The United States, under the new Biden administration, is planning to reverse Trump's "draconian" immigration approach while working on policies addressing the causes of migration.

Cracking down on both legal and illegal immigration was a core focus of Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump. Biden, meanwhile, has made an early push for a bill that would open a path for citizenship for the roughly 11 million people living in the United States illegally, though even his allies in Congress acknowledge that may be "a Herculean task."

In a Friday call with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Biden outlined his plan to create new legal pathways for immigration and improve the process for people requesting asylum, according to an account of the call released by the White House.

Priorities include "reversing the previous administration’s draconian immigration policies," the White House said.

The two leaders agreed to work together towards reducing "irregular migration."

The call was “pleasant and respectful,” López Obrador said in a brief Twitter post. "Everything indicates relations will be good and for the benefit of our people and nations."

Mexico has a major role to play in Biden’s plans for immigration reform. Earlier this month, Mexico helped coordinate efforts in Central America to contain a large caravan of migrants heading for the United States.

Mexico’s Foreign Ministry also said it had begun talks with Washington about a COVID-19-related order signed by Biden to establish firmer health protocols for people entering US territory.

The United States, under the new Biden administration, is planning to reverse Trump's "draconian" immigration approach while working on policies addressing the causes of migration.

The United States, under the new Biden administration, is planning to reverse Trump's "draconian" immigration approach while working on policies addressing the causes of migration. Cracking down on both legal and illegal immigration was a core focus of Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump. Biden, meanwhile, has made an early push for a bill that would open a path for citizenship for the roughly 11 million people living in the United States illegally, though even his allies in Congress acknowledge that may be "a Herculean task." In a Friday call with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Biden outlined his plan to create new legal pathways for immigration and improve the process for people requesting asylum, according to an account of the call released by the White House. Priorities include "reversing the previous administration’s draconian immigration policies," the White House said. The two leaders agreed to work together towards reducing "irregular migration." The call was “pleasant and respectful,” López Obrador said in a brief Twitter post. "Everything indicates relations will be good and for the benefit of our people and nations." Mexico has a major role to play in Biden’s plans for immigration reform. Earlier this month, Mexico helped coordinate efforts in Central America to contain a large caravan of migrants heading for the United States. Mexico’s Foreign Ministry also said it had begun talks with Washington about a COVID-19-related order signed by Biden to establish firmer health protocols for people entering US territory.

US to reverse Trump's immigration policies, Biden tells Mexican president

The leaders of the U.S. Senate agreed on Friday to push back former President Donald Trump's impeachment trial by two weeks, giving the chamber more time to focus on President Joe Biden's legislative agenda and Cabinet nominees before turning to the contentious showdown over Trump.

Donald Trump impeachment trial in the US Senate to begin soon

Darrell Frazier believed he had found a path out of his life sentence in federal prison, with a president whose allies had advocated a broad use of pardons and a new clemency initiative. Frazier thought he seemed like a perfect candidate.

But when Barack Obama left office in 2017 having pardoned or commuted the sentences of more people than any other president, Frazier was not among them. The Justice Department had denied his application for clemency.

So when Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, took office, Frazier resolved to try a different path. Instead of only going through the formal channels, he also tried to get the attention of people with direct access to Trump.

After years of writing letters to celebrities, activist organizations and even Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Frazier got his break. An activist who had worked with the administration took Frazier’s case directly to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who had been taking pardon requests to her father in his final days in office. And early Wednesday, Trump’s last day as president, Frazier’s counselor came to his cell to deliver the news: He had been pardoned and would soon be released.

Tears started to flow.

“It just blew me away,” said Frazier, 60, who had served 32 years of a life sentence after being convicted of a conspiracy to sell cocaine.

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While Trump was heavily criticized for issuing dozens of pardons to political allies and friends, there also were numerous cases that won the praise of activists for providing relief to people serving harsh sentences for relatively minor, nonviolent offenses.

Frazier’s case in many ways epitomized Trump’s mixed record on criminal justice. On the one hand, he did support some bipartisan reforms to reduce the prison population. On the other, the pardon process showed Trump’s ad hoc, somewhat capricious approach to justice, one that often required special access and was motivated by optics and political expediency during an election where he set out to target more Black voters, some activists said.

“Trump did nothing to actually address the racist practices of the prison industrial complex,” said Thenjiwe McHarris, a member of the leadership team for the Movement for Black Lives. “While we support those he pardoned, we just also want to acknowledge that it was done as a spectacle — an attempt to paint him as a savior while not actually addressing the harms of the actual system.”

The pardon process, and criminal justice reform more broadly, will be among the areas in which President Joe Biden is most closely scrutinized because of his previous record of promoting tough-on-crime policies. He was an architect of the 1994 crime bill, legislation that has since been criticized across the political spectrum for leading to overpopulated prisons and the devastation of Black families.

Although Biden has apologized for his past actions on criminal justice, activists say he will have to prove his sincerity.

“I think that for me the jury is still out,” said Syrita Steib, who was among those to receive a pardon from Trump on his final day and runs an organization that helps women who are currently and formerly incarcerated.

She added that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took actions that helped to create the punitive justice system of today. “It’s my hope that this administration will begin to right the wrongs that they created years ago,” she said.

During the campaign, Biden promised to use his clemency power “broadly” to secure the release of individuals facing unduly long sentences for certain nonviolent and drug crimes. He said he would build on the legacy of Obama, under whom he served as vice president.

A White House spokesperson Friday declined to comment on the president’s plans.

Part of the challenge will be reforming a clemency system that many view as arcane and unfair.

The pardon attorney’s office, operating out of the Justice Department, is responsible for reviewing the petitions for pardons and sentence commutations and making recommendations for clemency to the president. That system has left thousands of petitions waiting for review with a small team of lawyers unable to keep up.

In the past, some advocates have argued that the pardon office should operate out of the White House. In an informal way, that is what Trump did in an operation that reflected the personal interests of his family members and appealed to Trump as an issue that he believed would please Black voters.

Jessica Jackson, a lawyer who advocated for clemencies during the Obama and Trump administrations, said pardons should be run by an independent office. It was a conflict of interest for the Justice Department to both prosecute cases and decide who gets pardoned, said Jackson, who brought Frazier’s case to Ivanka Trump.

There needed to be a systemic mechanism for granting clemencies so that they occur more frequently, she said, rather than presidents jamming them through before leaving office. Jackson said she felt there would be a real openness on the part of the incoming administration to reforming the pardon process and the criminal justice system more broadly.

“He’s looking for issues where he can find common ground on both sides of the aisle,” Jackson said of Biden. “I think this issue naturally presents itself.”

What that reform looks like, though, will be hotly debated and scrutinized in the months and years ahead.

Trump’s most notable legislation on criminal justice reform was the First Step Act, but even that was criticized by many activists as being far too modest to effect real change. Still, those intimately involved with Trump’s pardon process seemed unwilling to let his tough-on-crime approach — he oversaw more federal executions than any president in more than 120 years — derail the work on clemencies.

This week’s pardons included Chalana McFarland, who was sentenced in 2005 to 30 years for multiple counts of mortgage fraud, and Michael Pelletier, who was serving a life sentence in federal prison for a nonviolent marijuana conspiracy offense. But he also pardoned Al Pirro, the ex-husband of one of his favorite Fox News hosts, Jeanine Pirro; Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist; and Elliott Broidy, one of his top fundraisers in 2016.

