Trump news today: McConnell says ex-president not his ‘fan’ as he warns Republicans not

“Starting just months after January 6, Putin began building up forces on the border. He saw the discord here,” Lt Col Vindman told The New York Times Magazine. “He saw the huge opportunity presented by Donald Trump and his Republican lackeys.”

Gustaf Kilander reports from Washington, DC.

Eric Garcia writes: As politicians across the spectrum test positive for Covid-19, neither party can agree to pass a bill to fund tests and vaccines that until recently was straightforward.

Experts are warning that far-right agitators are using online gaming platforms to spread hate and recruit a new generation of converts. Supercharged by the rise of gaming and social isolation during the pandemic, extremism academics say more needs to be done to police these platforms for grooming hate. Io Dodds reports.

Cindy Axne represents one of only 16 rare ‘crossover districts’: a district that voted for a member of Congress opposite of how it voted for president. Eric Garcia looks at what other Democrats could learn from her.

Donald Trump has made much of his disdain for Republican officials who refused to support him in his effort to overturn the 2020 election, and he has now lashed out at yet another: Pennsyvania gubernatorial candidate Bill McSwain, whom the former president blames for not aggressively pushing false claims of massive electoral fraud while serving as a US attorney.

Here’s Mr Trump’s statement:

As candidates line up for the 2022 midterm elections, Donald Trump’s coveted endorsement has gone to various Republicans trying to unseat members of their own party that the former considers insufficiently loyal.

Among his most hated GOP figures is Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, one of the handful of senators who voted to convict the ex-president after the 6 January insurrection – and now, his chosen challenger to Ms Murkowski, Kelly Tshibaka, has formally filed to begin her campaign.

Also on the Alaska ballot will be Sarah Palin, who recently secured Mr Trump’s endorsement for her campaign to take the state’s open House seat.

A federal jury convicted a former Virginia police officer of storming the U.S. Capitol with another off-duty officer to obstruct Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.

Jurors on Monday convicted former Rocky Mount police officer Thomas Robertson of all six counts he faced stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, including charges that he interfered with police officers at the Capitol and that he entered a restricted area with a dangerous weapon, a large wooden stick.

His sentencing hearing wasn’t immediately scheduled.

Robertson’s jury trial was the second among hundreds of Capitol riot cases. The first ended last month with jurors convicting a Texas man, Guy Reffitt, of all five counts in his indictment.

Robertson didn’t testify at his trial, which started last Tuesday. Jurors deliberated for several hours over two days before reaching their unanimous verdict.

Adam Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans on the 6 January committee, has once again made clear his views on Donald Trump’s role in the Capitol riot he and his colleagues are investigating, as well as the prospect of holding the ex-president accountable.

“There’s no criminal component to what the House of Representatives can do,” he said, “but certainly we can put that information out there, and DoJ can take a look and do whatever they will with it.”

Fox News’s Tucker Carlson has lately been making waves with his conspiracy-mongering about the 6 January riot and his increasingly Putin-sympathetic statements on the Ukraine conflict, including questioning the well-established facts of war crimes in places like Bucha.

However, he is still featuring guests with a variety of extreme views, and this week’s uproar comes from an interview he did with notorious Princeton academic Amy Wax, whom he hosted for an astonishing discussion of immigration and the intellectual faculties of students of different nationalities and ethnic backgrounds.

Watch a segment of their interview below.

The South Dakota House on Tuesday impeached state Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg over a 2020 car crash in which he killed a pedestrian but initially said he might have struck a deer or another large animal.

Ravnsborg, a Republican, is the first official to be impeached in South Dakota history. He will at least temporarily be removed from office pending the historic Senate trial, where it takes a two-thirds majority to convict on impeachment charges. The Senate must wait at least 20 days to hold its trial, but has not yet set a date.

Ravnsborg pleaded no contest last year to a pair of traffic misdemeanors in the crash, including making an illegal lane change. He has cast Joseph Boever’s death as a tragic accident.

In narrowly voting to impeach Ravnsborg, the Republican-controlled House charged him with committing crimes that caused someone’s death, making “numerous misrepresentations” to law enforcement officers after the crash and using his office to navigate the criminal investigation. A Senate conviction would mean Ravnsborg would be barred from holding any state office in the future.

“When we’re dealing with the life of one of your citizens, I think that weighed heavily on everyone,” said Republican Rep. Will Mortenson, who introduced the articles of…