This concludes our live chronicle of the second Trump administration to a close, on a day when the president casually suggested that the US ally Oman had to “behave” or “we’ll have to blow ‘em up”. Here are the latest developments:

• In a new interview with CBS News, Jill Biden, the former first lady, said that she was “frightened” as she watched her husband, then-president Joe Biden, freeze up during his disastrous 2024 debate against Donald Trump. Pressed to explain what happened, Jill Biden said: “I don’t know what happened. I mean as I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke’. And it scared me to death.”

• CNN reports that the US Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation of E Jean Carroll, the writer who won a $5m civil judgment against Donald Trump in 2023, when a federal jury found that he had sexually abused her in 1996 and defamed her in 2022 when he denied attacking her.

• Two House Democrats, Don Beyer of Virginia and Dina Titus of Nevada, announced that they plan to introduce a bill that would “explicitly prohibit construction of President Trump’s proposed ‘triumphal arch’ outside Arlington National Cemetery”.

• Cam Higby, a rightwing activist disguised as a pro-Palestinian activist, disrupted a news conference with the Democratic congressmen Jerry Nadler and Dan Goldman outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey.

CNN reports that the US Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation of E Jean Carroll, the writer who won a $5m civil judgment against Donald Trump in 2023, when a federal jury found that he had sexually abused her in 1996 and defamed her in 2022 when he denied attacking her.

According to CNN’s sources, who were not named, the investigation is focused on whether Carroll committed perjury in testimony in her two civil lawsuits against Trump, one for allegedly sexually abusing her in a department store dressing room in 1996, and the second for defamation.

The apparent legal theory prosecutors are pursuing is a claim that Carroll lied in a 2022 deposition when she said she had received no outside funding for her lawsuit.

Nearly six months later, before the trial started, Carroll’s attorneys informed the judge and Trump’s lawyers that a nonprofit funded by Reid Hoffman, the billionaire LinkedIn co-founder, had paid some legal fees and expenses. Carroll’s lawyers said she never met or spoke with anyone from the nonprofit. The judge allowed Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, to question Carroll again in a second deposition.

Excerpts from Carroll’s videotaped depositions with Habba were included in a new documentary, Ask E Jean, which opened last week in New York.

Juries later awarded Carroll millions of dollars in damages, which the president is appealing. Trump has appealed the $5m in damages in the sexual abuse case judgement and $83m in the defamation case. Trump has repeatedly tried to have the awards thrown out.

A three-judge federal appeals court panel in New York already dismissed the claim that Carroll had lied in her deposition in 2024. In their opinion affirming the judgement against Trump, on 30 December 2024, the judges wrote:

Ms. Carroll plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding counsel obtained in September 2020 when this question was first posed to her in 2022, and the additional discovery did not indicate otherwise. Rather, it showed that Ms. Carroll simply was not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs. Ms. Carroll testified that, after her counsel informed her in September 2020 that they had received some outside funding, she did not speak with her counsel about this topic again until the spring of 2023 and did not even know the funder’s political position or why they were partially funding her lawsuit. Therefore, by the time of her deposition in October 2022, Ms. Carroll had not spoken with her counsel about the matter of outside funding for over two years.

The New York Times reports that the investigation was opened by Andrew Boutros, the US attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who was appointed by Trump.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, defended Trump in the Carroll case, and has recused himself, sources told both CNN and the Times.

Boutros is currently at the center of an inquiry himself, after a defense attorney for an anti-ICE protester whose case was dismissed told a federal judge in Chicago on Tuesday that he has “reason to believe” that Boutros had personal contact with the grand jury in the case.

Protesters outside an immigration detention facility in New Jersey discovered that a videographer who heckled two Democratic congressmen while covering his face in a keffiyeh on Wednesday was Cam Higby, a rightwing influencer who works with Turning Point USA, the late Charlie Kirk’s advocacy organization.

Earlier in the day, protesters outside the Delaney Hall facility in Newark, where detainees are on hunger strike, reportedly became suspicious of the videographer, who concealed his face in the black and white Palestinian scarf while holding a selfie-stick in one hand and, at one point, a Polymarket-branded mic in the other.

Video recorded by an Intercept reporter, Noah Hurowitz, showed that Higby loudly heckled the congressmen, Dan Goldman and Jerry Nadler, shouting anti-immigrant rhetoric at them during a news conference, while his head was still covered in the kind of keffiyeh worn by pro-Palestinian protesters.

