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Former President TrumpDonald TrumpOn The Money: Schumer pressured from all sides on spending strategy | GOP hammers HUD chief over sluggish rental aid | Democrat proposes taxes on commercial space flights Overnight Health Care: Fauci clashes with Paul - again | New York reaches .1B settlement with opioid distributors | Delta variant accounts for 83 percent of US COVID-19 cases Overnight Defense: Military justice overhaul included in defense bill | Pentagon watchdog to review security of 'nuclear football' | Pentagon carries out first air strike in Somalia under Biden MORE will meet with Rep. Liz CheneyElizabeth (Liz) Lynn CheneyTrump says he'll meet with Cheney challengers ahead of endorsement Pelosi weighing GOP picks for Jan. 6 probe Jim Jordan among McCarthy picks for Jan. 6 panel MOREs (R-Wyo.) primary challengers at his New Jersey golf club next week as he looks to make an endorsement in the race to oust one of his most prominent Republican critics.

Trump announced the upcoming meetings in a statement issued through his political action committee (PAC) Save America, underscoring the need for Republicans to coalesce behind a single candidate in the primary against Cheney.

This is a hot race with some very interesting candidates running against her. Remember though, in the end we just want ONE CANDIDATE running against Cheney, Trump said. I'll be meeting with some of her opponents in Bedminster next week and will be making my decision on who to endorse in the next few months. JUST ONE CANDIDATE. Thank you!

Trump has been hellbent on ousting Cheney since January, when she broke party lines in a vote to impeach him for his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. While Trump was ultimately acquitted in a Senate vote, he has vowed to campaign against Republicans who backed his impeachment.

Since the January impeachment vote, Cheney has continued to criticize the former president, especially over his repeated and baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him. That criticism prompted House Republicans to oust her in May as their conference chairwoman.

Cheney was picked by Speaker Nancy PelosiNancy PelosiEthics panel upholds 0 mask fines against Greene, other GOP lawmakers Trump says he'll meet with Cheney challengers ahead of endorsement Pelosi weighing GOP picks for Jan. 6 probe MORE (D-Calif.) to serve on a House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

So far, half-a-dozen Republicans have lined up to challenge Cheney in her 2022 primary, including state Sen. Anthony Bouchard and state Rep. Chuck Gray.

In his statement on Tuesday, Trump said that some highly respected pollsters have told him that Cheney is toast, though it wasnt clear whom he was referring to.

Public polling in the race remains scarce, but Cheney has continued to rake in large sums of money despite her status as persona non grata in Trump World. She raised nearly $1.9 million in the second quarter of the year, far outpacing any of her primary challengers.

Bouchard, by comparison, raised about $213,000 between April 1 and June 30, according to his filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), while Grays campaign pulled in about $221,000. Another challenger, former Laramie County GOP Chair Darin Smith, raised $171,000.

Still, a Trump endorsement is expected to go a long way in the race to replace Cheney, given Wyomings strong Republican tilt and the former presidents 43-point margin of victory there in the 2020 election.

Speaking to reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday, Cheney cast her primary race as a choice between the U.S. Constitution and the former president.

The people of Wyoming are gonna have a very clear choice between somebody who is loyal to the Constitution and somebody whose claim is loyalty to Donald Trump, and I'm confident that people will make the right decision, Cheney said.

--Scott Wong contributed.

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Trump says he'll meet with Cheney challengers ahead of endorsement | TheHill - The Hill

WASHINGTON (AP) Former President Donald Trump insisted Thursday that he wouldnt have used the military to illegally seize control of the government after his election loss. But he suggested that if he had tried to carry out a coup, it wouldnt have been with his top military adviser.

In a lengthy statement, Trump responded to revelations in a new book detailing fears from Gen. Mark Milley that the outgoing president would stage a coup during his final weeks in office. Trump said hes not into coups and never threatened, or spoke about, to anyone, a coup of our Government. At the same time, Trump said that if I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The mere mention of a coup was a stunning remark from a former president, especially one who left office under the cloud of a violent insurrection he helped incite at the U.S. Capitol in January in an effort to impede the peaceful transfer of power to Democrat Joe Biden. Since then, the FBI has warned of a rapidly growing threat of homegrown violent extremism.

