Former Roger Stone aide urged Trump supporters to ‘descend on Capitol’ – live

Questions from Donald Trump’s first impeachment remain unanswered as the war in Ukraine enters a new phase.

In 2019, Mr Trump secretly withheld military aid to Ukraine before asking President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations into then-candidate Joe Biden and his family.

Lawmakers and witnesses from the following impeachment say the scandal is directly connected to the current conflict, Politico reports.

The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, told the outlet that Mr Trump’s actions “absolutely” negatively affected Ukraine’s preparedness to fight Russia and made them unsure of the commitment of the US to their security.

“Remember, this was the guy who tried to extort political favours from President Zelenskyy for his own personal political gain,” Mr Warner said. “But the fact is we need to continue to get all the aid we can, as quickly as possible.”

A former aide to Republican political operative Roger Stone urged Trump supporters to “descend on the Capitol” a week before the insurrection on 6 January 2021.

According to The New York Times, Right-wing communications advisor Jason Sullivan, a promoter of QAnon conspiracy theories, said during a conference call on 30 December 2020 that the election had been stolen and told Trump supporters to go to Washington, DC and make congressional representatives “sweat” before they certified President Joe Biden’s election victory.

“If we make the people inside that building sweat, and they understand that they may not be able to walk in the streets any longer if they do the wrong thing, then maybe they’ll do the right thing,” The Times quoted Mr Sullivan as saying.

A lawyer for Mr Sullivan told the paper that he wasn’t condoning any violence.

Donald Trump is struggling to get evangelical Christians to support his bid to oust Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp.

Mr Trump deemed Mr Kemp to be insufficiently supportive of his attempt to overturn the 2020 election results in the state.

While evangelicals support Mr Trump and like his preferred candidate for the governorship, former US Senator David Perdue, they also support Mr Kemp.

Mr Perdue and Mr Kemp will face off in the Republican primary on 24 May.

Evangelical voters make up a third of Republican voters in the state and half of GOP primary voters.

Mr Trump is backing candidates across the country who support his false 2020 election claims, but voters are concerned about other issues, Bloomberg noted.

Evangelicals in the state say they like Mr Kemp for pushing a bill that bans abortion when a heartbeat is found, for not closing churches during the pandemic, and for his opposition to mask mandates.

The executive director of the conservative Christian group Faith and Freedom Coalition, Tim Head, told Bloomberg that “most evangelicals do feel strongly that Brian Kemp has delivered very well”.

As Donald Trump makes a haphazard effort to walk back his long history of remarks praising Vladimir Putin’s strength and supposed strategic brilliance, former vice president Mike Pence claimed yesterday that he had told Mr Putin some hard truths when encountering him during his own time in office.

Far-right Colorado representative and gun-themed restaurant owner Lauren Boebert, who infamously tweeted the words “This is 1776” on the day of the Capitol riot, has attracted a Republican primary challenger.

Longtime state legislator Don Coram says on his campaign website that “When the fringe leaders of both political spectrums have taken all the oxygen in the room and act more like out-of-touch celebrities than members of Congress, we have a problem” – a judgment shared by many less outré Republicans than Ms Boebert, but not by Donald Trump, who has endorsed her for re-election.

Controversial Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker has attracted Donald Trump’s endorsement, but his history of alleged violence against his ex-wife and steady stream of bizarre and mangled interviews have some Republicans worried that he might fail to knock off Raphael Warnock in the fall.

Now, another problem has presented itself. The Daily Beast’s Roger Sollenberger reports that Mr Walker’s various boasts about his achievements in business appear to be exaggerated or even downright false:

Read the full investigation here.

GOP Congressman and Trump critic Adam Kinzinger has torn into his extremist colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene for remarks she made equating military service to “throwing your life away”.

Mr Kinzinger, who has served in the military for several years, is currently one of Congress’s strongest advocates for arming Ukraine against Russia, putting him at odds with the so-called “America First” caucus to which Ms Greene belongs – a pro-Trump tendency that scorns American military involvement in foreign wars.

The deadly 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia was one of the lowest moments of Donald Trump’s presidency, as neo-Nazis and white supremacists clashed violently with anti-racist counterprotestors. The nadir came when a man deliberately drove his car into a crowd, injuring several people and killing one, Heather Heyer, who was demonstrating against the extremists.

There is now a memorial to her at the mall where she died, a plaque that was yesterday visited by former vice president Mike Pence – who has never condemned Donald Trump for saying there were “some very fine people” on “both sides” on the day when Ms Heyer died.

Namita Singh has the story.

The national Senate map in this year’s midterms currently looks to be in Republicans’ favour, but some in the party hierarchy are worried that a rash of extreme and/or strange candidates could put several winnable races in jeopardy.

Among the concerned is Senate GOP leader and sworn Trump enemy Mitch McConnell, who conceded at an event in his home state that candidates without broad appeal could alienate the voters the party needs to win and hold the upper chamber.

The most concerning races for Republicans are in Georgia, where sometimes erratic sportsman Herschel Walker has been endorsed by Donald Trump, and Ohio, where a wide field of candidates have driven each other into increasingly extreme positions as they compete for the backing of the party faithful.

Two key figures from the Trump White House are slated to talk to the 6 January committee today in what’s said to be a preliminary conversation. Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy Pat Philbin are both widely reported to have pushed back against some of the more radical suggestions for how to overturn the 2020 result, including the abortive plan to appoint a special counsel – perhaps even the extreme conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell – to investigate the alleged fraud that had supposedly robbed Mr Trump of a second term.