Trump news - live: President posts ‘most important’ 46-minute speech filled with false voter fraud claims

"He learned about public service from one of my lifelong heroes, John Lewis," Barack Obama says in the ad for Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff.

Ossoff enlisted the former president as he faces a tight runoff election for US Senate in Georgia. The TV spot – part of a seven-figure weekly buy, set to air on Tuesday – paints the candidate as an advocate for voting rights who will “listen to the experts” to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

The Independent’s Alex Woodward has the story.

An attorney working for the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn 3 November’s election result has been condemned for saying that Chris Krebs, the former head of US cybersecurity, should be “shot” for declaring the election secure.

Campaign lawyer Joe DiGenova said during an appearance on The Howie Carr Show that Krebs was an “idiot” and “a class A moron.”

“He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot," he added.

James Crump reports.

Ohio’s Sherrod Brown has torn into treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin for withdrawing hundreds of billions of dollars from Federal Reserve lending programmes for use in buttressing the economy amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“It looks like you and the president and others in the current administration are trying to spend your final days in office pre-emptively… sabotaging the next administration's efforts to clean up your mess,” the Democrat said in a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing on Tuesday.

“But you still work for the American people, even though I don't think you're acting like it, Secretary Mnuchin,” Brown said.

Griffin Connolly has the latest.

Republican and Democrat lawmakers spent much of the Thanksgiving holiday trying to break the impasse on Capitol Hill between the two parties and believe they have at last come up with a bailout solution.

Oliver O’Connell has this update.

The president’s personal attorney, who suffered a torrid November leading Trump’s disastrous legal challenge to the election result, has reportedly discussed being issued with a pardon by the outgoing commander-in-chief.

Here’s the latest.

Lieutenant general Paul Ostrowski, Operation Warp Speed’s supply, production and distribution director, appeared on MSNBC last night and offered an optimistic take on the prospect of coronavirus vaccines riding to the rescue.

Gino Spocchia has this report on what he had to say.

That’s how Rob Flaherty, Biden’s digital director, reacted to the news that the outgoing president has raised more than $170m from his poor bamboozled supporters since election day.

James Crump has more on Don’s new “slush fund”, which was supposed to be bankrolling his legal challenges but looks more likely to be used for paying off campiagn debt, as revealed by the smallprint on his own site.

Appearing on "The Later Show with Stephen Colbert", Barack Obama was asked whether he had a golf game arranged with the incumbent president.

His answer? 

“I do not,” he said, before adding: "Listen from what I understand he’s actually a pretty good golfer. I understand that shockingly enough there’s sometimes problems with the scoring. And whether he’s keeping track of his strokes."

The US Treasury has imposed sanctions against the company China National Electronics Import & Export Corporation (CEIEC), alleging that it has helped the Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro to erode democracy.  

In a statement, the department said the Chinese firm had supported the Venezuelan president’s "efforts to restrict internet service and conduct digital surveillance and cyber operations against political opponents."

Venezuela responded by branding the move “illegal” and claimed the measure was designed to isolate the country and its people.

Twenty-nine rights groups have asked Congress to block the sale of $23 billion worth of fighter jets, missiles and drones to the United Arab Emirates, saying it will lead to the worsening of the humanitarian crises in Yemen and Libya.

Seth Binder, who works at the Project on Middle East Democracy, said: "The hope is to stop these sales altogether. But if that is not possible in the short term, this sends an important signal to the incoming Biden administration that there is a diverse group of organizations that oppose delivery of these weapons."

Three senators have proposed legislation to halt the sale. Even if this passed through the Senate and the House of Representatives, it could still be vetoed by the president, unless it had two-third majorities in both chambers.

On Monday, the Democratic senator Chris Murphy tweeted that it was “hard to overstate the danger of rushing" through the sale.