Donald Trump news today: New details of Jan 6 inaction uncovered in special counsel probe

A years-long investigation by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee has uncovered what they describe as a “stunning” web of at least $7 million in payments from foreign governments directly into the coffers of then-president Donald Trump.

The committee’s findings, laid out in a newly released staff report, are derived from documents obtained by the panel before Republicans took control of the House last year and subsequently scuttled the probe into whether Mr Trump unlawfully accepted payments from foreign governments in violation of the US Constitution’s Emoluments Clause.

The report states that Democrats on the committee uncovered “millions of dollars in payments made by foreign governments and their agents directly to Trump-owned businesses” during his term, including the Washington DC hotel which Mr Trump operated just blocks from the White House.

Payments also flowed from foreign governments to Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, his Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza in New York, and Mr Trump’s eponymous Manhattan skyscraper, Trump Tower.

Andrew Feinberg reports from Washington, DC:

Mike Pence has denounced the debunked conspiracy theory that the FBI instigated the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol.

Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union on Sunday morning — just one day after the third anniversary of the attack — the former vice president said: “We’ve been assured again and again that it was not the case.”

“I just must tell you, having been there that day, to see people literally breaking windows, ransacking the Capitol, it just infuriated me. I remember thinking ‘not this, not here, not at the United States Capitol,’” he said.

Mr Pence added he is “very grateful” for the efforts of the FBI’s efforts to arrest those who “ransacked our Capitol and did violence against police officers that day,” demanding those who participated in the attack be held to “the fullest extent of the law”.

The attack, he said, “should never have happened. As I’ve said many times before, the former president’s words that day were reckless. I believe history will judge his role in that.”

Donald Trump and his co-defendants in a sprawling civil case alleging years of fraud within his real estate empire should be forced to pay more than $370m and effectively barred from doing business in New York, according to the state’s attorney general.

Several lengthy final briefs submitted to New York County Supreme Court on Friday summarise arguments from Mr Trump’s attorneys as well as Attorney General Letitia James’s long-running case and arguments against the former president and his chief associates, who faced a 44-day trial stemming from her blockbuster lawsuit against them.

The filings arrive one week before closing arguments in the case. Judge Arthur Engoron is expected to issue a decision by the end of January.

The judge’s pretrial ruling effectively ordered the dissolution of Mr Trump’s New York-based real estate empire, what the former president has labelled the “corporate death penalty” against him.

That order has been put on hold pending appeal while the trial played out in lower Manhattan.

Jacob Chansley, better known as the “QAnon Shaman” who stormed the Capitol on January 6, is now asking for the government to return his signature horned headdress.

“They’re keeping it like it’s evidence,” Chansley told The Daily Beast. “The case is over, so there’s no reason for them to continue holding onto it.”

“It’s rather upsetting that they’re not doing what the government is supposed to do and returning the property,” said Chansley, who has been well-acquainted with the government as of late.

After a day on the campaign trail in Iowa, praising President Xi of China and making bizarre claims about the Civil War, Donald Trump made time for a late-night rant on Truth Social about his New York State civil fraud trial.

The former president posted at 11.20pm:

Just a small piece of Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. New York State Judge Engoron values it at $18,000,000 in order to help his and Racist A.G. James’ CORRUPT & RIGGED case against me, when it is worth 50 to 100 times that amount. No jury, No Victim, only profits and success. WITCH HUNT!!!

After thirty minutes of brooding, he had more to say, this time with the Caps lock fully engaged:

IF JUDGE ENGORON IS ALLOWED TO DISREGARD THE COMPLETE APPELLATE DIVISION VICTORY THAT WE HAD IN JUNE, THEN THE RULE OF LAW IN NEW YORK STATE, AND INDEED OUR COUNTRY, WILL NEVER RECOVER. THE JUDGE HAS SO DISRESPECTED THE COURT OF APPEALS, IN THAT HE CONSIDERS THIS BIGGEST OF ALL LEGAL EVENTS TO HAVE NEVER HAPPENED, THAT NEW YORK STATE, AND OUR NATION AS A WHOLE, CANNOT ALLOW THIS TERRIBLE WRONGDOING TO TAKE PLACE. THIS IS LAWLESSNESS BY A JUDGE THE LIKES OF WHICH OUR COUNTRY HAS NEVER SEEN BEFORE. A VICTORY IS A VICTORY! LET IT BE. FIGHT VIOLENCE ON N.Y. STREETS, AND STOP THE MASS EXODUS OF OUR PEOPLE, OUR BUSINESSES, & OUR WEALTH OUT OF OUR ONCE GREAT STATE, & INTO OTHER, FAR MORE HOSPITABLE ONES. MAKE NEW YORK STATE GREAT AGAIN!

Alex Woodward has been following the trial:

Researchers say that the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine was prescribed to patients during the first wave of Covid-19 “despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits.”

The French study estimated that 16,990 patients in the US, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Turkey may have died as a result of the drug.

The study has been published in the February issue of Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy.

Mr Luna was apparently shocked at this response, given Mr Pence’s loyalty to his boss over the years, the outlet wrote.

A judge late Saturday said former President Donald Trump’s lawyers can’t present legal arguments to a jury assessing damages at a defamation trial on a jury’s conclusion last year that he didn’t rape a columnist in the mid-1990s.

U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan made the determination in an order in advance of a Jan. 16 trial to determine defamation damages against Trump after a jury concluded Trump sexually abused columnist E. Jean Carroll but did not find evidence was sufficient to conclude that he raped her.

Trump, speaking in Iowa on Saturday as the Republican frontrunning presidential candidate in advance of a Jan. 15 primary, criticized the judge as a “radical Democrat” and mocked E. Jean Carroll for not screaming when she was attacked. “It was all made up,” he said.

Carroll, 80, won a $5 million award last May from a jury that concluded Trump sexually abused her in 1996 in a luxury department store dressing room and defamed her in 2022.

Trump did not attend the Manhattan trial where Carroll testified that a chance encounter at a Bergdorf Goodman store across the street from Trump Tower was flirtatious and fun until he slammed her against a wall in a dressing room and attacked her sexually. Trump has vehemently denied it.