury of 12 people was seated Thursday at the New York criminal hush money trial of former President Donald Trump.

One alternate also was selected. Five alternates remain to be selected for the case when proceedings resume Friday morning.

Opening arguments in the trial could begin Monday.

“I’m hopeful we will finish tomorrow,” Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan said Thursday afternoon.

Trump blasted the case after court adjourned.

“The whole world is watching this New York scam,” Trump said.

He exited the courtroom carrying a ream of paper comprising dozens of news articles that were critical or skeptical of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case. Trump spent minutes thumbing through the papers and reading headlines.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee complained that he was forced to be in court for hours a day, preventing him from campaigning against President Joe Biden.

He even railed against the courtroom itself, saying he was stuck “in that freezing room, freezing.”

Earlier in the day, Merchan dismissed two jurors who had initially been seated Tuesday.

The first juror had raised concerns about her identity being made public, and her ability to be impartial. The second juror was excused after prosecutors questioned whether he had had been truthful in an answer about his criminal history.

The dismissal of the two jurors seemed to threaten the quick pace of jury selection, which looked to be on track to finish a week before some legal experts anticipated. But those seats, and the rest of the 12-person panel, were filled by Thursday afternoon.

The 13 jurors and alternate picked on Tuesday and Thursday were selected from a pool of 192 people.

Prosecutors earlier Thursday accused Trump of violating his gag order in the case seven more times on social media since Monday. The gag order bars him making certain statements about jurors and witnesses, as well as the family members of the judge and Trump’s prosecutors.

“It’s ridiculous, it has to stop,” assistant District Attorney Chris Conroy told Merchan.

Conroy said that the “most disturbing post” by Trump echoed a claim by Fox News host Jesse Watters that the pool of potential jurors includes “undercover Liberal Activists lying to the Judge.”

Conroy said prosecutors would decide later what sanctions to ask for against Trump. A hearing on Trump’s alleged gag order violations is set for next week.

The dismissed female juror said that on Wednesday, she received multiple calls from people asking whether she had been picked. Watters in a Tuesday night broadcast listed a number of details about the juror, including her marital status and news diet, and said, “I’m not so sure about” her.

That juror on Thursday morning told Merchan, “I don’t believe I can be fair and unbiased and let the outside influences not affect me in the courtroom.”

The judge apologized and promptly excused her from the trial. He admonished journalists covering the trial to “apply common sense” and refrain from publishing identifiable information about jurors who are supposed to be anonymous.

Merchan also ordered the press not to report the answers to a question on the jury questionnaire about past and current employers.

The parties were tasked Thursday with questioning a group of 96 prospective jurors to fill the remaining seats on the jury. But half of that group was quickly excused after they signaled to Merchan that they could not be fair and impartial.

Among the would-be jurors who remained, one person, who said he was born and raised in Italy, was dismissed after comparing Trump to the late former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi, who died last June, was a scandal-plagued billionaire who in 2012 was convicted of tax fraud.

Trump is charged with falsifying business records in a scheme to silence porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election.

Trump is required to sit in court throughout the trial, which convenes on all weekdays, except Wednesday, and is expected to last around six weeks.

Trump has denounced the trial as a political “witch hunt” and complained that it keeps him off the campaign trail.

But Trump has also used the media frenzy surrounding his trial — and his three other pending criminal cases — as an opportunity to spread campaign messages and attack his political foes. On Tuesday afternoon, Trump accused Judge Juan Merchan of “rushing” the trial.

He then traveled to a north Harlem bodega for a campaign stop aiming to suggest that Bragg is failing to stop crime in New York City because of his focus on the trial.

On Wednesday, Trump complained that his legal team was given “not nearly enough” chances to reject potential jurors. In fact, he received the exact number of strikes allotted under New York law.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Wednesday warned that China is treating the global economy as a dumping ground for its cheaper clean energy products, depressing market prices and squeezing green manufacturing in the U.S.

“I am concerned about global spillovers from the excess capacity that we are seeing in China,” Yellen said during a speech at a Georgia solar company called Suniva. “China’s overcapacity distorts global prices and production patterns and hurts American firms and workers, as well as firms and workers around the world.”

