Trump news today: Ex-president ‘will lose his mind’ over Jan 6 hearing as Lara Trump

The mother of a fourth-grader killed in the Uvalde school shooting made a tearful plea to Congress on Wednesday for stricter gun control – warning: “Somewhere out there, there is a mom listening to our testimony thinking, ‘I can’t even imagine their pain’ – not knowing that our reality will one day be hers unless we act now.”

A number of Republicans from Donald Trump’s inner circle has begun what many have called a mass counterprogramming effort ahead of the first public hearings from the January 6 committee, scheduled to begin this week.

The House Select Committee investigating the violent insurrection at the Capitol, which resulted in about 140 officers getting injured and one police officer dying, has conducted its work largely behind closed doors for the better part of a year. On Thursday, however, the bipartisan panel is set to open its first of six hearings during a primetime televised event.

Jared Kushner, son-in-law and one-time adviser to former President Donald Trump, reportedly decided to leave Washington and relocate to Miami even before the final result of the 2020 election was called, according to an upcoming book.

The New York Times reports that in the middle of the night on 5 Novermber 2020, only a day after then-President Trump had declared “frankly, we did win this election”, Mr Kushner is said to have told his wife, first daughter Ivanka Trump: “We’re moving to Miami.”

According to sources cited for the book The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, by the Times’ Peter Baker and The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, neither Mr Kushner nor his wife Ms Trump believed her father had won the election.

The couple are said to have been busy arranging their new life in Florida even as Trump allies pursued ill-fated attempts to overturn the election result.

Their decision to move is said to have “opened a vacuum around the president that was filled by conspiracy theorists like Rudolph W Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who relayed to Mr Trump farcically false stories of dead voters, stuffed ballot boxes, corrupted voting machines and foreign plots,” according to Mr Baker.

In addition, while the president refused to work with the transition team, Mr Kushner reportedly worked “quietly” with the incoming Biden administration to help with the transition.

Both Mr Kushner and Ms Trump spoke at length with the House select committee investigating the events leading up to and after the January 6 2021 Capitol riot. Excerpts of their video testimonies are expected to be shown during upcoming public hearings.

President Joe Biden has condemned the actions of an armed man who was arrested near the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told Fox News: “President Biden condemns the actions of this individual in the strongest terms, and is grateful to law enforcement for quickly taking him into custody.”

“As the President has consistently made clear, public officials — including judges — must be able to do their jobs without concern for their personal safety or that of their families,” Mr Bates said.

“And any violence, threats of violence, or attempts to intimidate justices have no place in our society.”

Mr Bates also told the network that the president supports legislation to fund increased security for the Court and Judges.

Residents of San Francisco voted decisively on Tuesday to recall Democrat district attorney Chesa Boudin over rising crime, policing and public safety reforms.

Partial returns showed Mr Boudin is set to be ousted as 61 per cent of the ballots are in favour of the recall, according to Edison Research.

Recall proponents blamed Mr Boudin, 41, for progressive policies that led to a spike in gun violence and other crimes during the Covid pandemic.

Steve Bannon’s lawyers have subpoenaed Nancy Pelosi and members of the House Select Committee investigating the 6 January riots.

Mr Bannon was indicted in November last year by a federal grand jury for his refusal to comply with a subpoena to testify and produce documents.

Now, the former Donald Trump aide is seeking to subpoena the January 6 committee as part of his challenge to whether the panel was properly formed.

Maroosha Muzaffar reports:

Attorney General Merrick Garland has announced the Department of Justice will conduct a critical incident review of the law enforcement response to the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting.

The final report will be made public.

Congresswoman Karen Bass and billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso advanced to lock horns in a runoff this November to become the mayor of Los Angeles.

An early tally of mail-in ballots showed Mr Caruso with 41 per cent and Ms Bass with 38 per cent votes. Although a dozen names were on the ballot, several candidates had dropped out of the race.

City councilman and former state senate leader Kevin de Leon was a distant third with 7 per cent votes.

Alisha Rahaman Sarkar reports:

Migration has taken center stage at an assembly of Western Hemisphere leaders, reflecting its emergence as a top foreign policy issue amid red-carpet drama over who comes and who stays home.

The “Los Angeles Declaration,” to be announced while US President Joe Biden meets with his counterparts from North, Central and South America Wednesday through Friday, is expected to be a brief call to action that supporters hope will guide countries on hosting people fleeing violence and persecution and searching for more economic stability.

The nine members of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection are on diverging political paths as they prepare for public hearings that could become a defining moment in their careers.

Working in private rooms in a Capitol office building, the seven Democrats and two Republicans have participated in hours of interviews, hearing testimony from members of former President Donald Trump‘s family, former Justice Department officials and Trump White House aides. They’ve issued dozens of subpoenas, interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses and gathered tens of thousands of pages of documents in an effort to piece together the worst attack on the Capitol in two centuries.

But as the lawmakers wrap…