Trump news: White House slams Putin ‘scheme’ as ex-president rejects House speaker plan

House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has said that he will speak to North Carolina Representative Madison Cawthorn about his comments that he’s been invited to orgies in Washington, DC and that he has seen people do cocaine.

The expected reprimand comes following expressions of frustration from Republicans at Mr Cawthorn’s comments.

A Russian TV host Evgeny Popov urged Americans to “change the regime in the US early” during a news broadcast on state TV which is directly controlled by Kremlin.

He went on to demand that “our partner”, former US president Donald Trump be reinstated.

“It is time for us, for our people, to call on the people of the United States to change the regime in the US early,” the host said, according to Julia Davis, a Russian media analyst.

“And to again help our partner Trump to become president,” he said.

It is worth noting that Mr Popov is not just a host calling for regime change in the US, but he is also a Russian government official, a member of the Russian State Duma.

Bombshell reporting from CBS News and The Washington Post published this week revealed that a mysterious gap exists in the Trump White House call logs from the day of the Captiol riot on 6 January 2021.

While rioters attempted to sack the US Capitol, chanted “hang Mike Pence”, and delayed the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, Donald Trump was holed up in the White House with his staff. We now know that several top officials, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, were fielding calls and texts from desperate lawmakers on Capitol Hill who were insistent that the president needed to call off his supporters before the violence got worse.

There is no mention of that in the White House call logs, however, which contain a more than seven-hour gap during the riot where no calls were recorded. The logs are not a complete picture of the communications that White House officials, including the president, had during the riot, given their use of personal cell phones, but the logs are still a point of interest for the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot.

John Bowden in Washington, DC has more details.

Former prosecutor Daniel Goldman, who served as counsel for the Democrats on Donald Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, said the hours-long gap in the former president’s record “indicates something nefarious”.

“Because either the Trump administration concealed the logs, erased them, or did not include them when they turned over presidential records to the national archives, which is where the January six committee got the logs from,” he said in an interview with MSNBC.

“Or it means that he was trying to avoid a record of the phone calls that he was making during the insurrection.”

He said even as the revelation is “alarming” the Jan 6 committee still has ways to figure it out through reverse engineering.

Former president Donald Trump beat Joe Biden in a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll published on Monday, which indicated that he would have won if the elections were held today.

Mr Trump received 47 per cent votes in support while 41 per cent backed Mr Biden. The gap between the two was well within the 12-point margin that represents the current share of undecided voters.

Against Mr Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, Mr Trump fares even better in a survey gauging that potential matchup. Ms Harris was only supported by 38 per cent of respondents, while Mr Trump had the support of 49 per cent.

“That Trump beats them both by a wide margin suggests most Republican nominees once known fully by the public would beat them unless they are able to pivot out of the current nadir in their numbers,” poll director Mark Penn told The Hill in a statement.

The White House said that it will not assert executive privilege for testimony by former president Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner before the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot.

White House communications director Kate Bedingfield said on Tuesday that Mr Biden has been clear “the constitutional protections of executive privilege should not be used to shield from Congress or the public information about an attack on the Constitution itself.”

It has cleared the way for Mr Kushner to testify on Thursday remotely.

Mr Kushner or Mr Trump have not declared publicly that they would refuse to testify or invoke executive privilege even as this has been suggested by several other former Trump administration officials.

Rick Scott likes to think of himself as Gen. Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War.

Barely halfway through his first Senate term, the Florida Republican is already leaning into a fight against his own party’s leadership as he navigates a delicate alliance with former President Donald Trump and pushes a handcrafted policy agenda that many Republicans reject.

But Scott, who is also the Senate GOP’s midterm chief, insists he has only begun to fight.

Read full report

Former President Donald Trump would win the 2024 election were it held today, a new poll published this week in The Hill found.

The 45th president, who faces widespread blame for spreading false claims about the last presidential election that led to a riot at the US Capitol, slightly leads Joe Biden in a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll published on Monday. Mr Trump would have the support of 47 per cent of voters while 41 per cent would back Mr Biden. The gap between the two was well within the 12-point margin that represents the current share of undecided voters.

Read John Bowden’s full report

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and a chorus of other Democrats called on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to January 6 after revelations that his wife Ginni sent numerous messages to Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff about overturning the 2020 election.

Mr Schumer made the remarks during the Senate Democrats’ weekly press conference after The Washington Post and CBS News reported that Ms Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, sent repeated messages to Mark Meadows to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Eric Garcia has more details

The emailed statements (and tweet substitutes) Donald Trump sends out via his Save America fundraising organisation veer back and forth between triumphalism, contempt for Joe Biden and outrage at those who speak the truth about the 2020 election and the events of 6 January. The latter genre of message in particular is getting more and more sour, and the latest message calling Mr Trump’s congressional critics “scum” is part of that trend.

Yet one of the 6 January select committee’s only two Republicans seems unfazed.