China has a surplus of solar power, electric vehicles and lithium-ion batteries that it can ship out to other countries at cheaper prices. That makes it difficult for the more adolescent green manufacturing industries of the U.S. and elsewhere to compete.

Yellen said she intends to put pressure on Chinese officials about these trade practices during her upcoming visit to China.

“I plan to make it a key issue in discussions during my next trip there,” she said. “I will press my Chinese counterparts to take necessary steps to address this issue.”

The secretary’s concerns come as the White House tries to build a burgeoning clean energy industry domestically with investments from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, along with other legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act.

Yellen has regularly touted the gains from these investments, including at another recent speech where she doubled down on the electric vehicle “boom” spurred by the IRA.

But those investments are playing catch-up with China’s government.

“The Biden Administration also recognizes that these investments are new,” Yellen said Wednesday.

Meanwhile, China has been pouring billions into clean energy for years, outpacing the rest of the world in the energy transition.

Yellen added that the more China’s clean energy glut interferes with global market prices, the worse off supply chains for these energy sectors will be.

“President Biden is committed to doing what we can to protect our industries from unfair competition,” Yellen said.

 The Chinese Embassy in Washington denied the notion that there is an excess of Chinese clean energy products.

Yellen’s comments highlight ongoing U.S.-China trade tension even as the two countries try to steady relations.

President Joe Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in November as an olive-branch effort to break the ice after years of tension, marked in part by a tariff war launched by former President Donald Trump.

Trump has floated reinstating significant tariff levels on Chinese products if he wins a second presidential term.

In the time since the Biden-Xi meeting, strengthening U.S.-China relations has proven a precarious effort due to ongoing cybersecurity and trade concerns.

In February, Biden launched an investigation into Chinese smart cars, which he said pose a national security risk because they connect to U.S. infrastructure when they drive on American roads.

“China is determined to dominate the future of the auto market, including by using unfair practices,” Biden said in a February statement. “China’s policies could flood our market with its vehicles, posing risks to our national security. I’m not going to let that happen on my watch.”

Neither President Joe Biden nor anyone else is expected to be criminally charged in an investigation into how classified documents ended up in Biden’s Delaware home and a private office, NBC News reported Tuesday.

A senior law enforcement official told NBC that a report on that probe by Department of Justice special counsel Robert Hur will be made public in the coming days.

Hur has spent more than a year investigating how classified government documents came to be sent to Biden’s home in Wilmington and to a Washington, D.C., office he had maintained before becoming president in January 2021.

By law, such documents should have been sent to the National Archives after Biden ceased being vice president in early 2017.

The White House declined to comment when contacted by NBC News, as did a spokesman for the president’s personal attorney Bob Bauer.  

Former President Donald Trump was indicted in 2022 on criminal charges related to retaining hundreds of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, after leaving the White House, and to his efforts to prevent government officials from recovering that material.

Trump has pleaded not guilty in that case, which has yet to go to trial in Florida federal court.

Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Biden, a Democrat, is seeking reelection this year.

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A prosecutor asked a judge to Friday to schedule the Georgia election interference criminal trial of former President Donald Trump and his co-defendants to begin on Aug. 5 — exactly three months before the 2024 presidential Election Day.

That proposed trial schedule would take into account potential delays in Trump’s other expected criminal trials next year, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said in a new court filing.

Trump’s defense lawyer Steven Sadow later Friday filed a response saying Trump opposes the proposed trial date, and asked Judge Scott McAfee to schedule oral arguments on the dispute in Fulton County Superior Court.

Trump, who is the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is charged with the other defendants with racketeering and other crimes related to their attempt to reverse his loss in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.

Wills in her filing Friday asked Judge Scott McAfee to scheduled a final plea hearing date on June 21 to accept negotiated guilty pleas.

“After the Final Please Date, the Defendants will only have the option of non-negotiated pleas, and the State intend to recommend maximum sentences at any remaining sentencing hearings,” Willis said in her motion.