Then, as Higby’s own video, and a second clip shot by the protest reporter Ford Fischer showed a protester tried to pull the scarf from around his neck while one of her colleagues said: “Take off that fake-ass keffiyeh. You’re not about Free Palestine; you’re a fake, infiltrator”.

As Higby was chased away from the protest by activists, he briefly paused to take what looked like a pair of Meta Ray-Ban sunglasses from his backpack, as ICE officers stepped in to guard him from the anti-ICE protesters.

Higby, a rightwing influencer who makes a living filming himself confronting leftwing protesters, was one of the the supposed experts who attended the White House Antifa roundtable last October, to brief Donald Trump on antifascism.

While his social-media profile highlights “Undercover Infiltrations” as a speciality, in his remarks at the White House, Higby cast himself as a reporter unfairly targeted by antifascists. “I’m attacked every time I do my job. When I leave my house to go to work, I’m violently assaulted. I’ve had guns pulled on me. I’ve been bear-sprayed. I’ve been beaten down. I’ve been almost killed,” he said.

Hours after the Trump administration announced a not quite star-studded lineup of musical acts for its Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington this summer, one of the announced performers, Morris Day, made it clear that he would not, in fact, be performing.

Day posted a graphic on Instagram with a red circle and a line through it with the message: “Contrary to rumor, Morris Day & The Time will not be performing at ‘the Great American State Fair’”.

The singer added, in a caption: “It’s A No For Me”.

Day’s name and photo was included on a poster published earlier in the day by Freedom 250, the organization producing the event to mark the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding in partnership with the White House.

The musicians who have not (yet) denied that they will take part are: Martina McBride, Young MC, C+C Music Factory, Vanilla Ice, Milli Vanilli, the Commodores, Flo Rida and Bret Michaels.

As some observers pointed out on social media, four of those acts are currently taking part in a nationwide I Love the 90s tour, including the surviving member of Milli Vanilli, a German pop duo that lost their Grammy for Best New Artist in 1990 after it was reveled that they did not sing on the record but just lip-synched in music videos and on stage.

The Trump administration re-imposed sanctions on Wednesday against Francesca Albanese, an Italian lawyer who was appointed by UN Human Rights Council to monitor human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.

An entry on the US treasury department’s website was updated on Wednesday to include Albanese, two weeks after a federal judge had temporarily blocked US sanctions against her for criticizing Israel’s war on Gaza, calling it a likely violation of her free speech rights.

Albanese was appointed US special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in 2022, a role filled by an independent expert.

Two House Democrats, Don Beyer of Virginia and Dina Titus of Nevada, announced on Wednesday that they plan to introduce a bill that would “explicitly prohibit construction of President Trump’s proposed ‘triumphal arch’ outside Arlington National Cemetery”, they said in a statement.

Given that the Democrats are in the minority, and their Arlington National Cemetery Viewshed Protection Act would need two-thirds majorities in both the House and the Senate to override a veto from Trump, the legislation has little chance to become law, but it does focus resistance to the planned 250-foot knock-off of the Arc de Triomphe the president insists he can build without congressional authorization.

Renderings of the giant monument Trump said last October would be in honor of himself show that it would obstruct the view of the Lincoln Memorial from Arlington National Cemetery.

Beyer, who represents a Northern Virginia district that includes Arlington National Cemetery (ANC), and whose parents, grandparents, and sister are buried there, said:

Arlington National Cemetery is sacred ground, the resting place for some of our nation’s greatest heroes. It is unthinkable that we would desecrate this hallowed space to build a monument to Donald Trump’s ego.

Trump’s vanity project would waste taxpayer money, brazenly violate existing law, and become yet another vehicle for his corruption. The Administration has also given no consideration to potential harmful effects on the region including impacts on air safety and traffic on major roadways.

“Worst of all, Trump is not trying to build this arch to commemorate national heroes, servicemembers who lie in Arlington National Cemetery, or to celebrate freedom. He did not dedicate it to the American people or our country’s greatness. Asked who this arch is for, Trump said, simply: ‘me.’

Representative Titus added: “As President Trump strips away the necessary safety nets from Americans who are struggling to afford their basic needs like groceries and healthcare, he builds his unauthorized, grandiose Triumphal Arch. While destroying historical monuments and artifacts important to our American identity, he is erecting monuments to honor himself.”

In a new interview with CBS News, Jill Biden, the former first lady, said that she was “frightened” as she watched her husband, then-president Joe Biden, freeze up during his disastrous 2024 debate against Donald Trump.

Asked if she was horrified as she viewed the debate, the former first lady said: “I wasn’t horrified, I was frightened, because I had never, ever seen Joe like that – before or since. Never.”

Pressed by the interviewer, Rita Braver, to explain what happened, Jill Biden said: “I don’t know what happened. I mean when, as I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke’. And it scared me to death.”

The comments were made in an interview that will air in full on Sunday.

The admission from the former first lady prompted immediate reactions from hosts of the podcast Pod Save America, former aides to Barack Obama who called for Joe Biden to immediately drop out of the presidential race in the aftermath of the debate. Biden did, eventually, step aside, but only after sustained pressure from Democrats, in the face of resistance from the president’s closest advisors and family, who insisted that he was fine.

“Those of us who agreed with Jill Biden’s actual assessment (i.e., people who could see and hear) were told by the Bidens and the campaign and the online dead-enders that we were all wildly overreacting and that his debate performance was fine -- even good!” Barack Obama’s former speechwriter Jon Favreau wrote.

“I think this is how most voters felt while watching that debate, and why it was obvious that Biden had to drop out of the race,” Favreau’s co-host Tommy Vietor added. “The impression left by Biden’s performance was unfixable, and pretending otherwise was insulting to voters.”

As the MS NOW correspondent Akayla Gardner noted, immediately after the debate, Jill Biden stood on stage with Joe Biden and told him: “you did such a great job; you answered every question, you knew all the facts!”

The day before Donald Trump’s first term ended in 2021, he inked a pardon for Elliott Broidy, a scandal-plagued Republican fundraiser and former Republican National Committee official who had pleaded guilty three months earlier to trying to illegally lobby Trump and his administration.

Last month, a company headed by Broidy won a $106m contract from the Department of Justice, according to federal contracting records.

Under the contract, awarded by the Bureau of Prisons to LEO Technologies, the company will use artificial intelligence to translate, transcribe and monitor prison phone calls. Broidy lists himself as the founder and CEO of LEO.

In a letter to the Guardian, LEO’s attorneys said Broidy sets the strategy of the company but does not run the day-to-day operations.

The company has previously won awards in state and local prison systems, but the new contract with the Bureau of Prisons marks the first time it is doing business with the federal government. On its website, the Texas-based company says that prisoners’ phone calls “represent the world’s largest concentration of criminally-minded activity – all on recorded lines, all legally accessible”.

Ken Paxton’s clear victory in a Texas runoff – the widest primary defeat of an incumbent US senator in almost five decades – highlights the extraordinary loyalty Trump continues to command over his base. But Democrats are still optimistic that Paxton’s extremism and scandal-riddled past will bring disenchanted Cornyn voters to their camp.

Paxton’s confirmation has bolstered Democratic optimism that the party is in with a shot of winning statewide office in Texas for the first time in more than three decades, with the help of old guard Republicans and Latino voters switching back from the GOP.

Donald Trump indicated on Wednesday that he plans to attend this year’s NBA finals after the New York Knicks clinched their place in the championship series earlier this week.

Trump, a New York native, has counted James Dolan, who owns the Knicks, the NHL’s Rangers and Madison Square Garden, as a friend and a campaign donor in recent years. The president said he had been invited to the finals by Dolan and “numerous” others.

“Jim Dolan’s great guy, [he], as you know owns … Madison Square Garden. He’s having a good year. Boy, what a team. They won all their games. They really have some great players,” the president told reporters during a cabinet meeting. “I think I’ll be going to one of the games, yeah. I was invited by numerous people and Jim – and I think I’ll be going. Great to see. The Knicks have really, they’ve really suffered for years. They’re doing right now very well.”

Republican leaders rushed to throw their weight behind Ken Paxton following his big primary victory in Texas over the four-term US senator, John Cornyn, amid anxiety within the party over his prospects in November’s general election.

Hours after the race was called, Donald Trump – who backed Paxton, despite intense concern among establishment Republicans – took to Truth Social to attack his Democratic rival in the midterm elections.

James Talarico “may be the worst Texas candidate I have ever seen”, said the US president, claiming the Austin state representative and Democratic nominee for Texas senator was weak on crime and an advocate for open borders.

