Democrats condemn McCarthy for handing Capitol attack footage to Tucker Carlson – live

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A day after he confirmed he would seek another term next year in what is sure to be a closely fought contest, Montana’s Democratic senator Jon Tester had a new message for Americans: I only have seven fingers.

Don’t take it from us, take it from him:

The culprit was a meat ginder. And no, this is not the first time he brought the childhood accident up on the campaign trail.

At her daily briefing, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg from those who say he waited too long to visit East Palestine, Ohio.

Republicans have argued Buttigieg shirked his duties by not visiting the village that’s been grappling with the aftermath of a chemical spill sooner. Here’s what Jean-Pierre had to say about that:

Hugo Lowell reports on the latest developments in the saga over Mike Pence’s testimony, or otherwise, in the US justice department investigation of January 6 and related election subversion…

The special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election issued a motion to compel testimony from Mike Pence in recent days – after the Trump legal team sought to block his appearance on executive privilege grounds, sources familiar with the matter said.

The compulsion motion against Pence marks a pre-emptive move by the special counsel to rebut the executive privilege arguments before Pence had even made an appearance before the federal grand jury in Washington DC pursuant to a subpoena issued last month, the sources said.

While Pence has suggested he would contest the subpoena, the Guardian has previously reported that is understood to involve him at least appearing before the grand jury and asserting the so-called speech or debate protection for congressional officials to specific questions.

The Trump special counsel, Jack Smith, appears to have issued the motion to compel – earlier reported by CBS News – not in response to Pence’s expected actions, but in response to a recent executive privilege motion filed in the case by Trump’s legal team seeking to stop Pence testifying in the investigation.

Full story:

Adam Gabbatt takes a look at what Tucker Carlson has said about the January 6 attack, and what he might say next now Kevin McCarthy has given the Fox News host 44,000 hours of Capitol security footage…

In the two years since the US Capitol attack, Tucker Carlson has described the violent assault on American democracy connected to the deaths of nine people as “vandalism” and a “forgettably minor” outbreak of “mob violence”.

The Fox News host has said the attack on Congress by supporters of Donald Trump, which has prompted more than 900 arrests, was a “false flag” operation, part of alleged persecution of conservatives by shady government forces. Carlson even devoted much of a conspiracy-laden TV series to undermining the severity of the attack.

It is not difficult to imagine, then, what Carlson might do with the 44,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from January 6 handed to him exclusively by Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House speaker. In fact Carlson gave an indication on his show on Monday night.

“Our producers, some of our smartest producers, have been looking at this stuff and trying to figure out what it means and how it contradicts or not the story we’ve been told for more than two years,” Carlson said.

He added: “We think already in some ways that it does contradict that story.”

Read on:

A Texas man who assaulted a police officer during the US Capitol riot and also threatened the New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was sentenced on Wednesday to 38 months in prison.

Garret Miller, 36 and from Richardson, Texas, was “at the forefront of every barrier overturned, police line overrun, and entryway breached within his proximity” on January 6 and was twice detained outside the building, prosecutors said.

On the night after the riot, he tweeted: “Assassinate AOC.”

As the Associated Press reports, when Miller was arrested at his home near Dallas two weeks after the riot, he “was wearing a shirt that read ‘I Was There, Washington DC, January 6, 2021’, with a picture of President Donald Trump on it.

“… Miller has already spent more than two years behind bars since his arrest, and with credit for good behavior he’s expected to serve another eight months, according to his lawyer, F Clinton Broden”.

More than 1,000 people have been charged over the Capitol attack. Slightly under half have, like Miller, pleaded guilty.

Miller has also expressed remorse. His lawyer, Broden, told the AP: “It should be always be remembered that although Garret is fully responsible for his individual actions that day, his actions and the actions of many others were a product of rhetoric from a cult leader that has yet to be brought to justice.

“Garret Miller was not the name on the flag carried by those who invaded our Capitol on this dark day in our nation’s history.”

