Trump news latest: GOP quietly drop House investigation into Trump finances

Republicans have quietly dropped a yearslong investigation into Donald Trump’s finances and whether his businesses profited improperly from his presidency.

The House Oversight Committee – now led by the GOP after the party took control of the House – is no longer enforcing a court order that Mr Trump’s former accounting firm Mazars USA turn over its financial records to Congress, revealed The New York Times.

Committee chairman Rep James Comer told the paper he “honestly didn’t even know who or what Mazars was” as he made it clear he is now steering the committee to investigate the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.

“What exactly are they looking for?” he said in a statement.

“They’ve been ‘investigating’ Trump for six years. I know exactly what I’m investigating: money the Bidens received from China.”

His apparent ignorance about the yearslong Democrat-led probe comes despite the fact he was the senior Republican on the committee during the last Congress, while the investigation was under way.

The admission of the dropping of the probe comes Rep Jamie Raskin wrote to Mr Comer accusing him of coordinating with Mr Trump’s lawyers to kill the investigation and block the committee from gaining access to the financial records.

“It has come to my attention that you may have acted in league with attorneys for former President Donald Trump to block the committee from receiving documents subpoenaed in its investigation of unauthorized, unreported and unlawful payments by foreign governments and others to then-President Trump,” Mr Raskin wrote to Mr Comer.

The Democrat accused the Republican of hypocrisy as he plowed ahead with a probe into Hunter Biden.

An attendee at The Players Championship golf tournament in Jacksonville, Florida seemingly hurled one of former President Donald Trump’s new nicknames at Governor Ron DeSantis.

Footage from the tournament shared on Twitter by lawyer Ron Filipkowski shows Mr DeSantis walking through the crowd at the event when someone can be heard yelling “Tiny D!” from off-camera.

Donald Trump said at his Iowa rally that it should be a priority for Republicans to depose Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, prompting cheers from the audience.

He made the remark Monday night, just hours after news broke that the senator had been discharged from the hospital after a concussion.

“We do have to do something about Mitch McConnell. He’s a disaster. He gets his ten guys and they give Biden whatever they want. There’s something going on, it doesn’t make sense,” he said in response to an audience questions.

Mr Trump and the Kentucky senator have a long-running feud. The former president has sought Mr McConnell’s ouster ever since the latter refused to sign on (and whipped his caucus against) Mr Trump’s objections to certifying the 2020 election’s results.

Donald Trump has claimed once again that he will end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of becoming president.

“Shortly after I win the presidency, I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine settled. That will take 24 hours, if it’s not done before,” he claimed Monday evening at his rally in Iowa.

“It’s a horrible thing taking place. I could get that thing settled. It would have never happened if I were president – zero chance.”

But one of his biggest boosters in conservative media, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, disagrees.

Read more from John Bowden:

George Santos, the US House representative who is facing a myriad of criminal and ethics investigations into his conduct, has filed a statement of candidacy for 2024.

As CNN’s Melanie Zanona points out, that doesn’t mean he has decided for sure to run for reelection — but it means he has the ability to do so if he desires to seek the seat again.

Mike Pence says he knows history will hold Donald Trump accountable over the Jan 6 insurrection and also made jokes at the expense of his former boss about the secret documents found at Mar-a-Lago.

The former vice president and Trump loyalist’s comments are some of the harshest he has made about the one-time president. Mr Pence, who once seemed reluctant to confront Mr Trump, made the remarks on Saturday evening during the white-tie annual Gridiron Club Dinner in Washington, DC.

“President Trump was wrong,” he said at the event attended by politicians and journalists.

“I had no right to overturn the election. And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who is running for the 2024 GOP nomination, released a scathing statement on Tuesday referring to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as merely an “echo” of Donald Trump after the latter accused the governor of copying his political positions.

“ President Trump is right when he says Governor DeSantis is copying him — first in his style, then on entitlement reform, and now on Ukraine,” said Ms Haley, a former governor herself.

Read the full statement below:

Donald Trump issued a furious response on Monday when asked by reporters about his former fixer, Michael Cohen, testifying to a New York grand jury about a hush payment he made to Stormy Daniels on Mr Trump’s behalf in 2016.

“ He’s a sick person. He’s a convicted felon. He’s a convicted liar. Lied before Congress said the greatest things about me too, by the way, you know, then all of a sudden one day he went crazy because he wanted to make a deal for him,” said Mr Trump, according to CBS News.

Mr Cohen is set to testify to the grand jury again on Wednesday after spending three hours behind closed doors offering his take on Monday.

Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen testified yesterday before a grand jury in Manhattan looking into the hush money payments he made on behalf of Mr Trump. He is slated to return for another round on Wednesday.

Mr Cohen is set to testify regarding Mr Trump’s involvement in payments made during the 2016 campaign to women who alleged he had had affairs with them.

“My goal is to tell the truth,” he told the assembled press outside the courthouse, according to the Associated Press.

“This is not revenge,” he added. “This is all about accountability. He needs to be held accountable for his dirty deeds.”

Gustaf Kilander has more:

Donald Trump attacked his former vice president while traveling to an Iowa campaign event on Monday, saying that Mike Pence can be blamed in “many ways” for the January 6 riots at the US Capitol.

“Had he sent the votes back to the legislatures, they wouldn’t have had a problem with January 6, so in many ways you can blame him for January 6,” the former president told reporters on his private plane.

Pointing to the former vice-president’s refusal to outlaw the electoral college votes in Congress as sought by him, Mr Trump said: “Had he sent them back to Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, the states, I believe, number one, you would have a different outcome. But I also believe you wouldn’t have had ‘January 6’ as we call it.”

This comes just two days after Mr Pence took an aim at his former boss and said that he knows history will hold Mr Trump accountable over the January 6 insurrection, amping up the tussle between them as they prepare to battle over the Republican nomination in next year’s election.

The Independent’s Arpan Rai has more: