Trump news – live: Jan 6 committee finds gaps in White House call logs as president denies destroying records
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Your support makes all the difference.It has emerged that the committee investigating the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol has identified gaps in the White House call logs from the day of the riot, posing another obstacle to establishing what Mr Trump said and did in the hours before and during the event. According to the New York Times, there is no evidence the records were deliberately deleted, but it is well known that Mr Trump frequently used his own and others’ cellphones to talk to his allies while in office.
Meanwhile, as the saga of the Trump administration documents wrongly taken to Mar-a-Lago continues to deepen, an new book has reported that Donald Trump himself clogged a White House toilet with torn-up documents that should have been preserved.
The story is featured in Confidence Man, a soon-to-be-released account of the president’s White House years written by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. Mr Trump has called the story “fake news” and accused Ms Haberman – whose work he follows closely – of making it up for publicity.
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Why investigating Trump and the 6 January insurrection still matters
Jan 6 committee chair: ‘We expect’ Navarro to comply
Rep Bennie Thompson, the Democrat leading the committee investigating January 6, said on Wednesday that committee members “expect” Mr Navarro will comply with their subpoena, noting that hundreds of other witnesses have already done so.
His statement seemed to imply that he did not believe the former White House trade adviser would take the path of defying the committee’s subpoena as did others such as Steve Bannon.
"More than 500 witnesses have provided information in our investigation, and we expect Mr. Navarro to do so as well," said Mr Thompson on Wednesday.
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‘This is going down a very dangerous path,’ Republican congressman says
Ignore the ‘crack pipe’ spin – this is what’s missing from attacks on Biden’s drug policy
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GOP Senator objects to effort to stop members trading stock
After a clutch of scandals in 2020 and 2021, momentum is building behind efforts to ban sitting members of Congress from trading stock. But not everybody is on board, as The Independent’s Eric Garcia found when he spoke to an Alabama Republican...
In polarized climate, threats to lawmakers surge
The New York Times has this report on the sheer volume and intensity of threats directed at members of Congress and their staff – among them specific threats of lethal violence:
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s gazpacho moment mercilessly mocked
Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele, a fierce Trump critic who has many times warned of the potential consequences of extremism in the Republican Party, has some choice words for Marjorie Taylor Greene over her soup/Nazi confusion – and plenty of others are joining in, from anti-Trump campaign groups to celebrity chefs.
Report: Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents contained “possible classified material"
According to the New York Times, the 15 boxes of Trump administration records recently returned from Mar-a-Lago may not just have contained benign mementos from dealings with other world leaders. Per “a person briefed on the matter”, the paper reports, the National Archives discovered “what it believed was classified information” in the document cache. It is unclear if the matter has been referred to the Department of Justice.
Read more below.
Melania Trump snubs Truth Social for Parler
Donald Trump and his associates are banging the drum for the launch of the ex-president’s new social media organ, Truth Social – currently set to go live as much as a month late – but the former first lady looks to have nailed her colours to a different mast.
Melania Trump has signed a “special arrangement” with Parler, a platform popular with Trump-leaning right-wing users, under whose terms she will use it exclusively for all her social media communications.
“I am excited and inspired by free speech platforms that give direct communication to people worldwide,” she said in a press statement.
Read more here:
Melania Trump announces ‘exclusive communication’ deal with Parler in snub to husband
The company, popular with right wing users, earlier launched the former first lady’s NFT venture
How Republicans are spinning Jan 6 (or not)
A week after the RNC’s censure of Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney for joining the investigation into the Capitol riot, Washington Republicans are still all over the map when it comes to describing what the attack on the electoral certification process by Trump supporters actually was. CNN has this roundup of some of the different words they’ve chosen to describe it.
Jen Psaki on “crack pipe” accusations: “This is not a game"
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki yesterday pushed back against right-wing allegations that the White House is planning to recklessly hand out drug paraphernalia, reminding reporters of the toll that drug abuse takes in the US and admonishing critics that “this is not a game”.
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