The drumbeat for a second Trump impeachment is getting louder.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi could bring a new article of impeachment to the House floor as early as Monday, charging President Trump with “incitement of insurrection” for his role in encouraging a mob that went on to ransack the Capitol on Wednesday.
Privately, Republican leaders said conviction was not out of the question.
A second impeachment would be “a final showdown that will test the boundaries of politics, accountability and the Constitution,” writes Peter Baker, our chief White House correspondent. Lisa Murkowski and Patrick Toomey became the first Republican senators to publicly join the multitude of calls for Mr. Trump to resign.
No president has ever been impeached twice. If Mr. Trump were convicted, the Senate could vote to bar him from holding office again. Here’s what we know about the process.
President-elect Joe Biden sidestepped the issue, saying that “what the Congress decides to do is for them to decide,” focusing instead on the urgency of the health and economic crises facing the country. The drumbeat for a second Trump impeachment is getting louder.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi could bring a new article of impeachment to the House floor as early as Monday, charging President Trump with “incitement of insurrection” for his role in encouraging a mob that went on to ransack the Capitol on Wednesday.
Privately, Republican leaders said conviction was not out of the question.
A second impeachment would be “a final showdown that will test the boundaries of politics, accountability and the Constitution,” writes Peter Baker, our chief White House correspondent. Lisa Murkowski and Patrick Toomeybecame the first Republican senators to publicly join the multitude of calls for Mr. Trump to resign.
No president has ever been impeached twice. If Mr. Trump were convicted, the Senate could vote to bar him from holding office again. Here’s what we know about the process.
President-elect Joe Biden sidestepped the issue, saying that “what the Congress decides to do is for them to decide,” focusing instead on the urgency of the health and economic crises facing the country. Read more at New York Times
Three days after a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol carried out in President Trump’s name, Republican leaders have yet to outline plans to hold anyone accountable or to alter a platform and priorities lashed to the outgoing Republican president.
Trump and some congressional Republicans, meanwhile, stepped up their efforts Saturday to head off Democratic efforts to impeach Trump over what they call his incitement of violence.
Behind closed doors, Trump and his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner have encouraged allies to fight against a potential impeachment by issuing statements on social media or elsewhere that discourage or condemn the move, people familiar with the calls said.
It was not clear whether those efforts were having much success. Republican allies of the president were mainly muted Saturday, as pressure continued to mount among Democrats to try to force Trump from office before his term expires Jan. 20. Read more at Washington Post
President Trump urged Georgia’s lead elections investigator to “find the fraud” in a lengthy December phone call, saying the official would be a “national hero,” according to an individual familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the conversation.
Trump placed the call to the investigations chief for the Georgia secretary of state’s office shortly before Christmas — while the individual was leading an inquiry into allegations of ballot fraud in Cobb County, in the suburbs of Atlanta, according to people familiar with the episode.
The president’s attempts to intervene in an ongoing investigation could amount to obstruction of justice or other criminal violations, legal experts said, though they cautioned a case could be difficult to prove.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had launched the inquiry following allegations that Cobb election officials had improperly accepted mail ballots with signatures that did not match those on file — claims that state officials ultimately concluded had no merit. Read more at Washington Post
Amazon suspended the pro-Trump social network Parler from its Web-hosting service this weekend, a move that threatens to darken the site indefinitely after its users glorified the recent riot at the U.S. Capitol. The e-commerce and Web-hosting giant said Parler had violated its terms of service given its inadequate content-moderation practices, adding in a letter that it would implement its punishment just before midnight Pacific time Monday.
The move by Amazon Web Services, or AWS, marks the latest and most crippling blow for the pro-Trump social network, which has emerged as a haven for conservative users who have fled more mainstream Silicon Valley sites that crack down on harmful, viral falsehoods online. Earlier this week, Apple and Google removed Parler’s app from their stores for smartphone downloads, similarly citing concerns that posts on Parler could contribute to violence. Read more at Washington Post
Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
The Capitol rioters had different perspectives — QAnon, Proud Boys, elected officials, regular Americans — but one allegiance.
