Trump news - live: Trump to testify in E Jean Carroll defamation case as feds raid Pence home

Donald Trump’s former national security adviser has been subpoenaed in special counsel probes investigating the former president, according to reports – which came just hours after it emerged a subpoena had been served to former vice president Mike Pence.

Robert O’Brien, who served as national security advisor from 2019 to 2021 under the Trump administration, was served a subpoena by special counsel Jack Smith in both his investigation into the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago and the probe into Mr Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

A source familiar with the matter told CNN that Mr O’Brien has so far been asserting executive privilege in declining to provide some of the information that prosecutors are asking of him.

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Donald Trump‘s former lawyer Michael Cohen said he was meeting yet again Wednesday with New York City prosecutors who have spent years examining the former president’s financial dealings.

Cohen stopped briefly to talk with reporters as he entered the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He said it was the 15th time he had met with prosecutors.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg recently convened a new grand jury to hear evidence related to payments Cohen helped arrange in 2016 to two women who claimed to have had sexual encounters with Trump.

“I don’t know why I’m here yet. We’ll find out as soon as I get upstairs,” Cohen said.

Cohen was previously one of Trump’s top lieutenants, acting as a liaison with the media and handling some of his legal and business affairs. But after federal prosecutors charged Cohen with tax evasion and criminal campaign finance violations, the two have become enemies.

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Donald Trump has so far remained silent on his newly-restored Facebook and Instagram accounts – despite the revelation that two of his administration’s top officials have been subpoenaed in special counsel probes investigating the former president.

On Thursday, Mr Trump officially had his Facebook and Instagram accounts restored by Meta after a two-year ban following the January 6 US Capitol riot.

The social media giant said in January that the one-term president would have his suspension lifted “in the coming weeks” and his accounts became active again on Thursday.

Mr Trump, who has announced he is running again for the White House in 2024, now has access again to a Facebook account which in January had 34 million followers and 23 million on Instagram.

Sir Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister who is now Meta’s president for global affairs, announced in a January blog post that the company had made the decision after assessing “whether the serious risk to public safety that existed in January 2021” had “sufficiently receded”.

As of around 6am ET on Friday, Mr Trump was yet to make a return to the accounts – with the last posts on the page still being his final posts on January 6 2021.

The image amplified by Mr Trump on Tuesday was shared by a Truth Social user whose other posts include a claim that he is a “soldier for Trump ready to go on a battlefield and shed blood”.

The unverified photo links back to a 2021 report on Mr DeSantis from a site called Hill Reporter, a blog from a Democratic super PAC.

The article cites anonymous sources and claims that someone with “close knowledge of the matter” said Mr DeSantis “had a reputation among students for being a young ‘hot teacher’ who girls loved, and the girls in the photo are believed to have graduated in 2002, making them seniors at the time.”

Last year, the New York Times reported that after Mr DeSantis graduated from college, he spent time teaching at the Darlington School in Georgia as a 23-year-old, where he had a reputation for attending parties with seniors who lived nearby.

“As an 18-year-old, I remember thinking, ‘What are you doing here, dude?’” one former student told the paper.

Others said his alleged presence at the parties, including at least two where alcohol was served, wasn’t unwelcomed.

Maryland congressman and former January 6 committee member Jamie Raskin hammered former Twitter executives at a GOP-led House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday.

Mr Raskin argued at the hearing that “rather than conspiring to suppress right-wing MAGA speech, as my colleagues astonishingly claim, Twitter and other media companies knowingly facilitated Trump’s spread of disinformation”.

Democratic US Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticised Twitter for its refusal to permanently suspend an influential account linked to anti-LGBT+ smears and threats of violence, including bomb threats at children’s hospitals.

During a House Oversight Committee hearing on 8 February, the New York congresswoman questioned former executives at the social media platform why “Libs of TikTok” was allowed to falsely suggest that Boston Children’s Hospital was performing hysterectomies on transgender children, claims that allegedly fuelled threats and harassment towards the hospital and its staff.

Ms Ocasio-Cortez asked Twitter’s former head of safety Yoel Roth why the account was not suspended “despite inspiring a bomb threat due to the right-wing incitement of violence against trans Americans.” Mr Roth said that “regrettably” the account remained

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Donald Trump unveiled his energy plans should he become president in 2024 in a new video he posted. In the video, he vows to “deploy a team of warrior lawyers to hunt down every unnecessary regulation in the federal registry that hampers domestic production,” and “issue approvals for all worthy energy infrastructure projects with a focus on maximum speed to bring prices down rapidly.”

He also downplayed the ongoing threat posed by the climate crisis.

In the video he said he will “restore hope and aspiration to America’s young people, instead of being irrationally terrified by political predictions of climate apocalypse.”

In a wide-ranging interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, a “faithful copycat of Donald Trump.”

He listed the men’s alleged numerous similarities, saying they “don’t enjoy trade unions … they don’t like workers, don’t like women. They don’t like Black people.”

Donald Trump has finally offered to hand over his DNA in his upcoming rape trial with E Jean Carroll – but only after the deadline passed to submit evidence in the case.

Attorneys for the former president said last week that he had finally agreed to take a DNA test so that his sample can be compared to a dress Ms Carroll says she was wearing at the time of the alleged sexual assault, reported The Daily Beast.

Ms Carroll, who was a TV talk show host at the time, claims that Mr Trump raped her in a dressing room in high-end Manhattan department store Bergdorf Goodman in 1996.

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