Trump news today: Ex-president demands ‘new election immediately’ in latest Truth Social rant

Donald Trump’s former attorney believes that the former president may have “given away” sensitive information while travelling around the world during his tenure in the White House.

In a Tik Tok video, Mr Cohen reacted to a Washington Post report, which stated that Mr Trump would take unorganised boxes of classified documents with him on overseas trips.

“Let me be very clear, considering I know this ‘Mandarin Mussolini’ extremely well. Donald doesn’t take boxes of material around the world for no reason at all. He took it for nefarious reasons,” Mr Cohen said.

“Nothing that Donald Trump is doing is for the benefit of you, for me, for the American people, for this country.

“This is all about him. And I stand firm when I say that Donald wants to use this in order to hold the country hostage. That’s his goal,” he said.

“His goal, because he knows his ass is in the grinder right now. He knows that he’s cooked, that he’s going to use this information, look for all we know, he’s already given it away, but there’s definitely more that’s there.”

He added that Mr Trump would try to use the classified information to “ensure that he doesn’t spend the rest of his natural life behind bars charged with treason”.

Former president Donald Trump reportedly bragged to his friends that he knew details about the “love life” of French president Emmanuel Macron.

Among the information that was seized from Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and office, was a document listed as “info re: President of France” and this disclosure has left officials on both sides of the Atlantic scrambling to find out what it is that Mr Trump thinks he knows, Rolling Stone reported.

According to sources quoted in the report, Mr Trump has had a “tawdry” interest in Mr Macron for years and bragged recently that he knew “illicit details” about his “love life”.

Mr Trump claimed that he learned about some of this dirt through “intelligence” he had seen or been briefed on, the sources told the American magazine.

However, it is not known if the Macron-related document had anything to do with the French president’s personal life. “But the mere revelation of its existence triggered a trans-Atlantic freakout,” the sources said.

Republicans are pointing to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s past remarks indicating that she did not believe student debt could be cancelled unilaterally by the Executive Branch as they urge her to oppose Joe Biden’s decision to cancel up to $10,000 in loans for most borrowers.

“People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness,” the Speaker of the House said in July of last year. “He does not. He can postpone, he can delay but he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.”

GOP lawmakers sent Ms Pelosi a letter this week insisting that given her past stance, it is “imperative that you act immediately in defense of our Constitution and the powers of the legislative branch”.

Read more from Eric Garcia in The Independent:

Ohio congressman Jim Jordan caught the ire of Twitter users on Monday after a seemingly-innocuous tweet about “working hard” and paying your bills.

Mr Jordan posted the tweet on Monday morning, writing that “In Real America, you work hard, pay your bills, and provide for your family. Isn’t that how it should be?”

He was mocked by Democrats over the seeming hypocrisy of his belief in “working hard” given his support for Donald Trump, who has publicly used the bankruptcy system to his advantage and stands accused of defrauding banks and other financial authorities.

A large number of Republican voters prefer Donald Trump to be the GOP’s 2024 presidential election nominee, a new poll has found.

The USA Today/ Ipsos poll conducted after the Mar-a-Lago searches found that nearly 59 per cent of the Republican voters back Mr Trump and that he “deserves re-election,” while 41 per cent said it’s time for a change.

The poll was conducted between 18-22 August among a nationally representative survey of 2,345 adults, including 800 Republican voters and 1,031 Democratic voters.

Arizona senate nominee Blake Masters reportedly cleaned his website to remove the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from former president Donald Trump.

After his primary win, the Republican candidate also removed controversial language saying Democrats were trying to “import” a new electorate.

A person close to Mr Masters told CNN that the candidate designs, codes and updates his website himself and his updates to the abortion section reflect his desire to use his policy section as a “living document”

President Joe Biden will speak in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall this week for a national address presumably about the ongoing threat to American freedoms that he says the Republican Party poses.

His remarks will come as GOP-led legislatures are rolling out bans on abortion in response to the overturning of Roe vs Wade, while signs indicated that some conservatives want the Supreme Court to overturn the precedent protecting same-sex marriage rights next.

“He will talk about the progress we have made as a nation to protect our democracy, but how our rights and freedoms are still under attack,” said the White House in a statement. “And he will make clear who is fighting for those rights, fighting for those freedoms, and fighting for our democracy.”

Read more in The Independent:

First lady Jill Biden tested negative for Covid-19 on Monday and will return to Washington on Tuesday, nearly a week after she came down with a “rebound” case of the coronavirus.

Ms Biden had been isolating at her family’s house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, since testing positive on 24 August, her communications director said in a statement.

She first tested positive for the coronavirus on 15 August when she and president Joe Biden were vacationing in Kiawah Island, South Carolina.

Tony Ornato, the US Secret Service official accused of lying about the president’s conduct during January 6, stepped down on Monday.

His departure comes just before he was set to testify to the January 6 committee; as a private citizen, he cannot be compelled to testify before Congress.

The former official claimed in a statement on Monday that his retirement had been planned long in advance.

Read more from Josh Marcus in The Independent:

An FBI affidavit outlining the justification for the search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property has revealed that the former president held onto hundreds of classified documents after he left office.

One set of documents was handed over by Mr Trump’s team to the National Archives in January. Another was seized in a search of Mar-a-Lago by FBI agents earlier in August.

Now, a redacted FBI affidavit has revealed what was returned to the federal government earlier this year for the first time.

Read more in The Independent from Richard Hall: