Trump reacts as Jan 6 panel withdraws subpoena

The organizer of the rally that preceded the Capitol riot reportedly threw his MAGA-world peer Charlie Kirk to the wolves during a meeting with the House Select Committee investigating the Capitol riot.

Ali Alexander, who organised “Stop the Steal,” told the House Select Committee during a closed-door deposition last year that right-wing media figure and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was among those at fault for the riot.

Read more about the infighting and backstabbing taking place on the far right in The Independent:

President Joe Biden was so disturbed by the Secret Service’s handling of text messages sought by the House January 6 select committee that he stopped speaking candidly in the presence of special agents assigned to his protection detail, a new book on the Biden White House has revealed.

The agency has been sharply criticised by lawmakers and others after text messages sent by agents on the day of the attack vanished during a scheduled software update — even after the Secret Service was instructed specifically to preserve them.

Read more from Andrew Feinberg:

Donald Trump has reacted to the House select committee investigating the Jan 6 attack withdrawing its subpoena to him.

In a statement on Truth Social, Mr Trump wrote: “Was just advised that the Unselect Committee of political Thugs has withdrawn the Subpoena of me concerning the January 6th Protest of the CROOKED 2020 Presidential Election.”

“They probably did so because they knew I did nothing wrong, or they were about to lose in Court. Perhaps the FBI’s involvement in RIGGING the Election played into their decision. In any event, the Subpoena is DEAD!”

The panel will be dissolved after the new Congress takes office on 3 January.

Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Mark Meadows, has revealed in her testimony to the Jan 6 House committee how the ex-chief of staff routinely burned documents in his office.

A fresh batch of transcripts released by the committee investigating the Capitol riots on Tuesday revealed Ms Hutchinson’s testimony from May in which she had told the committee that she saw Mr Meadows burn documents in his office fireplace around a dozen times – about once or twice a week – between December 2020 and mid January 2021.

White House staff began distributing a bizarre statement claiming then-president Donald Trump was spending his days making “many calls” and having “many meetings” in lieu of releasing a detailed daily schedule after Mr Trump discovered the decades-old practice during the final weeks of his term in office, a former press aide to Mr Trump has said.

The amusing revelation is a sign of just how little Mr Trump understood (or, more accurately, cared) about the inner working of his job nearly four years after being sworn in.

Marjorie Taylor Greene told Donald Trump days before the Capitol insurrection that some of her supporters who subscribed to QAnon were going to the January 6 rally, according to testimony from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson.

The remarks by Ms Hutchinson were from her May and June interviews given to the Jan 6 Congressional committee investigating the Capitol riots.

The committee released additional sets of transcripts that revealed Mr Trump’s discussions involving the far-right conspiracy theory group.

Former president Donald Trump took to social media to attack Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Kentucky Republican’s wife, who served as Mr Trump’s transportation secretary, after Mr McConnell declined to block a government funding bill.

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Apparently unsatisfied with merely lying about his religion, work history and educational background, George Santos has just been caught in yet another wave of lies.

The newest source of Mr Santos’s mistruths is the candidate’s own Twitter feed, which contains a number of tweets from 2021 and before that are downright shocking in their dishonesty. In one, he makes a never-before-heard claim to be half Black, which is patently untrue.

In another, he claims that his mother died on 9/11. And in still a third tweet, he claims she died, yet againbut this time in December of 2016 — more than a decade and a half after 9/11.

The increasingly bizarre series of lies increasingly demands an answer to the question: Is George Santos capable of telling the truth?

Taking a quick break from the seemingly unending cascade of lies emanating from George Santos and his 2022 campaign for a US House seat, the scandal surrounding this would-be-freshman member of Congress expanded late Wednesday to include a racial aspect.

A newly-uncovered tweet from the Republican sought to drive a wedge between the LGBT and Black communitites by falsely claiming that the Black Lives Matter movement had “hijacked” Pride Month, an assertion he made in the middle of some of the broadest demonstrations over racial justice in recent memory following the death of George Floyd.

But that’s not the only time he attemped to take a heavy-handed swing at the Black community. In an Instagram post from 2014, he shared an image of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama edited to look like chimpanzees in an obvious racist caricature.

The committee investigating January 6 on Wednesday withdrew its subpoena for Donald Trump’s testimony. The panel is now winding down, and will dissolve with the formation of the next Congress.

Many outside analysts had questioned the committee’s timing on the issue of subpoenaing Mr Trump — lawmakers held off on doing so for months, then finally issued one in the waning days of the probe when it was beyond clear that it would be too late to force the ex-president do testify through a legal battle.