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.
Morning Joe hosts mock Trump over Kim Jong-un ‘love letters’ and sharpie-adapted map he was hoardingTrump’s 2020 election lies could lead to civil war, says Adam Kinzinger
Biden mocks Trump with quip about ‘windmills causing cancer’ during White House meeting
Why investigating Trump and the 6 January insurrection still matters
Trump remains in contact with North Korea’s Kim as ‘love letters’ taken to archives
Donald Trump is still in contact with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — or at least is telling people that he is, according to The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman.
Axios reported this morning, citing an interview with Ms Haberman for her upcoming book Confidence Man: “Trump has told people that since leaving office, he has remained in contact with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un — whose ‘love letters,’ as Trump once called them, were among documents the National Archives retrieved from Mar-a-Lago.”
It has been reported before that Mr Trump exchanged written correspondence with Kim Jong Un outside of their in-person meetings; this is the first reporting indicating that the conversations continued after January 2021. But as Ms Haberman noted on CNN, it could all be bogus.
“You know, what he says and what's actually happening are not always in concert,” she quipped in a CNN interview on Thursday.
Read more here:
Trump remains in contact with Kim Jong-un as ‘love letters’ taken to archives
Trump was first US president to visit North Korean territory
Manchin slams rising inflation numbers
West Virginia Sen Joe Manchin, who doomed the Biden White House’s Build Back Better Act by announcing his opposition to the bill, reacted with dismay on Thursday after the US Labor Department announced that inflation had reached a four-decade high.
In a statement, he appeared to further dampen expectations for the passage of more spending bills, declaring: “We must get serious about the finances of our country. It’s time we start acting like stewards of our economy and the money the American people entrust their government with. Now, more than ever, we must remember it is not our money, it’s the American people’s money. It is not our economy, it’s their economy.”
But in an interview with a local West Virginia radio station, he also identified a target for Democrats to eliminate in their efforts to fight rising consumer prices: the 2017 tax cut bill passed under the Trump administration and dual Republican majorities in the House and Senate.
“We’ve got to get our financial house in order, get a tax bill that really puts us on a path to financial solvency,” said the senator.
Morning Joe blasts GOP hypocrisy over Hillary Clinton emails and Trump docs
Guests on MSNBC’s Morning Joe tore into Republicans for their silence on revelations that former President Donald Trump had retained documents related to his White House tenure at Mar-a-Lago, and was still in the process of returning them to the National Archives.
Democrats have roundly criticised the developing story, which this week escalated to include a letter to the Justice Department from the Archives suggesting a criminal investigation, as it echoes the situation for which their party’s 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton was pilloried in the weeks leading up to her defeat to Donald Trump.
Ms Clinton faced an FBI investigation into her use of a private email server while secretary of State; she was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing but described as “extremely careless” in her handling of official documents.
MSNBC’s Jonathan Lemuire opined on the situation Thursday morning, telling Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski that it was a “double standard” at work.
“We heard every night in 2016 on this rally stage saying Hillary Clinton abused her e-mails and it was a question of judgment,” he said. “That was the argument Donald Trump made – Hillary Clinton didn’t have the judgment to be president because she would use her private e-mail account for classified information.”
Read more from The Independent’s Gustaf Kilander:
Morning Joe blasts GOP hypocrisy over Hillary Clinton emails and Trump docs
‘Where is the Republicans’ yell for security? For preservation? For accountability?’
Fugitive Chinese billionaire and Bannon ally threatens to leave the US after judge orders him to pay $134m or face arrest
A Chinese billionaire aligned in the past with Steve Bannon faces a court order issued by a judge in New York on Thursday to pay a $134 million fine or face jail time for contempt of a court order.
Guo Wengui must pay a $500,000 fine for each day his superyacht, the Lady May, was outside of US jurisdiction in violation of a previous court order, a judge in New York ruled on Thurdsay. He has five business days to make the payment, according to the court filings, or he faces imprisonment.
On a livestream, Mr Guo indicated that he planned instead to flee the US for either Japan or the UK.
