Donald Trump

Donald Trump's TV fixation led him to the White House. The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol will show that ...

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If the hearings end without consequences for Trump, the main takeaway will be: this is how much you can get away with in 2020s America.

The January 6 committee has gathered the attention of the American people admirably. Every crime the committee shows that goes unpunished moves the line of acceptable political behavior in the United States a little lower. And as the American tolerance for political illegitimacy grows, the size of the monstrosity the country will accept swells. The actual structure of American government is crumbling plaster and cobwebs. They also revealed that the American system of government is basically a collection of habits and expectations. The January 6 hearings in Washington have made for riveting viewing.

The House committee investigating the insurrection plans to show footage at Thursday's hearing of then-President Donald Trump having difficulty working ...

from the depositions that will be aired as part of the hearing. The California Democrat said the outtakes will show "all of those who are urging him to say something to do something to stop the violence. by The Washington Post, were part of production of a speech Trump gave the night after the riot.

The House Jan. 6 committee plans to show late Thursday outtakes of former President Donald Trump struggling to complete a recorded speech to the nation on ...

Mr. Trump says the committee is a witch hunt designed to blunt his political fortunes. Advisers urged Mr. Trump to make the speech, but it did not go well. Reps. Elaine Luria, Virginia Democrat, and Adam Kinzinger, Illinois Republican, are expected to outline, minute by minute, Mr. Trump’s actions on the day of the Capitol riot. The Jan. 6 committee is holding a prime-time session Thursday to conclude its summer series of blockbuster hearings. The House Jan. 6 committee plans to show late Thursday outtakes of former President Donald Trump struggling to complete a recorded speech to the nation on the day after the U.S. Capitol riot. He wanted to call the Capitol rioters patriots, did not want to hold them to account and refused to say the election was over, according to The Washington Post, citing people familiar with the footage.

Thursday's hearing is expected to feature ex-White House counsel Pat Cipollone, WH press adviser Sarah Matthews and security adviser Matthew Pottinger.

Was he someone who freezes in a moment when they can't react to something? You're very special," himself. Cipollone, seen as one of the key witnesses in the January 6 investigation, frequently pushed back at Trump's attempts to overturn the election and is said to have expressed fears to former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson that the administration would be "charged with every crime imaginable" if Trump joined his supporters at the Capitol. "You might have earlier on said, 'Was he incompetent? During this time, Trump is said to have resisted repeated calls from members of his inner circle to urge his supporters to stop the attack— including from his own daughter Ivanka Trump—before eventually issuing a video statement from the Rose Garden telling the rioters to go home. The latest hearing, which will take place from 8 p.m. Eastern Time, will look at the 187 minutes between the former president's speech at the Ellipse and him telling his supporters to end the riot, the majority of which he spent in the White House watching the insurrection unfold.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Jan. 6 committee aims to show in what could be its final hearing Thursday night that Donald Trump's lies about a stolen election ...

The panel is expected to provide a tally of the Trump administration aides and even Cabinet members who resigned after Trump failed to call off the attack. The hearing will show never-before-seen outtakes of a Jan. 7 video that White House aides pleaded for Trump to make as a message of national healing for the country. The panel has said its investigation is ongoing and other hearings are possible. Trump has dismissed the hearings on social media and regarded much of the testimony as fake. “We have to get this right,” Garland said. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the chairman of the committee, is isolating after testing positive for COVID-19 and will attend by video. So far, more than 840 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the Capitol riot. Of the more than 200 defendants to be sentenced, approximately 100 received terms of imprisonment. Trump reluctantly condemned the riot in a three-minute speech that night. The prime-time hearing will dive into the 187 minutes that Trump failed to act on Jan. 6, 2021, despite pleas from aides, allies and even his family. He did not call his Attorney General. He did not talk to the Department of Homeland Security,” Cheney said. “He did not call the military.

Pomerantz and another prosecutor resigned over the decision by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. not to seek a grand jury indictment of Trump for the ...

"And there wasn't a reasonable expectation that the facts were going to change in any big way in the foreseeable future. Of course, we could have lost the case. "Now, inevitably, that leads to the question, well, what's going to change? You know, could we have lost the case? "That's ridiculous. "We were told the investigation would continue. That criminal case is pending and the defendants have pleaded not guilty. "We weren't told the case would be closed," Pomerantz said on the podcast. Was there a reasonable likelihood that things would change?" So I agreed to get involved and then went to work," he said. Vance in January 2021 enlisted Pomerantz, who at the time was retired from private legal practice, to work on the probe. Trump's attorney, Ronald Fischetti, did not immediately respond Thursday to a request for comment.

