Jan 6 hearing today: Meadows aide to testify at surprise hearing as Trump lawyer’s phone

Need to get up to speed before Tuesday’s surprise extra January 6 hearing?

Andrew Feinberg has you covered.

Many staunch supporters of former president Donald Trump, such as the ones who came out to hear him speak in Mississippi as part of his American Freedom Tour last weekend, are not closely following the January 6 committee’s hearings on the Capitol riot.

On Thursday evening, The Daily Show released a nearly seven-and-a-half minute video of correspondent Jordan Klepper quizzing rally attendees about the committee’s work.

One of the clips Mr Klepper showed was of the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump testifying that she accepted Attorney General William Barr’s assertion that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

“It don’t even look like her. It might be one of those — what do they got, clones out there these days?” one supporter said of Ms Trump’s testimony.

Former President Donald Trump had little more than compliments for the rioters who stormed the US Capitol in new documentary footage from March 2021 that was obtained by the January 6 committee this week.

In the footage, published by CNN on Thursday, Mr Trump claims (falsely) that a “small” number of people stormed the Capitol and calls them “smart” for believing his claims about widespread election fraud, which his own attorney admitted in separate audio released this week that the Trump campaign had no evidence to prove.

“They were angry from the standpoint of what happened in the election. Because they’re smart, and they see and they saw what happened, and I believe that that was a big part of what happened on January 6,” says the former president in the clip.

John Bowden has more in this report.

The Independent first observed trans issues bubbling up through QAnon and other conspiratorial far-right communities in the first half of 2021, following the movement’s failure to stop the inauguration of President Joe Biden by storming the US Capitol.

As Donald Trump and his most extreme supporters were purged from mainstream social networks, many turned to the private messaging app Telegram, where numerous new channels sprung up for the varied and often fractious cloud of movements and subcultures that adopted Trump as their mascot.

“A man cutting off his genitals and pretending to be a woman is about as satanic as it gets,” said one commenter during an extended discussion about trans rights in a conspiracy-peddling Telegram channel last January.

Io Dodds has this in-depth investigation.

A political shift is beginning to take hold across the U.S. as tens of thousands of suburban swing voters who helped fuel the Democratic Party’s gains in recent years are becoming Republicans.

More than 1 million voters across 43 states have switched to the Republican Party over the last year, according to voter registration data analyzed by The Associated Press. The previously unreported number reflects a phenomenon that is playing out in virtually every region of the country — Democratic and Republican states along with cities and small towns — in the period since President Joe Biden replaced former President Donald Trump.

But nowhere is the shift more pronounced — and dangerous for Democrats — than in the suburbs, where well-educated swing voters who turned against Trump’s Republican Party in recent years appear to be swinging back. Over the last year, far more people are switching to the GOP across suburban counties from Denver to Atlanta and Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Republicans also gained ground in counties around medium-size cities such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Raleigh, North Carolina; Augusta, Georgia; and Des Moines, Iowa.

Many staunch supporters of former President Donald Trump, such as the ones who came out to hear him speak in Mississippi as part of his American Freedom Tour last weekend, are not closely following the January 6 committee’s hearings on the Capitol riot.

On Thursday evening, The Daily Show released a nearly seven-and-a-half minute video of correspondent Jordan Klepper quizzing rally attendees about the committee’s work. One of the clips Mr Klepper showed was of the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump testifying that she accepted Attorney General William Barr’s assertion that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

But the Trump supporters Mr Klepper interviewed appeared unwilling to believe either Mr Barr or Ms Trump.

“It don’t even look like her. It might be one of those — what do they got, clones out there these days?” one supporter said of Ms Trump’s testimony.

Maybe this cloan will be the mystery witness in tomorrow’s hearing.

More on the wild fan theory here.

Donald Trump is lashing out over suggestions that the Republican Party is rejecting him because of the January 6 insurrection as the House Select Committee lays out a detailed description of what led up to and followed the attack on Congress.

On Sunday, Mr Trump took aim at conservative columnist Peggy Noonan, saying that she doesn’t understand his base and its politics.

In a statement issued via his political action committee Save America, the former president said: “I listen to all of these foolish (stupid!) people, often living in a bygone era, like the weak and frail RINO, Peggy Noonan, who did much less for Ronald Reagan than she claims, and who actually said bad things about him and his ability to speak”.

Mr Trump was responding to a piece Ms Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday that “both parties are rejecting their leaders, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It’s a continuing tectonic shift and the story underlying every daily political story. It’s building and will only grow. Both parties are starting to scramble for what’s next, who’s next. Both are casting about”.

Get the scoop on the intra-party dustup here.

In a clip shared by the 6 January documentary filmmaker Alex Holder, former president Donald Trump can be seen fussing over a glass of water in the camera frame.

Mr Holder, the maker of ‘Unprecedented’ — a three-part documentary about the final months of the Trump presidency — tweeted a clip from it and wrote: “The Trumps did not have editorial control. Full stop.”Unprecedented is slated to be released this summer and has been bought by Discovery Plus.

In fact, Mr Holder’s documentary footage has been subpoenaed by the House Select Committee investigating the Capitol riot of last year.

The clip shows Mr Trump checking himself in the frame after he takes a seat for the interview. Then goes: “I don’t think you want to have the water in the picture. You can take it. Yeah.”

Maroosha Muzaffar has more.

The so-called “blank check” company behind former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform now appears to be the subject of an investigation by federal…