“President-elect Donald Trump raised pardoning his supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly after President Joe Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon for his son Hunter on Sunday night,” the Washington Post reports.

“Trump has not made clear who among the group of 1,500-plus people charged with crimes related to the riot would receive pardons.”

“Karoline Leavitt, President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming White House press secretary, deleted two social media posts she shared after the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol — including a retweet praising then-Vice President Mike Pence for certifying the 2020 election,” CNN reports.

“President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to install loyalists have left officials fearful that he intends to carry out his threats of retribution but hopeful that rule-of-law norms can hold,” the New York Times reports.

Donald Trump was caught on camera offering to buy a young girl’s hair at his golf course in Palm Beach, Florida.

New York Times: “The hourlong hearing, punctuated by an angry outburst by Mr. Giuliani, was the most contentious yet in the winding search for his personal assets, which he was ordered to hand over to the two women more than a month ago.”

“For the first time in weeks, the strain of several cases stemming from Mr. Giuliani’s time as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer appeared to be getting to him, as he sat slumped back in his chair with his arms crossed.”

Jonathan Last: “He promises his base crazy shit. He then announces that he’s about to do the crazy shit. The media freaks out at the prospect of said crazy shit. Trump then wriggles out of doing the crazy shit and—this is the key part—his voters give him credit for the crazy shit anyway.”

Bloomberg: “In a gambit familiar to adversaries and allies alike, Trump said in a social media post Monday evening he would slap 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada and additional 10% duties on China, unless they clamp down on migrants and illegal drugs coming to the US. Those three countries account for about 40% of all US trade.”

“It all had a familiar feel to a flurry of threats in his first term.”

CNN: Trump tries to force other countries to negotiating table on immigration and trade with promise to hike tariffs.

David Graham: “Trump pulled off this legal trick with a simple and effective strategy of running down the clock until being reelected president. Traditionally, defendants have had two ways to beat a rap. They could convince a judge or jury that they didn’t do the crime, or at least that there isn’t enough evidence to prove they did. Or they could look for a way to get sprung on a technicality. Faced with a choice between A and B, Trump chose option C: weaponize the procedural protections of the American justice system against itself.”

“The problem is not that these protections exist. They are a crucial part of ensuring fairness for all defendants. But just as he has done in other circumstances, Trump sniffed how the things that make the American system great can also be cynically exploited. If you have sufficiently deep pockets and very little shame, you can snow a case under procedural motions, appeals, and long shots, enough to slow the case to a crawl. And in Trump’s case, delay was a victory—not because he could put it off indefinitely, but because he will soon be president again, with the Department of Justice under his authority.”

NBC News: “He is expected to walk through the lower west tunnel, where some of the worst violence of Jan. 6 took place, to be sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2025.”

Charlie Savage: “The end of the two federal criminal cases against President-elect Donald Trump on Monday left momentous, unsettled questions about constraints on criminal wrongdoing by presidents, from the scope of presidential immunity to whether the Justice Department may continue to appoint outside special counsels to investigate high-level wrongdoing.”

Kim Wehle: “It is hard to escape the grim conclusion: No president out of office has done more to grow the power of the presidency than Donald Trump. And the fact that this strengthening of the office is the result of his misdeeds, and empowers the president to undertake further misdeeds with impunity, is profoundly disturbing.”

Stephen Collinson: “Special counsel Jack Smith set out to prove in the United States of America v. Donald Trump that even presidents are not above the law.”

“Instead, his failed prosecutions ended up making Trump even more powerful as the ebullient president-elect prepares to return to office on January 20.”

“President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office, as an ordinary citizen, unless the statute of limitations has run, still liable for everything he did while in office, didn’t get away with anything yet – yet.” 

— Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), on February 13, 2021, arguing against the need to impeach Donald Trump.

Special counsel Jack Smith is dropping the federal election subversion and the mishandling of classified documents cases against President-elect Donald Trump, seeking the cases’ dismissal in court filings Monday, CNN reports.

Wrote Smith: “The Justice Department’s position is that the Constitution requires that this case be dismissed before the defendant is inaugurated. This outcome is not based on the merits or strength of the case against the defendant.”

“With a motion for civil contempt already looming over him in Washington, D.C., another judge warned Rudy Giuliani that ‘on pain of contempt’ he must comply with requests from the Georgia election workers he defamed to surrender his assets squirreled away in an increasingly controversial storage unit on New York’s Long Island,” the HuffPost reports.

Axios: “Lost in the noise of Trump’s most controversial picks is the simple, undebatable fact that this might be the most ideologically diverse cabinet of modern times.”

“The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s hush money case has given his lawyers more than a week to argue that his conviction should be thrown out because he was reelected as president, and officially called off Trump’s sentencing that was scheduled for next week,” the Washington Post reports.

Politico: “In a one-page decision, Justice Juan Merchan postponed the sentencing, which had been set for Nov. 26, in order to weigh Trump’s bid to dismiss the case entirely based on the fact that he is now president-elect.”

“Two Georgia election workers who won $148 million in damages from former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani last year asked a judge Wednesday to find him in contempt for repeating debunked claims about them,” the Washington Post reports.

New York Times: “What demanded the dayslong presence of all these Trumpworld figures during some of the most important weeks of their careers? The fall gathering of a secretive group of wealthy tech executives and their allies who have ascended swiftly within the Republican Party’s donor class: the Rockbridge Network.”

“The group, which was co-founded five years ago by JD Vance, sprouted from an informal set of dinners into a powerful coalition of Republican donors who have given more than $100 million to Rockbridge projects since 2019, according to a person close to the group, helping lead Silicon Valley’s march to the right. For Rockbridge, Mr. Vance’s election as vice president was a crowning achievement — and a tantalizing opportunity to wield new national influence.”

“But Rockbridge has largely kept its activities stealthy, mindful of how groups of wealthy conservatives like the Koch Network have drawn attacks from both liberal detractors and Republican wannabes.”

Donald Trump’s attorneys are demanding the judge who presided over his New York hush money trial and conviction immediately throw out the case, saying it would be “uniquely destabilizing to the country” otherwise, NBC News reports.