Alice Johnson, a onetime drug convict, had served 22 years of a life sentence when her case caught the eyes of Trump because Kim Kardashian had brought it to his attention. Trump commuted her sentence in 2018 and then pardoned her after she praised him at the Republican National Convention in 2020.

Her path to the Trump White House had given her what she saw as a unique opportunity to make a difference, and she became a key part of the informal clemency process. The president personally asked her to help him find other people with stories like her own, she said.

“I took him up on it and stayed on top of them,” Johnson said. “There was no way I was going to let that opportunity pass.”

Working mostly with Kushner and, in the final days of the administration, Ivanka Trump, Johnson provided long lists of strong cases to the White House. Kushner and Ivanka Trump would select stories that resonated with them, and then take those cases to the White House Counsel’s Office and the Justice Department for vetting, before making their cases directly to the president.

Frazier said he felt he had a pretty good chance of getting on Trump’s radar more than a year ago when CAN-DO Justice Through Clemency, an organization that advocates for incarcerated nonviolent offenders, took his case. The organization had won other pardons.

But one thing that really made him think Trump would consider his case was when he heard the former president describing his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, as a rat for talking to prosecutors.

It made him think that Trump could empathize with people like him — Frazier’s ultimate downfall was someone from the drug operation testifying against him, he said. So when he heard about the comment, he said he turned to a fellow inmate and told him: “The president’s going to get me out. He sounds like us in here.”

Darrell Frazier believed he had found a path out of his life sentence in federal prison, with a president whose allies had advocated a broad use of pardons and a new clemency initiative.

Darrell Frazier believed he had found a path out of his life sentence in federal prison, with a president whose allies had advocated a broad use of pardons and a new clemency initiative. Frazier thought he seemed like a perfect candidate. But when Barack Obama left office in 2017 having pardoned or commuted the sentences of more people than any other president, Frazier was not among them. The Justice Department had denied his application for clemency. So when Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, took office, Frazier resolved to try a different path. Instead of only going through the formal channels, he also tried to get the attention of people with direct access to Trump. After years of writing letters to celebrities, activist organizations and even Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Frazier got his break. An activist who had worked with the administration took Frazier’s case directly to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who had been taking pardon requests to her father in his final days in office. And early Wednesday, Trump’s last day as president, Frazier’s counselor came to his cell to deliver the news: He had been pardoned and would soon be released. Tears started to flow. “It just blew me away,” said Frazier, 60, who had served 32 years of a life sentence after being convicted of a conspiracy to sell cocaine. × While Trump was heavily criticized for issuing dozens of pardons to political allies and friends, there also were numerous cases that won the praise of activists for providing relief to people serving harsh sentences for relatively minor, nonviolent offenses. Frazier’s case in many ways epitomized Trump’s mixed record on criminal justice. On the one hand, he did support some bipartisan reforms to reduce the prison population. On the other, the pardon process showed Trump’s ad hoc, somewhat capricious approach to justice, one that often required special access and was motivated by optics and political expediency during an election where he set out to target more Black voters, some activists said. “Trump did nothing to actually address the racist practices of the prison industrial complex,” said Thenjiwe McHarris, a member of the leadership team for the Movement for Black Lives. “While we support those he pardoned, we just also want to acknowledge that it was done as a spectacle — an attempt to paint him as a savior while not actually addressing the harms of the actual system.” The pardon process, and criminal justice reform more broadly, will be among the areas in which President Joe Biden is most closely scrutinized because of his previous record of promoting tough-on-crime policies. He was an architect of the 1994 crime bill, legislation that has since been criticized across the political spectrum for leading to overpopulated prisons and the devastation of Black families. Although Biden has apologized for his past actions on criminal justice, activists say he will have to prove his sincerity. “I think that for me the jury is still out,” said Syrita Steib, who was among those to receive a pardon from Trump on his final day and runs an organization that helps women who are currently and formerly incarcerated. She added that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took actions that helped to create the punitive justice system of today. “It’s my hope that this administration will begin to right the wrongs that they created years ago,” she said. During the campaign, Biden promised to use his clemency power “broadly” to secure the release of individuals facing unduly long sentences for certain nonviolent and drug crimes. He said he would build on the legacy of Obama, under whom he served as vice president. A White House spokesperson Friday declined to comment on the president’s plans. Part of the challenge will be reforming a clemency system that many view as arcane and unfair. The pardon attorney’s office, operating out of the Justice Department, is responsible for reviewing the petitions for pardons and sentence commutations and making recommendations for clemency to the president. That system has left thousands of petitions waiting for review with a small team of lawyers unable to keep up. In the past, some advocates have argued that the pardon office should operate out of the White House. In an informal way, that is what Trump did in an operation that reflected the personal interests of his family members and appealed to Trump as an issue that he believed would please Black voters. Jessica Jackson, a lawyer who advocated for clemencies during the Obama and Trump administrations, said pardons should be run by an independent office. It was a conflict of interest for the Justice Department to both prosecute cases and decide who gets pardoned, said Jackson, who brought Frazier’s case to Ivanka Trump. There needed to be a systemic mechanism for granting clemencies so that they occur more frequently, she said, rather than presidents jamming them through before leaving office. Jackson said she felt there would be a real openness on the part of the incoming administration to reforming the pardon process and the criminal justice system more broadly. “He’s looking for issues where he can find common ground on both sides of the aisle,” Jackson said of Biden. “I think this issue naturally presents itself.” What that reform looks like, though, will be hotly debated and scrutinized in the months and years ahead. Trump’s most notable legislation on criminal justice reform was the First Step Act, but even that was criticized by many activists as being far too modest to effect real change. Still, those intimately involved with Trump’s pardon process seemed unwilling to let his tough-on-crime approach — he oversaw more federal executions than any president in more than 120 years — derail the work on clemencies. This week’s pardons included Chalana McFarland, who was sentenced in 2005 to 30 years for multiple counts of mortgage fraud, and Michael Pelletier, who was serving a life sentence in federal prison for a nonviolent marijuana conspiracy offense. But he also pardoned Al Pirro, the ex-husband of one of his favorite Fox News hosts, Jeanine Pirro; Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist; and Elliott Broidy, one of his top fundraisers in 2016. Alice Johnson, a onetime drug convict, had served 22 years of a life sentence when her case caught the eyes of Trump because Kim Kardashian had brought it to his attention. Trump commuted her sentence in 2018 and then pardoned her after she praised him at the Republican National Convention in 2020. Her path to the Trump White House had given her what she saw as a unique opportunity to make a difference, and she became a key part of the informal clemency process. The president personally asked her to help him find other people with stories like her own, she said. “I took him up on it and stayed on top of them,” Johnson said. “There was no way I was going to let that opportunity pass.” Working mostly with Kushner and, in the final days of the administration, Ivanka Trump, Johnson provided long lists of strong cases to the White House. Kushner and Ivanka Trump would select stories that resonated with them, and then take those cases to the White House Counsel’s Office and the Justice Department for vetting, before making their cases directly to the president. Frazier said he felt he had a pretty good chance of getting on Trump’s radar more than a year ago when CAN-DO Justice Through Clemency, an organization that advocates for incarcerated nonviolent offenders, took his case. The organization had won other pardons. But one thing that really made him think Trump would consider his case was when he heard the former president describing his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, as a rat for talking to prosecutors. It made him think that Trump could empathize with people like him — Frazier’s ultimate downfall was someone from the drug operation testifying against him, he said. So when he heard about the comment, he said he turned to a fellow inmate and told him: “The president’s going to get me out. He sounds like us in here.”

