Trump threatened by New York AG over payment of civil fraud fine: Live

Alexander Smirnov – who allegedly “provided false derogatory information” about the president and his son in interviews with the FBI – told authorities that he has “extensive and extremely recent” contacts with foreign intelligence officials, according to the US Department of Justice.

A court filing from the office of special counsel David Weiss on Tuesday seeking Mr Smirnov’s pretrial detention claims that he has “contacts with multiple foreign intelligence agencies and had plans to leave the United States two days” following last week’s arrest.

After his arrest, he told law enforcement that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden, prosecutors wrote.

After being slammed with a court order to play around $350m following his recent fraud case in New York, the former president has wasted no time in creating shiny gold sneakers with a staggering $399 price tag.

Amelia Neath has the story:

Once again, a throng of conservative activists, Republican elected officials and young right-wingers will descend on National Harbor just outside of Washington, DC for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

CPAC has served multiple purposes throughout the years. It often showcases new conservative talent, sets the tone for what major policies conservatives will champion in the next election and often allows potential candidates for president to test the waters. Indeed, in 2011, Donald Trump gave his first political speech at the conservative gathering. It debuted his conservative star turn and laid the groundwork for him becoming the Republican nominee for president in 2016 and winning the presidency.

This year, though, with Mr Trump being the presumptive nominee, CPAC – which runs from Wednesday to Saturday – will have a different tone and will serve as a booster for his campaign against Joe Biden in the general election.

Here’s what to expect this week at CPAC:

Joe Sommerlad reports on this unsurprising development:

The staunch opponent of Vladmir Putin also read voraciously from Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn to occupy his mind and prevent himself from sinking into despair amid the brutal conditions in which he was held.

In one 3 December letter to Evgeny Feldman, a photographer who covered his attempted run for president in 2018 and now lives in exile in Latvia, Navalny wrote that he feared that if anything should happen to President Joe Biden – a distinct possibility, he felt, given the American’s advanced age – “Trump will become president”.

To Navalny, a second Mr Trump term was a “really scary” prospect for the wider world.

Eric Garcia has the answers:

Former Prime Minister Liz Truss is now placing blame for her meltdown after just 49 days in Number 10 Downing Street on Sir Tony Blair and a slew of government agencies who she says do not care about the lives of average Britons.

Read the full story from Andrew Feinberg here:

Melania Trump will be out “quite a bit” during Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign for the presidency in 2024, her husband has said.

Mr Trump waxed lyrical about his wife, the former First Lady, during a political event in South Carolina on Tuesday, during which he described her as a “very brilliant person” who had done “a beautiful job in raising my very tall son”.

“Her life evolves around that boy it’s so important to her,” he said, adding: “At the same time, it also revolves around our country and the success of our country. She’s raised a lot of money for charity.

“She’s a private person. It’s funny, she was a very successful model, very, very successful, and yet she was a private person. She’s going to be out a lot, not because she likes doing it, but she likes the result. She wants to see this country really succeed.”

He added: “[The people] love the fact that she’s not out there so much. You know, a lot of first ladies will go out. They want to be everywhere. They get angry at their husband because he’s not introducing them. If I didn’t introduce Melania she’d be very happy about it. She’s just a different kind of a person. And she loves the country.

“She’s gonna be out quite a bit and she loves his country and she wants a great and she says hello.”

Over the Christmas period the whereabouts of Ms Trump was questioned after she did not appear in several family photographs. Mr Trump later said that she had been spending time with her mother, Amalija Knavs, who died in early January.

During a town hall in South Carolina, Donald Trump said he did not “want to be a comedian, with respect to the campaign” – drawing laughter from the audience.

“We have a country that’s dying. We have a country that’s it’s a failing nation,” he said. “I said in my speeches, it’s a failing nation. We have a nation and decline… and I just don’t think it’s a subject that we’re smiling too much about.”

Mr Trump went on to discuss the threats of terrorism, adding: “We’re gonna have a big problem with terrorists.”

“We’re gonna have a lot of problems, we have to get them and especially the bad ones.”

In bonus footage from a town hall event in South Carolina on Tuesday, Donald Trump claimed that he was “leading” with young voters and that they would prefer to see “competence in office” rather than him being on TikTok.

It comes after the Biden adminstration launched an official TikTok account for the president. Asked if he would joing the social media platform, he replied: “I’m leading with the young voters by a lot. I think they want to see competence in office.

“They see this guy who can put two sentences together he literally so if you were on this stage, he would not be able to figure out how to get off… They want to see competence much more so than being in TikToks… I was going to ban it permanently, but Congress didn’t want to do it.”