January 6 panel releases transcripts of key witness Cassidy Hutchinson – as it happened

We’re closing the live politics blog now, but look out for our news report later on the January 6 committee’s final report, assuming the panel sticks to its word and publishes it today.

Even without the report, it’s been a busy day. The select committee did release transcripts of the two-day deposition of Cassidy Hutchinson, aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and a key witness during public hearings this summer.

Hutchinson spoke of a campaign of pressure on her by White House attorneys, including one paid by Trump, to give misleading testimony.

Here’s what else we followed:

• The Senate voted 68-29 to pass the $1.7tn omnibus spending bill that will keep the government funded for another year. The House is expected to take up the bill later on Thursday, and Joe Biden must sign it before a Friday deadline to avert a government shutdown.

• Arizona governor Doug Ducey said he’d take down a makeshift wall made of shipping containers at the Mexico border, settling a lawsuit and political tussle with the US government over trespassing on federal lands.

• Newly elected New York congressman George Santos, whose life story has come under question since the Republican’s midterms victory last month, said he’ll address those concerns next week.

• Former president George W Bush issued a statement condemning the Taliban for pulling the plug on university education for women in Afghanistan, accusing the country’s ruling party of treating women as “second-class citizens”.

Joe Biden will speak from the White House at 4pm ET Thursday with a Christmas message.

The president’s address, the White House said in a memo, will be “focused on what unites us as Americans, his optimism for the year ahead, and wishing Americans joy in the coming year”.

You can watch the Biden Christmas address here.

The governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, will take down a makeshift wall made of shipping containers at the Mexico border, settling a lawsuit and political tussle with the US government over trespassing on federal lands.

The Associated Press reports that the Biden administration and the Republican governor entered into an agreement under which Arizona will cease installing the containers in any national forest, according to court documents filed in US district court in Phoenix.

The agreement also calls for Arizona to remove containers already installed in the remote San Rafael Valley, in south-eastern Cochise county, by 4 January and without damaging any natural resources. State agencies will have to consult with US Forest Service representatives.

Read the full story:

George W Bush, the president who ordered US forces into Afghanistan as part of the global war on terror, has issued a statement condemning the Taliban for pulling the rug on university education for Afghan women.

In a statement from his office in Crawford, Texas, the 76-year-old former commander in chief and former first lady Laura Bush said their “hearts are heavy for the people of Afghanistan”:

.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}We are especially sad for Afghan women and girls, who are enduring terrible hardship under the brutal Taliban regime. Just this week, all Afghan women were banned from studying at university. Many were turned away from their jobs in schools; others were prevented from worshiping in mosques and seminaries.

And in the latest assault on human rights in the country, we fear for young girls being barred from school entirely. Treating women as second-class citizens, depriving them of their universal human rights, and denying them the opportunity to better themselves and their communities should generate outrage among all of us.

For Afghans who were forced to flee their homes, these attacks remind us of our responsibility to help those who’ve helped us over the last two decades, including the evacuees here in the United States. Afghans, like people around the world, simply want to live in freedom and provide a better future for their children.

Laura and I, along with the team at the Bush Center, pray that 2023 will bring a better time for the people of Afghanistan and those fighting for freedom everywhere.

Other former world leaders have also been vocal. In an opinion piece for the Guardian, Gordon Brown, the United Nations special envoy for global education, and most recent Labour prime minister, said the Taliban’s ruling had done “more in a single day to entrench discrimination against women and girls and set back their empowerment than any other single policy decision I can remember”.

Read more:

Senators have just voted 68-29 to pass the $1.7tn omnibus spending bill that will keep the government funded for another year.

The House is expected to take up the bill later on Thursday, with the outgoing Democratic majority likely to pass it in one of its last acts before ceding control of the chamber to Republicans next month.

Politicians are facing a midnight Friday deadline to get the measure to Joe Biden’s desk before parts of the government would have to shut down through lack of funding.

“There are so many good things in the bill it’s hard to get them all out,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said.

“We’ve concluded this Congress, one of the most disruptive in decades, with one of the best omnibus packages in decades.”

George Santos says he’ll address questions “next week” about an allegedly fantastical biography the newly-elected New York congressman presented to voters in last month’s midterms.