Trump’s pardon process was a mix of mercy and favoritism

Donald Trump has been called by many to be someone with chronic case of denial. Even when US Election was called in favour of Joe Biden, Trump continued claiming that he was the winner. Now that he is gone, it's perhaps more than expected that Trump's supporters would whip something truly original to continue claiming that he is the real president of the US.

This has happened and fun fact is that the litigants have taken support from Lord Of The Rings (LOTR) to drive home their point.

So here's the deal, in LOTR, the Kingdom of Gondor had an empty throne, its king was exiled and the kingdom was ruled by a Steward, a temporary ruler. He was to rule till the rightful king returned.

So a lawsuit in Texas equates USA to Kingdom of Gondor. USA hasn't had a 'king' or anyone like that since 1776.

“This analogy is applicable since there is now in Washington DC a group of individuals calling themselves the president, vice-president and Congress who have no rightful claim to govern the American people,” the litigants state as per The Guardian.

“Since only the rightful king could sit on the throne of Gondor, a steward was appointed to manage Gondor until the return of the King, known as ‘Aragorn’, occurred at the end of the story.” they add.

Aragorn is the rightful king in LOTR. The character was played by Viggo Mortensen.

As it is apparent, President Joe Biden is like the Steward of Gondor, fit to rule only for a short time till the 'rightful king' (read Donald Trump) returns.

The litigants probably need a standing ovation for their courage for two thing

1. Continuing their journey through wonderland to still strongly believe that the election was rigged. This when even US Supreme Court trashed previous such litigation

2. Taking help of a fantasy kingdom to prove their point. Imagine the plight of their lawyer while arguing the case in a courtroom which only has place for cold hard facts and logic.

Aftereffects of four years of Trump-rule? Who knows.

Donald Trump has been called by many to be someone with chronic case of denial. Even when US Election was called in favour of Joe Biden, Trump continued claiming that he was the winner.

Donald Trump has been called by many to be someone with chronic case of denial. Even when US Election was called in favour of Joe Biden, Trump continued claiming that he was the winner. Now that he is gone, it's perhaps more than expected that Trump's supporters would whip something truly original to continue claiming that he is the real president of the US. This has happened and fun fact is that the litigants have taken support from Lord Of The Rings (LOTR) to drive home their point. So here's the deal, in LOTR, the Kingdom of Gondor had an empty throne, its king was exiled and the kingdom was ruled by a Steward, a temporary ruler. He was to rule till the rightful king returned. So a lawsuit in Texas equates USA to Kingdom of Gondor. USA hasn't had a 'king' or anyone like that since 1776. “This analogy is applicable since there is now in Washington DC a group of individuals calling themselves the president, vice-president and Congress who have no rightful claim to govern the American people,” the litigants state as per The Guardian. “Since only the rightful king could sit on the throne of Gondor, a steward was appointed to manage Gondor until the return of the King, known as ‘Aragorn’, occurred at the end of the story.” they add. Aragorn is the rightful king in LOTR. The character was played by Viggo Mortensen. As it is apparent, President Joe Biden is like the Steward of Gondor, fit to rule only for a short time till the 'rightful king' (read Donald Trump) returns. The litigants probably need a standing ovation for their courage for two thing 1. Continuing their journey through wonderland to still strongly believe that the election was rigged. This when even US Supreme Court trashed previous such litigation 2. Taking help of a fantasy kingdom to prove their point. Imagine the plight of their lawyer while arguing the case in a courtroom which only has place for cold hard facts and logic. Aftereffects of four years of Trump-rule? Who knows.

Pro-Trump lawsuit takes help of Lord of The Rings to make case stronger

The former US President <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump's</a> lawyer Rudy Giuliani is facing criticism now, more than ever, since his boss and friend completed his term of presidency.

A group of prominent lawyers have now asked the New York's judiciary to suspend Giuliani's law license and has alleged him of making false claims post US election.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/donald-trump-tried-replacing-attorney-general-for-personal-needs-reports-358769">Donald Trump tried replacing attorney general for personal needs: Reports</a>

He has also been alleged of motivating Trump supporters to engage in "trial by combat" after the former President diverted them to riot inside the US Capitol.

The group, Lawyers Defending American Democracy, has also called for an investigation for the past works of the tainted lawyer. He has earlier served as a federal prosecutor and a New York City mayor, before being hired as a personal attorney for Trump.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/donald-trump-tried-replacing-attorney-general-for-personal-needs-reports-358769">Donald Trump tried replacing attorney general for personal needs: Reports</a>

"This complaint is about law, not politics," the group of lawyers claimed in their letter to the attorney grievance committee for the New York supreme court.

The letter has been signed by more than 40 lawyers who are expecting this letter will be taken into consideration by the committee and can have serious consequences for Guiliani. The committee has the power to censure and suspend lawyers, in addition to revoking law licenses.

Giuliani has been the torch-bearer of the recent lawsuits filed against several state governments with the aim of overturning the US election result in which Trump had lost to the new US President<a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/joe-biden"> Joe Biden.</a>

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/videos/us-ex-president-trumps-impeachment-trial-postponed-to-february-358759">WATCH|</a>

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/us-ex-president-trumps-impeachment-trial-postponed-to-february-358759/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

Dozens of lawsuits were filed, and lost, within a span of nearly a month, by Giuliani's team, following which Biden's historic win against Trump was confirmed.

Trump is now set to appear for his <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trump-impeachment-trial-put-off-until-early-february-358797">second impeachment trial</a> — which is the first time for any US President — which was set in motion by the US Senate after Trump urged his supporters to march to the US Capitol, resulting in a deadly riot and destruction of federal property.&nbsp;The leaders of the US Senate have now, however, agreed to push back his&nbsp;impeachment trial by two weeks.

He has also been recently alleged of working with a Justice Department lawyer to&nbsp;replace the then-acting US attorney general Jeffrey A. Rosen with a candidate of his choice to help him turn out the results of the Georgia state in the recently-concluded US election 2020.

The former US President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani is facing criticism now, more than ever, since his boss and friend completed his term of presidency. A group of prominent lawyers have now asked the New York's judiciary to suspend Giuliani's law license and has alleged him of making false claims post US election.

