University of Rhode Island board votes unanimously to revoke degrees given to key allies of Donald Trump in 2003 and 2014
The University of Rhode Island will revoke honorary degrees given to Rudy Giuliani and Michael Flynn, key allies of Donald Trump in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
The URI board of trustees on Friday voted unanimously to revoke the degrees, which were given to Giuliani in 2003 and Flynn in 2014.
Continue reading...Some Trumpland observers are convinced that he is in serious legal trouble as New York’s AG investigation of Trump Organizations’s finances intensifies
When Donald Trump announced plans in 2006 to build a golf complex on ancient sand dunes on the Aberdeenshire coast in Scotland he told reporters it was love at first sight. “As soon as I saw it there was no question about it,” he said. It would be the world’s “greatest golf course”.
This week Trump International Scotland became a central element of a case that looks poised to dominate his post-presidential life, and could even put him behind bars.
Continue reading...Here’s where the day stands so far:
Continue reading...Investigators seek testimony from former first daughter, with panel increasingly focused on Donald Trump’s inner circle
The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack is asking Ivanka Trump, the daughter of the former president, to appear for a voluntary deposition to answer questions about Donald Trump’s efforts to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.
The move by the panel marks an aggressive new phase in its inquiry into the 6 January insurrection, as House investigators seek for the first time testimony from a member of the Trump family about potential criminality on the part of the former president.
Continue reading...Stephanie Grisham gave more significant details than expected about what Trump was doing before 6 January, sources say
The former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham told the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack that Donald Trump hosted secret meetings in the White House residence in days before 6 January, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
The former senior Trump aide also told House investigators that the details of whether Trump actually intended to march to the Capitol after his speech at the Ellipse rally would be memorialized in documents provided to the US Secret Service, the sources said.
Continue reading...US president Joe Biden has accused the Republicans of blocking his legislative agenda for purely political purposes, saying the party is more interested in defeating his presidency than doing things for the American people. Without mentioning his name, Biden suggested that former president Donald Trump was still in control of the Republican party, with members of Congress fearful they will be defeated in their primaries if they vote contrary to his wishes. Biden questioned what the purpose of the Republican party was during his a press briefing marking the one-year anniversary of his presidency
Court’s move leaves no legal impediment to turning National Archives documents over to congressional committee
The US supreme court has rejected a request by Donald Trump to block the release of White House records to the congressional committee investigating the deadly January 6 attack on the Capitol, dealing a blow to the former president.
The order, which casts aside Trump’s request to stop the House select committee from obtaining the records while the case makes its way through the courts, means more than 700 documents that could shed light on the attack can be transferred to Congress.
Continue reading...Court filing says investigators are seeking to question Donald Trump and his two eldest children
The New York attorney general’s office has told a court that its investigators have uncovered evidence that Donald Trump’s company used “fraudulent or misleading” asset valuations to get loans and tax benefits.
The court filing late on Tuesday said state authorities had not yet decided whether to bring a civil lawsuit in connection with the allegations, but that investigators needed to question Trump and his two eldest children as part of their inquiries.
Continue reading...The book, to be published in March, will divulge details from his tenure as attorney general for George HW Bush and Trump
William Barr, Donald Trump’s second attorney general and perceived “hatchet man” until he split from the former president over his lies about election fraud, will publish his memoirs in March.
HarperCollins, the publisher of One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, promised a “vivid and forthright” read on Barr’s long career in law and conservative politics, in which he was first attorney general under George HW Bush.
Continue reading...The committee is undecided on making the near-unprecedented step as the threat of Republican retaliation looms
The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack is weighing whether to subpoena some of Donald Trump’s top allies on Capitol Hill as it considers its options on how aggressively it should pursue testimony to move forward its inquiry into the January 6 insurrection.
The Republican House minority leader Kevin McCarthy and Republican members of Congress Jim Jordan and Scott Perry may have inside knowledge about Trump’s plan to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election and whether it was coordinated with the Capitol attack.
Continue reading...Subpoenas suggest committee examining whether Trump’s rally speech suggests White House had prior knowledge of attack plans
The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack closed in on Donald Trump’s inner circle on Tuesday, issuing subpoenas to three new White House officials involved in planning the former president’s appearance at the rally that preceded the 6 January insurrection.