Read more about Mr Guo’s legal troubles and his connection to Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist:
Bannon ally threatens to leave the US after judge orders him to pay $134 million
Chinese billionaire faces threat of arrest from furious judge
Lincoln Project pokes fun at report Trump flushed papers
The anti-Trump conservative Lincoln Project group posted a video on Thursday ridiculing Donald Trump over a report from The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman indicating that White House aides believed the president had attempted to flush a document down the toilet.
Axios reported on Thursday, citing Ms Haberman, that “staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet”, and believed Mr Trump to be the culprit.
Here’s the Lincoln Project’s response:
He's been circling the drain for a while now. pic.twitter.com/7ZRhVB5g2w
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) February 10, 2022
Cruz hits McConnell over characterisation of Jan 6 attack
Sen Ted Cruz knocked the head of the Senate GOP caucus, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, on Thursday when asked about the Republican National Committee’s recent resolution condemning the January 6 committee Republicans and declaring the day’s events “legitimate political discourse”.
Mr Cruz recently reversed his own position on the issue after a grilling from Tucker Carlson, a Fox News opinion host closely aligned with the Trump wing of the GOP.
"I think it is a mistake for Republicans to repeat the political propaganda of Democrats and the corporate media," he told CNN on Thursday.
Read more from The Independent’s Jade Bremner:
Ted Cruz reverses on Jan 6 opposition and says it wasn’t an insurrection after all
‘I think it is a mistake for Republicans to repeat the political propaganda of Democrats and the corporate media’ the Texas senator said
Biden faces brutal new approval rating poll from CNN
President Joe Biden faces a brutal new poll from CNN that finds that just about four in ten Americans approve of his job performance as president, down 12 points from April of last year.
The news comes as Mr Biden’s first sitdown interview with a major news network is expected to air this weekend.
Mr Biden has faced a rash of defeats on Capitol Hill over voting rights, his Build Back Better Act, and also faces ongoing frustration from some Americans as the Covid-19 pandemic stretches into its third year.
That conflict with Congress has resulted in a 28-point drop for Mr Biden among Democrats when asked whether they believed the president had an effective working relationship with the Hill.
Biden reveals he has SCOTUS shortlist
NBC News published the first snippet of a yet-to-be-aired interview with President Joe Biden, set to play in full during halftime at the Super Bowl this weekend.
The halftime interview is a presidential tradition that Mr Biden took part in last year and saw his former boss, Barack Obama, do throughout his presidency as well.
In the interview Mr Biden revealed that “about four” people remain on his shortlist for the upcoming vacancy resulting from the announced retirement of Stephen Breyer.
He added that he believed his eventual pick would receive at least some support from Republicans in the Senate.
President Biden on his search for a Supreme Court nominee:
— NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (@NBCNightlyNews) February 10, 2022
Biden tells @LesterHoltNBC that he’s done a deep dive on “about four people,” and thinks his pick will get a vote from Republicans
Biden says he's looking for someone "with the same kind of capacity" as Justice Breyer pic.twitter.com/pNYLrLVSBR
They wanted to overturn 2020 election results. Now these candidates want to run the next elections
One of former President Donald Trump’s top goals after leaving office last January was to purge the Republican Party at both the state and national level of politicians who opposed him and his false claims about the 2020 election.
The result of that intra-party battle is a slew of candidates running for top state-level positions with the power to oversee parts or all of state election processes who reject the accurate results of the 2020 election.
“We’re seeing lies and conspiracy theories, threats against election officials, and the now-former president who continues to stoke those flames. But the threat has actually evolved,” Joanna Lydgate, director of States United, told The Independent in an interview.
Read more from The Independent’s Alex Woodward:
They wanted to overturn election results. Now they want to run the next elections
‘Election denialism’ is fuelling dozens of campaigns for public office. Pro-democracy groups warn against ‘putting arsonists in charge of the fire department,’ Alex Woodward reports
Voting rights, inflation top Americans’ priorities
The CNN poll released on Thursday illuminated the top issues Americans believe the government should be dealing with, with rising consumer prices at the top of the list.
Roughly one in four Americans listed inflation as their top concern. Behind that was voting rights, and the effort to secure America’s elections amid historic efforts by a former president to lessen trust in the US electoral system.
Border security came in third, with 15 per cent of respondents calling it a top issue. It was a much higher priority for Republicans, with three in ten mentioning it.
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