Reaching for a favored Republican attack line against Talarico, Trump claimed he was a vegan who “dislikes meat, not exactly a good way to be if you’re wanting to win an Election in Texas”.

For the full story, click here:

Three Democratic state attorneys general said their deputies were turned away from a roundtable hosted by JD Vance on Tuesday, sowing confusion about what the White House has billed as a bipartisan crackdown on fraud.

After attorneys general – including New York’s Letitia James, California’s Rob Bonta and New Jersey’s Jennifer Davenport – declined a last-minute invitation to participate in the event alongside their Republican counterparts, they said representatives from their offices travelled to Washington to attend, but were shut out.

“My deputy attorney general went to Washington DC today, and unfortunately was not allowed access to the meeting,” James told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday, after Vance convened more than a dozen Republican state attorneys general as part of the White House’s campaign to root out fraud in government programs.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment. In his remarks at the roundtable on Tuesday, Vance, chair of the White House taskforce to eliminate fraud, said representatives from the Democratic state attorneys general offices in Oregon and Connecticut were present.

For the full story, click here:

Former attorney general Pam Bondi revealed that she was recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

In an interview with CNN, Bondi, who was ousted by Trump in April over her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, shared that she has already undergone surgery and is still recovering and “doing well, though.”

Although Bondi is no longer leading the justice department, Trump has tapped her for another influential role within his administration, Axios reports.

She will now serve on the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a group helping shape federal policy on artificial intelligence and technology.

“Pam has been an enormously valuable asset to the president’s team, and I’m thrilled for her and for all of us that she’s going to remain involved in confronting some of the most important issues the administration faces,” vice president JD Vance said, according to Axios.

Trump also said he wants to change the the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to NICE.

Since retaking office last January, ICE raids under the leadership of Trump have disrupted families across the country, led to widespread protests as well as multiple killings including to US citizens in Minnesota.

Yet during the cabinet meeting, Trump said: “I’d love to change the name called NICE,” before falsely claiming that protestors against the often violent violent immigration raids are paid actors.

In response to a question about whether his administration feels any urgency to strike a deal with Iran amid rising US gas prices linked to the US’s war on Iran, Trump dismissed the concern.

Instead, he said: “I’ll tell you, the primary urgency I have, I said this, it wasn’t covered properly, but the primary urgency is that we can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon, but at the same time we have a tremendous amount of oil, gas, coal. We have tremendous amounts of energy, we’re blessed with something very special.”

“Those prices are going to come down, they’re going to come down fast,” he added.

Trump has called for the numbers of US National Guard troops deployed across Washington DC to not be lowered.

“Keep them, and don’t lower the number, either. Somebody said, ‘Oh, are there less?’ I said, ‘I hope not, but don’t lower the number, if you don’t mind,” Trump said.

In response, defense secretary Pete Hegseth said: “We’re going to surge this summer too.”

Defense secretary Pete Hegseth is now speaking on Iran, saying that the US has imposed a “world-class blockade” on the country.

“They may have missiles, but they can’t build more right now, and they can’t build more drones right now, and they can’t build more ships, and so they came and cried uncle to talk,” Hegseth said.

“We know from intel that their economy is hurting big time, because that is their lifeblood again bringing them to the table, so whether it is through the efforts of your negotiators that ensure that they never have a new weapon, or we have to go back to the War Department to finish the job, we’re prepared to do that,” Hegseth added, addressing Trump.

On oil, interior secretary Doug Burgum said that the US has opened up lease sales on public land for further drilling.

“When we’re drilling on public land, those companies pay a royalty, and that money comes to all of our citizens, and it goes to local school districts, and it goes to states,” Burgum said.

“This is an opportunity for us to bring prosperity and affordability here at home, but also bring peace abroad,” he added.

Climate activists and Indigenous communities have warned that expanding oil drilling on public land could deepen the climate crisis and damage already fragile ecosystems across the US.

Trump briefly interjected Marco Rubio’s briefing, saying that the US is “producing right now more oil by double than Russia and Saudi Arabia combined.”

He then added: “We don’t need oil, we don’t need the straits, we don’t need anything but we have more oil now being produced by double, by two times than Russia and Saudi Arabia combined.”

Trump had previously threatened Iran, warning that “a whole civilization will die” if Tehran refused to comply with US demands to reopen the Strait of Hormuz - a critical chokepoint for global oil shipments.