Key events
The January 6 House panel investigating the Capitol attack, and Donald Trump’s insurrection, is set to meet in private on Friday to mull criminal charges against the former president.
The “walls closing in on Trump” headline has been written often, but this time with an elevated degree of peril for a man who recently announced his third run at the White House as a Republican.
A subcommittee formed in October to make recommendations will present its report to the full panel today, according to NPR, and a determination on recommending any particular action will follow in short order.
“We’ll just accept the report, and probably one day next week, make a decision one way or another,” Mississippi Democratic Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chair, told the network.
The committee is expected to release its final report around the middle of this month, and it is expected to focus heavily on Trump’s involvement in the Capitol attack and his potential culpability.
The Guardian reported last week that it has provoked something of a rift between panel members, with some believing it concentrates too much on Trump himself, and not enough of alleged intelligence failures by the FBI that resulted in the Capitol being overrun by supporters he incited.
Members of the subcommittee, which is chaired by Democrat Jamie Raskin, and includes Republican Liz Cheney alongside other Democrats Adam Schiff and Zoe Lofgren, all have a legal background, or, in Schiff’s case, prosecutorial experience.
As well as making recommendations on criminal charges, the subcommittee was also tasked with resolving how to respond to Trump’s lawsuit against his subpoena.
Read more:
Biden to sign rail legislation shortly
The White House has announced that Joe Biden will deliver live remarks at 10.15am as he signs legislation averting a national rail strike.
The Senate voted 80-15 on Thursday to progress an imposed settlement on rail workers, one day after the House did the same.
Biden, who became known as Amtrak Joe for his days riding the railroad to and from the Capitol when he was a senator, is likely to praise the speed at which Congress moved to avoid the planned 9 December shutdown.
Biden’s pushing of the settlement, however, is not without controversy. Read more here:
Good morning politics blog readers, and happy Friday. It’s a big day for the January 6 House committee investigating Donald Trump’s insurrection as it meets to mull potential criminal referrals for the former president, and those in his inner circle.
The bipartisan panel’s closed-doors meeting follows a massive setback late on Thursday for Trump’s tactics of obstructing a parallel justice department inquiry into his improper handling of classified documents at his Florida resort.
A federal appeals court struck down the assignment of an independent special master reviewing the documents, and delivered a direct rebuke for the Trump-appointed judge who engaged him.
We’ll have plenty more about those developments coming up.
Here’s what else we’re watching Friday on what promises to be a busy day:
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Joe Biden has picked up an unexpected fan in the form of Republican firebrand Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker who says the president is getting things right and enjoyed one of the best first-term midterm elections in history.
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Biden will meet the Prince and Princess of Wales later today at the John F Kennedy presidential library in Boston.
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White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief reporters at lunchtime aboard Air Force One en route to Boston.
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It’s the last day of early voting ahead of next Tuesday’s crucial Senate run-off in Gerogia. Latest polls give Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock a 3-4% lead over Republican challenger Herschel Walker.