That, of course, was Trump. The former president was impeached for inciting the insurrection but acquitted as enough Senate Republicans stayed loyal. He is still under investigation by the US justice department, to which the House January 6 committee made four criminal referrals.

Regardless, Trump remains the favourite to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

David DePape, the suspect in the attack last year on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the then House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is due to appear in state court on 12 April, his public defender said earlier.

DePape faces state and federal charges over the attack, in which Pelosi was attacked with a hammer and seriously wounded.

Here’s some reading about the case – and how politicians and pundits on the right sought to capitalise on it, and then retreated:

The day so far

Democrats are crying foul after Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy sent about 40,000 hours of footage of the January 6 insurrection to Tucker Carlson – Fox News’s best-known conservative commentator, who has repeatedly downplayed the attack. Meanwhile in court, former vice-president Mike Pence is planning his strategy to quash a subpoena from the special prosecutor investigating the insurrection, among other things, while Republican lawmaker Scott Perry is trying to stop the justice department from accessing his cellphone.

Here’s what else has happened today so far:

• Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg visited the Ohio village where a train derailment has sparked fears of toxic contamination, and expressed regret for not stopping by sooner.

• The United States has seen a disturbing streak of extremism-driven mass killings, a new report found.

• The latest Twitter feud is between New York mayor Eric Adams and congressman and fabulist George Santos.

In Florida, authorities have released the name of a journalist who was one of two people shot dead near the scene of a murder earlier that same day, the Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:

A Florida journalist killed near Orlando on Wednesday was identified as 24-year-old Dylan Lyons.

Lyons, a reporter for Spectrum News 13, was fatally shot on Wednesday afternoon while at the scene of a murder. Officials said Keith Melvin Moses, 19, shot Lyons and a colleague before walking into a nearby home and shooting a woman and her nine-year-old daughter. The girl died.

Lyons’ colleague, Jesse Walden, a photographer, was in critical condition but able to speak with investigators, according to Greg Angel, a station news anchor.

John Mina, the Orange county sheriff, said Moses ambushed Lyons and Walden as they were at the scene of a murder Moses is accused of committing. It was not clear if Moses knew Lyons and Walden were members of the media.

Mass killings linked to extremism in the United States are on the rise, as are the number of victims of these incidences, according to a new report. Here’s the latest on that, from the Associated Press:

The number of US mass killings linked to extremism over the past decade was at least three times higher than the total from any other 10-year period since the 1970s, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

The ADL report also found that all extremist killings identified in 2022 were linked to rightwing extremism, with an especially high number linked to white supremacy.

They include a racist mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, that killed 10 Black people and a mass shooting that killed five people at an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs.

“It is not an exaggeration to say that we live in an age of extremist mass killings,” the report from the ADL Center on Extremism says.

Between two and seven extremism-related mass killings occurred every decade from the 1970s to the 2000s but in the 2010s that number rocketed to 21, the report found.

The trend has continued with five extremist mass killings in 2021 and 2022, as many as there were during the 2000s.

The number of victims has risen too. Between 2010 and 2020, 164 people died in ideological extremist-related mass killings, according to the report. That was much more than in any other decade except the 1990s, when the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City killed 168.

Buttigieg acknowledges delayed response to Ohio train derailment

In his visit to the Ohio community where a freight train’s derailment earlier this month sparked fears of severe pollution, transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg expressed regret for not speaking out about the disaster sooner:

The stop in the village of East Palestine by Buttigieg, who is considered a rising star in the Democratic party and was a candidate in the 2020 presidential election, came less than a day after an appearance by Donald Trump, where the former president criticized the Biden administration:

Democrats have hit back at Trump, saying he rolled back safety regulations on the railroad and chemical industries during his time in the White House:

Not 24 hours after Donald Trump came and went from East Palestine, Ohio, transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg paid a visit to the scene of the freight train derailment that spilled toxic chemicals in the community.

Here’s a clip of his visit, from CNN: