Trump news today: Rice says ex-president bringing back ‘monarchy’ as he blames Pelosi for

Donald Trump continued his run of vindictive endorsements earlier this week by endorsing a challenger to GOP Congressman Tom Rice, who voted to impeach him after the Capitol riot – or, to use the former president’s words, “the coward who abandoned his constituents by caving to Nancy Pelosi and the Radical Left, and who actually voted against me on Impeachment Hoax #2”.

Speaking to NPR, Mr Rice mused that the former president is effectively trying to turn back the clock to before the US was even founded.

“If we are going to have a scenario where the president can try to intimidate Congress into doing what he wants,” he said, “well shoot, we might as well have a monarchy.”

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The office of Donald Trump has begun another day with a brace of angry statements reiterating false claims about the 2020 election and the events of 6 January 2021.

Railing against what he calls the “unselect committee” investigating the insurrection, Mr Trump both blames the Capitol attack on Nancy Pelosi’s supposed failure to secure the building – a longstanding Republican talking point with little basis in fact – claiming it is more important than the attack itself.

The ex-president also complains about a “massive ballot harvesting operation” in Georgia “and other swing states”. It isn’t clear exactly what he’s referring to, but false claims about the supposed mishandling of ballots have been a staple of Mr Trump’s “stolen election” narrative since before the vote even took place.

Former RNC chairman Michael Steele, who has become one of the former president’s tougher critics on the right, told MSNBC last night that Donald Trump’s personal role in the efforts to undermine the election should not be underestimated given the degree of control he is able to exert over those around him.

Another 6 January sentencing is looming, this time in the case of Shane Witcher, who notoriously forgot which building he was in after entering the Capitol – a confusion he later attributed to being “emotional and invested in the moment”.

On the mainstream news front, Joe Biden has announced a major event in US foreign policy: the killing of Islamic State leader, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, by a US military team in Syria last night. He is expected to speak on the news shortly.

One of the stranger parts of the post-2020 election saga is the submission of fake slates of pro-Trump electors from states that Joe Biden won. The coordinated effort came to nothing, but it involved more than a handful of zealots; in fact, it benefited from the participation of state Republican parties.

For evidence of that, here’s video from the Republican Party of Arizona that shows a group of GOPers declaring themselves “the duly elected and qualified electors for the president and vice president of the United States”. They were, of course, anything but.

According to the Archivist of the United States, David S. Ferriero, the vice presidential records requested by the 6 January committee are going to be transferred by 3 March – putting the final nail in the coffin of Donald Trump’s efforts to keep those documents away from the investigation.

Given the strong possibility it will be wound up if or when Republicans take back control of the House of Representatives, the 6 January select committee is under pressure to begin holding public hearings and broadcast its findings to as large an audience as possible.

According to CBS News’s Scott MacFarlane, who has reported closely on the criminal cases stemming from the insurrection, it looks likely that the primetime spectacle will kick off at Easter.

Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman has filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump Jr, ex-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and two former Trump White House officials, Julia Hahn and Daniel Scavino, for allegedly conspiring to retaliate against the decorated combat veteran after he testified during the 2019 House hearings.

The lawsuit makes use of provisions of the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act which makes it unlawful for “two or more persons” to “conspire to prevent, by force, intimidation, or threat, any person from accepting or holding any office, trust, or place of confidence under the United States, or from discharging any duties thereof”.

Mr Vindman, a Ukraine expert who was born in the former Soviet Union and emigrated to the US as a child, was the White House National Security Council’s Director for Eastern European, Caucasus, and Russian Affairs on 25 July 2019 – the day the then-president held his now-infamous phone call with Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

With Donald Trump last weekend indicating that he’d like to pardon individuals who participated in the 6 January Capitol Riot, NBC’s political contributor Jake Sherman has explained how counterproductive such statements could be to GOP candidates ahead of this year’s midterms.

“If you are a Republican running for election in 2022…you don’t want to be talking about January 6 in any competitive race at all.” Mr Sherman stated on Katy Tur’s show, regarding how GOP lawmakers should handle the former President’s statements on pardoning Jan 6 rioters.

“There’s no reason to be talking about this, except to say that the people who have committed violent crimes against democracy, against the capital, should be convicted,” he adds.