Trump’s protection nominee Pete Hegseth ripped by Tammy Duckworth as GOP grilled on cupboard picks: Live updates

In the waning hours of his first administration, Donald Trump enacted one of his final executive orders on January 20, 2021 and granted clemency to 143 individuals, including former aide Steve Bannon and rapper Lil Wayne.

Four years on, Trump, now with his own felony conviction, is just weeks away from returning to the White House and a raft of fellow convicted felons are already knocking at the door.

The president can issue pardons (removing a punishment after a court decision) and commutations (a reduction in punishment for a crime) as they sees fit for federal convictions, but not state crimes.

Disgraced politicians, January 6 rioters and reality TV celebrities have already begun clamoring for a Trump pardon.

The Independent has rounded up all the key names who are on the list.

In an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma downplayed Donald Trump’s threats of payback at the Department of Justice over the criminal indictments he faced over election interference and classified documents.

However, he then told Dana Bash: “If someone is in the Department of Justice right now that is actively trying to undercut the president, they should be gone.”

This was a sentiment echoed by Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, who told NBC’s Meet the Press that one of the president-elect’s first priorities should be to fire any staff at the Justice Department who worked on cases that involved charges against Trump.

“First and foremost, the people involved with this should be fired immediately,” he told Kristen Welker. “And anybody part of this, this effort to keep President Trump off the ballot and to throw him in jail for the rest of his life because they didn’t like his politics, and who continue to cast him as a quote, unquote threat to democracy, was wrong, and so we’ll see where that goes.”

Schmitt framed his stance as a form of “accountability,” telling Kristen Welker, “[The cases] all fell apart under the weight of the law. And so I do think there needs to be accountability. I think that getting it back to crime-fighting is important, but there has to be accountability for these kinds of abuses.”

As President-elect Donald Trump makes his transition to the White House, it’s not just his cabinet picks garnering scrutiny — it’s now also his funding as he’s keeping the donors funding the transition effort a secret.

Because Trump hasn’t signed the agreement, he doesn’t have to work within the confines of the fundraising limits or disclose what interest groups are funding his transition to the White House, The New York Times first reported.

Kelly Rissman reports.

Fox News host and veteran Pete Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary by Donald Trump has caused a stir from the get-go with his views on women in combat roles, his links to Christian nationalists, and his far-right coded tattoos.

This meant there was much to discuss on the Sunday morning shows this week.

During an appearance on ABC’s This Week, Senator Bill Hagerty was asked about Hegseth’s views on women in the military:

Further controversy erupted after when a police report about sexual assault allegations against Hegseth was released later in the week.

Here’s CNN’s Dana Bash and Senator Markwayne Mullin sparring about that on State of the Union:

Incoming congresswoman Sarah McBride appeared on Face the Nation this morning on CBS to talk about Republican attacks on her for which bathroom she should be allowed to use as a trans woman.

McBride said the attacks on her are “an attempt to distract”.

The congresswoman-elect also explained why she ran for office — because of the experience she had caring for her husband as he fought cancer, a battle he ultimately lost.

Meanwhile, over on Fox News, Rep Nancy Mace — who began the whole furor — and the host who interviewed her, misgendered McBride and other trans women.

And over on CNN’s State of the Union, Senator Tammy Duckworth called the new Capitol transgender bathroom “disgusting and wrong” and said that Congress has “a lot more to worry about than where somebody goes to pee”.

In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.

In yet another example of the transition team being blindsided by claims about Hegseth, members of the team were reportedly startled to see a California police report go public on Wednesday, detailing the 2017 night on which Hegseth was accused of sexually assaulting a woman.

Ariana Baio has the details.