Speculation has grown in recent days that the Republican may not have been entirely truthful in statements about his background, education and achievements. His beaten Democratic opponent, Robert Zimmerman, said Santos “was running a scam against the voters”.

“To the people of #NY03 I have my story to tell and it will be told next week. I want to assure everyone that I will address your questions and that I remain committed to deliver the results I campaigned on; Public safety, Inflation, Education & more,” Santos said in a Thursday afternoon tweet.

Santos had claimed his grandfather escaped the Holocaust; that he had worked at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs; that he had graduated from Baruch College; and that he ran a non-profit, tax-exempt pet rescue group.

Every one of the claims has been disproved, according to research by, among others, the New York Times and CNN.

Santos, who beat Zimmerman by eight points in November, became the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent, the Times reported.

More, from Maya Yang, on how Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump’s only current rival for the next Republican presidential nomination, has appointed a judge previously ousted over a controversial ruling in which he denied a teenager an abortion, citing her school grades.

DeSantis appointed Jared Smith to the newly established sixth district court of appeal, an appointment which will begin on 1 January 2023. Smith was previously a judge on the Hillsborough county court, until he was ousted in August after his decision on the abortion-related case.

In January, Smith ruled that a 17-year-old was unfit to obtain an abortion as he questioned her “overall intelligence”.

According to Florida law, both parental notification and consent is required in order for a minor to receive an abortion. In the teenager’s case, she asked the court to waive the requirement.

The requirement can be waived if the court finds “by clear and convincing evidence, that the minor is sufficiently mature to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy”.

In his ruling, Smith cited the teenager’s grades as a factor in his decision to deny her the abortion.

“Addressing her ‘overall intelligence’ … the court found her intelligence to be less than average because ‘[w]hile she claimed that her grades were ‘Bs’ during her testimony, her GPA is currently 2.0. Clearly, a ‘B’ average would not equate to a 2.0 GPA,’” Smith wrote.

Smith also questioned the teenager’s “emotional development and stability, and ability to accept responsibility”.

“This court has long recognized that the trial court’s findings … may support a determination that the minor did not prove that she was sufficiently mature to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy,” he wrote.

An appeals court overturned the ruling. In August, Smith lost his re-election bid against Nancy Jacobs, a Tampa criminal defense and family law attorney.

Speaking of impending investigations of Hunter Biden, the president’s son has hired a well-known Washington lawyer, who represented Jared Kushner in Congress as well as during the investigation of Russian election interference and links between Donald Trump and Moscow, to advise him during his looming congressional combat.

The younger Biden “has retained Abbe Lowell to help advise him and be part of his legal team to address the challenges he is facing,” another attorney, Kevin Morris, told news outlets on Wednesday.

“Lowell is a well-known Washington based attorney who has represented numerous public officials and high-profile people in Department of Justice investigations and trials as well as congressional investigations. [For Hunter Biden] Mr Lowell will handle congressional investigations and general strategic advice.”

Lowell has worked across the political divide, representing Democrats including Bob Menendez, a New Jersey senator, and the former senator and vice-presidential nominee John Edwards, both in corruption cases that ended in mistrials, and acting as chief minority counsel to House Democrats in the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Recently, Lowell represented Tom Barrack, a Trump ally acquitted in a foreign lobbying case.

Lowell, 70, has said that to be a trial lawyer, “you have to have a desire to be a performer at some level. If I hadn’t done this, it would have been Broadway”.

But his work for Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and chief adviser, brought an uncomfortable sort of spotlight. Writing in the American Lawyer in late 2020, Lowell suggested criticism of his work for another client was generated “primarily because I later represented … the president’s son-in-law.

“The resulting news coverage, and especially the more sensational headlines, triggered the all-too-common flurry of hate mail, threatening voice mails and anonymous criticisms for doing the very job that attorneys are supposed to do.”

Full story:

Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a member of the January 6 committee and before that a House manager in the second impeachment of Donald Trump, will be the top Democrat on the House oversight committee in the next Congress.

Raskin beat Gerry Connolly of Virginia in a closed ballot on Capitol Hill.

So far, so inside Beltway baseball. But it’s an important vote to note nonetheless.

