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Top judiciary committee Republican says that Smith’s investigations were always ‘about politics’
In his opening remarks today, House judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan slammed Jack Smith and his two failed investigations into the president.
“It was always about politics and to get president Trump. They were willing to do just about anything,” Jordan said.
He maintained that the probes into the president were part of a scheme to prevent Trump’s re-election. Jordan repeated the ruling by judge Aileen Cannon – who dismissed the classified documents case – saying Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.
“In spite of the Left and the weaponization efforts of Jim Comey, Alvin Bragg, Bonnie Willis and Jack Smith, we the people saw through it all, and we elected President Trump twice,” Jordan concluded.
Key events
As Jack Smith continues to testify, Donald Trump has taken to Truth Social claiming that he “is being DECIMATED before Congress”.
The US president repeated his attack on Smith as a “deranged animal” and said he hoped that attorney general Pam Bondi “is looking at what he’s done, including some of the crooked and corrupt witnesses that he was attempting to use in his case against me”.
“The whole thing was a Democrat SCAM — A big price should be paid by them for what they have put our Country through!” Trump went on.
A reminder that Trump has frequently called on Bondi and the DOJ to investigate individuals he perceives to be his political adversaries, and the department has brought cases against several of them.
Sam Levine
Two people were arrested on Thursday morning in connection with a controversial protest at a Minnesota church on Sunday, Pam Bondi posted on social media.
The two people, who the attorney general identified as Nekima Levy Armstrong and Chauntyll Louisa Allen, were taken into custody on Thursday. Charging papers were not immediately available and the justice department did not immediately return a request for comment.
“Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP,” Bondi said in a post on X.
The White House and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, celebrated Armstrong’s arrest on social media and posted a picture of her being detained. Armstrong was being charged under a statute that makes it a crime to conspire to block someone from exercising their civil rights.
The disruption at Cities church in St Paul took place after demonstrators alleged that one of the pastors, David Easterwood, was the acting field director of the St Paul ICE office. The upset at a religious institution has caused widespread outrage among conservatives and the Trump administration has pledged to bring charges.
Hugo Lowell
Jack Smith said earlier that he opted not to charge Trump with insurrection, but he is asserting clearly that the January 6 Capitol riot was principally the fault of the president.
“Our assessment of the evidence is that he is the person most responsible for what happened on January 6,” Smith said. “He caused what happened. It was foreseeable to him, and then when it happened, he tried to exploit it in furtherance of the conspiracy.”
Hugo Lowell
Republicans on the judiciary committee have been very focused on Jack Smith’s toll records of phone calls between Trump, the White House and members of Congress who supported the president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
As we noted earlier, toll records don’t contain the content of the conversations, but Republicans are framing Smith’s move to obtain the records – and get a gag order to prevent targeted lawmakers from being notified – as spying.
Smith has rebutted that several times, including in previous closed door testimony where he said that he was examining lawmakers because Trump was trying to enlist them in efforts to disrupt the 6 January 2021 certification.
Still, Smith has not directly addressed the technical point that obtaining toll records of members of Congress risked violating the speech or debate clause in the constitution, namely that obtaining a gag order meant there was no way for lawmakers to challenge him in court.
A quick note that throughout this hearing, ranking member Jamie Raskin has chided House Republicans on the committee for not letting Jack Smith answer their questions.
Representative Brandon Gill snapped back, insisting that this was not Raskin’s time, after the top Democrat told him that he was not giving Smith a chance to reply.
Congressman Darrell Issa, a Republican from California, finished his heated questioning of Jack Smith saying that “I yield back in disgust of this witness”.
The representative blasted Smith for going after “political enemies”.
“Maybe they’re not your political enemies,” Issa said. “But they sure as hell were Joe Biden’s political enemies, weren’t they? They were Harris’s political enemies. They were the enemies of the president.”
Smith defends obtaining ‘toll data’ on lawmakers phones
While answering questions from lawmakers earlier, Jack Smith defended gathering “toll data” from lawmakers’ personal mobile phones as part of his fake-elector investigation, known as “Arctic Frost”.
A reminder that as part of the probe, the FBI subpoenaed phone records of several Republican members of Congress. Notably this did not include the content of any correspondence, but the metadata of the calls.
