Closing summary
Democrats cried foul after Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy sent about 40,000 hours of footage of the January 6 insurrection to Tucker Carlson – Fox News’s best-known conservative commentator, who has repeatedly downplayed the attack. Meanwhile, special prosecutor Jack Smith moved to pre-empt former vice-president Mike Pence’s attempt to get out of testifying before a grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss. Expect to hear more about that in weeks and days to come.
Here’s what else happened today:
Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg visited the Ohio village where a train derailment sparked fears of toxic contamination, and expressed regret for not stopping by sooner.
Trump and FBI director Christopher Wray could be deposed as part of a lawsuit by two former bureau employees – unless Joe Biden stops it.
The United States has seen a disturbing streak of extremist-driven mass killings, a new report found.
The latest Twitter feud is between New York mayor Eric Adams and congressman and fabulist George Santos.
Did you know? Jon Tester has only seven fingers.
Judge allows ex-FBI agents to depose Trump — unless Biden objects
Two former FBI agents will be allowed to depose Donald Trump and the bureau’s director Christopher Wray as part of a lawsuit against the government, Politico reports.
But in an unusual twist, Joe Biden could put a stop to the deposition by asserting executive privilege. The lawsuit stems from the FBI’s firing of Peter Strzok, an agent who it was revealed exchanged text messages disparaging Trump with Lisa Page, an attorney for the bureau who resigned. Strzok was involved in the investigation into ties between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia, and the then-president attacked the pair repeatedly once the exchanges were revealed.
According to Politico, the pair are suing the FBI alleging breach of privacy for releasing their messages, while Strzok is contesting his firing. Here’s more from the report:
In the suits, Strzok and Page contend that Trump and his Justice Department appointees were carrying out a political vendetta.
The Justice Department and the FBI have both denied that Trump’s public attacks played any role in the bureau’s decision to fire Strzok, saying it was a decision arrived at by career officials and carried out without political pressure. They’ve argued that deposing Trump or Wray would shed little light on decisions that were made by others at the FBI.
But Jackson’s ruling suggests there might be evidence that she thinks only Trump and Wray can provide. She noted that her decision was rooted in an analysis of the “apex doctrine,” which requires litigants to first seek information from figures at lower rungs of an organization before pursuing testimony of more senior officials.
Jackson also indicated that the depositions would be limited to a “narrow set of topics” that were defined in a sealed hearing on Thursday.
Joe Biden today nominated a Wall Street insider to take over as president of the World Bank from David Malpass, a Trump nominee who drew fire for comments questioning climate change, and will be leaving the post early. But as Phillip Inman reports, Ajay Banga may not get a warm welcome from anti-poverty groups:
Joe Biden has nominated a former boss of Mastercard with decades of experience on Wall Street to lead the World Bank and oversee a shake-up at the development organisation to shift its focus to the climate crisis.
The US president’s choice of Ajay Banga, an American citizen born in India, comes a week after David Malpass, a Donald Trump appointee, quit the role.
The World Bank’s governing body is expected to make a decision in May, but the US is the Washington-based organisation’s largest shareholder and has traditionally been allowed to nominate without challenge its preferred candidate for the post.
Malpass, who is due to step down on 30 June, was nominated by Trump in February 2019 and took up the post officially that April. He is known to have lost the confidence of Biden’s head of the US Treasury, Janet Yellen, who with other shareholders wanted to expand the bank’s development remit to include the climate crisis and other global challenges.
One of the best known progressive voices currently on television is Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC. He sat down with the Guardian’s David Smith to discuss everything from being British to how to report the news in these hyper-partisan times:
One evening this month on cable television, Mehdi Hasan interviewed Ilhan Omar, who had just been ousted from a House of Representatives panel by Republicans still worshipping at Donald Trump’s altar of intolerance.
The significance of the moment was not lost on Hasan.
“When I was growing up, I never imagined I’d see, on primetime, a Muslim host interviewing a Muslim politician. Tonight, I did the interview,” the 43-year-old tweeted afterwards. “I also never thought I’d see double standards on terrorism bluntly addressed on primetime, but tonight I got to address it. Thanks @MSNBC.”