The former US President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani is facing criticism now, more than ever, since his boss and friend completed his term of presidency. A group of prominent lawyers have now asked the New York's judiciary to suspend Giuliani's law license and has alleged him of making false claims post US election. Also read| Donald Trump tried replacing attorney general for personal needs: Reports He has also been alleged of motivating Trump supporters to engage in "trial by combat" after the former President diverted them to riot inside the US Capitol. The group, Lawyers Defending American Democracy, has also called for an investigation for the past works of the tainted lawyer. He has earlier served as a federal prosecutor and a New York City mayor, before being hired as a personal attorney for Trump. Also read| Donald Trump tried replacing attorney general for personal needs: Reports "This complaint is about law, not politics," the group of lawyers claimed in their letter to the attorney grievance committee for the New York supreme court. The letter has been signed by more than 40 lawyers who are expecting this letter will be taken into consideration by the committee and can have serious consequences for Guiliani. The committee has the power to censure and suspend lawyers, in addition to revoking law licenses. Giuliani has been the torch-bearer of the recent lawsuits filed against several state governments with the aim of overturning the US election result in which Trump had lost to the new US President Joe Biden. WATCH| Dozens of lawsuits were filed, and lost, within a span of nearly a month, by Giuliani's team, following which Biden's historic win against Trump was confirmed. Trump is now set to appear for his second impeachment trial — which is the first time for any US President — which was set in motion by the US Senate after Trump urged his supporters to march to the US Capitol, resulting in a deadly riot and destruction of federal property. The leaders of the US Senate have now, however, agreed to push back his impeachment trial by two weeks. He has also been recently alleged of working with a Justice Department lawyer to replace the then-acting US attorney general Jeffrey A. Rosen with a candidate of his choice to help him turn out the results of the Georgia state in the recently-concluded US election 2020.

Group of lawyers call for suspension of Rudy Giuliani's law license

The leaders of the US Senate have agreed to push back former president Donald Trump's impeachment trial by two weeks.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, said the trial is set to begin during the week of February 8, an arrangement praised by the chamber's top Republican, Mitch McConnell.

This would give the chamber more time to focus on President Joe Biden's legislative agenda and Cabinet nominees before turning to the contentious showdown over Trump.

Trump on January 13 became the first US president to have been impeached twice. The Senate acquitted him last year in the previous trial focused on his request that Ukraine investigate Biden and his son. Trump's presidential term ended on Wednesday.

The House of Representatives is due to formally deliver to the Senate on Monday (January 25) the impeachment charge accusing Trump of inciting an insurrection, a move that ordinarily would have triggered the beginning of the trial within a day.&nbsp;

The charge stems from Trump's incendiary speech to supporters before they stormed the Capitol on January 6 in a rampage that delayed the formal congressional certification of Biden's election victory and left five people dead, including a police officer.

The new timeline, however, will allow the Senate to move quickly on key Biden appointees and other tasks while giving House lawmakers who will prosecute the case and Trump's team more time to prepare for the trial.

The timeline was a compromise after McConnell had asked the Democratic-led House to delay sending the charge until next Thursday, and called on Schumer to postpone the trial until mid-February to give Trump more time to prepare a defense.

Doug Andres, a spokesman for McConnell, said the senator was pleased Democrats had given Trump's defense more time, and laid out a timeline that could have the trial begin as soon as February 9.

Under the timeline, House impeachment managers will file their pre-trial brief and Trump's defense team will file an answer to the impeachment charge on February 2, and each side will respond to those filings on February 8.

Meanwhile, conviction in the Senate would require a two-thirds vote - meaning 17 of Trump's fellow Republicans would have to vote against him. A conviction would clear the way for a second vote, requiring a simply majority, to bar Trump from holding office again.

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters earlier in the day that the Senate should be able to move forward with both the trial and Biden's agenda, beginning with his call for $1.9 trillion of fresh COVID-19 assistance for Americans and the US economy.

The deal came even as Schumer and McConnell struggled to assert control in a chamber divided 50-50, with Democrats holding a majority thanks to Vice President Kamala Harris' tie-breaking vote.

Trump has, meanwhile, said he may seek the presidency again in 2024.

The leaders of the US Senate have agreed to push back former president Donald Trump's impeachment trial by two weeks. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, said the trial is set to begin during the week of February 8, an arrangement praised by the chamber's top Republican, Mitch McConnell.

The leaders of the US Senate have agreed to push back former president Donald Trump's impeachment trial by two weeks. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, said the trial is set to begin during the week of February 8, an arrangement praised by the chamber's top Republican, Mitch McConnell. This would give the chamber more time to focus on President Joe Biden's legislative agenda and Cabinet nominees before turning to the contentious showdown over Trump. Trump on January 13 became the first US president to have been impeached twice. The Senate acquitted him last year in the previous trial focused on his request that Ukraine investigate Biden and his son. Trump's presidential term ended on Wednesday. The House of Representatives is due to formally deliver to the Senate on Monday (January 25) the impeachment charge accusing Trump of inciting an insurrection, a move that ordinarily would have triggered the beginning of the trial within a day. The charge stems from Trump's incendiary speech to supporters before they stormed the Capitol on January 6 in a rampage that delayed the formal congressional certification of Biden's election victory and left five people dead, including a police officer. The new timeline, however, will allow the Senate to move quickly on key Biden appointees and other tasks while giving House lawmakers who will prosecute the case and Trump's team more time to prepare for the trial. The timeline was a compromise after McConnell had asked the Democratic-led House to delay sending the charge until next Thursday, and called on Schumer to postpone the trial until mid-February to give Trump more time to prepare a defense. Doug Andres, a spokesman for McConnell, said the senator was pleased Democrats had given Trump's defense more time, and laid out a timeline that could have the trial begin as soon as February 9. Under the timeline, House impeachment managers will file their pre-trial brief and Trump's defense team will file an answer to the impeachment charge on February 2, and each side will respond to those filings on February 8. Meanwhile, conviction in the Senate would require a two-thirds vote - meaning 17 of Trump's fellow Republicans would have to vote against him. A conviction would clear the way for a second vote, requiring a simply majority, to bar Trump from holding office again. White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters earlier in the day that the Senate should be able to move forward with both the trial and Biden's agenda, beginning with his call for $1.9 trillion of fresh COVID-19 assistance for Americans and the US economy. The deal came even as Schumer and McConnell struggled to assert control in a chamber divided 50-50, with Democrats holding a majority thanks to Vice President Kamala Harris' tie-breaking vote. Trump has, meanwhile, said he may seek the presidency again in 2024.

Trump impeachment trial put off until early February

Rudy Giuliani, the personal lawyer to former President Donald Trump, conceded Friday night that an associate had sent an email to campaign officials asking that Giuliani be paid $20,000 a day for his work after the Nov. 3 election, but he insisted he was unaware of it at the time.

Giuliani acknowledged in a brief phone interview that his associate, Maria Ryan, had sent the email shortly after Election Day. But he maintained that she consulted with another associate, Larry Levy, about what Giuliani should ask for from the campaign while Giuliani was out of town.

A copy of the email, reviewed by The New York Times, showed that she sent it from a Giuliani Partners email account.

“Mr. Giuliani began working the case in the wee hours of the morning on November 4,” Ryan wrote. “He has a team in Washington working out of rented hotel rooms.”

She wrote that the company was working on an engagement letter, and that instead of $2,000 an hour, “we will contract for $20,000 a day which will include all of the expenses for Mr. Giuliani and his staff.” The request was sent to at least three campaign officials at a time when the campaign was raising large sums of money for a legal fund to fight the election results.

When the Times asked about the fee request in November, Giuliani denied it. He had maintained it was a “lie” that he requested such a fee from the president, even as recently as Friday afternoon on his radio show. “I did not do that,” he said.

In the phone interview Friday night, after the Times asked his spokesperson about Ryan’s email, Giuliani said that he told the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and Trump, of the $20,000 amount, “It’s ridiculous, I don’t want to be paid.”

Giuliani said he did not recall precisely when he had that conversation. And it was unclear whether he was aware that Ryan had sent the email when the Times first asked him about the fee request.

