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A midnight deadline for Donald Trump to signal his intent to testify before a Washington, DC grand jury hearing evidence against him has come and gone, moving the twice-indicted ex-president a step closer to facing yet another set of criminal charges stemming from his effort to remain in office against the will of voters after losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. On Tuesday, Mr Trump publicly acknowledged receipt of a so-called “target letter” from the office of Jack Smith, the Department of Justice special counsel who is charged with overseeing multiple investigations into the former president’s conduct. Mr Smith, who in June obtained a 38-count indictment against Mr Trump and longtime aide Walt Nauta arising out of a probe into the ex-president’s alleged unlawful retention of national defence information at his Palm Beach, Florida home, has also been presenting evidence to a grand jury in the nation’s capital that has been focused on the events leading up to the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol, including Mr Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss to Mr Biden. According to sources familiar with the matter, the letter to Mr Trump informed him that the department is considering charging him with conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an official proceeding and deprivation of civil rights under colour of law, and set a midnight Thursday deadline for the ex-president to say whether he would appear before the grand jury to give evidence on his own behalf. While the first two potential charges are brought frequently in federal court and have been used against a significant number of the hundreds of defendants who’ve faced charges for participating in the Capitol attack, the third potential charge – deprivation of civil rights under colour of law – would be brought under an 1871 statute first enacted for use against the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. While that century-old statute was first enacted to give the government tools to fight the Klan’s racist terrorism in the post-Civil War era, in modern times it has routinely been deployed by prosecutors in cases of voter suppression or election fraud. A member of the ex-president’s legal team contacted by The Independent did not say whether Mr Trump would indeed testify, but it is highly unlikely that he would do so since his answers before the grand jury could be used against him. Grand jury probe examines Trump’s involvement in fake elector scheme and pressure campaign against Mike Pence The deadline for Mr Trump to avail himself of the invitation to appear before the grand jury, that could soon add significantly to the legal burden he is facing as he seeks his party’s nomination in next year’s election, comes as prosecutors have continued to present evidence pertaining to the ex-president’s actions before and during the Capitol attack. A crowd of Trump supporters temporarily interrupted the joint session of Congress at which the electoral votes cast in line with voters’ preferences were opened and counted under the supervision of then-vice president Mike Pence. Mr Pence, who was forced to retreat to an underground parking area while a riotous mob rampaged through the building and called for him to be hanged, is one of the numerous witnesses who have given evidence under questioning from Mr Smith’s team. In April, he testified for more than five hours regarding his interactions with Mr Trump in the period leading up to the joint session, though a federal judge ruled that he did not have to give evidence on anything pertaining to his actions while presiding over the Senate or the January 2021 joint session. Prosecutors have been questioning witnesses and gathering evidence to shed light on what Mr Trump knew, said and did in the period between the 3 November 2020 general election and the January 2021 Capitol attack. In particular, they have been attempting to elicit answers from witnesses regarding what Mr Trump knew about efforts being made on his behalf to submit forged electoral college certificates indicating he had prevailed in swing states that were actually won by Mr Biden to the National Archives and to Mr Pence in his role as president of the Senate. They have also been investigating the pressure campaign the former president mounted to convince the then-vice president that he had the power to unilaterally disregard the legitimate electoral certificates in favour of the fake ones as a way to declare himself and Mr Trump victorious even though they had not won the election. Prosecutors have also reportedly questioned multiple elected officials from swing states won by Mr Biden, including Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who Mr Trump infamously pressured to “find” enough non-existent votes to reverse his loss in a recorded phone call that was first reported by The Washington Post. A subpoena to Mr Raffensperger’s office demanded that he turn over election-related CCTV footage from State Farm Arena, the Atlanta sports venue that was used as a polling location and ballot counting site. Prosecutors sought testimony from Trump’s inner circle in Jan 6 probe In addition to Mr Pence, Mr Smith’s team has also questioned multiple former Trump administration officials who served at the highest levels. The former senior Trump White House officials who’ve been called before the grand jury include Marc Short, a longtime aide to and confidante of Mr Pence who served as the ex-vice president’s chief of staff during the time period at issue, former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Mr Pence’s former counsel, Greg Jacob, and ex-Trump senior policy adviser Stephen Miller. Mr Smith’s team has also compelled testimony from Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s son-in-law who served in the White House and on Mr Trump’s 2020 campaign as a senior adviser, former counsellor to the president Hope Hicks and Mark Meadows, the ex-North Carolina congressman who served as Mr Trump’s final White House chief of staff from April 2020 through January 2021. The Independent has previously reported that Mr Meadows has been testifying pursuant to a cooperation agreement with prosecutors. Even as recently as Thursday afternoon, Mr Smith’s team was still questioning one ex-White House staffer, ex-special assistant to the president and deputy advance director William Russell. Mr Russell, who still serves as one of Mr Trump’s personal aides, was making a repeat appearance before the grand jury, according to sources familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because grand jury proceedings are secret. It is understood that prosecutors also intended to spend part of Thursday questioning a former Trump campaign staffer who specialised in election data analysis. Although prosecutors could have asked grand jurors to vote on whether to approve an indictment of the ex-president this week, it is understood that prosecutors are more likely to take that final step on either Tuesday or Thursday of next week, the two days on which the grand jury is scheduled to meet. Read More Trump shares sinister new video issuing apocalyptic threat to anyone who ‘f***s around with us’ Trump bid to toss E Jean Carroll ruling backfires as judge says ex-president did ‘rape’ columnist DeSantis says he’d accept Trump being prosecuted for a ‘traditional crime’ like ‘robbing a bank’ Trump, January 6 and a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election: The federal investigation, explained Former Trump State Department official convicted for attacking police during Capitol riot

In a Donald Trump-influenced era of through-the-looking-glass politics, everything seems upside down, traditional loyalties are scrambled, history can be rewritten and truth is just what anyone wants it to be.

By Andrew MacAskill LONDON (Reuters) -British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's governing Conservatives lost two strategically important parliamentary seats on Friday

Hong Kong’s billionaire Cheng family has assumed control of a casino resort in Vietnam from the former listed

Actor Jim Caviezel has proclaimed Donald Trump “the new Moses” after visiting him in New Jersey. Caviezel, who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, made the biblical comparison to the twice-indicted and twice-impeached one-term president on Fox News. The conservative actor appeared on Fox & Friends on Fox News on Thursday to promote his new anti-trafficking movie Sound of Freedom. The move has already made more than $100m at the box office despite costing only $4.5m to make. Caviezel told host Brian Kilmeade that Mr Trump, who is leading GOP 2024 presidential hopefuls, had to be returned to the White Office as a matter of urgency. “Well, he’s got to be in there because he’s going to go after the traffickers,” he insisted. The actor said that he and producer Eduardo Verástegui had screened the film for Mr Trump the previous night at his private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. “This is the new Moses,” Caviezel said. “I mean, I’m still Jesus, but he’s the new Moses. Pharaoh, let my children go free.” The movie is loosely the work of anti-trafficking activist Tim Ballard, and in the fictional story, he sets out to rescue children from sex traffickers in Colombia. Between late 2019 and 2020, Mr Ballard served on an anti-trafficking White House advisory council while Mr Trump was president. Caviezel has been accused of referencing baseless claims by the QAnon conspiracy movement, which has claimed that Mr Trump is a saviour figure. While promoting the movie, he told Steve Bannon on his podcast that children were trafficked for their blood, which is a QAnon claim, and in the past has referenced “the storm”, a QAnon theory that Mr Trump would release a secret plan to defeat the deep state, his opponents and sweep back into power. Read More Poll suggests third-party bid wouldn’t derail Biden’s shot at re-election Trump shares sinister new video issuing apocalyptic threat to anyone who ‘f***s around with us’ Buoys, razor wire, and a Trump-y wall: How Greg Abbott turned the Rio Grande into an immigration ‘war zone’ Trump bid to toss E Jean Carroll ruling backfires as judge says ex-president did ‘rape’ columnist SEC announces settlement with merger partner of Trump’s Truth Social app Marjorie Taylor Greene roasted for claiming ‘prayer’ can end child sex trafficking Heat is biggest weather-related killer, but US officials won’t declare disaster Poll suggests third-party bid wouldn’t derail Biden’s shot at re-election

The US is deploying thousands of Marines and additional forces to the Middle East following recent Iranian attempts to seize commercial shipping vessels, the Pentagon announced Thursday.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is urging the state's pension fund manager to consider legal action against Bud Light's parent company amid conservative backlash to the beermaker's recent marketing efforts, the latest attempt by the Republican presidential candidate to inject himself and the state he runs into the country's culture wars.

Arkansas is appealing a federal judge's ruling last month striking down the state's ban on gender-affirming treatment for transgender youth.

