Trump news today: Donald Trump sues journalist Bob Woodward as Manhattan DA opens grand jury probe

Donald Trump is suing journalist Bob Woodward of the Watergate scandal fame for releasing his interview recordings to the public, claiming that he didn’t give him permission to use them for an audiobook.

The former US president filed a lawsuit on Monday against Woodward, the publisher Simon & Schuster and its parent company Paramount Global for releasing the recorded interviews that took place between December 2019 and August 2020.

Mr Trump claimed in the lawsuit that he consented to be recorded for a series of interviews but only for a book Woodward was working on. Woodward’s “Rage” was published in September 2021.

Read the full story here:

Donald Trump has described the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols as “horrible” and says that it “never should have happened.”

The former president’s comments came one day after the city of Memphis publicly released video footage of the attack earlier this month.

The video shows a violent confrontation between officers from the unit and 29-year-old Nichols, during which officers can be seen punching him and using batons and taser weapons to subdue him as he cried out for his mother.

Donald Trump lashed out at Ron DeSantis and called him “disloyal” as the Florida governor weighs a run for the 2024 Republican nomination against his former political benefactor.

Mr Trump spoke to Politico and CNN on his plane as he campaigned in New Hampshire and South Carolina, two states that have the first primary contests in the country.

“When I hear that he might [run] I think it’s very disloyal,” Mr Trump told reporters.

Mr Trump criticised Mr DeSantis for his record during the Covid pandemic.

“There are Republican governors that did not close their states,” Mr Trump said. “They’re trying to rewrite history.”

He added: “Ron would have not been governor if it wasn’t for me.”

House speaker Kevin McCarthy says he is looking forward to discussing with president Joe Biden a “reasonable and responsible way that we can lift the debt ceiling” when the two meet on Wednesday for their first sit-down at the White House since Mr McCarthy was elected to the post.

Mr McCarthy said he wants to address spending cuts along with raising the debt limit, even though the White House has ruled out linking those two issues together as the government tries to avoid a potentially devastating financial default.

The speaker pledged that cuts to Social Security and Medicare would be off the table.

“I know the president said he didn’t want to have any discussion (on cuts), but I think it’s very important that our whole government is designed to find compromise,” Mr McCarthy told CBS‘ “Face the Nation.”

“I want to sit down together, work out an agreement that we can move forward to put us on a path to balance and at the same time not put any of our debt in jeopardy at the same time.”

Nancy Mace is one of the Republican Party’s most interesting members in the House.

After surviving a Trump-endorsed challenge to her reelection last year, the South Carolina representative returns to Washington as one of the party’s most outspoken members on issues of gender and even the far-right’s embrace of conspiracies.

She sat down with The Independent’s Eric Garcia for an exclusive interview about her style of politics and new home in the GOP’s slim House majority.

NBC’s Chuck Todd got into it with Rep Jim Jordan over the weekend when the Ohio Republican stopped by the Meet the Press studio to discuss the responses of the federal government to Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s respective retention of classified material at their residences and, in Mr Biden’s case, a DC-based think tank.

The new chair of the House Judiciary Committee insisted to Mr Todd that there was a difference in the way that the two men were treated — unfairly so — thanks to what he contended was a supposed politicisation of the Justice Department.

But Todd wasn’t having it, and said that the two situations were not comparable due to the former president’s failure to comply with a subpoena from the Justice Department for the classified materials.

Watch their exchange below:

Donald Trump gave an unsolicited review of Fox News show The Five in which he branded co-host Jessica Tarlov “absolutely terrible” and called her voice “grating and unendurable.”

Tarlov, a former Democratic pollster, is one of the liberal voices on the show and was named a co-host in 2021.

“I really like The Five on Fox News, especially the hosts, with the exception of wacky Jessica Tarlov, who is absolutely terrible,” the one-term president wrote on his Truth Social platform.

“Her facts are knowingly wrong, her jittery presentation is horrendous and, forgive me, her VOICE is grating and unendurable.”

Donald Trump has responded to news that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has impanelled a grand jury as he weighs bringing charges against Mr Trump over the 2016 hush payment made to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star.

He fired back with one of his typical Truth Social rants, writing: “With murders and violent crime surging like never before in New York City, the Radical Left Manhattan D.A., Alvin Bragg, just leaked to the Fake News Media that they are still going after the Stormy ”Horseface” Daniels Bull….!”

“Working closely with the Weaponized Justice Department, this is a continuation of the Greatest Witch Hunt of all time,” he added. “They long ago missed the Statute of Limitations, & I recently won big money against “Stormy” in the 9th Circuit – NEVER HAD AN AFFAIR. This is old news!”

Arizona Republicans selected former state treasurer and Donald Trump aide Jeff DeWit to be the party’s next chairman, turning to a familiar face with relationships across the party fractured after its worst election in decades.

Mr DeWit replaces firebrand Trump ally Kelli Ward, who helped the former president in his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and was a vocal proponent of his false claim that the election results were fraudulent.

She broke with precedent in last year’s primary, openly promoting a slate of election deniers who went on to lose the general election in November.

“I’m going to work for you and we’re going to unify,” Mr DeWit said after winning. “And we’re going to get back to beating Democrats and winning elections.”

As Joe Biden contemplated his next move in 2017 after decades in government, he considered a familiar path – creating a Washington-based think tank to focus on international affairs and diplomacy. It proved an easy sell and a lucrative one, too.

Soft landings in the capital are common for officials with a resume like Mr Biden’s, and the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement was born, with a grand view of the Capitol.

The former vice president brought with him trusted staff and boxes of files. Now, a small batch of those files is at the centre of controversy because some were classified documents that Mr Biden had no right to retain.