Trump news today: Trump repeatedly pleading 5th deposition video leaked as Stormy Daniels mocks him

The new top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday called for more information about the classified records discovered in the private possession of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut was named the committee’s ranking member Wednesday by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Along with Ohio Rep. Mike Turner, the committee’s new Republican chairman, Himes will lead a panel that has been split by highly political fights in a break from its traditionally quieter oversight of the U.S. spy agencies.

Turner and the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee have in recent weeks pushed the White House to share more in private about the classified material found. The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence has declined to comment on its review of classified material, which is also the subject of multiple Justice Department investigations.

“There’s a strong bipartisan concern that Congress is not being briefed on even preliminary reviews of classified information that might have been exposed,” Himes said in an interview Wednesday with The Associated Press. “That’s wrong. That’s wrong as a matter of law.”

The intelligence committees already face several major tests this year, from multiple discoveries of top leaders keeping classified documents to the fight over whether to renew foreign surveillance powers used by the FBI, National Security Agency and other spy agencies.

House Republicans on Wednesday began their promised aggressive oversight of the Biden administration, focusing on what watchdogs described as “indications of widespread fraud” in federal coronavirus aid programs initiated under President Donald Trump.

GOP lawmakers complained that too little attention was paid to the problems when Democrats controlled Congress. Democrats blamed the Trump administration for much of the mess.

More than 1,000 people have pleaded guilty or have been convicted on federal charges of defrauding the myriad COVID-19 relief programs that Congress established in the early days of the pandemic. More than 600 other people and entities face federal fraud charges.

But that’s just the start, according to investigators who testified as the House Oversight and Accountability Committee held its first hearing in the new Congress on fraud and waste in federal pandemic spending. Congress approved about $4.6 trillion in spending from six coronavirus relief laws, beginning in March 2020, when Trump was in the White House and including the $1.9 trillion package that Democrats passed in the first months of the Biden presidency.

“We owe it to the American people to get to the bottom of the greatest theft of American taxpayer dollars in history,” said Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the committee chairman.

Former President Donald Trump’s political operation started the year with about $25 million socked away for his recently launched 2024 presidential campaign, a sum that is substantially less than what he had on hand just one year ago, new campaign finance reports show.

The diminished sum, which is spread out across four campaign committees, is far less than the $105 million that Trump reported at the start of 2022. It speaks to the potential challenges for Trump as he mounts his third bid for the presidency facing what is likely to be a crowded field of GOP candidates who will also be vying for campaign cash from the party’s donors.

Across his political committees, including his main campaign account, Trump raised $9.5 million since launching his bid on Nov. 15, according to his campaign, a far cry from the gargantuan sums his campaign boasted of raising in a matter of days — or even hours — back when he was still president.

Mr Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday that “the real” Ron DeSantis “is a RINO GLOBALIST, who closed quickly down Florida and even its beaches. Loved the Vaccines and wasted big money on ‘Testing.’ How quickly people forget!”

Mr Trump has previously told his supporters to get vaccinated against Covid-19.

Mr Trump was responding to a user on the platform who wrote, “President Trump will destroy DeSantis in the primary”.

The conservative judge and January 6 panel witness Michael Lutting told The Washington Post in a piece published Tuesday that he believes Mr Trump will be indicted, saying that he sees “ample evidence” of crimes.

“What Nixon did was just an ordinary crime,” the judge told the paper, referring to the Watergate scandal. “What Trump has done is quite arguably the worst crime against the United States that a president could commit.”

Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday morning that “our Southern Border Death Machine is 20 times worse today than at any time in the history of our Country, and it is only getting worse. Just two years ago, we were GOLD, the best in U.S. History. SAD!”

Mr Trump took to Truth Social to argue that the “only thing that can save” cable news is him being in the White House again.

“It’s an incredible and very beautiful thing to watch. After all these years, the purveyors of Fake News are being CRUSHED in the Ratings,” he wrote on Wednesday morning. “Be careful FoxNews, your numbers are WAY down also — heading in the wrong direction. You don’t want to be another Fake News CNN or MSDNC. Their FINISHED! Sorry to say, but the only thing that can save them is the Trump Presidency. I told them that a long time ago, but they just wouldn’t listen!”