January 6 panel could release report on Trump and Capitol attack before midterms – as it happened

The run-up to the 8 November midterms will be even more eventful than usual, after the January 6 committee made clear its plans to release more details of the attack on the Capitol in the weeks ahead. Meanwhile, a federal judge has approved the appointment of a special master to review documents seized by the government from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, while stopping the justice department from further examining them until the master has finished his work.

Here’s what else happened today:

• President Joe Biden will meet with the families of two Americans detained in Russia, while Moscow has yet to act on a reported prisoner-swap offer made to secure their freedom.

• The White House condemned GOP governors’ transportation of migrants to Washington, DC and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

• Donald Trump has apparently embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory to shore up his support base amid mounting legal problems.

• Lawmakers faced rancor and strife of all kinds, including a condemnation at a committee hearing, a feud on a flight and a kicking outside the Capitol.

• No, the White House did not hire a satanist as the deputy coordinator of its monkeypox response.

West Virginia’s Republican governor Jim Justice has signed a recently passed abortion ban into law, making it the latest state to crack down on the procedure after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last June.

The legislation approved by the GOP-controlled state legislature is intended to shut down the state’s only abortion clinic, but contains some exceptions for minors and victims of rape and incest.

Elsewhere on Thursday, the partisan venom went airborne, when Senator Ted Cruz encountered a supporter of Democrat Beto O’Rourke on a flight.

The Texas senator’s camera-wielding foe, whose identity remains unclear, captured their encounter on video, in which he challenged Cruz’s stance on gun control and asked him to name a victim of the May shooting in the town of Uvalde:

Cruz defeated O’Rourke when he stood against him for Senate in 2020. O’Rourke is currently trying to unseat Texas governor Greg Abbott, who is running for a third term.

The congressional tumult extended beyond committee chambers on Thursday, when video appeared to show rightwing Republican House representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicking an activist as they argued about gun control.

The Georgia lawmaker herself posted a lengthy video of the encounter. The alleged kicking happens at about the 1:15 mark:

The Washington Post has a write-up about the encounter between Voters of Tomorrow, a group representing Gen Z, and Greene, whom Democratic leadership booted from her committee assignments for a series of offensive remarks last year.

The entire encounter is reminiscent of what Greene used to do before being elected to Congress in 2020. She appeared in Washington the year prior to follow for several blocks and heckle gun control activist David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Florida.

Meanwhile in the House of Representatives, rancor was the order of the day in a Thursday committee hearing when one Republican lawmaker’s comments to a witness prompted a rebuke from his Democratic colleague.

“I’m trying to give you the floor, boo,” Republican Clay Higgins said as Raya Salter, a clean energy advocate, spoke before the House oversight committee.

New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not pleased by how her colleague from Louisiana treated Salter, who was talking about how the fossil fuel industry affected Black people and other racial minorities.

“In the four years that I’ve sat on this committee, I have never seen members of Congress, Republican or Democrat, disrespect a witness in the way that I have seen them disrespect you today,” Ocasio-Cortez told Salter. “Frankly, men who treat women like that in public – I fear how they treat them in private.”

In a statement to the Hill, Higgins said, “When radicals show up in front of my committee with an attitude talking anti-American trash, they can expect to get handled. I really don’t care if I hurt anybody’s feelings while I’m fighting to preserve our Republic.”

Here’s a video of the exchange:

Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis said bringing migrants to Democratic-led areas of the country was necessary to draw attention to the government’s failures at the southern border, Richard Luscombe reports:

Joe Biden has accused Ron DeSantis of “playing politics with people’s lives” for flying Venezuelan migrants to the wealthy liberal island community of Martha’s Vineyard without warning, while the legality of the Florida governor’s move is also under scrutiny.

In what immigration activists and Democratic politicians have decried as a “political stunt”, DeSantis, who is expected to run for the Republican party’s presidential nomination in 2024, arranged for two charter planes of about 50 migrant adults and children to fly from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday.

Claiming that “every community in America should be sharing in the burdens,” DeSantis told a press briefing he wanted to draw attention to what he claimed was a failure by the Biden administration to secure the US-Mexico border.

One migrant had to be taken to urgent care upon arriving in Washington. Another wasn’t aware that he was arriving on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard until his plane began its descent.

Those were some of the anecdotes White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre relayed as she continued her condemnation of Republicans governors sending migrants from the southern border to Democratic-run communities.

“This should not be happening,” she said. “Republican officials should not be using human beings as political pawns.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is echoing Joe Biden last night in slamming Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, after he arranged for a group of migrants from Venezuela to be flown to the small Massachusetts island, without warning to the state or a true explanation to the people being transported.

She said DeSantis did not notify Massachusetts that “migrant children, in need of food and shelter, were about to land on their doorstep.”

Jean-Pierre added: “These vulnerable migrants were misled about where they were headed.”

She said they were told they were going to Boston and misled about what benefits they would be provided when they arrived, “promised shelter, refuge benefits and more”.

She accused the Florida leader, and Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, who has unilaterally been bussing thousands of migrants awaiting the processing of their immigration applications in the US to Democratic-led cities New York, Washington and Chicago, of “the tactics of smugglers in places like Mexico and Guatemala”.

“And for what? A photo op? Because these governors care about creating political theater, not creating actual solutions,” Jean-Pierre fumed.