The new subpoenas show the select committee is moving ever nearer to Trump in its investigation and suggests the panel is now examining whether the former president’s speech suggested that the White House had advance knowledge of plans to attack the Capitol.
Continue reading...North Carolina group files candidacy challenge, citing Republican congressman’s alleged involvement in 6 January attack
A group of North Carolina voters told state officials on Monday that they want Republican congressman Madison Cawthorn to be disqualified as a congressional candidate, citing his involvement in the 6 January attack on the Capitol.
Cawthorn questioned the outcome of the presidential election during the “Save America Rally” before the Capitol riot later that day that resulted in five deaths.
Continue reading...Joe Biden spoke today to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, as the country continues to suffer through a bloody civil war that has attracted international condemnation for alleged war crimes.
“President Biden commended Prime Minister Abiy on the recent release of several political prisoners, and the two leaders discussed ways to accelerate dialogue toward a negotiated ceasefire, the urgency of improving humanitarian access across Ethiopia, and the need to address the human rights concerns of all affected Ethiopians, including concerns about detentions of Ethiopians under the state of emergency,” the White House said in a readout of the call.
Continue reading...Thomas Welnicki expressed interest in killing then president in interview with Capitol police in July 2020, complaint says
A New York man upset with what he perceived as Donald Trump’s threat to democracy was criminally charged on Monday with threatening to kill the former president, who he once referred to as Hitler.
According to an unsealed complaint, Thomas Welnicki, 72, from Rockaway Beach, expressed interest in killing the then president in an interview with US Capitol police in July 2020 and in several calls to the Secret Service the following year.
Continue reading...The US-run enclave has proved hard to dismantle over two decades, a legal anomaly and lead weight wrapped around America’s global reputation
On 4 January 2002, Brig Gen Michael Lehnert received an urgent deployment order. He would take a small force of marines and sailors and build a prison camp in the US-run military enclave on Cuba’s south coast, Guantánamo Bay.
Lehnert had 96 hours to deploy and build the first 100 cells, in time for the first plane-load of captives arriving from the battlefield in Afghanistan on 11 January. The job was done on time: a grid of chain-link cages surrounded by barbed wire and six plywood guard towers manned by snipers. There were five windowless huts for interrogations. It was named Camp X-Ray.
Continue reading...President strikes different tone in tacit admission that ignoring the most powerful force in the Republican party is risky
In the first moments of his presidency, Joe Biden called on Americans to set aside their deep divisions inflamed by a predecessor he intentionally ignored. He emphasized national unity and appealed to Americans to come together to “end this uncivil war”.
Nearly a year later, as a divided nation reflects on the first anniversary of the 6 January assault on the US Capitol, the uncivil war he sought to extinguish rages on, stronger than ever. In a searing speech on Thursday, Biden struck a different tone.
Continue reading...Messages between Mark Meadows and others suggest the Trump White House coordinated efforts to stop Joe Biden’s certification
The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack is examining whether Donald Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy on 6 January that connected the White House’s scheme to stop Joe Biden’s certification with the insurrection, say two senior sources familiar with the matter.
The committee’s new focus on the potential for a conspiracy marks an aggressive escalation in its inquiry as it confronts evidence that suggests the former president potentially engaged in criminal conduct egregious enough to warrant a referral to the justice department.
Continue reading...Joe Biden on Thursday forcefully denounced Donald Trump for spreading a “web of lies” about the legitimacy of the 2020 election in a desperate attempt to cling to power, accusing the former president and his allies of holding a “dagger at the throat of American democracy”.
The US president condemned his predecessor’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election as a “failed” pursuit, but one that continues to imperil American democracy one year after the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol, when a violent mob of Trump loyalists breached the Capitol in an effort to stop the certification of Biden’s presidential election victory.
Continue reading...Analysis: This was the moment the president realized the clear and present danger posed to US democracy by an ex-leader gone rogue
Here, at last, was the Joe Biden that anyone on vigil for America’s teetering democracy had been waiting for.
In historic National Statuary Hall at the US Capitol, a year to the day after it was overrun by an authoritarian mob, the US president gave his clearest dissection of “the big lie” and his clearest denunciation of his predecessor, Donald Trump.
Continue reading...The US president spoke directly against Trump, saying the former president had created and spread a 'web of lie's that resulted in the deadly
insurrection.
On the one-year anniversary of the 6 January Capitol attack, the US president said his predecessor had refused to accept the result of an election, like no former president had ever done
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