Trump cancels news conference for Capitol attack anniversary – US politics live

While the Republicans of Congress may be a little wishy-washy when it comes to the 6 January attack on the US Capitol - and exactly who bears responsibility for it - the White House said Americans should be prepared for Joe Biden to speak tomorrow about “the singular responsibility of President Trump for the chaos and carnage that we saw”.

“President Biden has spoken repeatedly about how the former president has abused his office, undermined the constitution and ignored his oath to the American people in order to amass more power for himself and his allies,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at today’s press briefing.

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Biden to speak ‘truth’ on Capitol attack anniversary as Trump cancels his event

President will honor police in his remarks while Republicans voiced concerns about Trump overshadowing the somber day

Joe Biden will mark the first anniversary of the deadly assault at the US Capitol this Thursday by honoring the bravery of law enforcement on the scene, and outlining the unfinished work the nation needs to do to strengthen its democracy, the White House said in its first preview of the president’s remarks.

“On Thursday, the president is going to speak to the truth of what happened, not the lies that some have spread since, and the peril it has posed to the rule of law and our system of democratic governance,” the White House spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters on Tuesday afternoon.

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Capitol attack panel seeks cooperation from Fox News host Sean Hannity

Committee requests answers from Hannity about communications with Donald Trump before, on and after day of 6 January attack

The US House of Representatives panel investigating the deadly attack on the US Capitol last January is seeking cooperation from Sean Hannity, the Fox News host and one of Donald Trump’s closest allies in the media, as the committee continues to widen its scope.

Congressman Bennie Thompson, the chair of the committee, and vice-chair Liz Cheney have requested that Hannity answer questions in relation to communications between Hannity and the former president, as well as the former president’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, and others in the days leading up to the attack, the day itself and in the aftermath.

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Melania’s latest NFT is selling for £180,000 – at last one of the Trumps is showing entrepreneurial spirit | Arwa Mahdawi

The former first lady has launched a jewellery line and caviar moisturiser, but digital portraits could be her real money maker

There’s no rest for the wicked, eh? While a lot of people have spent the past few weeks trying to do as little as possible, it has been go-go-go for the Trump family. Donald, Ivanka and Donald Jr have been issued with subpoenas as part of a fraud inquiry into the family’s businesses. Melania, meanwhile, has been busy building a business of her own. The former first lady, turned crypto queen, has jumped on the non-fungible token (NFT) trend: last month she was flogging a digital painting of her eyes titled Melania’s Vision (and promising an unspecified portion of the proceeds from her digital ventures would go to children ageing out of foster care). The price? One SOL (Solana, the cryptocurrency, is worth about £128). Now, she has released a picture of herself dressed in white for a starting bid of just 1,415.86 SOL (£180,000).

Melania’s NFT venture isn’t her first brush with entrepreneurship. She had a jewellery line and once developed a skincare range called Melania Trump’s Caviar Complexe C6™ with Lipid Matrix Receptor™ Technology. She tested her caviar creams on her then seven-year-old son Barron (“It smells very, very fresh … He likes it!” Melania told reporters at the time). Alas, no one else got a chance to use them due to a complicated lawsuit that killed the product before it got to the shops.

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New York attorney general subpoenas Donald Trump Jr and Ivanka Trump – report

Letitia James reportedly issues subpoenas to pair as part of fraud investigation into former president’s business empire

The attorney general of New York state has subpoenaed Donald Trump Jr and Ivanka Trump as part of its fraud inquiry into Trump’s businesses, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing a court document.

The document was filed by lawyers for Trump in response to Letitia James’s decision to subpoena the former president himself.

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Indictment of alleged Proud Boys leaders over US Capitol attack upheld

Federal judge rejects defence arguments, a development that could have potential implications for Donald Trump

A federal judge has refused to dismiss an indictment charging four alleged Proud Boys leaders with conspiracy and obstructing an official proceeding during the 6 January attack on the US Capitol – a development that could have potential implications for Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, the US district judge Timothy Kelly rejected arguments by defence lawyers that Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Charles Donohoe are charged with conduct that is protected by the first amendment right to free speech.

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Trump claims 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia – but the real number is four

Claim was part of push to overturn election but officials confirm four cases, all involving family members submitting votes

Donald Trump has claimed 5,000 dead people voted in 2020 in Georgia, a state he lost to Joe Biden on his way to national defeat.

He was off by 4,996.

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Donald Trump golf resorts claimed at least £3.3m in UK furlough support

Former US president’s two Scottish resorts claimed emergency support during Covid pandemic

Donald Trump’s loss-making Scottish golf resorts claimed in excess of £3.3m in emergency support from the UK government, to help furlough staff during the Covid pandemic.

Company accounts for the former president’s resorts at Turnberry in Ayrshire and Balmedie, north of Aberdeen, show his businesses cut 273 jobs due to the Covid crisis last year, while also claiming £2.8m in furlough support.

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Capitol panel to investigate Trump call to Willard hotel in hours before attack

Committee to request contents of the call seeking to stop Biden’s certification and may subpoena Rudy Giuliani

Congressman Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, has said the panel will open an inquiry into Donald Trump’s phone call seeking to stop Joe Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January hours before the insurrection.

The chairman said the select committee intended to scrutinize the phone call – revealed last month by the Guardian – should they prevail in their legal effort to obtain Trump White House records over the former president’s objections of executive privilege.

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Fauci says Omicron surge will continue and Americans must not be complacent

Cases of Covid-19 will continue to surge worldwide due to the Omicron variant, the US chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, said on Sunday, warning Americans not to get complacent amid reports that the variant is less harmful than others.

