Former US president Donald Trump claims he can declassify top secret documents just ‘by thinking about it’
On Sunday, GOP Senator Rick Scott of Florida refused to condemn the former president.
“I can never respond to why anyone says what they said, but here’s they way I looked at it is, I think what the president is saying is, you know, there’s been a lot of money spent over the last two years,” he told CNN.
Other Republican Senators, like Susan Collins of Maine, say the tone of violent rhetoric in US politics is ratcheting up, to the point where she’s worried a member of Congress might get assassinated.
Meanwhile, historians are arguing Mr Trump may seek “revenge” against rivals and former allies like Florida governor Ron DeSantis if he’s re-elected president in 2024.
The debate on violent words in politics follows another campaign-style rally from Mr Trump, who visited Michigan on Saturday.
In his speech, he lashed out at journalist Maggie Haberman of The New York Timesand praised people like conservative activist Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who lobbied to overturn the 2020 election result.
Militia leader plans to use Trump in January 6 defence
Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers extremist group, plans to invoke a novel legal defence in his trial for charges relating to the January 6 riots at the US Capitol: that he was awaiting orders from Donald Trump.
Mr Rhodes’s lawyers have said the militia leader believed Mr Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act and call up a militia to support him, thus justifying the Oath Keepers’ violent presence at the Capitol during January 6.
Trump administration Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will testify in UAE lobbying trial
Rex Tillerson, who served as Secretary of State during the early days of the Trump administration, will be called to testify on Monday in the trial of Thomas Barrack, a former fundraiser for Mr Trump who faces charges of unlawfully acting as a foreign agent for the United Arab Emirates.
The testimony will take place on Monday, Al Jazeera reports.
Trump-endorsed candidate for Nevada governor disavows Big Lie about 2020 election
During a debate on Sunday, Joe Lombardo, a Republican gubernatorial candidate for Nevada who has been endorsed by Donald Trump, disavowed Mr Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
“It bothers me,” he said.
“I’m not shying away from that,” he added. “I don’t stand by him in that aspect.”
On the whole though, Mr Lombardo said he still stands by Mr Trump.
“You’re never going to agree with anybody 100% and everything they do. Even in my own party, there’s people that don’t agree with 100% of what I present forward, but you know, you gotta look at the totality of the person and their leadership,” the candidate concluded.
Former White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin is one of few Republicans who has called out Donald Trump for comments he made about Mitch McConnell and his wife that struck many observers as violent and racist.
Mitch McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao served as transport secretary in the Trump administration
“This isn’t some crazy person on the internet, this is the GOP front-runner for President if the Party doesn’t wake up & demand better,” Ms Farah wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “He’s not even trying to hide the racism at this point. Just despicable.”
Other Republicans, like Florida Senator Rick Scott, have declined to criticise the president.
‘It never ever OK to be racist,’ GOP senator Rick Scott says when pressed
Why aren’t Florida Republicans voting for Hurricane Ian relief?
Representative Matt Gaetz voted against legislation that would have provided relief for victims of Hurricane Ian, which left a path of devastation in the congressman’s home state of Florida.
The House of Representatives voted 230 to 201 on a continuing resolution to keep the government open until 16 December on Friday. The continuing resolution also gives the Federal Emergency Management Authority the power to spend money through the Disaster Relief Fund.
DRF pays for repairs and restoration of infrastructure damaged by natural disasters, hazard mitigation initiatives, financial assistance to survivors and Fire Management Grants for large forests or grassland wildfires, according to FEMA.
Only 10 Republicans voted against the continuing resolution in the House on Friday. The bill passed the Senate on Thursday with Florida Senator Rick Scott voting against it. Senator Marco Rubio, the Sunshine State’s other US senator, was not present to vote for it.
Eric Garcia has the details for The Independent.
Rick Scott also voted against it and Marco Rubio was not not present
The Trump lawsuits just keep coming
Most recently, there’s the bombshell $250m lawsuit from New York attorney general Letitia James against Mr Trump and three of his children for a host of allegedly fraudulent business practices. But there are plenty more.
Read all about them here.
Former president says investigations are politically motivated
What Maggie Haberman says Trump learned from the 1990s tabloid world
So much of what Donald Trump did as president was unprecedented, but according to reporter Maggie Haberman, the former president is actually much the same as he’s always been.
Ms Haberman, who has covered Mr Trump for since the 1990s, first as a reporter for New York tabloids, and now for the New York Times, says the former president still acts like he’s a big shot real estate developer with city officials lining up to help him.
“Donald Trump is generally the same, depending on the context,” Ms Haberman, author of the forthcoming Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, told CBS News. “And he tended to treat the White House as if he was still in a real estate office dealing with local county leaders, as if it was still 1980.”
This perspective made Mr Trump unable to confront losing the election, Ms Haberman continued.
“Whether it was his father helping navigate systems for him or helping him financially, or elected officials lining up for him, he always believed things would work out,” she said. “And after November 3, 2020, it became clearer with each passing day that that was not going to happen, and he did not know how to handle it.”
The former president saw the White House the “ultimate vehicle to fame,” she went on, just like tabloids where he was once a fixture.
William Barr says Trump is going overboard on executive privilege claims
Former Trump administration Attorney General William Barr is one of a number of legal observers saying Donald Trump is probably going too far by claiming executive privilege prevents investigators from examining his efforts to keep White House documents and overturn the 2020 election results.
“There is a decent argument” that making such privilege claims infringes on the powers of current preisdent Joe Biden, Mr Barr told The New York Times on Sunday.
Others interviewed by the Times said such privilege claims are in a legal grey area, as no current or former president has ever invoked executive privilege to stop other members of the executive branch, in this case the Justice Department, from accessing documents.
“This is tricky stuff,” Mark J Rozell, a George Mason University professor and author of Executive Privilege: Presidential Power, Secrecy and Accountability. “That gets to the point where the Trump era changed things and raised these kinds of questions that before were unthinkable to us.”
Even Republicans are worried about violent political rhetoric
Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine warned about increasing violent threats against lawmakers in an interview with The New York Times, the day after Donald Trump made what some interpretted as a death threat against Senator Mitch McConnell.
The Republican senator spoke about her concerns in the wake of a man smashing a brick through her home in Bangor, Maine, and as political figures like Donald Trump and his supporters deploy increasingly incendiary language.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if a senator or House member were killed,” he said. “What started with abusive phone calls is now translating into active threats of violence and real violence.”
The threat against Ms Collins came amid escalating threats against lawmakers. In 2018, after she voted to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, she received a message that featured a beheading.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has also received numerous threats
Michael Fanone tears into Trump and ‘weasel’ GOP in profane Rolling Stone interview
Michael Fanone, a former Washington, DC, police officer who was seriously injured during the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, slammed Donald Trump and his GOP enablers in a profane new interview in Rolling Stone, ahead of the release of his forthcoming memoir.
The former officer and current CNN contributor said that since January 6, he’s been “waging a one-man war against Donald Trump and the f***ing people that refuse to accept reality” about what happened at the Capitol.
Among that group, Mr Fanone said, is House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, who the former officer said lied and equivocated during a meeting with him and the mother of officer Brian Sicknick, who was killed on January 6, about forming a bipartisan January 6 committee.
In the interview, Mr Fanone described, that “weasel b**** named Kevin McCarthy, with his fake f***ing spray-on tan, whose f***ing claim to fame, at least in my eyes, is the fact that he amassed a collection of Donald Trump’s favorite-flavored Starburst, put them in a Mason jar, and presented them to f***ing Donald Trump. What the f***, dude?”
The former officer also claimed that “history is going to s*** on Mike Pence’s head.”