“We wanted to conduct a thorough investigation of the matters that was assigned to me, including attempts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power,” Smith said. “It was relevant to get toll records to understand the scope of that conspiracy, who they were seeking to coerce, who they were seeking to influence, who was seeking to help them.”
The former special counsel also said that it is “common practice” to obtain non-content toll records in complex investigation.
Vance slams Minneapolis protests: ‘It’s cowardly bullshit’
While speaking in Toledo, Ohio, vice-president JD Vance slammed the ongoing demonstrations against federal immigration agents in Minneapolis (where he’s due to visit later today).
“If you want to turn down the chaos in Minneapolis, stop fighting immigration enforcement and accept that we have to have a border in this country. It’s not that hard,” he said during his Thursday remarks at a shipping facility.
He went on to say that people should show their disapproval at the ballot box, not by going “to the street and assaulting federal law enforcement.”
“It’s cowardly bullshit,” he added.
The committee is taking a recess for members to vote on the House floor. A reminder that today we’re expecting a vote on Department of Homeland Security funding bill that dozens of Democrats have vowed to vote against.
Raskin praises Smith’s investigation
The top Democrat on the House judiciary committee, Jamie Raskin, praised Jack Smith’s handling of his investigations into the president. Raskin also noted the persistent denigration by Donald Trump as Smith conducted the probes.
“He says you belong in prison not because you did anything wrong, mind you, but because you did everything right,” the Maryland congressman said.
Raskin also ran through the myriad instances in which Smith found that Donald Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election.
“If anybody decides to attack you [Smith] personally, they will only be revealing their own ignorance of what prosecutors do and their own indifference to what the rule of law requires in America,” Raskin said. “They will only be stroking the wounded ego of a lawless, twice impeached, convicted felon president.”
Top judiciary committee Republican says that Smith’s investigations were always ‘about politics’
In his opening remarks today, House judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan slammed Jack Smith and his two failed investigations into the president.
“It was always about politics and to get president Trump. They were willing to do just about anything,” Jordan said.
He maintained that the probes into the president were part of a scheme to prevent Trump’s re-election. Jordan repeated the ruling by judge Aileen Cannon – who dismissed the classified documents case – saying Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.
“In spite of the Left and the weaponization efforts of Jim Comey, Alvin Bragg, Bonnie Willis and Jack Smith, we the people saw through it all, and we elected President Trump twice,” Jordan concluded.
Jack Smith testifies before House lawmakers
In a short while we’ll hear from former special counsel under, Jack Smith. The prosecutor, who served under Joe Biden, is to testify in front of House lawmakers on the judiciary committee about his handling of two federal investigations into Donald Trump.
A reminder that Smith, reviled by Donald Trump, was in charge of the probes into the president’s attempts to subvert and overturn the 2020 election, and the classified documents recovered from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Ultimately, when Trump won the 2024 election the justice department dropped both cases. Smith, however, has routinely defended his indictments against the president during his eight-hour closed door testimony in front of the same committee in December, and said he would “still bring charges” against Trump given the evidence.
Appeals court allows ICE agents to continue using force against peaceful protesters
The eighth circuit court of appeals on Wednesday lifted restrictions on federal immigration agents’ use of force against protesters.
Last week, a US district judge in Minnesota issued a preliminary injunction curbing tactics that have been used widely by ICE agents against protesters in Minneapolis.
In her ruling, judge Katherine Menendez found that the federal officers’ actions, which included “the drawing and pointing of weapons; the use of pepper spray and other non-lethal munitions; actual and threatened arrest and detainment of protesters and observers; and other intimidation tactics,” had a chilling affect on protesters exercising their first amendment rights.
Attorney general Pam Bondi called the appeals court ruling a “victory”, called Menendez an “liberal judge” and said her initial ruling was “designed to undermine federal law enforcement”.
Top Democratic appropriator defends DHS funding bill, acknowledges there is
Senator Patty Murray, the top Democratic appropriator in the upper chamber, said that “there is much more we must do to rein in DHS”, but ulimtaltely Democrats need to reclaim power in Congress to enact meaningful change.