For those who criticise the American news media as too white, too Christian, too complacent, too inward looking, too pompous (“democracy dies in darkness”), too prone to herd mentality and too deferential to authority, Hasan has come along in the nick of time.
He is a British-born Muslim of Indian descent, anti-establishment muckraker and unabashed lefty with a bias towards democracy. As a former columnist and podcaster at the Intercept, and ex-presenter on Al Jazeera English, he used to worry that MSNBC would find him too edgy, too iconoclastic. But he says the network has been entirely supportive: he hosts weekly shows on MSNBC and NBC’s streaming channel Peacock.
One explanation is that, unlike shock jocks, bomb throwers and social media stars on the right, his show undeniably does substance. During the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, it featured the Afghan perspective at length. When the war in Ukraine erupted, Hasan offered a 10-minute monologue about the fascist philosopher who informs Vladimir Putin’s worldview. After the police killing of Tyre Nichols, an African American man in Memphis, he discussed critical race theory and policing with two leading academics.
Clearly, Hasan is not afraid to be an outlier. For one thing, he is personally opposed to abortion, though he condemned last year’s overturning of Roe v Wade and believes the law should uphold a woman’s right to choose. For another, he is still fastidious about taking precautions to avoid the coronavirus even as nearly everyone else seems to have thrown caution to the winds.
A day after he confirmed he would seek another term next year in what is sure to be a closely fought contest, Montana’s Democratic senator Jon Tester had a new message for Americans: I only have seven fingers.
Don’t take it from us, take it from him:
RT if you're ready to send a seven-fingered dirt farmer from Montana back to the Senate. pic.twitter.com/1zE95IRsSQ
— Jon Tester (@jontester) February 23, 2023
The culprit was a meat ginder. And no, this is not the first time he brought the childhood accident up on the campaign trail.
At her daily briefing, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg from those who say he waited too long to visit East Palestine, Ohio.
Republicans have argued Buttigieg shirked his duties by not visiting the village that’s been grappling with the aftermath of a chemical spill sooner. Here’s what Jean-Pierre had to say about that:
WH Press Sec. Karine Jean-Pierre condemns “bad faith attacks” on Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg amid growing scrutiny of his handling of the Ohio derailment:
— The Recount (@therecount) February 23, 2023
“If you remember Elaine Chao…when there was these types of chemical spills, nobody was calling for her to be fired.” pic.twitter.com/sEpNLr2jA6
Hugo Lowell reports on the latest developments in the saga over Mike Pence’s testimony, or otherwise, in the US justice department investigation of January 6 and related election subversion…
The special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election issued a motion to compel testimony from Mike Pence in recent days – after the Trump legal team sought to block his appearance on executive privilege grounds, sources familiar with the matter said.
The compulsion motion against Pence marks a pre-emptive move by the special counsel to rebut the executive privilege arguments before Pence had even made an appearance before the federal grand jury in Washington DC pursuant to a subpoena issued last month, the sources said.
While Pence has suggested he would contest the subpoena, the Guardian has previously reported that is understood to involve him at least appearing before the grand jury and asserting the so-called speech or debate protection for congressional officials to specific questions.
The Trump special counsel, Jack Smith, appears to have issued the motion to compel – earlier reported by CBS News – not in response to Pence’s expected actions, but in response to a recent executive privilege motion filed in the case by Trump’s legal team seeking to stop Pence testifying in the investigation.
Full story:
Adam Gabbatt takes a look at what Tucker Carlson has said about the January 6 attack, and what he might say next now Kevin McCarthy has given the Fox News host 44,000 hours of Capitol security footage…
In the two years since the US Capitol attack, Tucker Carlson has described the violent assault on American democracy connected to the deaths of nine people as “vandalism” and a “forgettably minor” outbreak of “mob violence”.
The Fox News host has said the attack on Congress by supporters of Donald Trump, which has prompted more than 900 arrests, was a “false flag” operation, part of alleged persecution of conservatives by shady government forces. Carlson even devoted much of a conspiracy-laden TV series to undermining the severity of the attack.