Despite such concerns, Trump is maintaining his grip on the Republican Party. He was meeting on Thursday with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and has stepped up his public schedule, holding a series of rallies for his supporters across the country in which he continues to spread the lie that last years election was stolen from him.

His comment about a coup was in response to new reporting from I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trumps Catastrophic Final Year by Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. The book reports that Milley was shaken by Trumps refusal to concede in the weeks after the election.

According to early excerpts published by CNN and the Post on Wednesday ahead of its release, Milley was so concerned that Trump or his allies might try to use the military to remain in power that he and other top officials strategized about how they might block him even hatching a plan to resign, one by one.

Milley also reportedly compared Trumps rhetoric to Adolf Hitlers during his rise to power.

This is a Reichstag moment, Milley reportedly told aides. The gospel of the Fhrer.

Milleys office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But Milley has previously spoken out against drawing the military into election politics, especially after coming under fire for joining Trump on a walk through Lafayette Square for a photo op at a church shortly after the square had been violently cleared of protesters.

Trump, in the statement, mocked Milleys response to that moment, saying it helped him realize that his top military adviser was certainly not the type of person I would be talking coup with.

The book is one of a long list being released in the coming weeks examining the chaotic final days of the Trump administration, the Jan. 6 insurrection and the outgoing presidents refusal to accept the elections outcome. Trump sat for hours of interviews with many of the authors, but has issued a flurry of statements in recent days disputing their reporting and criticizing former staff for participating.

There is no evidence that supports Trumps claims that the election was somehow stolen from him. State election officials, Trumps own attorney general and numerous judges, including many appointed by Trump, have rejected allegations of massive fraud. Trumps own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called the 2020 election the most secure in American history.

Trump remains a dominant force in Republican politics, as demonstrated by McCarthys visit on Thursday to the former presidents summer home in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Trump and McCarthy were expected to spend their meeting discussing upcoming special elections, Republicans record fundraising hauls and Democrats they see as vulnerable in the 2022 midterm elections, according to a person familiar with the agenda who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a private meeting. McCarthy previously met with Trump in January at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

Meanwhile, Republicans who are eyeing White House bids of their own arent crossing Trump, who remains popular with many GOP voters.

GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a potential 2024 presidential contender, said no comment, when asked if he thought Trumps statement was appropriate for a former president. A member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and an Army veteran of two combat tours in Iraq, Cotton declined to comment again when asked if he wanted to criticize Trumps remark.

I think he has the right to say what he wants to say, said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, when asked if he was comfortable with a former president even hypothetically entertaining the idea of a coup.

You know, Donald Trump speaks for himself and he always has, said Cruz, another potential White House candidate in 2024.

___

Associated Press writers Robert Burns and Alan Fram contributed to this report.

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Trump opines on coup while rejecting fears about his actions - Associated Press

Will former President Donald Trump launch his political comeback as a future speaker of the House of Representatives? Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., is sending out fundraising appeals that tell the recipient to think of how great it will feel when we make our next Speaker of the House Donald J. Trump. Another portion of the fundraising letter includes a big red button that says: Join me: Lets get Trump as Speaker. Never mind that Trump no longer holds elected office, and may or may not even be interested in the job. The former president did respond somewhat favorably to the suggestion after being told he could use the position to open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. What Biden might be investigated for is, of course, besides the point.

But Gaetzs fundraising efforts, using this extremely unlikely scenario, did get me thinking about the political, legal and logistical requirements for speaker, a position that has a lot of power but is less likely to be the topic of your average civics lesson.

To start off, does the speaker have to be an elected representative? Maybe not. As Pete Williams has noted previously for NBC News, the Constitution is silent on this question. So could the leader of the House of Representatives, the third person in the line of presidential succession, arguably be that guy on the street corner who is holding up a sign about chemtrails? This is America, after all, the land of opportunity.

Its important to note that every previous speaker has been an elected member of Congress. And that is almost unquestionably what the Founders intended. The surprising part here is that legally, such a requirement may be more custom than mandate.

Its important to note that every previous speaker has been an elected member of Congress.

The speaker holds an important role, and not just because he or she holds sway over one of our two federal legislative bodies. If disaster strikes, they are third in line to become president.