“I never had a single expectation of being paid a penny,” Giuliani said, adding that he’s had a few expenses reimbursed but nothing more. He faulted Trump’s other advisers and blasted them as “incompetent” leading up to the election.

“I feel extremely bad that I’m portrayed as some kind of money-grubbing ambulance chaser,” Giuliani said.

“I represented him out of my sense of commitment,” he continued. “I didn’t see anything about this that was going to lead to great wealth. I did see a lot about this that was going to lead to great torture.”

Rudy Giuliani, the personal lawyer to former President Donald Trump, conceded Friday night that an associate had sent an email to campaign officials asking that Giuliani be paid $20,000 a day for his work after the Nov.

Rudy Giuliani, the personal lawyer to former President Donald Trump, conceded Friday night that an associate had sent an email to campaign officials asking that Giuliani be paid $20,000 a day for his work after the Nov. 3 election, but he insisted he was unaware of it at the time. Giuliani acknowledged in a brief phone interview that his associate, Maria Ryan, had sent the email shortly after Election Day. But he maintained that she consulted with another associate, Larry Levy, about what Giuliani should ask for from the campaign while Giuliani was out of town. A copy of the email, reviewed by The New York Times, showed that she sent it from a Giuliani Partners email account. “Mr. Giuliani began working the case in the wee hours of the morning on November 4,” Ryan wrote. “He has a team in Washington working out of rented hotel rooms.” She wrote that the company was working on an engagement letter, and that instead of $2,000 an hour, “we will contract for $20,000 a day which will include all of the expenses for Mr. Giuliani and his staff.” The request was sent to at least three campaign officials at a time when the campaign was raising large sums of money for a legal fund to fight the election results. When the Times asked about the fee request in November, Giuliani denied it. He had maintained it was a “lie” that he requested such a fee from the president, even as recently as Friday afternoon on his radio show. “I did not do that,” he said. In the phone interview Friday night, after the Times asked his spokesperson about Ryan’s email, Giuliani said that he told the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and Trump, of the $20,000 amount, “It’s ridiculous, I don’t want to be paid.” Giuliani said he did not recall precisely when he had that conversation. And it was unclear whether he was aware that Ryan had sent the email when the Times first asked him about the fee request. “I never had a single expectation of being paid a penny,” Giuliani said, adding that he’s had a few expenses reimbursed but nothing more. He faulted Trump’s other advisers and blasted them as “incompetent” leading up to the election. “I feel extremely bad that I’m portrayed as some kind of money-grubbing ambulance chaser,” Giuliani said. “I represented him out of my sense of commitment,” he continued. “I didn’t see anything about this that was going to lead to great wealth. I did see a lot about this that was going to lead to great torture.”

Confirming $20,000 fee, Giuliani says it wasn’t him

The former US President and reality TV star, <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a>, has been accused of plotting with a Justice Department lawyer to replace the US attorney general to meet his selfish motives.

Trump, allegedly, wanted to replace the then-acting US attorney general Jeffrey A. Rosen with a candidate of his choice to help him turn out the results of the Georgia state in the recently-concluded <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/us-election">US election 2020.</a>

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/over-150-national-guard-troops-for-biden-inauguration-test-positive-for-coronavirus-358691" hreflang="en">Over 150 National Guard troops for Biden inauguration test COVID positive</a>

Jeffrey Clark, the lawyer who provided help to the former President, had been trying to come up with different plans to plant a seed of doubt in the minds of the concerned people regarding the election results. The two had been closely working together to replace Rosen with Clark.

The former President wanted to devise a plan to remove Rosen as then then-acting attorney general had refused to cater to the antics of Trump and has denied all baseless accusations of voter fraud.

Also read|&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/photos/inside-us-president-joe-bidens-redecorated-oval-office-358715" hreflang="en">Inside US President Joe Biden's redecorated Oval Office</a>

This piece of news has come at a time when Trump has started his post-White House life with a bump in his professional, social and personal life as he is set to face a Senate trial for "incitement of insurrection" for motivating his supporters to carry out riots in the US Capitol.

His personal life, too, has taken a hit with reports and rumours of his divorce with <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/watch-melania-trump-refuses-to-pose-with-donald-trump-after-he-leaves-white-house-twitter-laughs-358514">Melania Trump</a> started surfacing after the former FLOTUS refused to pose with him the day their duties as the First Couple ended.

However, the plan was terminated after the majority of the concerned employees said they would resign if Rosen was removed from his post.

The claim was first made by the US media house, the New York Times.

The former US President and reality TV star, Donald Trump, has been accused of plotting with a Justice Department lawyer to replace the US attorney general to meet his selfish motives.

The former US President and reality TV star, Donald Trump, has been accused of plotting with a Justice Department lawyer to replace the US attorney general to meet his selfish motives. Trump, allegedly, wanted to replace the then-acting US attorney general Jeffrey A. Rosen with a candidate of his choice to help him turn out the results of the Georgia state in the recently-concluded US election 2020. Also read| Over 150 National Guard troops for Biden inauguration test COVID positive Jeffrey Clark, the lawyer who provided help to the former President, had been trying to come up with different plans to plant a seed of doubt in the minds of the concerned people regarding the election results. The two had been closely working together to replace Rosen with Clark. The former President wanted to devise a plan to remove Rosen as then then-acting attorney general had refused to cater to the antics of Trump and has denied all baseless accusations of voter fraud. Also read| Inside US President Joe Biden's redecorated Oval Office This piece of news has come at a time when Trump has started his post-White House life with a bump in his professional, social and personal life as he is set to face a Senate trial for "incitement of insurrection" for motivating his supporters to carry out riots in the US Capitol. His personal life, too, has taken a hit with reports and rumours of his divorce with Melania Trump started surfacing after the former FLOTUS refused to pose with him the day their duties as the First Couple ended. However, the plan was terminated after the majority of the concerned employees said they would resign if Rosen was removed from his post. The claim was first made by the US media house, the New York Times.

Donald Trump tried replacing attorney general for personal needs: Reports

The leaders of the U.S. Senate agreed to push back former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial by two weeks. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that the trial is set to begin during the week of Monday (8 February).

US Ex-President Trump's impeachment trial postponed to February

He may be out of office, But <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump </a>is certainly not out of troubles.

The cloak of protection afforded by the presidency is largely gone.

It has been just two days and his rivals seem to be lining up for a shot.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is insistent on Trump's impeachment trial with the proceedings beginning on December 25 in Senate.&nbsp;

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trump-impeachment-to-be-sent-to-senate-on-january-25-358667">Trump impeachment to be sent to Senate on January 25</a>

Attorneys in New York are investigating his business dealings and add that they will stop at nothing in pressing charges against private citizen Trump.

The district attorneys in Manhattan are reportedly investigating Trump's hush-money payout to porn star Stormy Daniels.

Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/twitter-suspends-account-linked-to-khameneis-website-clarifies-its-fake-and-not-his-358646">Twitter suspends account linked to Khamenei's website, clarifies it's fake and not his</a>

Several commercial banks, including Trump's biggest lender Deutsche Bank have indicated that they no longer want to do business with him.

In Georgia, prosecutors are planning to open a criminal investigation against the former president over his attempts to overturn the results of the presidential election in the state.

