The three-judge panel initially found a total of 28 districts in both chambers had been gerrymandered to produce that result.

Their finding later was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the General Assembly went back to the drawing board this summer to come up with a new plan that GOP legislators said did not take race into consideration at all.

But the voters, represented by Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice, protested in an Oct. 12 hearing that several of these redrawn districts still appeared to be racially gerrymandered and others violated other election laws.

The judicial panel entered its order last week saying that it still had concerns about nine, newly-revised districts and that it was considering bringing Persily on board because of the limited time before the 2018they are dead," Mr Trump said at the White House.

The announcement followed Trump's dramatic cancellation of a top-secret plan to fly Taliban leaders in for direct talks at the Camp David presidential facility outside Washington.

Driving another nail into the coffin of what had appeared to be nearly finalised negotiations, Trump said a US military onslaught on the guerrillas was at its fiercest level in a decade.

"Over the last four days, we have been hitting our Enemy harder than at any time in the last ten years!" he wrote in a tweet.