It is not difficult to imagine, then, what Carlson might do with the 44,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from January 6 handed to him exclusively by Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House speaker. In fact Carlson gave an indication on his show on Monday night.
“Our producers, some of our smartest producers, have been looking at this stuff and trying to figure out what it means and how it contradicts or not the story we’ve been told for more than two years,” Carlson said.
He added: “We think already in some ways that it does contradict that story.”
Read on:
A Texas man who assaulted a police officer during the US Capitol riot and also threatened the New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was sentenced on Wednesday to 38 months in prison.
Garret Miller, 36 and from Richardson, Texas, was “at the forefront of every barrier overturned, police line overrun, and entryway breached within his proximity” on January 6 and was twice detained outside the building, prosecutors said.
On the night after the riot, he tweeted: “Assassinate AOC.”
As the Associated Press reports, when Miller was arrested at his home near Dallas two weeks after the riot, he “was wearing a shirt that read ‘I Was There, Washington DC, January 6, 2021’, with a picture of President Donald Trump on it.
“… Miller has already spent more than two years behind bars since his arrest, and with credit for good behavior he’s expected to serve another eight months, according to his lawyer, F Clinton Broden”.
More than 1,000 people have been charged over the Capitol attack. Slightly under half have, like Miller, pleaded guilty.
Miller has also expressed remorse. His lawyer, Broden, told the AP: “It should be always be remembered that although Garret is fully responsible for his individual actions that day, his actions and the actions of many others were a product of rhetoric from a cult leader that has yet to be brought to justice.
“Garret Miller was not the name on the flag carried by those who invaded our Capitol on this dark day in our nation’s history.”
That, of course, was Trump. The former president was impeached for inciting the insurrection but acquitted as enough Senate Republicans stayed loyal. He is still under investigation by the US justice department, to which the House January 6 committee made four criminal referrals.
Regardless, Trump remains the favourite to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
David DePape, the suspect in the attack last year on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the then House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is due to appear in state court on 12 April, his public defender said earlier.
DePape faces state and federal charges over the attack, in which Pelosi was attacked with a hammer and seriously wounded.
Here’s some reading about the case – and how politicians and pundits on the right sought to capitalise on it, and then retreated:
The day so far
Democrats are crying foul after Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy sent about 40,000 hours of footage of the January 6 insurrection to Tucker Carlson – Fox News’s best-known conservative commentator, who has repeatedly downplayed the attack. Meanwhile in court, former vice-president Mike Pence is planning his strategy to quash a subpoena from the special prosecutor investigating the insurrection, among other things, while Republican lawmaker Scott Perry is trying to stop the justice department from accessing his cellphone.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg visited the Ohio village where a train derailment has sparked fears of toxic contamination, and expressed regret for not stopping by sooner.
The United States has seen a disturbing streak of extremism-driven mass killings, a new report found.
The latest Twitter feud is between New York mayor Eric Adams and congressman and fabulist George Santos.
In Florida, authorities have released the name of a journalist who was one of two people shot dead near the scene of a murder earlier that same day, the Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:
A Florida journalist killed near Orlando on Wednesday was identified as 24-year-old Dylan Lyons.
Lyons, a reporter for Spectrum News 13, was fatally shot on Wednesday afternoon while at the scene of a murder. Officials said Keith Melvin Moses, 19, shot Lyons and a colleague before walking into a nearby home and shooting a woman and her nine-year-old daughter. The girl died.
Lyons’ colleague, Jesse Walden, a photographer, was in critical condition but able to speak with investigators, according to Greg Angel, a station news anchor.
John Mina, the Orange county sheriff, said Moses ambushed Lyons and Walden as they were at the scene of a murder Moses is accused of committing. It was not clear if Moses knew Lyons and Walden were members of the media.
Mass killings linked to extremism in the United States are on the rise, as are the number of victims of these incidences, according to a new report. Here’s the latest on that, from the Associated Press:
The number of US mass killings linked to extremism over the past decade was at least three times higher than the total from any other 10-year period since the 1970s, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
The ADL report also found that all extremist killings identified in 2022 were linked to rightwing extremism, with an especially high number linked to white supremacy.