The evidence will make it clear that the attack was “exactly” what Trump “wanted to have happen,” one committee member says.

Representative Adam Schiff, another member of the panel, told CNN on Wednesday that the outtakes “will be significant in terms of what the president was willing to say and what he wasn’t willing to say.” The clips, he said, will show “all of those who are urging him to say something to do something to stop the violence. “And after all of this, I’m convinced that this is exactly what he wanted to have happen.” In other evidence of presidential inaction, the committee is expected to hone in on Trump waiting until 4:17 p.m. to tell his supporters to leave—in a video address in which he told them, “We love you. Or was it exactly what he wanted to have happened?’” Representative Elaine Luria told the Post this week. Instead, it reportedly took an hour for his team to come up with something usable, as Trump “resisted holding the rioters to account, trying to call them patriots, and refused to say the election was over,” according to people familiar with the matter. Thus far, those hearings have included new granular details of things we already knew—like that Trump and his cronies pressured state officials to throw out the election results—and stunning revelations about things we didn‘t—like that the president of the United States allegedly knowingly sent armed supporters to the Capitol and attempted to physically assault a Secret Service agent when he was told he couldn’t join the mob.

The Jan. 6 select committee will take on a tall order Thursday night: Trying to prove not just that Donald Trump delayed calling off the violent Capitol mob ...

The panel is also likely to turn the lens on the post-Jan. 6 period in the White House, when a still defiant Trump continued to consider ways to overturn the election. Aides have testified about his communications with Trump during the riot. But rather than contact security agencies or military leaders, Trump called allies in his quest to overturn the election. Several aides, including Cipollone, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s executive assistant Molly Michael and national security adviser Keith Kellogg confirmed to the panel that Trump was watching news coverage of the riot as it unfolded. Rioters had already breached police lines when Trump pressed a crowd — which he knew included armed supporters, according to at least one witness — to descend on Congress as former then-Vice President Mike Pence oversaw the certification of Biden’s election. Thursday night’s hearing was supposed to be an explosive finale for the select panel.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. decided it was too risky to indict former President Donald Trump and was hung up on the idea he might lose the ...

“And I was utterly convinced that if the defendant had not been Donald Trump or the putative defendant, if it had been Joe Blow from Kokomo, we would have indicted without a big debate.” “I think it was a case that should have been brought. And a main witness, former Trump consigliere Michael Cohen, has stated emphatically that he is no longer willing to testify in the case due to Bragg’s timidity. It was very easy to do that under federal law, but, of course, we weren’t sitting as federal prosecutors,” Pomerantz told the Columbia law professor. “The devil was really in the details, and the details couldn’t be explained in kind of short form… The evidence, Pomerantz admits, was complicated and far-reaching.

President Joe Biden on Thursday tested positive for Covid-19, but his infection, while potentially serious, does not put him at the same risk as former ...

Biden could still be susceptible to long Covid. The post-viral condition, which sometimes includes severe fatigue, ongoing respiratory issues or cognitive impairments, is not yet well understood, even as health officials have a better grasp of its occurrence since Trump was infected at the end of 2020. Now, experts note, the wide-ranging list of symptoms has disabled some, even those who have been vaccinated. “And I think that message still does not seem to get through to people — that the vaccines are truly highly effective in preventing against hospitalization and death.” “Fortunately, that risk is small, but it has increased as the virus evolved to these much more difficult variants.” “Obviously, that isn’t a problem with Biden. I’m not aware of other comorbidities that Biden has outside of his age.” While comprehensive medical records are not available, both administrations have released some details of Trump and Biden’s health.

News of President Joe Biden's Covid diagnosis comes nearly two years after his predecessor Donald Trump contracted the virus. Mr Trump announced that he and ...

The first lady declined to use the drug, which takes around an hour to infuse intravenously, The Times noted. Mr Trump was provided with an aggressive group of treatments at the hospital. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Doctors said at the time that he appeared to be using the muscles in his neck to aid his breathing, a sign that his lungs weren’t getting sufficient oxygen. Mr Trump had a fever and found it difficult to breathe on 2 October, the day he was taken to Walter Reed. The president was sicker than what was revealed at the time, with his blood oxygen levels so depressed and his lung issues so severe that officials believed that he might have to be put on a ventilator.

House committee will hold its final scheduled hearing, making the case Donald Trump may have violated the law by not stopping Capitol attack.

