White House condemns appointments of far-right Republicans to House oversight panel – as it happened

That’s it for today’s US politics live blog!

Here’s what happened so far:

• Kamala Harris will be traveling to Florida on Sunday to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Roe v Wade, said the White House. White House officials have said that Harris will give a speech while in the Sunshine state, as local Democrats have battled against attempts to restrict abortion access from Republican governor Ron DeSantis, reported Associated Press.

• Trump is still the most popular man in the GOP, a new survey found.

• The Biden administration condemned the appointment of several far-right Republicans to the House committee overseeing investigations, Axios reports.

• Donald Trump is said to be planning a return to both Twitter and Facebook. The former president had his Facebook account locked following the January 6 insurrection, while Twitter did the same until its new owner Elon Musk reversed the ban after buying the platform last year.

• Trump claimed that classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago were just a bunch of cheap folders.

Thank you for reading! See you here tomorrow for more US live coverage.

During today’s White House press briefing, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded to questions about Representative George Santos being given committee positions, despite allegations that Santos fabricated several qualifications and life experiences.

From Real Clear News Philip Melanchthon Wegmann:

Kamala Harris will be traveling to Florida on Sunday to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Roe v Wade, said the White House.

White House officials have said that Harris will give a speech while in the Sunshine state, as local Democrats have battled against attempts to restrict abortion access from Republican governor Ron DeSantis, reported Associated Press.

“The Vice President will make very clear: the fight to secure women’s fundamental right to reproductive health care is far from over,” said Harris spokesperson Kirsten Allen in a statement. “She will lay out the consequences of extremist attacks on reproductive freedom in states across our country and underscore the need for Congress to codify Roe.”

The speech is one of many actions Harris has taken in recent months to signal the White House’s commitment to reproductive rights, including meeting with activists, healthcare providers, and local lawmakers, AP further reported.

Read the full article here.

The Associated Press reports that a longtime adviser to Donald Trump and organizer of conservative causes is being sued for allegedly groping a staffer for former GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker:

A staffer for Herschel Walker’s Republican Senate campaign filed a lawsuit against the prominent conservative activist Matt Schlapp on Tuesday, accusing Schlapp of groping him during a car ride in Georgia before last year’s midterm election.

Schlapp denies the allegation. His lawyer said they were considering a countersuit.

The battery and defamation lawsuit was filed in Alexandria circuit court in Virginia, where Schlapp lives, and seeks more than $9m in damages.

It accuses Schlapp of “aggressively fondling” the staffer’s “genital area in a sustained fashion” while the staffer drove Schlapp back to his hotel from a bar in October, on the day of a Walker campaign event.

The allegations were first reported by the Daily Beast.

A ex-New York prosecutor has written a book he says will provide an “inside account” of the Manhattan district attorney’s case against Donald Trump, and his former boss is not pleased.

Publisher Simon & Schuster last week announced it would on 7 February release “People vs. Donald Trump” by Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor in the office of the Manhattan district attorney, who after resigning last year said he believed Trump “is guilty of numerous felony violations”. In a synopsis of the book, Pomerantz says his work was used in district attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of the Trump organization and its former finance chief Allen Weisselberg, but he decided to quit when Bragg refused to pursue “a larger criminal case” against the former president.

“In People vs. Donald Trump, Pomerantz tells the story of his unprecedented investigation, why he believes Donald Trump should be prosecuted, and what we can learn about the nature of justice in America from this extraordinary case,” according to the synopsis.

At last week’s sentencing of the Trump organization after it was found guilty of tax fraud, Bragg hinted that his investigation is continuing, and his office today sent a letter to Simon & Schuster warning the Pomerantz could break the law if he discloses details of the case.

The Daily Beast obtained a copy of the letter, in which Bragg offers to review the book before publication:

Republicans have lost an election finance complaint against Google, in which they alleged the tech giant violated US law by deploying its spam filter against campaign emails, Ars Technica reports.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) rejected a complaint filed jointly by the Republican National Committee (RNC), National Republican Senatorial Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee which alleged Google’s filtering of their emails represent an “illegal in-kind contributions made by Google to Biden For President and other Democrat candidates.”

Last week, the FEC ruled that there was “no reason to believe” Google had made an illegal contribution, nor that Joe Biden’s presidential campaign had accepted such a contribution.

“The Commission’s bipartisan decision to dismiss this complaint reaffirms that Gmail does not filter emails for political purposes,” Google said in a statement to Ars Technica on Tuesday.

The Republican complaint cited a study from North Carolina State University (NCSU) that found “Gmail marks a significantly higher percentage (67.6 percent) of emails from the right as spam compared to the emails from left (just 8.2 percent).”