They include a racist mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, that killed 10 Black people and a mass shooting that killed five people at an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs.
“It is not an exaggeration to say that we live in an age of extremist mass killings,” the report from the ADL Center on Extremism says.
Between two and seven extremism-related mass killings occurred every decade from the 1970s to the 2000s but in the 2010s that number rocketed to 21, the report found.
The trend has continued with five extremist mass killings in 2021 and 2022, as many as there were during the 2000s.
The number of victims has risen too. Between 2010 and 2020, 164 people died in ideological extremist-related mass killings, according to the report. That was much more than in any other decade except the 1990s, when the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City killed 168.
Buttigieg acknowledges delayed response to Ohio train derailment
In his visit to the Ohio community where a freight train’s derailment earlier this month sparked fears of severe pollution, transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg expressed regret for not speaking out about the disaster sooner:
Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg admits he waited too long to address the train derailment disaster in East Palestine, Ohio:
— The Recount (@therecount) February 23, 2023
“I felt strongly about this and could’ve expressed that sooner.” pic.twitter.com/i3DD12VV62
The stop in the village of East Palestine by Buttigieg, who is considered a rising star in the Democratic party and was a candidate in the 2020 presidential election, came less than a day after an appearance by Donald Trump, where the former president criticized the Biden administration:
“Get over here.”
— The Recount (@therecount) February 22, 2023
— Donald Trump's message to President Biden during his visit to East Palestine, Ohio after the train derailment disaster pic.twitter.com/eRiWy9vurW
Democrats have hit back at Trump, saying he rolled back safety regulations on the railroad and chemical industries during his time in the White House:
Not 24 hours after Donald Trump came and went from East Palestine, Ohio, transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg paid a visit to the scene of the freight train derailment that spilled toxic chemicals in the community.
Here’s a clip of his visit, from CNN:
This morning, Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg is on the scene of the Norfolk Southern train derailment disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. pic.twitter.com/fHiHXmKT13
— The Recount (@therecount) February 23, 2023
The derailment of a train carrying toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio has become a political football, but now we have an idea of what may have caused it: an overheating wheel bearing. Here’s more from the National Transportation Safety Board’s just-released interim report:
Crew members on the freight train that derailed in Ohio earlier this month, unleashing a huge blaze and spreading dangerous chemicals, tried to slow and stop the train after seeing an alert about an overheating wheel bearing, but it came off the tracks, according to an interim report released on Thursday by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
The train engineer put the brakes on and the automatic braking system activated, the report said, but it was revealed that a wheel bearing had been heating up for a considerable time before the train reached the town of East Palestine, near the Pennsylvania state line.
Fifty of the train’s cars derailed, carrying huge quantities of toxic chemicals, prompting an evacuation order and a declaration of a state of emergency in the Ohio village.
The Guardian’s Kira Lerner reports Democratic secretaries of state want to crack down on the spread of election lies – though the effort could clash with the first amendment:
Chief election officials in several states want to make it illegal for someone to knowingly spread false information about an election, a move that raises questions around first amendment protected speech.
The Democratic secretaries of state for Michigan and Minnesota told the Guardian they’re supporting legislation that would criminalize people who spread misinformation about an election. Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, said the law would prevent people from tweeting that Election Day is on a Wednesday or saying that voting machines are insecure, when they know that information to be false.
Benson said that since she took office in 2019, she has seen an increase in people lying to voters about their rights, which she considers an election security threat.
In what commentators are (sadly not yet) calling a heavyweight political Scrapple in the Apple, two New York bruisers – congressman and fabulist George Santos and mayor and debatable vegan Eric Adams – have been swapping barbs on Twitter.
As reported by Politico, Santos, who represents parts of Long Island and Queens, took exception to reports of a New York City fire sale of equipment bought to combat the Covid pandemic, including ventilators sold for scrap metal.
Tagging Adams’ campaign account (not his much more popular personal page), the campaign account for the Republican congressman who has been shown to have lied about almost everything about his life wrote: “Hey … care to explain what’s going on here?”