In a statement, she explained that she agreed with most of her colleagues that Kristi Noem’s Departments of Homeland Security (DHS) is “sick and un-American”, but a government shutdown, or a stopgap spending bill, would mean remove the “critical guardrails and constraints imposed by a full-year funding bill” on DHS, and federal immigration officers.
“The hard truth is that Democrats must win political power to enact the kind of accountability we need,” Murray said. “We must take our fight to the ballot box.”
Vance to visit Minneapolis as anti-immigration enforcement protests continue
As Donald Trump wraps up his time in Switzerland, his vice-president JD Vance will head to Minneapolis today, as protests against federal immigration enforcement continues throughout the Twin Cities in the weeks since the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent.
The vice-president will first attend a meeting with ICE agents, and then hold a roundtable with local business leaders and officials. Both of these events will be closed to the press. He’ll then deliver public remarks at 2:40pm ET.
Prior to travelling to Minneapolis, Vance will head to Toledo, Ohio to tout the administration’s economic agenda.
We’ll make sure to bring you the latest lines here, as it happens.
ICE detains five-year-old Minnesota boy arriving home, say school officials
Sam Levin
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained a five-year-old Minnesota boy on Tuesday as he returned home from school and transported him and his father to a Texas detention center, according to school officials.
Liam Ramos, a preschooler, and his father were taken into custody while in their driveway, the superintendent of the school district in Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb, said at a press conference on Wednesday. Liam, who had recently turned five, is one of four children in the school district who have been detained by federal immigration agents during the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in the region over the last two weeks, the district said.
Liam and his father had just arrived home when they were detained, according to Zena Stenvik, the superintendent, who said she drove to the home when she learned of the detentions.
When she arrived, Stenvik said the father’s car was still running and the father and son had already been apprehended. An agent had taken Liam out of the car, led the boy to his front door and directed him to knock on the door asking to be let in, “in order to see if anyone else was home – essentially using a five-year-old as bait”, the superintendent said in a statement.
More here:
The Guardian’s Robert Tait reports that that the vast majority of congressional Democrats and their 213-strong House caucus are expected to vote against a bill funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with many expressing anger over the agency’s enforcement efforts in Minnesota, where an agent fatally shot Renee Good, a mother of three, this month.
But some like Rosa DeLauro, a representative from Connecticut and the ranking Democrat on the appropriations committee, are saying that it may be better for the bill to pass rather than run the risk of a renewed government shutdown that could affect other agencies.
“I understand that many of my Democratic colleagues may be dissatisfied with any bill that funds ICE,” she said.
“I share their frustration with the out-of-control agency. I encourage my colleagues to review the bill and determine what is best for their constituents and communities.”
But she added: “The Homeland Security funding bill is more than just ICE. If we allow a lapse in funding, TSA [transportation security administration] agents will be forced to work without pay, Fema [federal emergency management agency] assistance could be delayed, and the US Coast Guard will be adversely affected. All while ICE continues functioning without any change in their operations due to $75 billion it received in the One Big Beautiful Bill.”
More here:
Trump in Davos to talk peace as immigration crackdown advances at home
Hello and welcome to our live coverage.
Donald Trump is at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where on Thursday he, alongside several other leaders, signed the Board of Peace charter. While initially framed as a narrow mechanism to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, the board is now instead being positioned as a standing global body, chaired by Trump himself, operating in parallel to the United Nations.
Some countries such as France and Britain have declined the offer of membership, with Yvette Cooper, the UK foreign secretary, expressing concern over the announcement on Monday that Vladimir Putin had been invited to join.
In a marathon speech in Davos on Wednesday, Trump reiterated his desire to take control of Greenland, “including right, title and ownership,” but backed away from threats of military intervention. He later announced a “framework for a future deal” to settle the issue and withdrew the threat of tariffs against eight European countries.
For more Davos coverage, follow our colleage Graeme Wearden here:
Meanwhile back home, Trump’s immigration crackdown continues with enforcement efforts persisting in Minnesota and spreading to target Somali communities in Maine.
In Washington, congressional Democrats are coming out en masse to reject a bill to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“In the last 24 hours, we’ve heard our members speak loudly that ICE isn’t doing enough, these reforms aren’t doing enough. This lawlessness has to stop,” said Pete Aguilar, the chairman of the party’s caucus.
Keep checking back here for more updates.
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