Biden news - live: Trump Jr deposed over inaugural funds as White House defends migrant camp after AOC attack

“I certainly do regret resigning, I love this agency, I love the women and men of this agency, and I regret the day I left,” Steve Sund says.

Republican Senator Ron Johnson entered into the record an account of the US Capitol Riot from a writer at the conservative outlet, The Federalist, titled “I Saw Provocateurs At The Capitol Riot On Jan. 6”.

The writer of the article, J Michael Waller, outlines four different groups that he claims turned “unsuspecting marchers into an invading mob”. He says they were:

1. Plainclothes militants. Militant, aggressive men in Donald Trump and MAGA gear at a front police line at the base of the temporary presidential inaugural platform;
2. Agents-provocateurs. Scattered groups of men exhorting the marchers to gather closely and tightly toward the center of the outside of the Capitol building and prevent them from leaving;
3. Fake Trump protesters. A few young men wearing Trump or MAGA hats backwards and who did not fit in with the rest of the crowd in terms of their actions and demeanour, whom I presumed to be Antifa or other leftist agitators; and
4. Disciplined, uniformed column of attackers. A column of organized, disciplined men, wearing similar but not identical camouflage uniforms and black gear, some with helmets and GoPro cameras or wearing subdued Punisher skull patches.

The confirmation comes from The White House:

“On Friday, February 26, the President and the First Lady will travel to Houston, Texas. The trip will be pooled press. Additional details to follow."

Press secretary Jen Psaki has kicked off her daily press briefing.

Jen Psaki says they’re not going to comment on the Supreme Court’s ruling that Trump must hand over his tax returns to the Manhattan district attorney.

“We’re not going to comment on this specific ruling,” she says.

“The president did make clear on the campaign trail that the American people expect and deserve transparency from their president, that’s why he released over two decades of his own tax returns.”

Jen Psaki says that the United States’ response to Russia’s malign actions, including hacking and poisoning of Navalny, would come within weeks.

And people are not impressed.

It will resume in 5 minutes.

Press secretary Jen Psaki says the reopening of migrant camps on the border was not a repeat of the Trump administration’s policies.

When confronted at today’s White House press briefing over past comments from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who called the facility under Trump as “horrifying” and “human rights abuses”, Psaki said it was a temporary reopening due to Covid-19 and social distancing requirements.

“This is not kids being kept in cages, this is a facility that was opened that’s going to follow the same standards as other HHS facilities, it is not a replication, certainly not, that was never our intention of replicating the immigration policies of the past administration,” she says.

“But we are in a circumstance where we are not going to expel unaccompanied minors at the border. That would be inhumane, that is not what we’re going to do here.”

The facility was originally created under the Obama-Biden administration, but it became utilized during the Trump administration under its zero-tolerance policy that separated children from their parents.

The Independent’s Gustaf Kilander has more on the outrage and the Biden administration’s reopening of the facility.

At a high-profile hearing on the insurrection at the US Capitol earlier this year, Senator Ron Johnson on Tuesday claimed the mood of pro-Trump protesters who eventually stormed the Capitol had been “festive” before police fired a tear gas canister at them.

Mr Johnson, citing the first-hand account of right-wing think tank scholar J Michael Waller published in the far-right publication The Federalist, blamed a cadre of “fake Trump supporters” for provoking police at the Capitol, who then provoked the larger crowd into riotous behaviour when they responded in kind.

“He said that the mood of the crowd was ‘positive’ and ‘festive,’” Mr Johnson said, reading Mr Waller’s account of the riot into the official congressional record.

Griffin Connolly has more on this angle from the hearing.