Raskin, who was a professor of constitutional law before entering Congress, has achieved a high profile and he will need to wield it to good effect in the oversight role from January, given Republicans’ declared intent to use the committee to launch investigations into Hunter Biden and other subjects designed to damage Joe Biden.

The current oversight chair, Carolyn Maloney of New York, will leave Congress shortly, having lost her primary this year.

James Comer of Kentucky, the incoming Republican chair, told reporters last month he intended to go on the offensive, by investigating whether family business activities have “compromise[d] US national security and President Biden’s ability to lead with impartiality”.

“We want the bank records and that’s our focus,” Comer said. “We’re trying to stay focused on: ‘Was Joe Biden directly involved with Hunter Biden’s business deals and is he compromised?’ That’s our investigation.”

Raskin’s work on the January 6 investigation is all but done. Now comes the next hefty task.

Here’s some further reading about Raskin, from our Washington bureau chief, David Smith:

White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson said she felt she had “Trump himself looking over my shoulder” as she discussed with her attorney her upcoming testimony to the January 6 committee earlier this year.

Hutchinson, an assistant to then-president Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, makes the revelation in a transcript of a deposition to the panel that was released on Thursday morning.

In it, Hutchinson, a star witness against Trump in public hearings of the committee this summer, outlines what she saw as sustained campaign of pressure by lawyers paid by Trump to get her to mislead the panel.

CNN reported on Wednesday that Stefan Passantino, the top ethics attorney in the White House at the time, allegedly advised Hutchinson to tell the committee that she did not recall details that she did over Trump’s efforts to reverse his defeat to Joe Biden.

According to the transcript, Hutchinson told the panel:

.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}It wasn’t just that I had Stefan sitting next to me; it was almost like I felt like I had Trump looking over my shoulder. Because I knew in some fashion it would get back to him if I said anything that he would find disloyal.

And the prospect of that genuinely scared me. You know, I’d seen this world ruin people’s lives or try to ruin people’s careers. I’d seen how vicious they can be.

Hutchinson, then 26, said she originally thought she was “fucked” because she couldn’t afford a lawyer after receiving a subpoena from the House committee, but was hooked up with Passantino through her White House contacts. It turned out that Passantino was being paid by a Trump political action committee.

Hutchinson also said that Passantino had never explicitly asked her to lie to the panel:

.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}I want to make this clear to you: Stefan never told me to lie. He specifically told me, ‘I don’t want you to perjure yourself, but ‘I don’t recall’ isn’t perjury. They don’t know want you can and can’t recall’.

But she said she felt increasingly pressured into misleading the panel. The relationship with Passantino soured, and ended, she said.

Read more:

The $1.7tn government spending bill could pass Congress as early as Thursday night after Democratic and Republican negotiators in the Senate appeared to strike a deal over certain amendments that were holding it up.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer announced the agreement to clear about 15 amendments, the Associated Press reported. Such amendments are subject to a 60-vote requirement and would ordinarily fail in the evenly divided chamber.

“It’s taken a while, but it is worth it,” Schumer said in announcing the series of votes, needed to lock in an expedited vote on final passage and get the bill to Joe Biden’s desk before a partial government shutdown would begin at midnight Friday.

The House will take up the bill after the Senate completes its work, the AP reports.

The massive bill includes about $772.5bn for non-defense, discretionary programs and $858bn for defense, and would finance the government through September.

Lawmakers were racing to get the bill approved before a shutdown could occur, and many were anxious to complete the task before a deep freeze and wintry conditions leave them stranded in Washington for the holidays. Many also want to lock in government funding before a new GOP-controlled House next year could make it harder to find compromise on spending.

Read more:

The full report from the January 6 House panel investigating Donald Trump’s insurrection has not yet materialized, but the committee has just published transcripts of the testimony of a key witness.

Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, gave some of the most dramatic, and damning testimony during a live public hearing in the summer.

She said Trump attempted to strangle his secret service agent and lunged for the steering wheel when he was told that he would not be driven to join the rioters he incited during the January 6 Capitol riot.

She gave further, closed doors testimony to the panel in September, released by the committee in two documents this morning. One from 14 September is here; and the other from the following day is here.

