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Former president says he ‘doesn’t see a reason’ to return to Twitter
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Merrick Garland appoints special counsel to oversee Trump investigations
Donald Trump’s Twitter account was reinstated early on Sunday after being banned for almost two years. The reinstatement came after Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk held a survey on the platform earlier on Saturday and announced he would restore Mr Trump’s account after the majority voted in favour.
Shortly after the announcement, Mr Trump’s account reappeared on Twitter along with his previous tweets. It was restored with 0 followers and following 0 accounts, but within minutes the number of followers started rising dramatically into the hundreds of thousands.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump and many Republicans are still furious at Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of an independent special prosecutor to oversee two major investigations involving the former president – one revolving around the January 6 Capitol attack and another around Mr Trump’s hoarding of government documents at Mar-a-Lago.
The appointment of Jack Smith to investigate Mr Trump has sent many in the GOP claiming that Joe Biden and Mr Garland have “politicized” the Justice Department.
A week after Donald Trump’s not-so-surprise announcement of a 2024 bid for the presidency, fractures in the GOP are beginning to emerge and potential challengers to his bid for the Republican nomination are not yet backing down.
With that in mind, The Independent’s Oliver O’Connell took a look at who accepted invitations to be at Mr Trump’s side for the historic moment at Mar-a-Lago — and who chose to remain behind.
Read more:
Why were so many of Trumpworld missing? Scheduling conflicts? Personal political ambition? Maybe the weather?
Former President Barack Obama is headed down to Georgia as Democrats hope to hold the seat currently occupied by Senator Raphael Warnock, who won a special election in 2021.
Still one of the Democrats’ top campaigners, Mr Obama’s star power will be put to the test as Donald Trump remains fully supportive of his scandal-plagued ally, Herschel Walker, and polls indicate the race remains tight. Mr Warnock held a slim lead over Mr Walker in the initial results earlier this month.
Read more:
Former President Barack Obama will campaign again for Sen. Raphael Warnock as the Georgia Democrat tries to withstand a strong challenge from Republican Herschel Walker
Prosecutors with DA Alvin Bragg’s office in Manhattan have rested their case in the proceedings against the Trump Organization.
The district attorney’s office is alleging that the company committed tax fraud through a scheme in which its ex-CFO Allen Weisselberg concocted a lavish perks package for executives at the corporation so they could avoid paying taxes on what was essentially wide swaths of their income.
The New York Times reported that the decision by the prosecutors was a sign of the “confidence” Mr Bragg’s team had in their case. Mr Weisselberg testified himself in recent days.
A judge in Georgia has ruled that a ban on voting this coming weekend would be an undue burden on voters in the state and has nullified the law for the state’s upcoming runoff election between Senator Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker.
State law forbids early voting on the weekend after a major holiday, which would mean voting would not have taken place this coming weekend after Thanksgiving. But a judge has ruled that it will take place, thanks in part to a separate law passed by Republicans this year which further restricted early voting to end the Friday before a runoff election.
The development could be a boon for Democrats, who are hoping for large turnout especially in urban areas as Mr Warnock faces a challenge for his seat from Mr Walker, a Trump-backed Republican.
Raphael Warnock’s campaign wins in a lawsuit against a state law banning early in-person voting on the Saturday after a holiday, allowing voters to head back to the polls on the weekend after Thanksgiving
Manhattan’s District Attorney Alvin Bragg is reportedly resuming an investigation into whether Donald Trump paid hush money to Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who alleged that she had an affair with the businessman and ex-president.
According to The New York Times, the investigation recently resumed after Mr Bragg made the decision to focus narrowly on the issue of the supposed hush money payment and not, as his predecessor had done, looked into a wider range of legal statutes that were seen as being on sturdier prosecutorial grounds.
Mr Trump has long denied that he ever had a relationship with Ms Daniels, though his onetime fixer Michael Cohen has confirmed that it took place.
Read more:
Ex-president paid $130,000 to keep adult film actress from revealing his alleged affair with her before the 2016 election
Joe Biden took a shot at Donald Trump and the failure of his hand-picked candidates to bring a “red wave” at this year’s Turkey Pardon on the White House lawn.
Mocking the GOP’s failure to take the Senate and marginal gains in the House, he quipped that the only red wave he’d be seeing this year would come if his dog Commander knocked over the cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving dinner.
Follow Andrew Feinberg’s coverage of the annual tradition here:
The annual pardoning of a turkey is a Thanksgiving tradition that dates back to the Lincoln administration
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is officially on the list of far-right figures and conspiracy theorists who have been allowed back on to Elon Musk’s Twitter.
The Georgia Republican was permanently suspended by the platform’s moderators in January after her third strike of spewing misinformation about Covid-19. In that case, she had claimed that federal VARS statistics (which are completely based off of anecdotal user-submitted reports) proved that the Covid-19 vaccine was dangerous and was leading to thousands of deaths.
Elon Musk’s assumption of Twitter’s top spot has caused many of those so-called “permanent” bans to be reversed over the past week — others unbanned from the platform include Donald Trump and Canadian lecturer Jordan Peterson.
Read more:
Georgia congresswoman was banned for repeated spread of Covid misinformation
Elon Musk has revealed a caveat to his “free speech absolutist” approach to governing Twitter after allowing Donald Trump to return but refusing to reinstate conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
It came as a response to author Sam Harris, who asked whether it was “time” to let the embattled right-wing broadcaster, famous for whipping up hate against anyone from Democrats to victims of school shootings, back on the platform.
Read Elon Musk’s explanation for why that won’t be happening any time soon:
‘I felt his last heartbeat,’ the tech billionaire tweeted
Former White House aide Ivanka Trump attemped to wriggle her way out of a court order appointing a special monitor to oversee the major transactions of the Trump Organization and individuals with connections to the company, according to The Daily Beast.
The news outlet reported on Monday that the ex-president’s eldest daughter sought through letters from her attorneys to the court to have her name removed from the order, a step that her two brothers Eric and Donald Jr did not take as the New York attorney general’s lawsuit against the company progresses.
Read more from John Bowden:
Ex-president’s daughter no longer holds a position with her family’s company
Ye, the musician previously known as Kanye West, has said that he’s intending to run for president in 2024.
In a video posted to the X17 YouTube Channel on Sunday, Ye appeared with far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos in which Ye appeared to refer to him as his campaign manager.
Ye’s 2020 campaign became known for its unpredictability and his alarmingly erratic public appearances, including a “rally” in South Carolina where he appeared in a bulletproof vest and wept profusely while describing how his mother supposedly considered aborting him.
While he conceded that he lost in 2020, he immediately appeared to set up expectations for another run, posting a picture showing himself in front of an election map with the words “WELP Kanye 2024”.
The news comes after the restoration of his Twitter account following the company being taken over by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Gustaf Kilander has more.
Ye was seen and heard announcing the run in a YouTube video alongside far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos
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Elon Musk has reinstated Donald Trump’s account on Twitter
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