<h2>Threat to life</h2>

There seems to be a threat to his life as well from Iran.&nbsp;

Last year, Trump had said that the US has killed the "number one terrorist" in the world after Iran's top general Qasem Soleimani was killed in a drone strike in Iraq.&nbsp;

Iran has not forgotten its revered general's assassination and wants to take revenge against now civilian Trump.&nbsp;

The official Twitter account of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei posted an image which showed a golfer, resembling Trump playing golf and a drone is hovering over him.&nbsp;

The caption said: "revenge is certain".&nbsp;

There has been no comment from Iran, but the threat cannot be downplayed.

This is not the first time that something similar to this has happened and two weeks back, the Chief Justice of Iran Ebrahim had warned, saying: "those who had a role in this assassination and crime will not be safe on earth".&nbsp;

"Do not presume that someone, as the president of America, who appeared as a murderer or ordered a murder, may be immune from justice being carried out," he had said.&nbsp;

Trump has extended secret service protection to his family as well, including his four adult children and two of their spouses.&nbsp;

Right before he left office, the former Republican president issued a directive to extend post-presidency secret service protection to his children.

Under the country's federal law, Trump, his wife Melania and their 14-year-old son Baron are the only people entitled to secret service protection.

But Trump wanted everybody covered, and given the threats from iran, the high-security makes sense.&nbsp;

He may be out of office, But Donald Trump is certainly not out of troubles. The cloak of protection afforded by the presidency is largely gone. It has been just two days and his rivals seem to be lining up for a shot.

He may be out of office, But Donald Trump is certainly not out of troubles. The cloak of protection afforded by the presidency is largely gone. It has been just two days and his rivals seem to be lining up for a shot. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is insistent on Trump's impeachment trial with the proceedings beginning on December 25 in Senate. Also read | Trump impeachment to be sent to Senate on January 25 Attorneys in New York are investigating his business dealings and add that they will stop at nothing in pressing charges against private citizen Trump. The district attorneys in Manhattan are reportedly investigating Trump's hush-money payout to porn star Stormy Daniels. Also read | Twitter suspends account linked to Khamenei's website, clarifies it's fake and not his Several commercial banks, including Trump's biggest lender Deutsche Bank have indicated that they no longer want to do business with him. In Georgia, prosecutors are planning to open a criminal investigation against the former president over his attempts to overturn the results of the presidential election in the state. Threat to life There seems to be a threat to his life as well from Iran. Last year, Trump had said that the US has killed the "number one terrorist" in the world after Iran's top general Qasem Soleimani was killed in a drone strike in Iraq. Iran has not forgotten its revered general's assassination and wants to take revenge against now civilian Trump. The official Twitter account of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei posted an image which showed a golfer, resembling Trump playing golf and a drone is hovering over him. The caption said: "revenge is certain". There has been no comment from Iran, but the threat cannot be downplayed. This is not the first time that something similar to this has happened and two weeks back, the Chief Justice of Iran Ebrahim had warned, saying: "those who had a role in this assassination and crime will not be safe on earth". "Do not presume that someone, as the president of America, who appeared as a murderer or ordered a murder, may be immune from justice being carried out," he had said. Trump has extended secret service protection to his family as well, including his four adult children and two of their spouses. Right before he left office, the former Republican president issued a directive to extend post-presidency secret service protection to his children. Under the country's federal law, Trump, his wife Melania and their 14-year-old son Baron are the only people entitled to secret service protection. But Trump wanted everybody covered, and given the threats from iran, the high-security makes sense.

Donald Trump is out of office, but his troubles keep on piling up

Twitter&nbsp;on Friday suspended what it said was a fake account&nbsp;linked to Iran's Supreme Leader, hours after it carried the image of a golfer resembling former US president Donald Trump apparently being targetted by a drone alongside a vow to avenge the killing of a top Iranian general in a US drone attack.

The post, on a Persian-language account linked to Khamenei's website, had carried the text of remarks by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in December, in which he said "Revenge is certain". That speech renewed a vow of vengeance ahead of the first anniversary of the killing of top military commander General Qassem Soleimani in the attack in Iraq.

Twitter Inc, however, clarified it had not suspended the account of Iran's Supreme Leader.

A Twitter spokeswoman said the @khamenei_site account was suspended for violating the company's platform manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts.

Asked if the @khamenei_site account was fake, she said it was.

“Revenge is inevitable. Soleimani’s killer and the man who gave the orders must face vengeance,” the post on the @khamenei_site Twitter account said late Thursday, warning there was no escape from payback for the US strike outside Baghdad airport which killed Iran’s foreign military operations chief General Qassem Soleimani and his Iraqi lieutenant.

"Revenge can take place at any moment."

<img alt="Khamenei tweet.jpg" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="73d6ec2e-c3b0-4aa2-903d-b0a71d83d2eb" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Khamenei%20tweet.jpg" />

However, Khamenei’s office runs several accounts and the others were still working.

The golfer image tweet was retweeted by Khamenei's main Persian-language account @Khamenei-fa, although it appeared to have been deleted later. The text and graphic of the tweet was also carried by Khamenei's official website (farsi.khamenei.ir) and widely quoted by Iranian media.

Khamenei's @Khamenei_fa account and his main Twitter account in English, which did not carry the golfer image tweet, were still operational.

<img alt="Account suspended" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="4aa95871-ed37-43b3-9cf2-499244840917" src="//cdn.wionews.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Account%20suspended.jpg" />

Trump left office on Wednesday and flew straight to his Mar-a-Lago golf club in Florida, without attending the inauguration of his successor President Joe Biden.

Iranian officials have pledged repeatedly that Soleimani will be avenged.

Earlier this month, on the first anniversary of his killing, judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi warned that not even Trump was "immune from justice" and that Soleimani's killers would "not be safe anywhere in the world".

Twitter had also suspended Trump’s account after the storming of the US Capitol citing the “risk of further incitement of violence.” 
&nbsp;

Twitter on Friday suspended what it said was a fake account linked to Iran's Supreme Leader, hours after it carried the image of a golfer resembling former US president Donald Trump apparently being targetted by a drone alongside a vow to avenge the killing of a top Iranian general in a US drone attack.

Twitter on Friday suspended what it said was a fake account linked to Iran's Supreme Leader, hours after it carried the image of a golfer resembling former US president Donald Trump apparently being targetted by a drone alongside a vow to avenge the killing of a top Iranian general in a US drone attack. The post, on a Persian-language account linked to Khamenei's website, had carried the text of remarks by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in December, in which he said "Revenge is certain". That speech renewed a vow of vengeance ahead of the first anniversary of the killing of top military commander General Qassem Soleimani in the attack in Iraq. Twitter Inc, however, clarified it had not suspended the account of Iran's Supreme Leader. A Twitter spokeswoman said the @khamenei_site account was suspended for violating the company's platform manipulation and spam policy, specifically the creation of fake accounts. Asked if the @khamenei_site account was fake, she said it was. “Revenge is inevitable. Soleimani’s killer and the man who gave the orders must face vengeance,” the post on the @khamenei_site Twitter account said late Thursday, warning there was no escape from payback for the US strike outside Baghdad airport which killed Iran’s foreign military operations chief General Qassem Soleimani and his Iraqi lieutenant. "Revenge can take place at any moment." However, Khamenei’s office runs several accounts and the others were still working. The golfer image tweet was retweeted by Khamenei's main Persian-language account @Khamenei-fa, although it appeared to have been deleted later. The text and graphic of the tweet was also carried by Khamenei's official website (farsi.khamenei.ir) and widely quoted by Iranian media. Khamenei's @Khamenei_fa account and his main Twitter account in English, which did not carry the golfer image tweet, were still operational. Trump left office on Wednesday and flew straight to his Mar-a-Lago golf club in Florida, without attending the inauguration of his successor President Joe Biden. Iranian officials have pledged repeatedly that Soleimani will be avenged. Earlier this month, on the first anniversary of his killing, judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi warned that not even Trump was "immune from justice" and that Soleimani's killers would "not be safe anywhere in the world". Twitter had also suspended Trump’s account after the storming of the US Capitol citing the “risk of further incitement of violence.”