The DA also asked the judge not to consider any requests by Trump or other defendants to sever their trials from one another until after the final plea date.

“The State clearly retains the logistical and prosecutorial capabilities to try all of the remaining Defendants together,” Willis said in her motion.

Trump’s campaign spokesman said, “Radical Democrat Fani Willis has again proven that her case is purely political, designed to interfere with President Trump’s re-election by demanding a trial date in the most vital time in President Trump’s winning campaign.”

“Crooked Joe Biden knows he can’t beat President Trump and this corrupt step by Fani Willis is just further proof of that fact,” the spokesman said.

Trump and his 18 co-defendants were indicted in August by a grand jury in Atlanta.

Since then, four defendants have pleaded guilty in deals negotiated with Willis’ office: the lawyers Kenneth Cheesbro, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell, and bail bondsman Scott Hall.

Trump is scheduled to go on trial on March 4 in federal court in Washington, D.C., on charges related to his efforts to undo his loss to Biden in the national election in 2020.

He is then scheduled to go on trial on March 25 in New York state court, where he is charged ith falsifying business records related to a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. The Manhattan Supreme Court judge in that case has said he will willing to re-schedule it to avoid a conflict with Trump’s trial earlier that same month in Washington.

Trump has another trial scheduled to start on May 20 in Florida federal court on charges related to his retention of classified government documents after he left the White House in January 2021, and his efforts to hide those records from government officials seeking their return.

He has pleaded not guilty in all cases.

Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son and co-defendant of former President Donald Trump, testified Wednesday that he did not remember working on financial statements at the heart of the $250 million New York civil fraud trial of him and his father, brother and business.

Taking the witness stand for the first time, Trump Jr. said that he relied on the expertise of outside accounting firm Mazars, and on Donald Bender, a former Trump family accountant, according to NBC News.

Bender already testified that the information he used to assemble the financial statements was provided by the Trump Organization.

New York Attorney General Letitia James alleges the defendants falsely inflated the values of Trump’s real estate properties and other assets by billions of dollars a year in order to get various financial perks, including tax benefits and better loan terms.

Wednesday’s testimony gave James’ team their first chance in the trial to grill a member of the Trump family about how their closely held real estate empire operates.

Trump Jr.’s testimony in Manhattan Supreme Court was expected to continue Thursday.

Trump Jr. and his brother Eric Trump took control of the Trump Organization as executive vice presidents when their father was elected president in 2017. Ahead of the trial, they both gave sworn depositions in which they downplayed their involvement in creating the financial statements that the attorney general says were fraudulent.

Trump Jr. was the first of four members of the Trump family expected to testify in the trial.

Trump Sr. lashed out at Judge Arthur Engoron in a Truth Social post early Wednesday morning. Engoron will deliver the verdicts in the no-jury trial.

“Leave my children alone, Engoron,” the former president posted at 2:28 a.m. ET. “You are a disgrace to the legal profession!”

In addition to seeking around a quarter of a billion dollars in damages, James wants to permanently bar Trump Sr. and his sons Donald and Eric from running a New York business.

Engoron has already found the defendants liable for fraud and ordered the cancellation of their New York business certificates. The trial will resolve six other claims alleged by James.

Trump Jr.’s testimony will be followed by Eric Trump’s on Thursday, according to a schedule from the attorney general’s office. The former president is expected to testify Monday.

Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, who was removed as a defendant on statute-of-limitations grounds by a New York appeals court earlier this year, is set to take the stand Nov. 8.

In a surprise move last week, Engoron ordered the former president to the stand to be questioned about his remarks outside the courtroom, which Engoron considered to be a violation of his gag order on Trump.

Trump in that brief testimony denied that he was referring to the judge’s principal law clerk, Allison Greenfield, when he complained to reporters about “a very partisan judge with a person who’s very partisan sitting alongside him.” Trump had previously been ordered not to make public statements about Engoron’s staff, after he attacked Greenfield in a social media post.

Engoron did not believe him, saying in a written order that his testimony rang “hollow and untrue.” Trump has now been fined a total of $15,000 for two violations of the gag order.