Trump latest news: Ivanka subpoena being considered by Jan 6 panel

In a searing speech on the Senate floor yesterday, Bernie Sanders delivered a remarkable broadside against the rise of extreme wealth inequality in the US – singling out the country’s two wealthiest people for owning more wealth than the bottom 42 per cent of the population.

Among the many things Donald Trump tried to shield from the 6 January committee are the White House visitor logs dating from around the time of the insurrection. These documents, which Joe Biden has now cleared for release to the panel, promise to offer at least some insight into who the president was in touch with in the vital weeks and days leading up to the worst attack on the Capitol since 1814.

Andrew Feinberg explains why the logs matter so much:

Hillary Clinton has pushed back hard against false claims that she ordered a spying operation that targeted Donald Trump – a story that is running strong on right-wing outlets but which has been debunked elsewhere.

With thousands of people already banned by individual airlines for refusing to abide by masking rules during the Covid-19 pandemic – and in many cases for abusing staff and other passengers who asked them to comply – there are new proposals to establish a single TSA “no-fly” list for serious offenders.

But several congressional Republicans have now voiced their displeasure at the idea, with one group of senators writing that “Creating a federal ‘no-fly’ list for unruly passengers … would seemingly equate them to terrorists who seek to actively take the lives of Americans and perpetrate attacks on the homeland.

“The TSA was created in the wake of 9/11 to protect Americans from future horrific attacks, not to regulate human behavior onboard flights.”

Jumping on a trend that has swept the internet and concerned many onlookers, Melania Trump has begun selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for the benefit of her nebulous anti-bullying initiative Be Best. But according to an analysis of transactions recorded in a blockchain, the cryptocurrency used to purchase Ms Trump’s first NFT came from a wallet that belonged to the entity that originally listed the project for sale.

Donald Trump Jr has been excitedly sharing a screenshot of what puports to be his father’s first post on Truth Social, the bespoke social network created for Mr Trump and his followers as a “free speech” alternative to Twitter.

Yet as soon as he shared the image, the ex-president’s son found himself being ridiculed not just for the site’s extraordinary resemblance to the Twitter interface, but for the fact he was having to promote it on Twitter at all.

The Georgia gubernatorial primary has seen Donald Trump endorse his own challenger candidate, former Senator David Perdue, in an attempt to unseat incumbent Brian Kemp – a Republican who refused to bow to Mr Trump’s demands that he “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

Yet even as Mr Trump dominates his party and exerts serious political and financial heft on behalf of his allies, Mr Perdue is making little headway, raising the question of how much of a difference Mr Trump’s backing can really make.

According to the Guardian, the 6 January select committee is considering what would be a dramatic step: issuing a subpoena to Ivanka Trump, who would be the first member of the ex-president’s family to be personally targeted by the investigation.

The paper cites a source who claims the panel will not be subpoenaing her imminently, but that the move is under serious discussion as the committee’s members wait to see if Ms Trump will co-operate with its inquiry without legal pressure.

Ms Trump is one of numerous figures who is thought to have spoken to Mr Trump during the riot and attempted to persuade him to call his supporters off.

It was relatively late in the 2016 election campaign that Donald Trump made corruption in Washington, DC one of his main campaign themes, making “drain the swamp” one of his most recognisable slogans. But his presidency was consistently dogged by allegations that he, his family and various of his administration’s staff were profiting from their positions and brazenly benefiting from conflicts of interest – and now another Trump-era figure has been caught out.

The House Oversight Committee has concluded that Ryan Zinke, who served as secretary of the interior under the 45th president, “failed to abide by his ethics obligations in which he committed not to manage or provide any other services”. Specifically, he continued to work on real estate negotiations for a private business venture and even directed his subordinates to assist him in the project.

John Bowden has the story:

Despite its potentially ruinous implications, the New York authorities’ investigation into Donald Trump’s finances has burned so slowly that it’s sometimes been all but drowned out by other scandals. But the news that the Trump Organization has been disowned by its accounting firm, Mazars USA, has sent a shockwave through Trumpworld – and as the Daily Beast reports, some in the ex-president’s inner circle are extremely rattled.