Adams’s communications director, Maxwell Young, duly fired back with a list of Santos’s greatest misses: “Hey … care to explain where you worked, why you lied about being on the volleyball team, who funded your campaign, why you faked a dog charity and bounced checks trying to buy puppies, and where you got the nerve to lie to the New Yorkers who elected you?”
Fun for everyone, including Young, who followed up with a statement to Politico thus: “Instead of trying to distract from his burning pile of lies and deceit, Rep Santos (R-Fantasy Land) should be focusing on how he’s going to serve the constituents and the country he’s betrayed.”
Today in Washington, a federal court will hear arguments over whether the justice department can access the cellphone of far-right congressman Scott Perry, which they seized last year. Here’s the latest from the Guardian’s Peter Stone:
Scott Perry, the far-right House Freedom Caucus chairman, is in a legal battle with the justice department for his work with Donald Trump allies to overturn the 2020 election results.
Perry, a congressman from Pennsylvania whose belated vote and those of caucus allies helped elect Kevin McCarthy as speaker, has been waging a legal fight for months to block the Department of Justice (DoJ) from accessing his cellphone, which was seized last August as part of the DoJ’s sprawling January 6 inquiry and Trump’s efforts to thwart Joe Biden’s election with false fraud claims. A federal appeals court in DC is slated to hear arguments about accessing Perry’s phone on Thursday.
The legal dustup between Perry and the DoJ involves the US constitution’s speech or debate clause, which Perry has cited to stop the department from accessing his phone. The clause typically protects members’ legislative work from legal scrutiny, but does not protect potential criminal actions involving non-legislative matters, say ex-prosecutors.
If you’ve been paying attention to the news over the past two days, you may have seen interviews with the foreperson of the special grand jury empaneled in Georgia to investigate Donald Trump’s election meddling attempts. Here’s what the former president had to say about her media blitz, from the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly:
Donald Trump responded to interviews given by the foreperson of the Georgia grand jury which investigated his election subversion attempts by ridiculing the woman and claiming to be the victim of his political enemies.
“This Georgia case is ridiculous,” the former president wrote on his Truth Social platform, claiming “a strictly political continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time”.
It has been widely reported that lawyers for possible Republican targets in the investigation are preparing to seek dismissal of the case based on the foreperson’s comments.
Running for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump remains in wide-ranging legal jeopardy over election subversion including inciting the January 6 attack on Congress, his financial affairs including a hush money payment to a porn star, the retention of classified documents and an accusation of rape, which he denies.
The district attorney of Fulton county, Fani Willis, requested the grand jury to investigate Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 defeat in Georgia by Joe Biden, the first Republican loss there in a presidential election since 1992.
Portions of the grand jury report have been released but indictments have not yet followed.
To get an idea of what Tucker Carlson may do with the January 6 footage given to him by House speaker Kevin McCarthy, let’s tune into the Twitter feed of Donald Trump Jr.
The former president’s son has unsurprisingly worked to downplay the deadly event his father played a crucial role in. Just yesterday, he posted what appears to be body camera footage from a police officer on the scene, which shows an officer from the Washington DC police department repeating “they set us up”. Who might he be referring to? The clip doesn’t make that clear, but the officer appears to be complaining about how and when Washington’s police force was deployed to the Capitol.
This is the strategy Trump’s allies have adopted practically since the insurrection happened – throw various photos or video clips to the public and argue they contradict the well-documented evidence of Trump’s pivotal role in making the insurrection happen. Don’t be surprised if Carlson does more of the same with the footage McCarthy gave him.
Here’s Trump Jr’s tweet, with the video:
Wait, there’s more? I’m shocked we haven’t seen this over the past two years… yet another narrative breaker and it’s been found in about 24 hours. Imagine what we will find in the other 41,000 hours of video footage that the Dems hid from us since J6? pic.twitter.com/y25pKzAVMH
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 22, 2023
The January 6 committee might have finished its work, but the legal wrangling over the insurrection is far from over. The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports on former Mike Pence’s strategy to beat a subpoena from the special counsel tasked with investigating the attack:
Mike Pence is expected to fight his grand jury subpoena as part of the January 6 criminal investigation with the “speech or debate” protection – a move that could prevent the special counsel from obtaining his testimony about key conversations with Donald Trump and members of Congress.
