Trump news today: Jan 6 panel considers Ivanka subpoena

Bernie Sanders has suggested a “unanimous resolution congratulating the billionaire class” for amassing more wealth during the pandemic even as the remaining US citizens suffer economic loss.

In a speech laced with sarcasm on the Senate floor, the Vermont senator tore into the wealthiest Americans, including CEOs, at the Senate by saying: “…for those people these times have not been bad. They in fact, have been very very good.”

Mr Sanders pointed out that “while the vast majority of people in our country are hurting emotionally, they’re hurting economically, these are not difficult times for everybody”.

Alisha Rahaman Sarkar reports.

Representatives Carolyn Maloney of New York and Gerald Connolly of Virginia, the top Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, have asked to General Services Administration (GSA) to consider terminating former president Donald Trump’s federal hotel lease in Washington, DC.

They cite allegations that Mr Trump provided false information to the agency during the bidding process many years ago, which his now former accountancy firm Mazars says should not be considered reliable.

The same bid is also the subject of a civil inquiry into the Trump Organization by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Mr Trump’s company is in the process of selling the hotel lease with the deal set to close this spring for a reported amount of approximately $375m, The Washington Post reports.

The lease of the historic Old Post Office Pavilion is being sold to Miami-based investment firm CGI Merchant, which reportedly hopes to turn the property into a Waldorf Astoria in partnership with Hilton Worldwide.

With the deal set to close soon for what would be a record for a hotel sale in DC, Democrats may be acting now to stop the Trump Organization making a profit believed to be about $100m from a deal they believe was flawed from the start.

It is unknown whether the GSA will act when a Trump exit from the lease is so close.

A new round of polling has shown that Republican voters may not be as closely aligned with Donald Trump’s “stolen election” narrative as he might hope, with more than half of self-described GOP voters saying they agreed with Mike Pence that the vice president had no power to overturn the result in Congress on 6 January.

Assuming no legal action against Mr Trump prevents him from running for office again, the question is how much impact this will have on the former president’s expected re-election campaign.

The select committee investigating the 6 January Capitol riot is reportedly considering issuing a subpoena to Ivanka Trump – a move that would make her the first member of the Trump family obliged to testify to the panel.

According to The Guardian, the panel may issue Donald Trump’s daughter with an official summons to testify if she refuses to co-operate with its inquiry, as certain others in the inner Trump orbit have done already.

Ms Trump’s role in the events of 6 January and the days before it is not entirely clear, but in a letter to her last month, the committee’s members said they had evidence she played a direct role in trying to get the then-leader to intervene during the riot.

One of the judges overseeing cases involving Capitol rioters has specifically hit out at the Republican National Committee for its recent resolution that minimised the seriousness of the insurrection.

Judge Howell said last year that Republicans needed to take responsibility for their rhetoric about what happened on the day.

“No wonder parts of the public in the U.S. are confused about whether what happened on January 6 at the Capitol was simply a petty offense of trespassing with some disorderliness, or shocking criminal conduct that represented a grave threat to our democratic norms,” she said. “Let me make my view clear: The rioters were not mere protesters.”

In a searing speech on the Senate floor yesterday, Bernie Sanders delivered a remarkable broadside against the rise of extreme wealth inequality in the US – singling out the country’s two wealthiest people for owning more wealth than the bottom 42 per cent of the population.

Among the many things Donald Trump tried to shield from the 6 January committee are the White House visitor logs dating from around the time of the insurrection. These documents, which Joe Biden has now cleared for release to the panel, promise to offer at least some insight into who the president was in touch with in the vital weeks and days leading up to the worst attack on the Capitol since 1814.

Andrew Feinberg explains why the logs matter so much:

Hillary Clinton has pushed back hard against false claims that she ordered a spying operation that targeted Donald Trump – a story that is running strong on right-wing outlets but which has been debunked elsewhere.

With thousands of people already banned by individual airlines for refusing to abide by masking rules during the Covid-19 pandemic – and in many cases for abusing staff and other passengers who asked them to comply – there are new proposals to establish a single TSA “no-fly” list for serious offenders.

But several congressional Republicans have now voiced their displeasure at the idea, with one group of senators writing that “Creating a federal ‘no-fly’ list for unruly passengers … would seemingly equate them to terrorists who seek to actively take the lives of Americans and perpetrate attacks on the homeland.

“The TSA was created in the wake of 9/11 to protect Americans from future horrific attacks, not to regulate human behavior onboard flights.”

Jumping on a trend that has swept the internet and concerned many onlookers, Melania Trump has begun selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for the benefit of her nebulous anti-bullying initiative Be Best. But according to an analysis of transactions recorded in a blockchain, the cryptocurrency used to purchase Ms Trump’s first NFT came from a wallet that belonged to the entity that originally listed the project for sale.