Alameda Research’s former Co-Chief Executive Officer Caroline Ellison estimated there was a more than $10 billion cash deficit

Bankrupt FTX Trading Ltd. will try to claw back millions of dollars in cash and unwind more than

Former President Donald Trump shared a menacing new video on his Truth Social account on Thursday in which he promises to “do things that have never been done before” to people who “f*** around with us.” The video, produced by MAGA.com, features audio of the former president’s appearance on the late Rush Limbaugh’s radio show three years ago. During that appearance, Mr Trump was discussing Iran. Now, with Mr Trump set to face another federal indictment over his attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, the audio has been repurposed. The nine-second video features a close-up, black and white image of Mr Trump’s face set to ominous music and Mr Trump saying, “If you f*** around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.” MAGA.com captioned its post featuring the video with the words, “We aren’t afraid of them.” That caption echoed comments Mr Trump made during a town hall on Fox News. “They feel, I guess, they want to try to demean, diminish, and frighten people, but they don’t frighten us, because we’re going to Make America Great Again,” Mr Trump said. On social media, however, Mr Trump has reacted with anger to news that he is a target of a federal investigation into efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election and has to decide whether to appear before a grand jury. Mr Trump has already been indicted in New York for allegedly falsifying business records as part of a hush money payment scheme and is under federal indictment in Florida for allegedly mishandling classified documents. But despite his mounting legal problems, Mr Trump continues to run and lead the race for the Republican nomination for president. Mr Trump has led recent national polls of the race by more than 25 points, and also has a commanding lead in early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire. Mr Trump’s lawyers have attempted to delay many of his legal proceedings until after next year’s election, at which point he or another Republican may be in a position to squash the Department of Justice-led investigations and shield him from prosecution entirely. It remains to be seen, however, whether judges across the country will be willing to delay possible trials that would take Mr Trump away from the campaign trail and make something like his alleged attempt to subvert democracy the centre of national attention. For now, the former president and many of his supporters are adopting a defiant tone. Read More Trump defends Jason Aldean amid music video backlash Trump shares threatening video as midnight deadline to appear before Jan 6 grand jury closes in - live

