Trump news live: Trump turns down grand jury in hush money probe as he’s slammed for SVB collapse

Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen is set to testify before a grand jury in Manhattan looking into the hush money payments he made on behalf of Mr Trump.

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:

More than a million pages of internal Fox messages have revealed that a producer for Fox News host Tucker Carlson described the show’s audience as “especially dumb” and “terrorists” who sleep with their cousins.

The files were released in connection to the $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against the company by Dominion Voting Systems.

After Carlson had publically rebuked some of the outlandish claims pushed by Donald Trump’s lawyer Sydney Powell, which prompted pushback from her and other rightwing figures, a Fox executive texted a producer for Carlson about finding a middle ground and possibly taking time on the show to address her baseless claim that she had an affidavit linking Dominion and Venezuela.

Read more about the exchange that followed:

Donald Trump will not testify before a grand jury investigating the hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential election, according to his attorney.

Joe Tacopina told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Monday that Mr Trump has “no plans” to participate in the probe – as possible criminal charges against the former president loom.

“We have no plans on participating in that proceeding,” he said.

“Decision needs to be made still. There’s been no deadline set, so we’ll wait and see.”

Federal prosecutors have shot down any suggestion that footage aired on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News programme has in any way exonerated the so-called QAnon Shaman who joined a mob that stormed the halls of the US Capitol on January 6.

Jacob Chansley was sentenced to 41 months in prison after he was convicted of a felony count of obstructing an official proceeding before Congress. An attorney for another rioter charged with seditious conspiracy argued in court filings that the footage showing Chansley interacting with officers directing him to leave the building was “exculpatory”.

“Chansley was not some passive, chaperoned observer of events for the roughly hour that he was unlawfully inside the Capitol,” prosecutors replied.

“He was part of the initial breach of the building; he confronted law enforcement for roughly 30 minutes just outside the Senate Chamber; he gained access to the gallery of the Senate along with other members of the mob … and he gained access to and later left the Senate floor only after law enforcement was able to arrive en masse to remove him,” they continued.

Donald Trump returned to one of his favourite punching bags on Monday: MSNBC’s flagship morning newscast, Morning Joe.

And in doing so, he ventured into the realm of sexism with a bizarre mispelling of co-host Mika Brzezinski’s name.

“MSNBC can barely float, it is a ratings disaster. Morning Joe and his sidekick, ‘Mike,’ are getting pummeled. All of these Fake News Cable shows are. My CPAC speech was just announced as #1 on all of Cable. That’s because it was not Fake News!” wrote the former president on Truth Social.

Critics looking to assign blame for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank have found possible culprits in Donald Trump and Republican senators.

Though little known outside of Silicon Valley, the SVB was the leading lender to tech firms and startups before it crumbled on Friday.

SVB announced on Wednesday that it had sold a number of securities at a loss, and that it planned to sell $2.25bn in new shares to help right its balance sheet.

Donald Trump took to Truth Social late on Sunday night to celebrate that the Jan 6 Prison choir’s song had topped the iTunes chart over the weekend.

The former president’s song with the J6 Prison Choir called “Justice for All” reached number one on iTunes’ Top 100 list on Saturday, bumping Miley Cyrus and her hit “Flowers” down to second place.

Mr Trump celebrated, writing “Wow!” on his social media platform.

A former official in the Trump administration said the one-term president kept such close ties with Fox News that he would sometimes have aides call the network to pressure employees to turn whatever was irking him into news stories.

Stephanie Grisham, the former White House Communications Director under Donald Trump, recalled her interactions with Fox News during an interview with CNN’s Jim Acosta.

During the discussion, Acosta said he recalled seeing Fox News personalities like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham being openly invited in to meet with White House officials despite the fact they were ostensibly members of the press.

Read the full story here:

Last week, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office invited Mr Trump to testify in the grand jury investigation into the hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential election.

While it’s an invitation he is unlikely to accept, it sends the clearest signal yet that he could be criminally indicted over the matter.

Under New York law, a person has a right to appear before a grand jury before a prosecutor asks the grand jury to indict them on charges.

If prosecuted, Mr Trump would become the first former president in US history to face criminal charges.

Mike Pence said 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.

“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.”