Trump set to be named Time’s ‘Person of the Year’ with 40 days to inauguration: Live

Russell Taylor is just the latest Capitol rioter to start making demands in anticipation of receiving the promised pardon from the president-elect after he is inaugurated next month (although Trump has specified he will not be issuing a blanket clemency order and, instead, reviewing cases one-by-one).

A congressional task force investigating the attempts to kill Trump during his presidential campaign is recommending changes to the Secret Service, including protecting fewer foreign leaders during the height of election season and considering moving the agency out of the Homeland Security Department.

The 180-page report by the bipartisan task force released on Tuesday is one of the most detailed looks so far into the July assassination attempt against Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania and a second attempt in Florida two months later.

Like the series of other investigations and reports, the task force railed at the agency tasked with protecting the top echelon of America‘s democratic leaders.

Here’s more.

The California Democrat, particularly loathed for his “pencil-neck” by the president-elect, has been pointing out that calling for the jailing of your rivals is a pretty dictatorial look, advice that Trump is pretty unlikely to heed.

Mike Johnson managed to sound pretty paranoid talking to Bret Baier on Fox News last night about Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), insisting it is necessary to root out supposed operational bias within the workings of the federal government, a conservative obsession that may or may not be a real problem.

The Trump-iana purchase!

A prominent Fox News host has floated that President-elect Donald Trump could be looking to make a major land purchase during his second term.

Her prediction comes as Trump continues to taunt Canada and its officials and has reportedly suggested the northern neighbor should be America’s 51st state.

“I actually think that the United States might make some sort of purchase. I don’t know, not Canada, but there might be some sort of like big real estate purchase in the next four years,” Dana Perino said on Tuesday’s episode of The Five on Fox.

Co-host Jessica Travlov then suggested Greenland as a potential purchase, given Trump’s interest in it in 2019, which sparked a memorable diplomatic beef with Denmark.

Alex Lang has more.

Tom Cotton of Arkansas has blocked a federal shield law that would have protected reporters from revealing their sources and material to the government.

In the Senate on Tuesday, Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden called for the unanimous consent of the chamber to pass the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying (or PRESS) Act, only for Cotton to object, arguing that the “liberal media” does not “deserve” further protections.

“The press badge doesn’t make you better than the rest of America or put you above the law,” he said on the Senate floor.

Cotton subsequently posted this on social media:

The South Carolina Republican Representative has said she was “physically accosted” on Capitol grounds on Tuesday evening, seemingly in relation to her recent string of anti-trans rhetoric.

“I was physically accosted tonight on Capitol grounds over my fight to protect women,” Mace wrote on X. “Capitol police have arrested him. All the violence and threats keep proving our point. Women deserve to be safe. Your threats will not stop my fight for women!”

In another post, Mace said she was hurt by a “pro-tr*ns man”.

Capitol Police have arrested the person accused of assaulting Mace, a Capitol Police spokesperson said in a statement.

Mace said the physical assault resulted in her being treated with a “new brace” on her wrists and ice on her arm.

Here’s Gustaf Kilander’s report.

Republican Representative Mike Turner, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said the Department of Justice (DOJ) under the first Trump administration committed a “grave constitutional violation” when it secretly obtained phone records and emails belonging to Congressional members and staffers.

Turner attacked Trump’s DOJ for collecting communication logs from 43 congressional staffers and two House Democrats , which was revealed in a report from Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

“This report lays out outrageous behavior by the Department of Justice,” Turner told CNN on Tuesday.

“This is a grave constitutional violation.”

Between 2017 and 2018, prosecutors utilized subpoenas to demand that Apple and Google collect and hand over data, without approval from a court or from then-attorney general Bill Barr.

They then issued gag orders to prevent the companies from informing those targeted.

Federal investigators targeted two unnamed House members, congressional staffers and journalists as part of its investigation into the source of leaked sensitive information.

Ariana Baio reports.

The president said yesterday he is bequeathing President-elect Donald Trump what he described as “the strongest economy in modern history” and “the envy of the world” while warning that efforts by the next administration to roll back his economic policies would result in great harm to Americans’ pocketbooks.

Speaking at the Brookings Institution think-tank at what was billed as a major address on the economic legacy he is leaving behind after just a single four-year term, Biden recounted how he had come into office with a “fundamentally different theory” from the “trickle-down” beliefs that have dominated economic policy since the rise of Ronald Reagan and modern conservatism in the 1980s.

Using a playbook of working to grow the US economy “from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down,” Biden explained how he had pushed Congress to enact the American Rescue Plan Act shortly after he took office, along with the bipartisan infrastructure law he signed, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act clean energy and climate spending package that capped his first two years in the White House.

Those record investments, he said, have resulted in a record number of applications to start new small businesses, record-low unemployment and a “soft landing” for the economy that has seen inflation retreat to pre-pandemic levels at or below two percent.

There was plenty of Trump-bashing in amongst it.

Here’s a full report from Andrew Feinberg.

Trump’s embattled nominee for defense secretary is expected to meet with more Republican senators today as he works to earn their support ahead of confirmation hearings, CNN reports.

Those senators include Idaho Senator Mike Crapo and Montana Senator-elect Tim Sheehy, with also reportedly making courtesy calls to Maine Senator Susan Collins, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy and Indiana Senator Todd Young.

On conservative media, you can get away from Republicans falling over themselves to absolve him of his alleged sins.