The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 provides that if by reason of death, resignation, removal from office, inability, or failure to qualify, there is neither a President nor Vice President to discharge the powers and duties of the office of President, then the speaker of the House resigns his or her position and acts as the president. So far so good, except for the small matter of the constitutionality of that 1947 law.

The Succession Clause in the Constitution provides that if both the president and the vice president are unable to discharge the powers and duties of said office, then Congress can name which Officer shall act as president until the original president has recovered or a new president is elected. The legal issue is whether the speaker is considered an officer.

On the one hand, there is some evidence that the drafters of the Succession Clause understood Officers to mean executive officials (like members of the Cabinet) and not legislators. This would mean Congress lacks the power under the Constitution to place the speaker of the House in the presidential line of succession. There are also structural reasons why a legislative leader may not be the best choice to serve as acting president. For instance, it could create a conflict of interest in the event of impeachment proceedings. On the other hand, there are two places in the Constitution in which the term Officers is used to refer to legislative officials. And members of the Second Congress apparently believed that placing the speaker in the line of presidential succession was permissible.

In addition to potential legal landmines, there are plenty of political questions to consider when it comes to the current line of succession. If the Electoral College elects a Republican president and vice president, there is something rather problematic about installing a Democratic speaker as the acting president (assuming the speaker at the time is a Democrat).

What is the solution here? Congress could always pass a new statute, consistent with the Constitution, that provides that the third in line for the presidency must be a member of the Cabinet, like the secretary of state. (This was previously the case, from 1886 to 1947). Because when it comes to issues like who will be in charge of leading our country, it feels best not to wait for a catastrophe to clarify this relatively key point.

The Trump era has brought us plenty of fascinating legal hypotheticals. But, if Gaetzs fundraising somehow sparks a push for Trump to become speaker, we may be seeing more musings along these line soon. Changing the presidential line of succession could quickly become impossibly politically charged. Imagine a world with both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris indisposed in which Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Speaker Donald Trump contend that they are each the acting president. It's an unlikely (and dystopian) scenario but not a technically impossible one.

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Matt Gaetz says Trump should become speaker of the House. Is that possible? - MSNBC

A new report alleging Russian spy agencies were told to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election is disgusting and fiction, the former president said Thursday.

This is disgusting, Trump tweeted through spokeswoman Liz Harrington. Its fake news, just like RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA was fake news. Its just the Radical Left crazies doing whatever they can to demean everybody on the right.

Its fiction, and nobody was tougher on Russia than me, including on the pipeline, and sanctions, the tweet said. At the same time we got along with Russia.

Russia respected us, China respected us, Iran respected us, North Korea respected us. And the world was a much safer place than it is now with mentally unstable leadership.

At issue is a new report by the Guardian that Russian leader Vladimir Putin ordered a secret spy agency to find practical ways to support Trumps bid for the White House during a Jan. 22, 2016, meeting at the Kremlin.

According to the report, Putin deemed Trump mentally unstable and believed his accession to the White House would create social turmoil and weaken the US.

The report, which the Guardian said is based on leaked Kremlin documents, claims Trump was identified as the most promising candidate.

The documents include a psychological assessment describing Trump as an impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex.

The Guardian said the documents were shown to Western intelligence officials who believed they were genuine.

However, a spokesman for the Kremlin denied the claims, and called the Guardian report pulp fiction.

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Donald Trump slams 'disgusting' report on Russian interference in 2016 election - New York Post

Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail with a rally in Ohio on Saturday night, campaigning against a Republican who voted for his impeachment and trailing his own candidacy for president in 2024.

Trump repeated his baseless election 2020 grievances and painted a dystopian picture of the country under Democratic control, while in another echo the past, the crowd chanted Lock her up at the mention of Hillary Clinton, the Democrat he defeated in 2016.

The rally outside Cleveland on Saturday was to support Max Miller, a former White House aide challenging Anthony Gonzalez, a former college football and NFL star censured by his state party for voting for Trumps impeachment.

While he praised Miller as an incredible patriot and a great guy who loves the people of Ohio, Trump spent much of the rally fixating on the 2020 election, which he insists he won. This is despite top state and local election officials, his own attorney general and numerous judges, including some he appointed, saying there is no evidence of the mass voter fraud he alleges took place.

The 2020 presidential election was rigged, he told the crowd, which at one point broke into a Trump won! chant. We won that election in a landslide.

When Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Republican from Georgia known for her incendiary rhetoric, asked the crowd who their president is, they boomed loudly, Trump!

President Trump is my president, too, she said.

The event had many of the trappings of the rallies Trump held as a candidate and as president. There was the eclectic playlist, the same stage design, and many familiar volunteers.

In the lead-up to the event, Trump told the conservative Newsmax channel: Were giving tremendous endorsements.

Fake Republicans, anybody that voted for the impeachment doesnt get it. But there werent too many of them. And I think most of them are being primaried right now, so thats good. Ill be helping their opponent.

Trumps first impeachment, for abusing his power in approaches to Ukraine, attracted one Republican vote, that of the Utah senator Mitt Romney. In his second, for inciting the deadly US Capitol attack, 10 House Republicans and seven in the Senate voted for Trumps guilt.

Trump was acquitted twice but banned from major social media platforms over his role in the Capitol attack. Regardless, he dominates the Republican party.

All bar one of the House Republicans who voted against him have attracted challengers. The 10th, John Katko of New York, co-authored a proposal for an independent, 9/11-style commission to investigate the 6 January attack on Congress, in which a mob roamed the Capitol, looking for lawmakers to capture or kill in an attempt to overturn the election. Senate Republicans blocked it.

By Saturday afternoon, traffic was backed up from the fairgrounds into town, where pro-Trump signs dotted residents lawns. On street corners, vendors sold Trump 2024 flags and other merchandise as supporters arrived.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right congresswoman from Georgia who was stripped of her committee assignments over a number of extreme comments, mingled with attendees and took pictures.

Trump has said he didnt win the election but has not formally conceded defeat by Joe Biden and continues to voice his lie that the loss was the result of electoral fraud.

On Friday he told Newsmax he would be making an announcement in the not too distant future about whether he will run again, and said supporters were going to be thrilled by election results in 2024.

We want a little time to go by, maybe watch what happens in [2022], he said.

In those midterm elections, Republicans hope to retake the House and Senate.

Trumps legal problems mounted on Friday, as his own lawyer confirmed that charges are likely in the investigation of the Trump Organization by the Manhattan district attorney. The companys chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, and the company itself are in prosecutors sights.

Many observers point out that Trumps many legal problems did not stop him winning the presidency in 2016 and are unlikely to put off many Republican voters should he run for the White House again.

In his Newsmax interview, the former president referred to his problems and to those affecting Rudy Giuliani, Trumps lawyer and loyal ally. The former New York mayor this week saw his law license suspended, over his advancement of Trumps election fraud lie.

Right now, Trump said, Im helping a lot of people get into office, and were fighting the deep state, and were fighting [the] radical left. Theyre after me, Theyre after Rudy, theyre after you, probably. Theyre after anybody.

The deep state conspiracy theory holds that a permanent government of bureaucrats and operatives exists to thwart Trump. Steve Bannon, Trumps campaign chairman in 2016 then a White House strategist and chief propagator of the theory, has said it is for nut cases.

Theyre vicious, Trump went on, and they dont do a good job and theyre very bad for the country But Ive been fighting them for five and a half years.

Since I came down the escalator [at Trump Tower in New York in June 2015, to announce his run for president], Ive been fighting them. These are vicious people I honestly believe they dont love this country.

Trump has spent much of his post-presidency at his Florida resort and his golf course in New Jersey. He also told Newsmax he was working very hard not only for 2024, but were working very hard to show the corruption of what took place in 2020, and then we see what happens.

Trumps rallies have been an instrumental part of his brand since he launched his 2016 campaign. The former reality star often test-drives new material and talking points to see how they resonate with crowds. His political operation uses the events to collect critical voter contact information and as fundraising tools.

The rallies have spawned hardcore fans who traveled the country, often camping out overnight to snag prime spots. Some such supporters began lining up outside the Ohio venue days early this week.

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Donald Trump returns to campaign trail with rally ...