All had assembled in response to President Trump’s repeated appealsto march to the Capitol on Wednesday, a day that he promised would be “wild.” Many Americans thought the rally near the White House beforehand was just one more salve for Mr. Trump’s ego, wounded by losing the election. But supporters heard something else — a battle cry.
In the end, five people died, including Brian Sicknick, a military veteran and experienced Capitol Police officer. A Confederate flag was carried into the Capitol. Lawmakers, aides and journalists feared for their lives.
Some of the people pictured in viral photos and videos from the raid on the U.S. Capitol have been arrested and charged, including 13 who face federal charges. Dozens of cases are pending. Read more at New York Times
In the end, it was two California billionaires who pulled the plug on President Trump.
In a watershed moment in the history of social media, Twitter permanently suspended Mr. Trump’s account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” and Facebook banned the president at least through the end of his term.
Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook had been under pressure for years to hold Mr. Trump accountable. Making their move now “provides a clarifying lesson in where power resides in our digital society,” writes Kevin Roose, our technology columnist.
Many of Mr. Trump’s followers derided his banishment as an example of Silicon Valley’s tyrannical speech controls, but the First Amendment is not on their side.
(Our investigation from 2019: How Trump Reshaped the Presidency in Over 11,000 Tweets.) Read more at New York Times
Lindsey Graham thanked police and expressed sympathy with those frustrated by President Donald Trump's defeat a day after being harangued by an angry crowd that called him a "traitor" for not trying to block the certification of the Electoral College results.
Video shared on social media Friday showed the South Carolina Republican, flanked by officers, being followed through Washington's Reagan National Airport by about a dozen people hurling insults and shouting baseless claims that the election had been fraudulent.
"Lindsey Graham, you are a traitor to the country!" a woman shouts in one of the videos.
"Hope you enjoy Gitmo!" she yells at another point. "It's going to be like this forever, wherever you go, for the rest of your life." Read more at USA Today
The more transmissible coronavirus variant pummeling Britain has been detected in 45 countries and at least eight American states.
For years, public health officials called for routine genetic surveillance of viral outbreaks, but many countries — including the U.S. — are conducting only a fraction of the genomic studies needed to determine how prevalent mutations of the virus are.
The new variants only add pressure to speed up vaccine rollouts, both to keep caseloads from further skyrocketing and to protect as many people as possible before mutations undercut the vaccines’ efficacy. About 6.7 million people in the U.S. have received at least one of the two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine; more than 150,000 have gotten both.
Some states are expanding eligibility, though millions of people that were recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to go first — health care workers and nursing home residents — have yet to get their shots. See how vaccinations are going in your state. Read more at New York Times
Los Angeles County has a coronavirus-related death every eight minutes, and the city is on the threshold of one in 10 residents testing positive for the virus. Dozens of overcrowded emergency rooms have shut their doors to ambulances for hours at a time. Oxygen and the portable canisters to supply it to patients are low.
And in Chicago, some students are set to return to school on Monday for the first time since March. But it’s unclear how many of their teachers will be there to greet them: The mayor and teachers’ unions are locked in a bitter fight over whether to reopen classrooms. Read more at New York Times
A search and rescue operation entered its second day after an Indonesian passenger jet crashed into the Java Sea minutes after takeoff in heavy monsoon rains.
More than 60 people were believed to be aboard the Boeing 737-500, operated by Sriwijaya Air, that had taken off from Jakarta, the capital, on Saturday. Officials said they found body parts and some clothes from the passengers as well as part of the wreckage in an area known as the Thousand Islands.
The crash comes at a terrible time for Boeing, whose reputation and bottom line were devastated by two crashes involving its 737 Max jet two years ago, including Lion Air Flight 610 that also plunged into the Java Sea. Read more at New York Times
Michael Apted, a versatile director whose films were as varied as the James Bond picture “The World Is Not Enough” and the biographical dramas “Gorillas in the Mist” and “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and who made his most lasting mark with the “Up” documentary series, which followed the lives of a group of British people in seven-year intervals for more than a half century, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 79. Read more at New York Times
No posts