The special counsel overseeing the Trump investigations recently issued a subpoena to Pence – a key witness with unique insight into a number of conversations with the former president and the efforts to stop the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election.
Pence spoke to Trump one-on-one on 6 January 2021, when Trump was imploring him to unlawfully reject electoral college votes for Biden at the joint session of Congress, and was at a December 2021 meeting at the White House with Republican lawmakers who discussed objections to Biden’s win.
The two interactions are of particular investigative interest to the special counsel Jack Smith as his office examines whether Trump sought to unlawfully obstruct the certification and defrauded the United States in seeking to overturn the 2020 election results.
Needless to say, Democrats are howling over the release of the January 6 footage, saying it risks Congress’s safety.
“The apparent transfer of video footage represents an egregious security breach that endangers the hardworking women and men of the United States Capitol Police, who valiantly defended our democracy with their lives at risk on that fateful day,” leader of the House Democrats Hakeem Jeffries wrote in a letter to colleagues earlier this week.
He noted that the January 6 committee had access to the footage McCarthy released, and was “able to diligently review (it)… with numerous protocols in place to protect the safety of the Members, police officers and staff who were targeted during the violent insurrection. There is no indication that these same precautionary measures have been taken in connection with the transmission of the video footage at issue. Unfortunately, the apparent disclosure of sensitive video material is yet another example of the grave threat to the security of the American people represented by the extreme MAGA Republican majority.”
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said much the same in his letter to colleagues yesterday. “The speaker is needlessly exposing the Capitol complex to one of the worst security risks since 9/11,” he wrote. He said the footage shows where cameras are located in the Capitol and other details of the complex’s security arrangements.
“Giving someone as disingenuous as Tucker Carlson exclusive access to this type of sensitive information is a grave mistake by Speaker McCarthy that will only embolden supporters of the Big Lie and weaken faith in our democracy,” Schumer said.
Kevin McCarthy’s protracted battle to win election as speaker of the House had far-reaching consequences. His decision to release a massive trove of surveillance footage from January 6 to Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson is one of them.
It was lawmakers on the GOP’s right wing who held up McCarthy’s election as speaker for days last month, resulting in an unheard-of 15 rounds of balloting. McCarthy only won their support by making a number of promises – and releasing the January 6 footage was apparently among them.
“I promised,” McCarthy told the New York Times, when asked why he gave Carlson the footage. “I was asked in the press about these tapes, and I said they do belong to the American public. I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment.”
The speaker said he wanted to ensure Carlson, who has claimed the insurrection was a “false flag” attack and generally tried to downplay it, without evidence, “exclusive” access to the footage, but could release it to other outlets later. As for Carlson, he told the Times he was taking the footage “very seriously” and had a large team reviewing it.
Democrats cry foul after McCarthy releases January 6 footage to Tucker Carlson
Good morning, US politics blog readers. You would think Republicans would like to put the January 6 insurrection – where a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters ransacked the Capitol – behind them. Apparently not. In keeping with a pledge he says he made in his lengthy-but-successful quest to be elected speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy has handed over more than 40,000 hours of surveillance footage from the insurrection to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, a conservative mouthpiece who has consistently downplayed the attack on his show, which is one of the most watched on television.
Top Democrats are fuming over the move, including Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who warned colleagues McCarthy’s decision “poses grave security risks”. We’ll get into why McCarthy did this, and what Carlson’s doing with the footage, on this blog later on.
Here’s what we expect to happen today:
Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg is visiting East Palestine, Ohio, where a train derailment spilled toxic chemicals earlier this month. He arrives a day after Trump made an appearance in the village, where he criticized the Biden administration’s response.
January 6 committee investigators will discuss the continued threat posed by violent extremism in an event at the Georgetown Law Center at 3.30pm eastern time.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre holds her briefing at 1.30pm.