The first session lasted five and a half hours, and the second was two and half. There’s more than 200 pages of transcript here, but one episode sticks out, aboard Air Force One early on 5 January 2021, as Trump was flying back to Washington after “stop the steal” rallies in Georgia.

It would appear to allude to the plot to try to persuade vice-president Mike Pence to deny certification of Trump’s election defeat by Biden in Congress the following day, the infamous Capitol riot incited by Trump.

In a conference room meeting attended by, among others, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene, allies were talking up the scheme, and assuring Trump it would succeed, Hutchinson says.

But she says she then saw Meadows take Trump aside after the meeting and caution him thus: “In case we didn’t win this [the election] sir, and in case, like, tomorrow doesn’t go as planned, we’re gonna have to have a plan in place.”

According to Hutchinson, Trump replied: “There’s always that chance we didn’t win, but tomorrow’s gonna go well,” a potentially crucial admission that Trump already knew his defeat was not fraudulent.

Nancy Pelosi is delivering the final press conference of her long-time tenure as House speaker, and is reminiscing over all the memorable presidents she has served:

It’s safe to say that Madam Speaker has not suddenly become that forgetful as she prepares to stand down.

Kyrsten Sinema, Arizona’s Democratic-turned-independent senator, has always had a reputation as one of Washington’s more unconventional politicians. Now, it seems, she’s also one of the most demanding.

The Daily Beast has published details of what it says is a 37-page memo “intended as a guide for aides who set the schedule for and personally staff Sinema during her workdays in Washington and Arizona”.

It makes for quite a read, reminiscent of some of the more outlandish demands contained in the “riders” of various rock stars.

Sinema must always have a room temperature bottle of water at hand, the Beast says, citing the memo.

At the beginning of each week, her executive assistant must contact Sinema in Washington to “ask if she needs groceries,” and copy both the scheduler and chief of staff on the message to “make sure this is accomplished”.

Anyone booking her travel must avoid Southwest Airlines, never book her a seat near a bathroom, and never a middle seat, the Beast says.

And if the internet in Sinema’s private apartment fails, the executive assistant “should call Verizon to schedule a repair” and ensure a staffer is present to let a technician inside the property.

The allegations come just a week after Slate published a piece claiming Sinema was a prolific seller on Facebook’s online marketplace, listing mostly shoes and clothing.

The Beast said Sinema’s office said it couldn’t verify the document’s authenticity, which is not an outright denial, and said the information as published “is not in line with official guidance from [her] office and does not represent official policies of [the] office”.

You can read the Beast’s report here.

Never one to hide his opinions, however extreme, Fox News host Tucker Carlson did not share in the almost universal acclaim for Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s historic address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night.

“The president of Ukraine arrived at the White House, dressed like the manager of a strip club and started to demand money,” Carlson announced at the opening of his show on Wednesday, citing both Zelenskiy’s request for more western armaments and his trademark olive green military-style clothing.

“Amazingly, no one threw him out. Instead, they did whatever he wanted,” Carlson continued, fuming at the further $1.85bn in US aid for Ukraine, including, for the first time, advanced Patriot air defense missiles, announced by the Biden administration on Wednesday.

Right-wingers bashing US support for Ukraine as it fights to repel the 10-month-old invasion by Russia is nothing new. A number of politicians and celebrity figures such as Carlson have long questioned the tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers money committed so far.

But the howls of protest have become louder in recent weeks as Republicans prepare to take control of the House, and a further $44bn in emergency aid for Ukraine is included in the $1.7tn government spending package that looks on track for congressional passage today.

Ahead of November’s midterms, Republicans even hinted that if they won control, the stream of funding for Ukraine could be cut off, as reported by Axios, and others, in October.

On Wednesday night in the House, two notorious Republican extremists, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Matt Gaetz of Florida, remained sitting and unmoved as Zelenskiy spoke, while many party colleagues sprang to their feet in applause.

It caught the attention of Democratic New York congressman Ritchie Torres, who was not impressed with the pair’s antics, or Carlson’s comments for that matter.

“Tucker Carlson, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz stand with [Russian president Vladimir] Putin; most of America stands with Zelenskiy and the people of Ukraine. The contrast between the far right and most of America has never been more glaring,” he said in a tweet.