The proportion of Republicans who think Trump shouldn’t stand for office again also increased, to 32 percent from 26 percent in early June. Forty percent of Republicans say Trump was at least partly to blame for the attack, an increase of about seven percentage points from before the hearings. Or he could have sent a tweet trying to stop the violence far earlier than he actually did, during the 187-minute duration of the Capitol attack. Today’s rulings indicates the special grand jury will continue to remain one potential avenue for allies of the former president, or perhaps Trump himself, to face criminal charges over his meddling in the 2020 election. “Donald Trump ignored and disregarded the desperate pleas of his own family, including Ivanka and Don Jr,” Thompson said. Photographers gathered beneath the dais to take close-up shots of the witnesses. During a previously aired clip of tesimony he gave, he said he decided to quit after seeing a Trump tweet saying that Mike Pence should have had more courage. Within 15 minutes of leaving the stage, President Trump knew that the Capitol was besieged and under attack.” Efforts to litigate and overcome immunity and executive privilege claims have been successful, and those continue. “In the course of these hearings, we have received new evidence and new witnesses have bravely stepped forward. Pottinger resigned as deputy national security adviser in response the January 6, the highest-ranking White House official (other than cabinet secretaries) to do so. She resigned, saying she was “was deeply disturbed by what I saw” on January 6.

Back when former President Donald Trump came down with Covid-19 in October 2020, the world was a lot different than today, when the White House announced ...

After U.S. President Joe Biden was diagnosed with COVID-19 in July 2022, former President Donald Trump released a statement wishing Biden a speedy recovery ...

Trump typically releases statements to members of the media via email. Fake Trump statements remain quite popular on social media, as of this writing. (So far, the White House said Biden was experiencing “ mild symptoms” from the coronavirus.)

This is CNBC's live blog following Thursday's 8 p.m. ET hearing of the House Select Committee probing the Jan. 6, 2021 pro-Trump attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Committee spokesman Tim Mulvey told reporters that Thompson directed the panel to proceed with Thursday evening's hearing without him. Pottinger, a Marine Corps veteran, is expected to detail how the former president failed to act for hours as his supporters broke into the Capitol. Fact-checkers have repeatedly determined that there is no evidence that Pelosi rejected a request from Trump to authorize National Guard troops ahead of Jan. 6, 2021. Other high-level Trump officials, including former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, resigned in the aftermath of the insurrection. Matthews, who was White House deputy press secretary under Trump, resigned on the evening of the Capitol riot. "There must be stiff consequences for those responsible." "So of course he didn't intervene," Kinzinger said. He refused to relay his direct conversations with Trump during the interview, citing executive privilege. That room is near the White House briefing room; in between both is the Rose Garden, where Trump eventually recorded his video call for the rioters to "go home." — Kevin Breuninger "I didn't want to be associated with the events that were unfolding at the Capitol." "If we lose any more time, we may lose the ability to leave," one member of Pence's security team said on a radio call.

“President Trump did not fail to act,” Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger, a member of the Jan. 6 committee, said. “He chose not to act.” The ...

What looks like a speech given by Donald Trump in Arizona on July 18 has been viewed more than 16000 times on Facebook.

His July 16 event there was rescheduled for July 22. No, Trump didn’t speak in Prescott Valley, Arizona, on July 18, 2022 No, Trump didn’t speak in Prescott Valley, Arizona, on July 18, 2022

The House Jan. 6 committee is closing out its set of summer hearings with its most detailed focus yet on the investigation's main target: former President ...

But he bristled at that line, telling a roomful of supporters, “I don’t want to say the election is over.” “I am asking you to leave the Capitol Hill region NOW and go home in a peaceful way,” the script said. The committee played audio from an unidentified White House security official who said Pence’s Secret Service agents “started to fear for their own lives” at the Capitol and called family members in case they didn’t survive. My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power.” As he sat in the White House, Trump made no efforts to call for increased law enforcement assistance at the Capitol, the committee said. “We have considerably more to do. That was after some rioters had already breached barriers around the Capitol – and after Trump had been told about the violence within 15 minutes of returning to the White House. The committee played audio of Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reacting with surprise to the former president’s reaction to the attack. You’ve got an assault going on on the Capitol of the United States of America. And there’s Nothing? No call? In video testimony played at the hearing, former White House aides talked about their frantic efforts to get the president to tell his supporters to turn around. The panel is examining Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, as hundreds of his supporters broke into the U.S. Capitol, guiding viewers minute-by-minute through the deadly afternoon to show how long it took for the former president to call off the rioters. “He could not be moved.”

Hours after rioters overran the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, then-President Donald Trump released a video message to them.

But we now know that wasn't the speech he initially wanted to give. Trump refused to say the election results had been settled and attempted to call the rioters patriots. Turns out, Trump wasn't sorry about the tone of his remarks that day.

With the exception of a few states, dereliction of a duty is mostly used in military law and does not apply to citizens, including US presidents.

A more precise way to consider the legality of President Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 is to determine whether he wanted the rioters to commit a criminal act and engaged in some speech or behavior that urged them to do so or assisted them in some way. Given that most people believe dereliction of duty is a failure to take action that is legally required, the phrase can be used in this context to summarize a broader behavior and offer a way to cast blame. The House committee investigating President Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 may find that he did not fulfill his duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” a requirement of each president, detailed in Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution. Committee Chairman U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, didn’t use “dereliction of duty,” but he detailed Trump’s inaction for 187 minutes between the time the president ended his speech at the rally near the White House at 1:10 p.m. and when he asked the rioters to leave in a video taped message from the Rose Garden at 4:17 p.m. The justification for using that term is that Trump encouraged attendees at a rally to march on the Capitol and then failed to do anything to stop the violence once they had invaded the U.S. Capitol building, despite the pleas of his staff, political leaders and his family to do so. “But he refused to do anything…It was a dereliction of duty.”

Over seven hearings, the January 6 committee has weaved its shocking findings with surprise witness testimony, building towards the series finale, ...

"We have to have peace. "We continue to hear from witnesses. "I know your pain. I know your hurt. He tried to destroy our democratic institutions," said committee chair Bennie Thompson, who recently tested positive for COVID-19, via video. It was a landslide election," the president said in the video uploaded to Twitter. "I don't want to say the election's over," Mr Trump was recorded telling an aide as he read the speech. "The president was upset and was adamant about going to the Capitol and there was a heated discussion about that," he said. At around 4pm, Donald Trump and a video crew went to the Rose Garden to record a scripted message to his supporters. Mr Trump then tweeted out a link to his speech, with no mention of "the lawlessness and the violence", according to Democratic committee member Elaine Luria. Trump wanted to go to the Capitol and got frustrated when he was refused At 1.10pm, Mr Trump finished his speech at the White House Ellipse, while his then-vice-president was already performing his constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 election.

Whereas the first seven hearings set out unforgivingly what Trump had done, this one told a gripping story about what he did not do.

The answer was Republican Senator Josh Hawley. The big screen showed a photo of him with fist raised in support of the insurrectionists earlier on January 6 – haughty, preening, self-satisfied – and cut to a video of Hawley running for his life from the rioters as if auditioning for Chariots of Fire. Priceless. He is responsible for the attack on the Capitol on Jan 6.” Thompson and Cheney announced that more evidence is being gathered and hearings will resume in September. Will this be a sequel that lives up to expectations, like The Godfather Part II, Toy Story 2 or Top Gun: Maverick? Or will it be Jaws 2? It is a dishonour to all those who have sacrificed and died in the service of our democracy.” A photo of Trump in the Oval Office had the caption: “Minute 11.” At 2.24pm, Trump tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage” to overturn the election in his favour. But it was another brilliant piece of choreography, guaranteed to provide fodder to late-night TV hosts and go viral on social media. And from outtakes on 7 January there was the defining image of Trump struggling to read a teleprompter, stumbling over simple words such as “yesterday”, and especially those that acknowledged he was a loser, and banging the presidential lectern like a frustrated child. If the president wanted to address people, he could have done so.” For whatever reason on the ground the VP detail thought this was about to get very ugly.” And the presidential photographer was told “no photographs”. Whereas the first seven hearings set out unforgivingly what Trump had done, this one told a gripping story about what he did not do, for 187 minutes on 6 January 2021.

(CNN) Stay tuned. Season two is coming. The prime-time finale of the compelling and highly produced television saga otherwise known as the House January 6 ...

You have to get people ready for something as unusual as the prosecution of a former President." What message will it send to future generations if Trump escapes political and criminal accountability for trying to incite a coup against the US government that he was sworn to protect? Some seasoned lawyers believe that the committee has indeed established evidence of intent by Trump to precipitate the horrendous events leading up to and on January 6 -- an important component to any court case. Then there is the question of whether a potential prosecution of Trump, as a former President, would be in the national interest -- since it could potentially rip even deeper partisan divides in an already internally estranged nation. The panel is able to select snippets of information most advantageous to its case. On Thursday, the committee played footage from Fox showing the carnage that Trump watched in real time. But that may only have opened a spigot to more testimony and evidence. The committee enlisted experienced TV producers to shape its hearings -- two of which unfolded on prime time. And he further incited the crowd with a tweet. It has also embroidered a broader narrative of an out-of-control President who put his own fantastical belief he won an election above more than two centuries of democratic tradition and the national interest. - According to witness testimony, Trump thought Pence, rushed to safety by the Secret Service as the rioters invaded, deserved the calls for him to be hanged. A committee witness, whose identity was obscured, testified in a recording on Thursday that members of Pence's detail genuinely feared that they would be killed.