Trump wins Nevada and US Virgin Islands Republican caucuses: Live

An angry and animated President Joe Biden hit back at a Republican prosecutor’s claim that his memory is faulty in last-minute remarks to reporters on Thursday.

Earlier in the day, the Department of Justice released a report by special counsel Robert Hur, the former Maryland US attorney that attorney general Merrick Garland charged with probing how classified documents ended up at Biden’s home in Delaware and former office in Washington.

Hur did not recommend that Biden face criminal charges, citing what he described as significant “mitigating factors” that led him to state that charges were not warranted and would not have been warranted even if Biden were not president and barred from being prosecuted by Department of Justice policy.

More contentiously, the Republican prosecutor noted that Biden’s memory about the documents was “significantly limited” during his interviews with investigators and included details in the report about Biden’s presentation during interviews that appeared tailor-made to fit claims by former president Donald Trump and his allies that the president is not mentally competent.

At one point, he claimed that Biden did not remember what year his late son, Beau Biden, had died from brain cancer, and he described part of an interview in which the president, in his telling, had trouble keeping track of the years during which he served as vice president.

Responding, the president was having none of it.

Here’s Andrew Feinberg’s report.

The self-help guru has announced she is ending her long-shot run to unseat Joe Biden from the Democratic nomination, which comes as not a huge surprise after she was only able to chalk up two lacklustre primary performances at great expense.

Here she is signing out in typically idiosyncratic fashion.

Here’s more on her exit.

Trump may be the current 2024 Republican frontrunner but his mounting legal problems are threatening his chance of even appearing on the presidential election ballot in some states.

Political activists and government watchdog organisations have pushed for states to bar the former president from being an option for voters by invoking a little-known provision of the 14th Amendment.

Section 3 of the amendment prohibits those who take part in insurrections or who aided enemies of the United States government from taking office and the Supreme Court convened on Thursday to hear arguments raised by the states of Colorado and Maine that it should be used to block Trump from running in 2024 in light of the Capitol riot.

John Bowden and Ariana Baio take a look at the amendment and its significance today.

The Republican front-runner also won the Nevada caucuses on Thursday, a victory even less surprising than his repeat performances in Iowa, New Hampshire and, earlier in the evening, in the US Virgin Islands.

Here he is in Las Vegas, gloating over Haley’s primary loss, which was in fact on Tuesday night, not Wednesday.

John Bowden has this one.

You Know Who amassed another win at a Republican caucus held on Thursday in the US Virgin Islands, where officials flouted several GOP party rules, including holding the contest earlier than allowed.

The caucus is the third Republican contest held this election season with delegates at stake, with Trump receiving 73.98 per cent of the votes and Nikki Haley 26.02 per cent.

Here’s something to bookmark going forward — our delegate tracker map for the Republican primaries.

Our map will be updated as the results of primaries or caucuses come in. You can scroll over the states in red to see how delegates have been allocated to each candidate so far.

The night was essentially a worst-case scenario for Ms Haley; her campaign chose not to compete in Nevada’s caucuses, set for Thursday, and instead put Ms Haley up against three rivals who had already departed the primary before Tuesday. The result? Instead of losing to Donald Trump in a contest her team blasted as “rigged”, the former governor found herself finishing second behind “none of these candidates” as vote totals came in.

Her campaign, with apparent knowledge of how the state was trending, reminded reporters in a memo earlier this week that the campaign had not run ads or invested any serious effort in Nevada; Ms Haley herself hasn’t been in the state this year, and has instead focused her energy on campaigning in her home state of South Carolina.

“Nevada is not and has never been our focus,” Haley campaign manager Betsy Ankey had said on Monday. “I’m truly not sure what the Trump team is up to out there but they seem pretty spun up about it.”

Two days after Donald Trump told a news channel that he would be recommending changes at the Republican National Committee, it appears that chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel will be heading for the exit.

The New York Times reported the news on Tuesday evening, as voters in Nevada participated in Democratic and Republican contests that were largely meaningless, albeit for different reasons. President Joe Biden coasted to another victory while Nikki Haley embarrassingly lost a primary – to “none of these candidates” – that would have netted her zero delegates anyway in her race against Donald Trump for the GOP nomination.

One of Ms McDaniel’s former rivals, Vivek Ramaswamy, had publicly called for her firing onstage at a Republican debate before his own departure from the 2024 race.

Section Three of the amendment prohibits those who take part in insurrections or aid enemies of the US government from taking office.

Donald Trump gained further ground in the race for the GOP presidential nomination, a race that increasingly appears to be of the one-horse variety.

With the South Carolina Republican primary at the end of this month, poll watchers are waiting to see if his only significant rival Nikki Haley proves to be triumphant in her home state, where she also served as governor.

According to a poll from Monmouth University in New Jersey, it appears as though 58 per cent say they support Mr Trump, while only 32 per cent support Haley.

The South Carolina GOP primary will take place on 24 February.