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

Like most State of the Union speeches, this one was notable not for its content but for the drama that was unleashed on the margins. It began with a CNN report that Mitt Romney had gone up to George Santos in the chamber and told him, “You don’t belong here,” and it ended with Marjorie Taylor Greene heckling the president while dressed as Cruella de Vil.

But let’s rewind. Al Weaver, a reporter at The Hill who covers the Senate, asked Romney to confirm whether he had called Santos “an embarrassment”, and got the reply: “I don’t know the exact words I said. He shouldn’t have been there. Look, he’s a sick puppy. He shouldn’t have been there.”

Mitt clearly hadn’t gotten the memo that you shouldn’t mention sick puppies around George Santos. (For anyone who hasn’t been following the latest on Congress’s most fascinating liar, one of the many, many allegations recently made against Santos is that he stole $3,000 from a GoFundMe intended for a veteran’s sick dog. Then again, Santos has never admitted to those allegations – whereas Romney himself once readily admitted to strapping the family dog to the luggage rack of his car before driving six hours down the highway.)

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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, says that she and Mr Trump randomly bumped into each other and they got chatting, before Mr Trump pinned her against a wall in a dressing room and sexually assaulted her.

Mr Trump denies the claims.

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Former president Donald Trump’s political committees have lined his coffers with almost $1m obtained from donors over the last two years, even as he failed to put much of the receipts towards electing Republicans in last year’s midterm elections.

According to Federal Election Commission filings reviewed by The Independent, Mr Trump’s self-dealing has brought $905,570 in funds from his Save America Political Action Committee and his nascent 2024 presidential campaign committee into his family’s businesses’ pockets from 20 January 2021 — the day Mr Trump left office — to the end of 2022.

Andrew Feinberg has the story:

The Trump administration and its allies regularly asked for tweets to be taken down by the social media platform, something the GOP has accused Democrats of doing.

“It was strange to me when all of these investigations were announced because it was all about the exact same stuff that we had done,” while Mr Trump was president, a former aide in the administration told Rolling Stone. “It was normal.”

“Everybody worked the refs,” a Twitter source told the outlet. “Usually with the Republicans, most of the time rather than saying, ‘Why are you taking things down?’ it was, ‘You need to put things back up.’ It was, ‘Put me back, put me back.’”

Former Fox News host Lou Dobbs has criticised Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders for not mentioning Donald Trump during her response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.

“I think that was a great insult to Trump - not mentioning his name. To not mention his name, to talk about ‘new leadership’ ... it was a shame,” he said on Steve Bannon’s War Room broadcast.

Perhaps no series of remarks angered Republicans during President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday evening than when he referenced how some Republicans want to let Social Security and Medicare expire.

Mr Biden and Democrats have hammered Republicans for supposedly wanting to cut the two entitlement programs which offer money and health insurance to senior citizens and are wildly popular.

“Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans -- some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset,” he said.

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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 active.

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Donald Trump is attacking the Club for Growth, a conservative group typically aligned with the GOP establishment, after he was not invited to a donor retreat in his new home state of Florida.

The group is holding a summit with a guest list ripped from polling of the likely 2024 GOP field, with one notable exception — Mr Trump himself. Other invited attendees include Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pompeo.

“Club for Growth endorsed 24 candidates during the 2022 midterms, LOSING 25% of them. On the other hand, President Trump was 233 WINS out of 253 races!” the former president claimed on Truth Social.

In another post, he added: “The Club For NO Growth, an assemblage of political misfits, globalists, and losers, fought me incessantly and rather viciously during my presidential run in 2016. They said I couldn’t win, I did, and won even bigger in 2020, with millions of more votes than ‘16, but the Election was Rigged & Stollen [sic].”

Mr Trump continued: “They asked to get together on Endorsements of candidates, we did, and had MANY WINS & NO losses. Relationship broke up over my Endorsement of certain great people in Alabama & Ohio. I won them all!”

Donald Trump has officially had his Facebook and Instagram accounts restored by Meta after a two-year ban following the fatal 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 confirmed it on Thursday morning.

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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