Trump news latest: Ex-president hugs Jan 6 rioter who called for Pence to be executed

Growing anger at the FBI from both parties in Congress has become a major hurdle for US intelligence agencies fighting to keep their vast powers to collect foreign communications that often sweep up the phone calls and emails of Americans.

Key lawmakers say they won’t vote to renew the programs under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that expire at the end of this year without major changes in the FBI’s targeting. Many blame problems with how the FBI’s special agents search for US citizens using Section 702 — along with publicly revealing mistakes in other intelligence investigations by the bureau.

Among the revelations since the law was last renewed in 2018: The bureau misled surveillance court judges in seeking to wiretap a 2016 campaign aide for former President Donald Trump, and agents didn’t follow guidelines in searching Section 702 databases for the names of a congressman on the House Intelligence Committee, a local political party, and people of Middle Eastern descent.

Former vice president Mike Pence has given evidence before the federal grand jury investigating former president Donald Trump and his efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss to Joe Biden, The Independents has confirmed.

Mr Pence spent roughly seven hours testifying to the grand jury and answering questions from prosecutors led by Jack Smith, the US Department of Justice special counsel leading investigations into Mr Trump’s push to remain in office against the will of voters, and the twice-impeached ex -president’s alleged unlawful retention of national defense information.

Mr Pence’s appearance before the Washington DC grand jury comes less than 24 hours after a federal appeals court rejected a last-ditch appeal to block his testimony by Mr Trump’s legal team.

Former President Donald Trump announced at a campaign event on Thursday that he is “retiring” the ‘Crooked’ nickname for Hillary Clinton and will instead be using it going forward for President Joe Biden.

“I will be retiring the name ‘Crooked’ from Hillary Clinton and her moniker, and I’m going to give her a new name, I don’t know, like maybe ‘Lovely Hillary’ or ‘Beautiful Hillary,’ but I’ m going to retire the name ‘Crooked’ because he will be known from now on as ‘Crooked Joe Biden,’” Mr Trump said.

The watching crowd cheered and whistled. Mr Trump then speculated that Ms Clinton would be “celebrating” the announcement. He then launched a sizeable accusation at Mr Biden, the candidate who beat him handily in both the popular vote and the Electoral College in 2020.

Donald Trump is again threatening to skip a presidential debate.

The Republican former president has privately said that a debate in August would be too early and he would not participate, according to two people familiar with his concerns who insisted on anonymity to detail private discussions. He also has stepped up his public complaints this week, suggesting that his poll numbers are so high he has no reason to compete with the rest of the field.

“I see that everybody is talking about the Republican Debates, but nobody got my approval, or the approval of the Trump Campaign, before announcing them,” Trump said in a Tuesday post on his social media network.

Trump repeated the idea at campaign event in New Hampshire on Thursday afternoon, showing a slideshow of his recent poll numbers among the GOP contenders and saying of the debates, “Why would you do that?”

Hundreds of thousands of Fox News viewers are reacting to Tucker Carlson’s firing by abandoning the network in his old time slot — at least temporarily.

Fox drew 1.33 million viewers for substitute host Brian Kilmeade in the 8 pm Eastern hour on Wednesday night, putting the network second to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in a competition Carlson used to dominate, the Nielsen company said.

That’s down 56% from the 3.05 million viewers Carlson reached last Wednesday, Nielsen said. For all of 2022, Carlson averaged 3.03 million viewers, second only to Fox’s “The Five” as the most popular program on cable television.

Carlson offered his own alternative to Kilmeade on Wednesday, posting a two-minute monologue on Twitter at 8 pm By Thursday afternoon, that video had been viewed 62.7 million times, according to Twitter.

Kilmeade had 1.7 million viewers on Tuesday and 2.59 million on Monday, when he told people who hadn’t already heard the news that Carlson would no longer be there.

On day three of E Jean Carroll’s civil trial against Donald Trump, the former columnist faced tough cross-examination from Mr Trump’s lawyer, Joe Tacopina, and defended himself not screaming during the alleged rape.

Mr Tacopina pressed Ms Carroll about her previous testimony, in an attempt to discredit her recollection of Mr Trump allegedly assaulting her.

Ms Carroll is alleging that Mr Trump sexually assaulted and raped her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodmans in the mid-1990s.

“I’m a fighter, not a screamer,” Ms Carroll said during her emotional testimony on April 26.

A draft of a report examining the Republican Party’s struggles in last year’s midterm elections says the results show that voters aren’t interested in “relitigating previous elections” and that failing to heed those warnings could harm the GOP in 2024 and beyond.

The draft notably does not mention former President Donald Trump by name, but alludes to the controversial, far-right candidates he endorsed who went on to lose. That includes many who echoed the former president’s lies about a stolen 2020 election.

“We cannot afford to ignore the obvious lessons of the 2022 election cycle,” the report’s introduction reads. “The Republican candidates in 2022 who delivered results and had a vision for the future did much, much better than those stuck in the past and rehashing old grievances.”

The draft also says that Republicans “underestimated the impact” of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in the months before the midterms, a landmark ruling that both parties have acknowledged played a role in Democrats’ surprisingly strong performance in the elections.

The former president has been accused of sexual assault by more than two dozen women, but this is the first time a jury will be asked to determine the claims in court.

Legal experts told The Independents that Mr Trump’s likely non-appearance in the civil battery and defamation trial in the US District Courthouse in lower Manhattan was a major gamble.

“The risk for Trump if he doesn’t testify is huge,” Jennifer Keller, who represented Kevin Spacey when he was found not liable of sexual battery by a jury in 2022, told The Independents.

“The jury will hear only one side of the story — the plaintiff’s. And the jurors may well conclude he’s afraid of showing up because he knows the allegations are true.”