Trump-linked lawyer compares FBI to Stasi as president’s Putin call revealed – live

Representatives Mo Brooks, Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Louie Gohmert and Scott Perry were among the Republican members of Congress who asked President Donald Trump to insulate them from future prosecutions by granting them presidential pardons in the days immediately following the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January last year.

Their names were revealed by the House January 6 select committee hearing on Thursday that focused on Mr Trump’s efforts to pressure the Department of Justice to assist in his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.

Illinois representative Adam Kinzinger, the Republican select committee member who led the hearing, suggested that seeking pardons implied that his colleagues may have at least suspected they may later face prosecution.

“All I know is if you’re innocent, you’re probably not gonna go out and seek a pardon,” he said.

Read more from Andrew Feinberg.

Jeffrey Clark, a former Department of Justice lawyer who was a key player in Donald Trump’s attempt to reverse his 2020 loss, compared the FBI to the infamous East German Stasi secret police after his home was searched by law enforcement.

“I don’t recognize this country anymore with these kinds of Stasi-like things happening,” Mr Clark told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson on Thursday, a day after agents raided Mr Clark’s Virginia home and seized electronic devices.

As Thursday’s January 6 hearings laid bare, Mr Clark was at the center of an unprecedented pressure campaign from Donald Trump and his allies to use the DOJ to change the election results.

Ali Alexander, who helped organise some of the “Stop the Steal” demonstrations that bled into the 6 January riot at the US Capitol, testified before a federal grand jury on Friday as part of the government’s investigation into the election insurrection.

Mr Alexander has already handed over documents to and testified before the special January 6 committee in Congress.

“Today a DC grand jury brought me in under subpoena and the threat of imprisonment. I told them I committed no crimes and observed no one committing any crimes during the 2020 Election and January 6th,” Mr Alexander posted on Friday on Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social media app.

Here’s his full statement on the grand jury, where he describes being called in as a “fact witness.”

And here’s our April report on the controversial activist.

In a clip shared by the January 6 documentary filmmaker Alex Holder, the former president 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 the story.

As Rudy Giuliani’s conduct between the 2020 election and the Capitol attack is examined in forensic detail in Washington, Politico has this look at his performances on the campaign trail for his son, Andrew Giuliani, who is running for the Republican nomination in the New York governor’s race.

And as might be expected, the former New York City mayor and leading national advocate for demonstrably false election fraud conspiracy theories has been asked a lot about what happened in Washington, DC 18 months ago.

Read the full report below.

“Proud of my father for what he has accomplished today,” the president’s eldest son and namesake tweeted just hours after the high court made its announcement on Friday.

“He gave our movement 3 strong pro-life Supreme Court Justices and despite the Dems and the leftwing media doing everything they could to stop their confirmations, especially with Kavanaugh, he never wavered!!!”

For his part, the former US president took a humbler course and cited “God” as being responsible for the end of Roe, which came by way of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation.

Johanna Chisholm has the story.

One Trump administration official who has managed to quietly continue his career into the Biden era is US Post Office Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a former logistics executive.

Now, he is facing calls to resign for his alleged role in trying to aid Donald Trump in winning the 2020 election.

During the campaign, Mr DeJoy was accused of causing mail slowdowns that amounted to “weaponising the United States Postal Service to disenfranchise Americans who choose to vote by mail,” a group that leans Democratic.

Now, in the context of the January 6 hearings, advocacy group Citizens for Resonsibility and Ethics in Washington is calling for Mr DeJoy to leave office.

“Donald Trump’s plans to interfere with the election went beyond spreading lies about wide spread voter fraud,” the group wrote on Twitter on Friday. “He had an ally in USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy who tried to slow down the mail service to interfere with voting by mail. It’s time to remove DeJoy from his post.”

Former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark was the main focus of Thursday’s January 6 hearings, perhaps only second to Donald Trump himself.

Following the election, the environmental lawyer was a key Trump ally inside the Justice Department, pushing his superiors to get behind Donald Trump’s baseless election claims and trying to encourage states Biden won to send their own, illegimate pro-Trump electors.

On Wednesday, the FBI raided Mr Clark’s home in Virginia, as part of its investigation into those subverting the 2020 election.

Mr Clark spoke with the January 6 committee, but largely claimed the 5th Amendment, refusing to answer numerous questions.

That didn’t stop him from going on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on Thursday, where he compared the FBI search of his home to the Stasi, the former East Germany’s secret police force.

“I don’t recognize this country anymore with these kinds of Stasi-like things happening,” he told Mr Carlson.

As part of the evidence unveiled yesterday, the 6 January select committee has put together this video of key witnesses describing which Republican members of Congress got in touch with the Trump administration to seek pardons after the Capitol attack.

Donald Trump’s fingerprints are on today’s Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade, according to President Biden.

“It was three justices named by one president, Donald Trump, who are the core of today’s decision to upend the scales of justice and eliminate a fundamental right for women in this country,” Mr Biden said on Friday in remarks from the White House.

The president called on Congress to make the right to an abortion part of federal law.

“Let me very clear and unambiguous,” Mr Biden continued. “The only way we can secure a women’s right to choose and the balance that existed is for Congress to restore the protections of Roe v Wade as federal law. No executive action from POTUS can do that.”