Ex-president faces GOP backlash after endorsing Dr Oz – follow live

Adam Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans on the 6 January committee, has once again made clear his views on Donald Trump’s role in the Capitol riot he and his colleagues are investigating, as well as the prospect of holding the ex-president accountable.

“There’s no criminal component to what the House of Representatives can do,” he said, “but certainly we can put that information out there, and DoJ can take a look and do whatever they will with it.”

Fox News’s Tucker Carlson has lately been making waves with his conspiracy-mongering about the 6 January riot and his increasingly Putin-sympathetic statements on the Ukraine conflict, including questioning the well-established facts of war crimes in places like Bucha. However, he is still featuring guests with a variety of extreme views, and this week’s uproar comes from an interview he did with notorious Princeton academic Amy Wax, whom he hosted for an astonishing discussion of immigration and the intellectual faculties of students of different nationalities and ethnic backgrounds.

Watch a segment of their interview below.

The question of whether or not the 6 January committee will secure prosecutions hinges heavily on the Department of Justice and Attorney General Merrick Garland, and it remains to be seen if Mr Garland is actually considering investigating and even indicting Donald Trump himself.

Speaking on MSNBC last night, the LA Times’s Harry Litman explained that in his view, whether or not the committee makes a criminal referral to the department recommending charges against the president is not the main factor in Mr Garland’s calculation; instead, he says, the real issue is what the attorney general things would best benefit the US writ large.

Watch his remarks below.

On Russian state television, “political experts” are calling for a regime change in the US amid Joe Biden’s support for Ukraine.

The Daily Beast reported that during a programme hosted by Evgeny Popov last week, the host said that time has come “again to help our partner Trump to become President.”

It reported that Russian political scientist Malek Dudakov also suggested that Donald Trump should be invited to Mariupol once Russia wins the city.

He added that “when things thaw out and the presidential race for 2024 is firmly on the agenda, there’ll be moments we can use. The most banal approach I can think of is to invite Trump—before he announces he’s running for President—to some future summit in liberated Mariupol.”

Kelly Tshibaka — who has been endorsed by Donald Trump — filed her papers for an official run as a candidate for the US Senate in Alaska on Monday.

Ms Tshibaka will face incumbent Republican Lisa Murkowski in the race.

As she filed her papers she claimed that Ms Murkowski was helping the agenda of President Joe Biden — Ms Murkowski voted to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson in the Supreme Court.

Ms Tshibaka called Ms Brown Jackson a “leftist judge” and criticised Ms Murkowski for not backing Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

“Lisa Murkowski has forgotten us because she cares more about being popular with her friends in Washington, DC,” she said.

Donald Trump’s supporters are disappointed that Elon Musk isn’t joining the Twitter board.The fans of the former president had assumed that Mr Musk would overturn Mr Trump’s Twitter ban.

Mr Trump received a permanent ban from Twitter on 8 January 2021 amid concerns that he was inciting violence on the platform.

Meanwhile, Trump’s supporters begged the Tesla owner to reconsider his decision and to help revoke the ban on Trump’s and other conservatives’ Twitter handles.

“Now that @ElonMusk is Twitter’s largest shareholder, it’s time to lift the political censorship,” Rep. Lauren Boebert had tweeted. “Oh… and BRING BACK TRUMP!”

How likely is it that Donald Trump will actually face criminal charges, after being acquitted in two impeachment trials and so far facing few political consequences for the events of 6 January?

Read John Bowden’s piece here:

A Canadian billionaire is set to pay a “record-breaking” fine levied by the Federal Election Commission after he was found liable for donating nearly $2m to a super PAC supporting former President Donald Trump and candidates aligned with his agenda.

Barry Zekelman broke campaign finance law by helping direct the contributions from Wheatland Tube, a US-based company he controls, to Super PAC America First Action in 2018, the Federal Election Commission ruled.

Now Mr Zekelman faces one of the FEC’s largest election-related fines in history after he illegally helped orchestrate US$1.75m in donations to a Donald Trump campaign group.

Read the full story here:

A federal judge will have final say this week regarding whether a group of voters seeking to block Marjorie Taylor Greene from mounting a reelection campaign will see their case move forward or end in failure.

The controversial Georgia congresswoman is the second GOP member of the House to be targeted by a legal effort to block avowed supporters of former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election from seeking office under the 14th amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits those who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the US from holding federal office.

John Bowden has the latest.

Former president Donald Trump routinely told foreign heads of state and government that he deserved a “re-do” of his first two years in office and said he wanted to serve more than two terms as president, according to one of his former foreign policy advisers.

In an interview with The New York Times Magazine, ex-National Security Council director Fiona Hill said she saw Mr Trump had aspirations to be an autocrat in the mould of Russian president Vladimir Putin, Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Ergodan, or Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

Andrew Feinberg has the story.