Summary
- Donald Trump called for the House committee tasked with investigating the 6 January 2021 insurrection on the US Capitol to “stop its work immediately”. The former president, who encouraged his supporters to “fight like hell” before they headed to the Capitol, falsely claimed the committee was a coverup for “Biden’s failed administration”.
- The US surpassed 900,000 Covid-19 deaths, the highest highest reported death toll of any country. The new figures come less than two months after Covid deaths in the US reached 800,000 as the highly contagious Omicron variant led to a surge in cases this winter.
- The Republican National Committee approved a resolution censuring Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two Republican members of the House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection. The resolution refers to the violent insurrection, which resulted in several deaths and hundreds of arrests, as “legitimate political discourse”.
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The RNC’s mischaracterization of the insurrection sparked bipartisan outrage, with many accusing the party of attempting to normalize political violence. Cheney shared a video that included footage from the insurrection, showing rioters attacking police officers with chemical spray and flag poles. “This was January 6th. This is not ‘legitimate political discourse,’” Cheney said in her tweet.
- Mike Pence rejected Donald Trump’s claims that he could have overturned the results of the 2020 election. Trump and some of his allies have argued Pence could have overruled the Electoral College as the vice-president oversaw the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory on January 6. “President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence said at a Federal Society event today. “The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone.”
- The House select committee investigating the insurrection has reportedly gathered evidence that Trump spoke to Republican congressman Jim Jordan the morning of the Capitol attack. According to CNN, call records show Trump spoke with Jordan for 10 minutes on the morning of January 6. The select committee has asked Jordan to voluntarily provide information on the events of January 6, but he has so far refused to do so.
- Biden celebrated the strong January jobs report, which showed that the US economy added 467,000 jobs last month. In a speech this morning, Biden noted that 6.6m jobs have been created in the year since he took office, as the country continues to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. “America is back to work,” Biden said. “History’s been made here.”
-Joan E Greve and Dani Anguiano
Tucker Carlson has been accused of promoting “antisemitic tropes” in his documentary Hungary vs Soros: The Fight for Civilization, which attacks the billionaire Democratic donor – and frequent target of antisemitic hate – George Soros.
The film, which aired last week, sees Carlson, a Fox News host with a long history of inflammatory rightwing rhetoric, travel to Hungary, where he tees up a selection of politicians and commenters to attack Soros, a wealthy philanthropist who has donated billions of dollars to Democratic causes.
Soros, who is Jewish and was born in Hungary, has been subjected to antisemitic attacks from conservatives for decades. Far-right activists and believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory have accused Soros of funding violent protests, of supporting an imagined global ring of pedophiles and of driving illegal immigration, a recurring theme in Carlson’s film.
Carlson claims in the documentary that Soros has “spent decades” waging “a kind of war, political, social and demographic war on the west”. Carlson’s narration is accompanied by black and white images and screeching, dystopian music.
“Unlike the threats from the Soviets and the Ottoman empire, the threat posed by George Soros and his nonprofit organizations is much more subtle and hard to detect,” Carlson says. Later, he claims that Soros has plotted to “oust democratically elected leaders” and “install ideologically aligned puppets”, nodding to antisemitic tropes about a global cabal which controls the world’s politics and finances.
Soros has given at least $18bn to his Open Society Foundations organization, which offers financial grants to groups around the world, and has been a key donor to Democratic politicians and causes. He has long been a target of the political right, which has projected an array of conspiracy theories about the billionaire. In 2018 a pipe bomb was delivered to Soros’s home in Bedford, about 40 miles north of New York City.
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