Twitter suspends account linked to Khamenei's website, clarifies it's fake and not his

What is Donald Trump's Post-presidency plan? Will he stay in politics? What perks and pension will Trump receive as a Former President? Palki Sharma Upadhyay has the answers

Gravitas: Trump's post-presidency plans

Former US president Donald Trump will go on trial in the US Senate soon after an impeachment case against him is transmitted by the House of Representatives on Monday (January 25).

The House impeached the Republican leader for a historic second time on January 13, just one week before he left office, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi has yet to send the article of impeachment to the Senate.&nbsp;The step is necessary in order to launch the trial process.

"I have spoken to Speaker Pelosi who informed me that the article will be delivered to the Senate on Monday," Chuck Schumer, the new Democratic Senate majority leader, said in a floor speech Friday.

"A trial will be held in the United States Senate and there will be a vote whether to convict the president," Schumer told his colleagues.

Trump was impeached on a single charge of "incitement of insurrection" for his role in whipping up his supporters during a speech in Washington on January 6, the day a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol.

The Senate's top Republican, Mitch McConnell, severely reprimanded the outgoing president and left the door open for voting to convict Trump.&nbsp;He, however, sought a delay in an impeachment trial until February, arguing Trump needs time to hire lawyers and mount a defense.

But on Friday, McConnell, now the Senate minority leader, acknowledged the Democrats' timetable.

McConnell spoke of the "unprecedentedly fast" process in the House, where Trump was impeached in a single day.

He also said that delaying the trial would have provided time for the Senate to confirm members of new President Joe Biden's cabinet, and consider crucial legislation like a coronavirus pandemic rescue package. 
&nbsp;

Former US president Donald Trump will go on trial in the US Senate soon after an impeachment case against him is transmitted by the House of Representatives on Monday (January 25).

Former US president Donald Trump will go on trial in the US Senate soon after an impeachment case against him is transmitted by the House of Representatives on Monday (January 25). The House impeached the Republican leader for a historic second time on January 13, just one week before he left office, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi has yet to send the article of impeachment to the Senate. The step is necessary in order to launch the trial process. "I have spoken to Speaker Pelosi who informed me that the article will be delivered to the Senate on Monday," Chuck Schumer, the new Democratic Senate majority leader, said in a floor speech Friday. "A trial will be held in the United States Senate and there will be a vote whether to convict the president," Schumer told his colleagues. Trump was impeached on a single charge of "incitement of insurrection" for his role in whipping up his supporters during a speech in Washington on January 6, the day a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol. The Senate's top Republican, Mitch McConnell, severely reprimanded the outgoing president and left the door open for voting to convict Trump. He, however, sought a delay in an impeachment trial until February, arguing Trump needs time to hire lawyers and mount a defense. But on Friday, McConnell, now the Senate minority leader, acknowledged the Democrats' timetable. McConnell spoke of the "unprecedentedly fast" process in the House, where Trump was impeached in a single day. He also said that delaying the trial would have provided time for the Senate to confirm members of new President Joe Biden's cabinet, and consider crucial legislation like a coronavirus pandemic rescue package.

Trump impeachment to be sent to Senate on January 25

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — It was New Year’s Eve, and dance music was pulsating from the backyard of a multimillion-dollar home here co-owned by Philip Esformes, a former nursing home executive who orchestrated one of the biggest Medicare frauds in U.S. history.

Just days after being granted clemency by President Donald Trump and released after serving four years of his 20-year sentence, Esformes was under a disco ball celebrating his daughter’s wedding.

Not far away, in Hialeah, Florida, Judith Negron, 49, who had been convicted in a separate scheme to siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent Medicare payments, was also at home for the holidays instead of in federal prison. Thanks to a commutation by Trump, she had been released after serving eight years of a 35-year sentence and was relieved of any remaining obligation to pay her share of $87 million in court-ordered restitution.

This was hardly the outcome that Paul E. Pelletier expected when he and a team of other top Justice Department prosecutors and federal investigators set out to expose what Esformes and Negron had done.

After years of painstaking work and millions of dollars spent to investigate and prosecute the cases, the remainders of the sentences being served by the two convicted felons — participants in a type of fraud that costs taxpayers billions of dollars — had been wiped away by the stroke of a presidential pen.

In explaining his decisions, Trump said that Negron was a “wife and mother” and had dedicated her time in prison to “improving her life and the lives of her fellow inmates.” Esformes, he said, spent his time in prison “devoted to prayer and repentance and is in declining health,” and that others had raised claims of misconduct by prosecutors in his case.

The presidential rationales did not hold much weight with those who had sought to hold Esformes and Negron accountable.

“It is an incredible kick in the teeth to the agents and prosecutors who toil away every day under very difficult circumstances to achieve justice and some restitution to the taxpayers from the billions of dollars that has literally been stolen from them,” Pelletier said.

His frustration is shared by many current and former Justice Department officials who spent years working on these cases, considered two of the most important taken up in the nationwide effort to combat widespread Medicare fraud.

“It is disheartening, demoralizing,” said Wifredo A. Ferrer, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, speaking generally about presidential commutations in Medicare fraud cases. “We are doing these cases to control health care costs and save lives and make sure legitimate health care centers don’t have to compete with the crooks.”

The wave of pardons and commutations issued by Trump in his final months in office has drawn criticism from prosecutors and federal agents involved in other types of cases as well. Most notably, his decision to pardon four Blackwater guards convicted in the killing of Iraqi civilians infuriated many involved in those complex, long-running and contentious prosecutions.

Trump’s willingness to grant clemency in a string of Medicare cases has elicited particular outrage in Florida, a hotbed of this type of case and a focus of Justice Department efforts to combat fraud.

Trump added to the anger Tuesday, when he commuted what was left of the prison sentence for Dr. Salomon E. Melgen, 66, who ran clinics in Florida that fraudulently diagnosed Medicare patients with eye diseases and then performed medically unnecessary tests and procedures, falsely billing the federal government at least $42 million, according to prosecutors.

He was sentenced in 2018 to 17 years in prison and was not scheduled to be released from prison until 2031, according to Bureau of Prisons records.

Roger H. Stefin, lead prosecutor on the Melgen case, said that he considered it to be the most important conviction of his nearly 32-year career at the Justice Department — and that he was outraged at what Trump did.

“It is an insult and slap in the face to everybody,” said Stefin, 67, who retired last month, including “the patients who are getting needles stuck in their eyes and lasers blasting their retinas for treatments they did not even need.”