He may be suing the governor of Texas, but Jessie Fuentes isn’t really a political guy. His disagreement with Greg Abbott is personal. Continental, in a sense. Spiritual even. On 7 July, Mr Fuentes, who owns a small kayaking business, sued the state for its decision to install a 1,000-foot buoy wall in the town of Eagle Pass, within a stretch of the Rio Grande river. In Texas, the river forms the legal border between the US and Mexico. More than just a legal argument that a state politician doesn’t have jurisdiction over an international borderline, Mr Fuentes, who grew up along the Rio Grande, feels Mr Abbott has crossed a moral line. The governor, he says, is violating a river that nourishes ecosystems, people, and a vibrant transborder culture that’s existed far longer and far more freely than the rolls of razor wire multiplying across the banks suggest. “I’m not a politician. I just say listen, I love that river. Nobody speaks up for it. I’m speaking up for the river. Man, I have the right to try to prosper from my love of the river, that allows me the opportunity to get out there, to bring people to the river,” he told The Independent. “They don’t live here. I do,” he added of Texas’s state leaders. “You’ve taken a beautiful waterway and you’ve converted it into a war zone.” Mr Fuentes is part of a group of local residents, human rights activists, and international officials who are pushing back on the floating barrier project. They face challenging waters ahead, though. Governor Abbott is a shrewd operator. He has combined media savvy and audacious use of government funds and powers to secure billions of dollars and heaps of political capital for his notion of a military-style crackdown at the border. He has charged ahead with little resistance, even though governors and presidents have spent decades taking this iron-fisted approach with little empirical success to show for it. In mid-July, state contractors were nearly complete installing the floating border barrier, a $1m, 1,000-foot pearl string of giant orange buoys with strong netting in between, anchored to the river floor. Discussing the plan in June, Mr Abbott described the floating wall as a key part of his larger buildup at the border, which has featured mass deployment of as many as 10,000 state troopers and national guardsmen at a time, as well as razor wire and sections of a new border wall on private lands. "When we’re dealing with 100 or 1,000 people, one of the goals is to slow down and deter as many of them as possible," Mr Abbott said on 8 June. "Some may eventually get to the border where they are going to face that multilayered razor wire and a full force of National Guard and DPS [Department of Public Safety] officers." An estimated 250 people died crossing the Rio Grande last year, but Texas officials have nonetheless claimed that installing what amounts to a giant net in the river will “prevent the loss of life due to drownings.” The barrier technology, like much of Mr Abbott’s border agenda, is a retrofitted version of what the Trump administration was pursuing. In 2020, the Border Patrol advertised on Twitter, then quickly deleted, a post showing a demo of a floating barrier system from the same company that built Mr Abbott’s wall, Cochrane USA, only the Trump version had large black spikes that wouldn’t look out of place in a dungeon. The Texas buoy plan dropped the spikes but kept the same controversy that Mr Trump’s attempts to seal off the border attracted. Last week, Mexico’s diplomat said the barrier plan may violate international treaties over the Rio Grande-based border, and said she will send an inspection team to investigate the buoy wall. Migrant advocates say the buoys, like generations of border installations before them, won’t actually slow down immigration, but rather will push migrants towards ever more remote places to cross the border, increasing the likelihood they will face a perilous and potentially lethal crossing. This strategy, known as “prevention through deterrence” has more or less been the explicit policy of the US government since the Clinton administration in the 1990s, a policy choice many on the ground say is causing unnecessary deaths. “It’s been proven time after time that these so-called prevention through deterrence strategies don’t work,” Fernando García of the Border Network for Human Rights told The Independent. “They have not stopped immigration flows, but what they have done is they have put immigrants at risk.” “It’s very likely that with [the floating buoy wall] they are looking for more remote and isolated places to come across so that whenever they are in danger by heat exhaustion, by drowning, they will not have anybody to help them,” he added, saying he worries it could be a record year for migrant deaths in the Rio Grande. “All of this is death by policy.” According to leaks from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees the state’s border scheme, this policy includes intentionally putting migrants into harm’s way. In a series of emails shared with news outlets including The Independent, a border medic described questioning orders from superiors to push exhausted migrants back into the river and to refrain from giving them water if captured. “We were given orders to push the people back into the water to go to Mexico. We decided that this was not the correct thing to do. With the very real potential of exhausted people drowning,” the trooper wrote. The DPS source also claimed in the span of one week in late June, a teen mother was trapped in razor wire at the border while having a miscarriage, a 15-year-old broke his leg as he tried to find a way around the deterrence buoys, and a man lacerated his leg while trying to rescue his child from razor wire placed on a buoy. Texas officials have defended the use of the razor wire while denying reports troopers were told to push people into the river. “The Texas National Guard mission is to work alongside our Texas law enforcement partners to prevent, deter and interdict transnational criminal activity between ports of entry,” the Texas Military Department told The Independent in response to news about the emails. “There is no order or directive instructing Service Members to push illegal immigrants back into the river or deny them drinking water.” “Texas is deploying every tool and strategy to deter and repel illegal crossings between ports of entry as President Biden’s dangerous open border policies entice migrants from over 150 countries to risk their lives entering the country illegally,” a spokesperson for the governor told The Independent earlier this week. The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to requests for comment on this story from The Independent. Beyond just putting migrants at risk, the border barriers are cutting into the deep cross-border cultural ties in the region, residents said. Mr Fuentes, the business owner suing the state, said the locked-down border is only a recent historical development. His grandfather used to be able to casually ride into Mexico on a donkey to get supplies. He says that Texas politicians fomenting