However, the FEC rejected that assertion, saying there were several limitations to the study, and “the NCSU Study does not make any findings as to the reasons why Google’s spam filter appears to treat Republican and Democratic campaign emails differently.”

Google’s trouble with the Republicans aren’t over. In October, the RNC sued the company, saying it is “throttling its email messages because of the RNC’s political affiliation and views.”

A woman who helped attack the US Capitol on January 6 was indeed simply following Donald Trump’s orders but that fact does not absolve her of her culpability, a federal judge found.

The opinion came in an 18-page ruling spelling out why Danean MacAndrew was guilty of violent entry and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building.

Prosecutors persuaded the judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, that MacAndrew recorded video of herself storming the Capitol along with other Trump supporters in a failed attempt to prevent certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential win.

In her ruling on Tuesday, Kollar-Kotelly found that MacAndrew traveled to Washington DC from California because Trump urged supporters to somehow overturn his defeat.

MacAndrew ignored signs on the way to the Capitol and in the building itself which warned that her actions were unlawful, and therefore she was guilty as charged, Kollar-Kotelly concluded after a three-day bench trial.

The ruling could have important implications. It echoes the central finding by the House January 6 committee which recommended Trump be charged criminally in connection with the Capital attack, because of how he urged his supporters to stage it.

Trump has not been charged but prosecutors have not said he will not face charges.

Others charged over the Capitol attack have defended themselves by saying they were following Trump’s orders. Such cases include five members of the far-right Proud Boys group currently on trial on charges of sedition who say they are being scapegoated for following Trump’s orders, because they are easier to prosecute than a former president.

Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling in effect says obeying orders from Trump is a valid argument but does not get the accused off the hook.

MacAndrew is among more than 940 people charged over the Capitol attack. About 540 have been convicted. MacAndrew’s sentence has not yet been handed down.

Interesting reporting from CNN about how the White House is formulating its strategy for answering Republican attacks over Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents after leaving the vice-presidency in 2017, particularly in light of claims of hypocrisy and unfair treatment of Donald Trump, who retained many more documents when he left power two years ago and was markedly less keen to return them to the National Archives when they were discovered.

A key quote, from an unnamed adviser: “He’s the president. But he also knows what people really care about – and this isn’t it.”

Another key quote, from a “person familiar with the internal White House discussions”:

.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}I’m not sure anyone is comfortable saying they’ve put that behind them at this point. That said, there’s a pretty prevalent view that if this lands how they think, nobody will remember the mess of last week anyway.

CNN says “the clearest window” into White House thinking is a “barrage of attacks leveled from West Wing officials in the last 48 hours at House Republicans pledging their own investigations into the matter”.

.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Phrases targeting House Republicans that include ‘fake outrage’, ‘purely for partisan gain’ and ‘shamelessly hypocritical’ have started to animate a demonstrably more aggressive response from the West Wing.

In an example of that strategy, Ian Sams, spokesman for the White House counsel’s office, accused Republicans of ‘handing the keys of oversight to the most extreme MAGA members of the Republican caucus who promote violent rhetoric and dangerous conspiracy theories’.

Sams provided a statement to CNN. It said: “As we have said before, the Biden administration stands ready to work in good faith to accommodate Congress’ legitimate oversight needs. However, with these members joining the oversight committee, it appears that House Republicans may be setting the stage for divorced-from-reality political stunts, instead of engaging in bipartisan work on behalf of the American people.”

Reuters reports on a warning from the US energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, to Republicans in Congress, in which Granholm says limiting Joe Biden’s authority to tap US oil reserves would undermine national security, cause crude shortages and raise gasoline prices.

Here’s a taste of the Reuters report:

.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}A bill called the Strategic Production Response Act, introduced earlier this month by Republican Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, would limit presidential authority in releasing oil from the strategic reserve, except in the case of a severe energy supply interruption.

McMorris Rodgers now chairs the House energy and commerce committee after Republicans took over the chamber earlier this month.

“This bill would significantly weaken this critical energy security tool, resulting in more oil supply shortages in times of crisis and higher gasoline prices for Americans,” Granholm said in the letter to the House energy panel, which was first seen by Reuters.

The administration has faced bipartisan concern over the current inventories of the emergency reserves and the letter represents the administration’s latest efforts to defend its actions and ease concerns about the state of reserves.

Some further reading about Biden and oil:

Speaking of the culture wars in which Ron DeSantis so gleefully fights, here’s some lunchtime reading from our columnist Jill Filipovic about a key if somewhat surprising front in those seemingly never-ending wars…

Of all the political issues I assumed would come to the fore in 2023, gas stoves were not on my bingo card. And yet Americans’ right to cook on an open gas flame has turned into a red-hot culture war issue. Conservatives are gearing up for a War of the Cooktops – and unfortunately, some Democrats aren’t helping.

