Trump news – latest: Trump Organization jury selected as Jan 6 panel plans to interview Secret Service agents

Donald Trump gleefully shared comments made by former Fox News anchor and Trump nemesis Megyn Kelly dismissing the chances of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2024.

The former president shared the comments which were included in Dave Rubin’s podcast after Ms Kelly initially made them on The Rubin Report on 16 October.

Gustaf Kilander reports.

Donald Trump made history in becoming the first president in US history to be impeached twice by the House of Representatives.

After losing the 2020 election, can he run again?

The House select committee investigating the Jan 6 attack on the US Capitol is reportedly planning to interview top Secret Service officials and agents in the coming weeks.

The growing list of witnesses, which includes about half a dozen current and former officials, showed that the investigating committee is still pursuing answers from the Secret Service on a number of fronts, CNN reported, citing multiple sources.

Although the dates for the interviews have not been confirmed, the effort comes after the panel was given more than one million electronic communications by the federal agency, of which some of the text messages from the day of the riots were “erased”.

Alisha Rahaman Sarkar has the story.

Eric Garcia writes:

Former president Donald Trump has announced a flurry of rallies across the country for the final days of the 2022 midterm campaign. That in and of itself is nothing new; presidents often stump for down-ballot candidates at crunch points in midterm cycles, and Trump enjoys going out on the campaign trail — in part for the benefit of GOP candidates, but mostly for himself.

Read more:

A Tennessee man who dragged a police officer into a mob of rioters, initiating one of the most harrowing acts of violence during the US Capitol attack, was sentenced on Thursday to more than seven years years in prison.

Albuquerque Cosper Head declined to address the court before US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced him to seven years and six months of imprisonment followed by three years of supervised release. The judge said Head was responsible for “some of the darkest acts committed on one of our nation’s darkest days.”

Head’s prison sentence is six months shy of the statutory maximum in his case. It’s also the second-longest so far among hundreds of cases arising from the Capitol siege on 6 January 2021.

Hardline right-wing Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who infamously called on the government to “send in the troops” to quell the racial justice protests that swept the US in the summer of 2020, has got a book coming out soon – as befits someone known to be considering a 2024 presidential campaign. And it’s already making headlines.

According to The Guardian, the book, Only the Strong: Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage American Power, contains a passage in which Mr Cotton flaunts his disregard for the prosecution case in Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, admitting he sat through it reading about other matters instead of listening to the evidence.

“I was paying attention – to the story that mattered most. The outcome of the impeachment trial was a foregone conclusion, and it wouldn’t impact the daily lives of normal Americans.”

The senator also describes a call with Mr Trump in which it was clear the former president did not understand the military protocol involved in authorising the killing of a foreign terrorist by US forces.

Elon Musk has fired the Twitter executive who banned Donald Trump as speculation mounts that the former president could return to the platform.

The one-term president was banned by Twitter’s previous board in the wake of the pro-Trump insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 202 and was forced to set up his own social media site, Truth Social.

Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal, policy and trust at the company was one of the senior executives fired by Mr Musk on Thursday night as he completed his $44bn.

It has been reported that Ms Gadde played a central role in Twitter’s decision to ban Mr Trump with CEO Jack Dorsey vacationing on a private island at the time.

Graeme Massie reports.

Republicans and conservatives are celebrating reports that Tesla billionaire Elon Musk has closed his $44bn purchase of the social media company – with many now awaiting a potential return of former president Donald Trump to the platform.

Elected GOP officials have hailed the Tesla chief executive’s move to complete his takeover of the company, claiming it will pave way for the former president to return to the mainstream social media platform after being banned from it, while many other conservatives and rightists welcomed Mr Musk’s move and rejoiced after he tweeted “The bird is freed” on Friday.

Sravasti Dasgupta has more.

While right-wing members of Congress and everyday users of Twitter are gunning for Donald Trump to return to the platform now Elon Musk has taken over, the former president himself has yet to say he will do so. The only clue as to his views is a somewhat elliptical “truth” issued on his own platform this morning, in which he claims without providing evidence that Truth Social is outpacing the largest social media platforms in the English-speaking world:

It’s worth noting that Mr Trump only began “truthing” when the Musk buyout was announced, perhaps because it raised the possibility that the hardcore right-wing users Truth Social was trying to attract would be able to flock back to Twitter having previously been banned.

For now, Republicans who want Mr Trump back on the platform are issuing cryptic messages of their own seeming to imply he will return – without actually saying so:

In a newly published interview with the right-wing Washington Examiner, former Trump attorney general Bill Barr has delivered a contemptuous assessment of his former boss’s potential should he run for the presidency again in 2024.

In his characteristically blunt assessment, Mr Barr asks: “How do we actually make America great again? That will take more than a lame-duck 78-year-old coming into office who obviously seems to put a premium on revenge and payback and who, in my mind, doesn’t have the strategic sense to really construct a unified party and a subsequent agenda that will provide durable results.”

And asked by interviewer Byron York whether another Trump campaign could tear the GOP apart, he agreed that it could – largely because of Mr Trump’s trademark abusive political style.

“Parties can have primaries without tearing themselves apart. But Trump, you know his game is essentially to say, “Look, I control a hardcore 30% of the Republican Party, and if you don’t give me the nomination, I’m going to take my ball and go home.” It’s essentially extortion. That’s how he leverages his base. And so I think there is the possibility of division.”

Read the full interview here.