She accused Republicans of treating humans like “chattel in a cruel, pre-meditated political stunt”.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is due to brief the media shortly, in Washington DC. The session has been put back slightly from its original 1pm ET scheduling.

Joe Biden is due to meet South African president Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House early afternoon.

The US president plans to fly to the UK tomorrow, ahead of Queen Elizabeth’s state funeral on Monday.

But on Sunday he plans to have his first meeting with the brand new British prime minister, Liz Truss. She met the Queen as incoming prime minister just two days before the monarch’s death last Thursday, providing the world with the last official photographs of the Queen, at Balmoral, smiling and wearing a tartan skirt.

And as the campaigns rev up for the US midterm elections in early November, the White House has just said that Biden will hit the trail, traveling to Orlando, Florida, on Tuesday to attend a Democratic National Committee rally.

Then next Wednesday, Biden plans a major speech in New York at the United Nations general assembly, where he will expand on the theme he is hammering on this autumn – the battle between the forces of democracy and autocracy, including within the US.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has also now been confirmed as a speaker at UNGA and will address world leaders via a video-link from is country, embattled since the invasion by Russia six months ago.

If readers want to dive into live news of all the developments in the war, do follow our global blog on the topic, here.

And for news on Queen Elizabeth and the British royal family, as thousands queue to see the casket of the monarch as she lies in state in London, follow developments in our blog out of London, as they happen, here.

The run-up to the 8 November midterms will be even more eventful than usual, after the January 6 committee made clear its plans to release more details of the attack on the Capitol in the weeks ahead. Meanwhile, a federal judge has approved the appointment of a special master to review documents seized by the government from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, while stopping the justice department from further examining them until the master has finished his work.

Here’s what else has happened today:

• President Joe Biden will meet with the families of two Americans detained in Russia, while Moscow has yet to act on a reported prisoner-swap offer made to secure their freedom.

• Donald Trump has apparently embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory to shore up his support base amid mounting legal problems.

• No, the White House did not hire a satanist as the deputy coordinator of its monkeypox response.

One of the biggest outstanding questions the January 6 committee is trying to answer is what the Secret Service knew about the attack, and why agents acted the way they did as the Capitol was being stormed.

Questions have swirled around the Secret Service as its actions were brought to light, particularly after it was revealed that it deleted much of agents’ communications from around the time of the insurrection. Bloomberg reports that the committee has obtained documents, text messages and other materials from the Secret Service that could answer some of those questions. “It’s a combination of a number of text messages, radio traffic, that kind of thing. Thousands of exhibits,” the committee’s chair Bennie Thompson said earlier this week.

It was unclear if any of what had been turned over were the communications from January 5 and 6 that were reported as erased. Another committee member, Zoe Lofgren, said some of what had been obtained was “relevant”.

The House committee investigating January 6 plans to release preliminary findings into the attack on the Capitol sometime in October, meaning voters may be digesting new details of the insurrection as the midterms approach, Axios reports.

The committee has tentative plans to hold its first public hearing since July on 28 September, and Axios reports that its members are meeting today to flesh out the rest of their schedule. The Democratic chair Bennie Thompson said an early version of its report into the attack will come out in October. “The goal is to have … some information pushed out, obviously, before the November election,” he said, adding that the time between the late-September hearing and the 8 November election “won’t be a quiet period.”

The committee’s public hearings held in June and July dredged up highly publicized details of the attack and Donald Trump’s actions before, during and after that put the former president and his Republican allies on the defensive. That dynamic may repeat in the two months ahead, assuming the committee is able to match its earlier revelations.

For a sense of how the committee is thinking in relation to its impact on the midterms, here are the thoughts of one of its Democratic members, Jamie Raskin: “There are those partisans of former President Trump that will denounce anything we do, so we’re not going to jump through hoops to please people who will call anything we do partisan.”

If there’s one thing Donald Trump likes, it’s people who like him. The Associated Press reports that the former president has reached out to a new group of friends: QAnon supporters.

While saying as recently as 2020 that he didn’t know much about the convoluted conspiracy theory-turned-movement, he has lately made several social media posts embracing some of its ideas. The AP reports that it may be a way to shore up his support base as he deals with an array of legal troubles, like the Mar-a-Lago investigation:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The former president may be seeking solidarity with his most loyal supporters at a time when he faces escalating investigations and potential challengers within his own party, according to Mia Bloom, a professor at Georgia State University who has studied QAnon and recently wrote a book about the group.

“These are people who have elevated Trump to messiah-like status, where only he can stop this cabal,” Bloom told the AP on Thursday. “That’s why you see so many images (in online QAnon spaces) of Trump as Jesus.”

On Truth Social, QAnon-affiliated accounts hail Trump as a hero and savior and vilify President Joe Biden by comparing him to Adolf Hitler or the devil. When Trump shares the content, they congratulate each other. Some accounts proudly display how many times Trump has “re-truthed” them in their bios.

By using their own language to directly address QAnon supporters, Trump is telling them that they’ve been right all along and that he shares their secret mission, according to Janet McIntosh, an anthropologist at Brandeis University who has studied QAnon’s use of language and symbols.

It also allows Trump to endorse their beliefs and their hope for a violent uprising without expressly saying so, she said, citing his recent post about “the storm” as a particularly frightening example.

A survey published earlier this year found that belief in QAnon has surged ever since Trump left the White House.