Summary
It is 4pm in Washington DC. Here is a wrap-up of the day’s key events:
The House speaker, Mike Johnson, has pledged that he is going to make “all the January 6th tapes available to all Americans.” “Today, I am keeping my promise to the American people and making all the January 6th tapes available to ALL Americans,” he tweeted on Friday.
Rosalynn Carter, the 96-year-old former first lady, is in hospice care at home in Plains, Georgia. A statement released by her office on Friday afternoon said: “She and President Carter are spending time with each other and their family. The Carter family continues to ask for privacy and remains grateful for the outpouring of love and support.”
The Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has criticized San Francisco over its street cleanup for the Apec summit and Joe Biden’s bilateral meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping earlier this week. “Xi Jinping’s coming to town, and what do they do? They get the poop off the sidewalk, they ... clear the homeless, they stop the drugs, they stop the crime,” said DeSantis.
Thirteen Republicans have supported a resolution to expel George Santos from the House of Representatives. Meanwhile, Santos, who has been charged with fraud, said: “The one thing I never knew was that the process in Congress was dirty. I will continue to fight for what I believe in and I will never back down.”
Democrats in New Hampshire still see Joe Biden as the party’s best shot to hold the White House, according to a new poll from CNN. Although Biden’s name will not appear on the state’s primary ballots, 65% of New Hampshire Democrats said they will write in Biden’s name, while 10% said they will vote for Minnesota’s Democratic representative Dean Phillips.
The White House has condemned a tweet from Elon Musk that endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish communities “push hatred against whites”. “We condemn this abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans,” the White House said.
Following the suspension of Donald Trump’s gag order in his ongoing New York fraud trial, Trump’s team resumed its attacks against the trial’s presiding judge Arthur Engoron’s law clerk, Allison Greenfield. Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, went after Greenfield on X, denouncing her as a “Democrat operative and hack”.
Donald Trump himself has also gone after Allison Greenfield following the gag order’s suspension. In a post on Truth Social, Trump denounced Greenfield as “politically biased and out of control”.
That’s it from me, Maya Yang, as we wrap up the blog for today. Thank you for following along.
Updated
House speaker Mike Johnson has pledged that he is going to make “all the January 6th tapes available to all Americans”.
“Today, I am keeping my promise to the American people and making all the January 6th tapes available to ALL Americans,” he tweeted on Friday.
Today, I am keeping my promise to the American people and making all the January 6th tapes available to ALL Americans.
— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) November 17, 2023
Updated
