Trump News Today: Jan. 6 texts ‘wiped’ from Pentagon officials’ phones, court documents reveal

Pat Cipollone, former President Donald Trump’s White House counsel, has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol Building, ABC News reported Tuesday.

ABC News, citing unnamed sources, said Mr. Cipollone’s lawyers were expected to negotiate the terms of his deposition before the grand jury.

Mr. Cipollone late last month testified via videotape before the commission Jan. 6 in a lengthy closed-door interview that was also part of the commission’s most recent public hearings.

“I’ve been pretty clear that there needs to be an immediate and strong response, statement, public statement, that people need to get out of the Capitol now,” Mr. Cipollone said in his Jan. 6 committee testimony.

A firm whose investigation into alleged voter fraud at the behest of Trump loyalists in Arizona has been able to uncover only one instance of a fraudulent ballot cast in the name of a dead voter, according to the state’s top elections official.

Mark Brnovich, Arizona’s attorney general, issued a letter to Republicans who have led the effort to demand a recount of the 2020 state Senate election on Monday. In the letter, Mr Brnovich describes how the Cyber ​​Ninja investigation led to hundreds of unfounded fraud allegations involving the names of “dead” voters who actually turned out to be alive.

John Bowden has the story.

A Biden administration task force has reunited 400 immigrant children separated under Donald Trump with their families, but advocates say more than 1,000 remain separated.

The youths were from about 5,000 families separated during the Trump administration as migrants crossed into the United States at the southern border with Mexico.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has set his sights on the next horizon in his administration’s fight in the so-called culture wars: “woke CEOs.”

The Republican governor, who is considered a possible 2024 presidential candidate, said during press release last week that it plans to take on money transfer giants such as PayPal, as well as investment funds and banks that try to impose an alleged “awakening ideology” on their potential customers. He also hopes to introduce a slew of legislative and executive initiatives that would curb these companies’ abilities to “discriminate” against customers based on their political or religious beliefs.

Johanna Chisholm reports.

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green has publicly backed the idea that she could take on Donald Trump’s possible 2024 presidential bid, saying she would be “honored” to run with him as his running mate.

“I think if he asked me, I would definitely take it seriously,” she said when asked by the hosts during an interview on America’s Real Voice last week if she would be interested in being the twice-impeached president’s running mate.

Negative impressions of former President Donald Trump are leading Republican U.S. Senate candidates in four key state races, according to a recent poll commissioned by a political action committee tied to a top former Trump adviser.

The survey of 1,200 voters — 300 general election voters each in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and Georgia — was commissioned by the John Bolton Super PAC. The PAC is run by Ambassador John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser.

It found that Trump-endorsed candidates in three of the four states trail their Democratic rivals and rate largely unfavorably with “independent and undecided voters.”

Andrew Feinberg reports the findings.

Speculation continues to swirl about whether Donald Trump would face criminal charges stemming from the Jan. 6 attack after it became clear the select committee was building a case to prove his various wrongdoings.

Attention has turned in recent weeks to the committee’s chairman and vice chairman, who appear to have opposing positions from their respective party majorities on whether the committee itself would formally seek the impeachment of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump reiterated his claim that he wanted 10,000 troops on Capitol Hill on January 6, but the request was rejected by Nancy Pelosi and DC Mayor Muriel Bowser.

He wrote on Truth Social:

The Unselect Committee of Political Thugs has not spent a single hour on the massive election fraud and irregularities that occurred in the 2020 presidential election, the reason hundreds of thousands of people marched on Washington on January 6th. When will they start? The Unselects also refuse to look into why crazy Nancy Pelosi and the Mayor of DC rejected 10-20,000 troops. Why is that, I wonder?

But testimony at the Jan. 6 hearings denies that order ever took place.

CNN reports that the Defense Department wiped the phones of top officials leaving at the end of the Trump administration, erasing any texts from key witnesses to events surrounding the Capitol uprising, according to court records.

The admission that Pentagon officials’ phones had been wiped was first revealed in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the US Watchdog against the Defense Department and the military. The oversight group is seeking records on Jan. 6, 2021, from former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, former Chief of Staff Kash Patel and former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, among other prominent Pentagon officials — having filed initial FOIA requests just days after the attack on the Capitol.

Here’s Andrew Feinberg with the latest: