Trump news today: Trump denies ever having ‘Iran’ paper despite recording, as Fox confronts him over 2020

A petition has been launched in Australia calling for a ban on Donald Trump Jr from visiting the country for a right-wing event next month.

By Monday nearly 15,000 people had signed the Change.org petition protesting against the former president’s eldest son attending the “Turning Point Australia” event.

Lashing out after his arraignment on federal charges last week, Donald Trump took aim at President Joe Biden and Democrats with language that seemed to evoke another era: He was being persecuted, he said, by “Marxists” and “communists.”

On his first day as attorney general, Merrick Garland pledged a return to what he called the “norms” of the Justice Department and said he would work to eliminate the perception of political interference. But in the two years since he took office, the former federal judge has found himself in the middle of a political firestorm of historic proportions.

Chris Christie became the latest Republican to publicly trash the decisions of his party’s leadership this week when he laid into the pledge that GOP bigwigs are requiring participants in the 2024 debate cycle to sign.

Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, the ex-New Jersey governor seemed to indicate that he had signed the pledge — which states that any participant in the GOP debates will support the party’s eventual nominee — merely in order to make it onstage, while alluding to the idea that he would not hesitate to break it.

John Bowden reports from Washington, DC.

As the ex-president’s loyalists continue to offer a wide scope of defences for their leader ranging from arguments that Mr Trump was allowed to designate the materials as personal records for his own safekeeping to the idea that the prosecution is merely a politicised weaponisation of the Justice Department, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper has offered his own assessment on the situation.

John Bowden has the story.

Donald Trump says that if he wins a second term, there’d be no Ivanka or Jared in the White House.

“That’s enough for the family,” he says.

Former president Donald Trump denied that he ever possessed a secret document about attacking Iran despite the fact a recording exists that had him discussing a document he kept from his presidency.

Mr Trump spoke in an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier at his property in Bedminster, New Jersey less than a week after he pleaded not guilty to 37 charges in a federal court in Miami for his arraignment in Miami. A federal grand jury had indicted him for allegedly willfully mishandling of classified documents, obstruction of justice and making false statements.