“If you have many, many, many more people with a less level of severity,” Fauci told ABC’s This Week, “that might kind of neutralise the positive effect of having less severity.

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Caller tells Joe Biden ‘Let’s go Brandon’ during White House Christmas event

The saying has became an internet sensation as a coded vulgarity among Trump supporters

A vulgar anti-Biden slogan made for an awkward moment on Friday during Joe Biden’s phone calls with children tracking Santa’s flight when a father said, “Let’s Go Brandon.”

The refrain, a sanitized version of “Fuck Joe Biden,” has been an internet sensation since a television journalist told race car driver Brandon Brown that a Nascar crowd shouting the vulgarity was actually saying, “Let’s go Brandon.”

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Donald Trump could face charges for trying to obstruct certification of election, legal experts say

Analysis: charges could be well founded given Trump’s incendiary remarks to a rally before the Capitol attack and aggressive pressuring of officials

Expectation is growing that Donald Trump might face charges for trying to obstruct Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election this year as a House panel collects more evidence into the 6 January attack on the Capitol, former prosecutors and other experts say.

Speculation about possible charges against the former US president has been heightened by a recent rhetorical bombshell from Republican representative and 6 January panel vice-chair Liz Cheney suggesting the House panel is looking at whether Trump broke a law that bars obstruction of “official proceedings”.

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Trump asks supreme court to block release of 6 January records

An appeals court ruled against the former US president two weeks ago but prohibited documents from being turned over

Donald Trump turned to the supreme court Thursday in a last-ditch effort to keep documents away from the House committee investigating the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol.

A federal appeals court ruled against the former US president two weeks ago, but prohibited documents held by the National Archives from being turned over before the supreme court had a chance to weigh in. Trump appointed three of the nine justices.

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Michael Flynn sues Capitol attack committee in bid to block subpoena

Lawsuit filed by longtime adviser to Donald Trump is the latest in a flood of litigation by targets of the committee

Michael Flynn, a longtime adviser to Donald Trump, has sued the congressional committee investigating the deadly 6 January attack on the US Capitol in hopes of blocking it from obtaining his phone records.

Flynn alleged in a lawsuit, filed in federal court in Florida, that a subpoena issued to him by the House of Representatives select committee was too broad in scope and punishes him for constitutionally protected speech as a private citizen.

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Republican congressman refuses to cooperate with Capitol attack panel

Scott Perry is first sitting member of Congress to get request for interview as Trump announces 6 January press conference

Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican and the first sitting member of Congress to be requested to provide documents and sit for an interview with the committee investigating the Capitol riot, said on Tuesday he would not comply with the panel.

The news came shortly after Donald Trump provocatively announced that he will hold a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort on 6 January, the first anniversary of the deadly attack on Congress.

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Trump’s Peace review: dysfunction and accord in US Israel policy

Barak Ravid has written a fascinating account of four chaotic years in which some progress was nonetheless made

Trump’s Peace is a blockbuster of a book. Barak Ravid captures the 45th president saying “Fuck him” to Benjamin Netanyahu and reducing American Jews to antisemitic caricatures. Imagine the Republican reaction if Barack Obama had done that. Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham would plotz. But Trump? Crickets.

Ravid also delivers a mesmerizing tick-tock of the making of the Abraham Accords, the normalization of Israel’s relations with four non-neighboring Arab states.

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Republicans are shamelessly working to subvert democracy. Are Democrats paying attention?

Voting rights activists say the country has not fully awakened to the threat

A dry run. A dress rehearsal. A practice coup. As the first anniversary of the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol approaches, there is no shortage of warnings about the danger of a repeat by Republicans.

But even as Donald Trump loyalists lay siege to democracy with voting restrictions and attempts to take over the running of elections, there are fears that Democrats in Washington have not fully woken up to the threat.

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Mark Meadows was at the center of the storm on 6 January. But only Trump could call it off

Trump’s former White House chief of staff has become a character of supreme interest to the Capitol attack committee, with a treasure trove of documents divulging golden nuggets of information

On the morning of 29 December, eight days before hundreds of Trump supporters and far-right extremists stormed the US Capitol in the worst domestic attack on American democracy arguably since the civil war, the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows fired off an email to the head of the justice department.

It was a strange message for Donald Trump’s right-hand man to send to Jeffrey Rosen, acting US attorney general, given that the material in it was written entirely in Italian. It attached a letter addressed to Trump from an Italian named Carlo Goria who said he worked for a US aerospace company and then went on to regurgitate a conspiracy theory that was doing the rounds, known as “Italygate”.

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Capitol attack a ‘coordinated act of terrorism’, says DC lawsuit against far-right groups – as it happened

Karl Racine, the attorney general of the District of Columbia, in filing federal suit against the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, states that: “The District seeks compensatory, statutory and punitive relief and, by filing this action, intends to make clear that it will not countenance the use of violence against the District, including its police officers.

The lawsuit filed in federal court moments ago lists as defendants not only the far right, white nationalist groups the Proud Boys (of Aubrey, Texas, per the suit) and Oathkeepers (of Las Vegas, Nevada), but also lists 32 individuals deemed to have associations to those groups, as well as noting there are 50 other unnamed defendants collectively referred to as “John and Jane Does 1 - 50”.

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Capitol attack panel recommends Mark Meadows for criminal prosecution

In a unanimous vote, the committee said Donald Trump’s former chief of staff attempted to obstruct the 6 January investigation

The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack on Monday voted to recommend the criminal prosecution for former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, punishing Donald Trump’s most senior aide for refusing to testify about the 6 January insurrection.

The select committee advanced the contempt of Congress report for Meadows unanimously, sending the matter to a vote before the full House of Representatives, which is expected to approve the citation as soon as Tuesday.

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