fear about immigration miss the fact that many who live along the US-Mexico border don’t feel the same way. The walls aren’t stopping some hypothetical invasion of immigrants. They’re dividing a community that’s older and bigger than boundaries on a map. “That’s the beautiful thing about America,” he said. “We’ve got our culture on the border. The way it’s being misinterpreted right now, them saying we’re a war zone, things are out of control. We’re not that. We’re a community on the river. We get along with our neighbours.” “I don’t think we’re under siege from an inflow of immigrants,” he added. “We’re under siege by law enforcement.” When Mr Fuentes encounters migrants on the river, he offers them a blessing and any spare water if it he has it. You wouldn’t know about these sorts of ties by watching the governor on TV. The Fox News regular frequently describes the situation in places like Eagle Pass as an “invasion” of drug-pushing cartel members, though drugs like fentanyl are overwhelmingly brought across the border by US citizens at official points of entry. It’s not an accidental choice of words calling the situation an “invasion.” In November, the governor invoked a clause in the US Constitution allowing states to take military actions if they are under “invasion” to defend his policies, a theory legal scholars and critics say is both nonapplicable to immigration and an echo of the white-supremacist rhetoric that fueled incidents like the 2019 El Paso shooting, where 23 mostly Latino people were killed. It may not be legally bulletproof, but it’s another savvy move from Mr Abbott, who has proved adept at using crises in recent years to further his border agenda. The governor declared a state disaster at the US-Mexico border in 2021, freeing him up to use additional emergency powers, and used creative accounting to funnel an estimated $1bn in federal Covid relief funds to Operation Lone Star, the umbrella plan Mr Abbott has used to send troopers to the border and bus thousands of migrants out of Texas to liberal states. Despite massive investments from the state and the federal government over decades from leaders of both parties, immigration levels at the US-Mexico border in late 2022 and 2023 are about the same as they were during their previous most recent peak around the year 2000. A spokesperson for the governor’s office declined to answer specific questions from The Independent about the floating border barrier, and criticisms that it’s illegal and dangerous for migrants. The governor’s office said Operation Lone Star had led to the apprehension of more than 393,000 unauthorised immigrants and the repelling of more than 49,000 illegal immigrants, as well as over 31,000 arrests, “all of which would have otherwise made their way into communities across Texas and our country thanks to President Biden’s open border policies,” according to spokesperson Andrew Mahaleris. The Department of Justice is investigating Operation Lone Star for alleged civil rights abuses. Immigration is a concern of federal law, but thousands of immigrants have been arrested by state personnel for trespassing on private property, allegedly being held in jail for weeks without facing charges. According to an investigation by the Texas Tribune, ProPublica, and The Marshall Project, state officials were arresting far more trespassers than cartel members, and allegedly inflated data on Operation Lone Star by citing arrests on crimes like cockfighting, sexual assault, and stalking in their success statistics, even though these offences had no clear link to immigration enforcement. “We’ve spent $12bn over the last decade, and we have nothing to show for it,” Jaime Puente, director of economic opportunity programmes at the advocacy group Every Texan, which monitors the state budget, told The Independent. “People are not being deterred from coming to the US to seek a better life and opportunities…no matter how deadly we make that journey.” Ironically, according to Mr Puente, the governor’s border crackdown has finally driven resources towards borderland communities that have historically suffered from under-investment. However, these resources are coming in the form of armed police officers and contracts to build military infrastructure, rather than investments in things like education or healthcare. “Texas has historically undervalued and underserved border communities over the last century or more, and now, because it’s politically viable, because it makes for a great 7pm Fox News clip, these communities are being inundated with billions and billions of dollars,” Mr Puente said. He points to the example of Uvalde, Texas, the site of a horrific 2022 school shooting, as a place that needs a different kind of investment from the state. “That community doesn’t have a hospital,” he said. “That community doesn’t have some basic services, but they have 350 DPS troopers and Border Patrol agents just roaming around. That didn’t help 19 kids and 2 teachers a year ago.” In fact, according to some local residents, the influx of state personnel to border communities has made the residents there feel less safe. Operation Lone Star has driven a spike in the racial profiling of Latinx drivers in South Texas, according to the ACLU. According to an analysis from NBC News of Latinx-majority border areas, traffic citations have shot up, in one county by a factor of six, since Operation Lone Star came online in 2021. Despite the governor’s ever-expanding footprint on the border, Jessie Fuentes still believes in the magic of the Rio Grande. He ends our interview by inviting me to come onto the river with him sometime, though he notes it’s getting harder and harder for him to access the water because of all the fences, walls, and razor wire deployed around Eagle Pass. He has a bitter chuckle at the difference between the US and Mexico sides of the river. On the Mexico side, it’s parkland, with families out for walks or fishing on the river. On the US side, it’s a practically medieval tableau of walls and spikes, overseen by a group of state officials, one of whose title is literally Border Czar. “I invite anyone to come if they’ll let me,” he said. That’s the thing about the US border: what happens there often has deep roots. Border walls, once built, are rarely taken down, and connections to the land, built over generations, don’t disappear from one administration to the next. Governor Abbott has vowed to fight Mr Fuentes all the way to the US Supreme Court. In the coming months, we will see whose vision of this complicated, beautiful region prevails. Read More Texas trooper's accounts of bloodied and fainting migrants on US-Mexico border unleashes criticism Border Patrol fails to assess medical needs for children with preexisting conditions, report says Mexico files border boundaries complaint over Texas' floating barrier plan on Rio Grande Texas trooper's accounts of bloodied and fainting migrants on US-Mexico border unleashes criticism Texas troopers allegedly told to push migrant children into the Rio Grande Trump wanted to put cattle on ladders over border wall, ex aide reveals