Some five decades’ worth of studies have found that gas stoves are hazardous to human health, with a recent one suggesting that gas stoves in US homes may be to blame for nearly 13% of childhood asthma cases. Gas stoves are bad for the environment, too, powered as they are by fossil fuels.

This has led some liberal cities – Berkeley, California, and New York City – to mandate that some new buildings use electric over gas. But the blistering gas stove dispute really ignited when a commissioner at the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Richard Trumka Jr, told Bloomberg gas was a “hidden hazard” and that when it came to banning gas stoves, “any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned”.

Cue rightwing firestorm.

Read on:

In light of the Morning Consult poll, reported by Chris Stein here, which showed Donald Trump 17 points up on Ron DeSantis in the notional Republican primary for 2024 … some interesting work from the Daily Beast.

The site reports today on DeSantis’s decision to open a new front in his “war on woke” by going after … the NHL.

Yes, the NHL, a pro sports league where even the playing surface is white and where, the Beast points out, “the player base is 93% white, and until the hiring of Mike Grier by the San Jose Sharks earlier this month there had yet to be a Black general manager in the history of the sport” … has in DeSantis’s mind apparently “somehow become the new epitome of woke culture gone awry”.

DeSantis’s beef with the NHL is that around its forthcoming All-Star Game in Florida, it wanted to stage a jobs fair to benefit Floridians, and said it would welcome applications from employees in the following categories: “female, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latino, Indigenous, LGBTQIA+, and/or a person with a disability”.

On Friday, a DeSantis spokesman said: “Discrimination of any sort is not welcome in the state of Florida, and we do not abide by the woke notion that discrimination should be overlooked if applied in a politically popular manner or against a politically unpopular demographic.”

An unnamed Republican strategist told the Beast DeSantis “sees this issue as an easy one to use as an example of hypocrisy by folks on the left as well as another example of woke culture”, and insisted: “It’s a great play to make.”

But others were not so sure.

Stuart Stevens, a veteran Republican operative now an anti-Trump campaigner, told the Beast: “I’ve been in these rooms where political consultants get together, they try and say, ‘Well, what can we do to appeal to white voters without being just super-blatantly racist?’”

But, Stevens said, DeSantis’s swipe at the NHL showed “Republicans are losing culture wars at an exponential speed.

“What the NHL is doing bothers absolutely nobody in America … There was a time with Ronald Reagan, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’ So here’s Ron DeSantis standing in front of a hockey rink in Florida saying, what, exactly?

“I mean it’s just ridiculous. It makes him look very small.”

The White House is continuing its counteroffensive against the new GOP majority in the Congress’s lower chamber, encouraging Democrats to attack Republican economic proposals and criticizing the appointment of four rightwing lawmakers to the panel leading its investigation campaign. Elsewhere, Donald Trump is said to be planning a return to both Twitter and Facebook, and offered up a new explanation for the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago: they were just a bunch of cheap folders.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

• Trump is still the most popular man in the GOP, a new survey found.

• “If you’re going to have a party, you have to pay the band.” So says Republican senator John Kennedy, when describing the GOP’s stance in the high-stakes negotiations over raising the debt ceiling.

• Republicans have made cutting government spending their top priority in this Congress.

In posts on his Truth social account today, Donald Trump argued that the classified documents found last year at his Mar-a-Lago resort were merely “ordinary, inexpensive folders with various words printed on them”.

“The Fake News Media & Crooked Democrats (That’s been proven!) keep saying I had a “large number of documents” in order to make the Biden Classified Docs look less significant. When I was in the Oval Office, or elsewhere, & ‘papers’ were distributed to groups of people & me, they would often be in a striped paper folder with ‘Classified’ or ‘Confidential’ or another word on them,” the former president begins in the first of three posts arguing that Joe Biden’s possession of classified materials was more significant than his.

“When the session was over, they would collect the paper(s), but not the folders, & I saved hundreds of them,” Trump wrote. “Remember, these were just ordinary, inexpensive folders with various words printed on them, but they were a ‘cool’ keepsake.”

He then went on to posit that “the Gestapo” may have construed these as classified documents, or that “Trump Hating Marxist Thugs” would “plant” classified materials. Never one to beat around the bush, Trump concludes with, “I did NOTHING WRONG. JOE DID!”

Biden’s defenders have pointed to the substantial differences in the two cases, including that the president’s aides quickly alerted the justice department when they discovered classified materials, while Trump repeatedly dithered and only partially complied with a subpoena to turn over the secret documents in his possession.