CNN is reporting that Senate negotiators for the Democrats and Republicans have struck a deal to secure passage of the $1.7tn government spending package.

A number of amendments are incorporated into the bill, reflecting a “furious push by Senate leaders to get this done,” the network reports.

We’ll have more details soon.

Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chaired the January 6 House panel, says its investigation into Donald Trump’s insurrection uncovered witnesses that not even the justice department could find.

In a revealing interview with MSNBC on Wednesday night, Thompson also said the bipartisan, nine-member committee took its time before referring the former president for criminal charges on Monday because it “wanted to get things right”.

Thompson, and Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair from Wyoming, will present their 800-page full report to Congress sometime today. The panel has already sent evidence to the justice department to assist its own parallel criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

Thompson told MSNBC:

.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}I am more comfortable with the fact that the special counsel has been actively engaged in pursuing any and all the information available. They have been in contact with our committee, asking us to provide various transcripts.

There were people that we deposed that justice had not deposed. There were electors in various states that justice couldn’t find. We found them. We deposed them.

So we had a lot of information, but now we make all that information available to them. And if they come back and want to interview staff or any members, ask any additional information, you know, we’ll be more than happy to do it.

Thompson also spoke emotionally about the demands of conducting an intensive, 18-month inquiry, and the reason it was necessary:

.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}It’s been difficult. I have spent many nights away from home. I’ve spent a lot of time just trying to figure out why, in the greatest democracy in the world, would people want to all of a sudden stow on the Capitol because they lost an election?

You know, normally in a democracy, you settle your differences at the ballot box. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but under no circumstances do you tear the city hall up, or the courthouse up, and, God forbid, the United States Capitol.

It was just something that for most Americans, it was beyond imagination. And so, it played out in real time. People could see it. And there are still a lot of people who can’t fathom why our people would do that.

You can view Thompson’s MSNBC interview here.

It’s a third day of reckoning this week for Donald Trump as the January 6 House committee releases the final report from its 18-month investigation into the former president’s insurrection.

Delayed from Wednesday, today’s publication of a dossier expected to run to 800 pages will expose in depth the extraordinary, and illegal efforts Trump employed to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

• On Monday, the panel held its final hearing and referred Trump to the justice department for four criminal charges, including engaging in or assisting an insurrection.

• And on Tuesday, a separate House panel voted to release tax returns that Trump had fought for three years to keep secret.

We already know from previous hearings much of the plotting and scheming that took place. Trump incited a mob that overran the US Capitol on January 6 2021, seeking to halt the certification of Biden’s victory; tried to manipulate states’ election results in his favor; and attempted to install slates of “fake electors” to reverse his defeat in Congress.

On Wednesday night, the House panel released transcripts of 34 witness interviews.

Subjects of the interview transcripts included Jeffrey Clark, a senior official in the Trump justice department; John Eastman, a conservative lawyer and an architect of Trump’s last-ditch efforts to stay in office; and former national security adviser Mike Flynn, who was convicted of lying to the FBI but pardoned by Trump.

Each invoked his fifth-amendment right against self-incrimination.

More transcripts are expected to be released today.

Panel member Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, told CBS: “I guarantee there’ll be some very interesting new information in the report, and even more so in the transcripts.”

Read more:

Good morning US politics blog readers. If you figured things were winding down for the Christmas holiday, think again.

Sometime today we will see the release of the full January 6 House committee report into Donald Trump’s insurrection, delayed from Wednesday for reasons unknown. But the panel did release transcripts of 34 witness interviews last night, many of which make interesting reading.

Also in Trump news, we’re learning the former president paid no federal tax at all in the final year of his administration.

Elsewhere, here’s what we’re following:

• There’s uncertainty over the passage of the bipartisan $1.7tn government spending package after early-hours drama in the Senate when Republicans threatened to blow up the deal over an immigration provision.

• Nancy Pelosi will give her last press conference, scheduled for 10.45am, before she stands down as speaker when Republicans take control of the chamber early next month.

• There’s reaction to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s powerful and historic address to to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night.

• Joe Biden has no public engagements scheduled, and no White House press briefing is listed, although that could change.

A reminder you can follow ongoing developments in the war in Ukraine in our live blog here.

Strap in and stick with us. It’s going to be a lively day.