He remains baffled at why Trump acted in this case. “Why do these rich and well-connected people — really bad people — get this special treatment?” he said. “Why do they deserve it when other people are languishing in the jails?”

Negron, and lawyers for Melgen and Esformes, 52, argue that the commutations were justified. They said the Justice Department was overzealous in its prosecutions, either by using unethical practices during the investigation or by pushing for excessively long prison sentences and unrealistic restitution orders.

“I was sentenced based on numbers that were not relevant to me,” Negron said this month in an interview, referring to her 35-year sentence and multimillion-dollar restitution requirement. She argued that her earnings from the scheme were not more than her salary of about $250,000 a year. Prosecutors said during the trial that much of the stolen money was still missing.

Melgen’s case had become particularly high-profile because of his friendship with Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., who was accused of bribery and corruption for accepting gifts from Melgen while intervening in his case with federal officials. Menendez’s trial ended with a deadlocked jury; a judge subsequently dismissed some of the charges, and the Justice Department decided not to retry him.

“Throughout this ordeal, I have come to realize the very deep flaws in our justice system and how people are at the complete mercy of prosecutors and judges,” Melgen said in a statement issued by his lawyer.

Some lawyers have argued that Trump’s actions on the Medicare cases were justified.

“There are a lot of health care cases that are very questionable, very questionable, and I think that’s been brought to the attention of the White House,” said Alan M. Dershowitz, a member of Trump’s legal team during his first impeachment and a supporter of clemency for Esformes.

The cases involving Esformes and Negron were investigated by a special unit created in Miami in 2007 and led by Pelletier that targeted Medicare fraud. Pelletier and his colleagues said they were amazed at the depth of corruption they found.

“We were ground zero for Medicare fraud,” Ferrer said.

There were so many schemes unfolding in South Florida that prosecutors set up an office with two football fields’ worth of space to store documents seized during raids and house the dozens of prosecutors, FBI agents and personnel from the inspector general’s office at the Department of Health and Human Services assigned to the team.

The team also included a nurse who could help them reverse-engineer falsified billing codes and data experts who could examine billing trends to help them identify surges in reimbursements that might merit further investigation. The program was eventually expanded to 14 other cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Houston and Chicago.

In Negron’s case, investigators found that the network of mental-health clinics she helped run, known as American Therapeutic Corp., paid bribes and kickbacks to owners of nursing homes and halfway houses and to so-called patient brokers to deliver clients to their clinics. In many cases, those clients were not eligible for the services that the company then billed Medicare to supposedly provide.

Negron and others made sure that patient files and therapist notes were altered to make it falsely appear that patients were being treated, with Negron at times signing files as if she was in two places at once.

In total, at least $83 million in improper Medicare payments were made to the companies over eight years. Only a tiny share of the money was located after arrests were made.

The case involving Esformes was even bigger, as the network of clinics he owned collected an estimated $1.3 billion in fraudulent Medicare claims, with Esformes extracting $38.7 million in payments from 2010 to 2016, according to prosecutors.

They said he used the money to fuel a luxurious lifestyle that included a $360,000 watch; a $1.6 million Ferrari; a series of multimillion-dollar homes in Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles; and even bribes for a basketball coach to help his son get into college.

Esformes, according to testimony during his trial, used code words like “fettuccine” for cash payments that would be placed in supermarket bags and delivered to a closet in the same Miami Beach home where he celebrated New Year’s Eve.

The average prison sentence in Medicare fraud cases is four or five years, according to recent summaries of convictions. But the longest sentences are reserved for defendants like Esformes and Negron who are shown to have played key roles in organizing the schemes.

The prosecutors intentionally sought long sentences both to punish them for the immense scale of the fraud and to send a deterrent message, Pelletier said.

“If you are going to steal $250 million from Medicare, you are going to jail for 20 years,” he said. “I have no sympathy for these people. None.”

Negron is now helping her husband run his pool construction business and looking after her two teenage sons. There was effectively no chance she would have managed to pay the government her share of the full restitution amount— $87.5 million split among several of the defendants. But now she will no longer have 10% of her monthly wages deducted to cover the debt.

Negron gained the attention of Trump in part because she happened to serve time in federal prison with Alice Marie Johnson, who after lobbying on her behalf by Kim Kardashian West had a life sentence on nonviolent drug charges commuted by Trump and has gone on to advise the White House on other pardon and commutation candidates.

Among those Johnson brought to the attention of the White House was Negron, given the length of her prison sentence, the fact that she had two children at home, and that this was her first criminal offense.

Negron later visited the White House with Kardashian West and Johnson to thank Trump.

Esformes’ release came after a lobbying campaign by the Aleph Institute, a group advised by Dershowitz and started by the Chabad-Lubavitch movement of Hasidic Jews, which seeks to help inmates facing long sentences. The movement has long-standing connections to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who helped oversee the pardon process.

Rabbi Sholom Lipskar, founder and chairman of the Aleph Institute — which has collected $65,000 worth of donations from Esformes’ family since his 2016 arrest — officiated the wedding held at Esformes’ property on New Year’s Eve.

Esformes is also still facing an order that he repay the federal government $5 million and forfeit another $38 million in illegal proceeds. But his lawyers are seeking to overturn those orders. Even though Esformes no longer faces any remaining prison time, his criminal conviction — and the resulting penalty — is being appealed, with his lawyers claiming prosecutorial misconduct.

The festivities at Esformes’ home on New Year’s Eve, soon after his release, surprised some of his neighbors. Anticipating complaints, the bride and groom distributed gift baskets to neighbors with a note apologizing “for any noise from the celebration.”

But one neighbor tweeted a photo of the gift basket, asserting that the lawn at Esformes’ home went uncut during his time in prison and expressing wonderment that Esformes so quickly “found the wherewithal to host a grand wedding for his daughter in his backyard tonight!”

The neighbor added the hashtag #CrimePays.

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — It was New Year’s Eve, and dance music was pulsating from the backyard of a multimillion-dollar home here co-owned by Philip Esformes, a former nursing home executive who orchestrated one of the biggest Medicare frauds in U.

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — It was New Year’s Eve, and dance music was pulsating from the backyard of a multimillion-dollar home here co-owned by Philip Esformes, a former nursing home executive who orchestrated one of the biggest Medicare frauds in U.S. history. Just days after being granted clemency by President Donald Trump and released after serving four years of his 20-year sentence, Esformes was under a disco ball celebrating his daughter’s wedding. Not far away, in Hialeah, Florida, Judith Negron, 49, who had been convicted in a separate scheme to siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent Medicare payments, was also at home for the holidays instead of in federal prison. Thanks to a commutation by Trump, she had been released after serving eight years of a 35-year sentence and was relieved of any remaining obligation to pay her share of $87 million in court-ordered restitution. This was hardly the outcome that Paul E. Pelletier expected when he and a team of other top Justice Department prosecutors and federal investigators set out to expose what Esformes and Negron had done. After years of painstaking work and millions of dollars spent to investigate and prosecute the cases, the remainders of the sentences being served by the two convicted felons — participants in a type of fraud that costs taxpayers billions of dollars — had been wiped away by the stroke of a presidential pen. In explaining his decisions, Trump said that Negron was a “wife and mother” and had dedicated her time in prison to “improving her life and the lives of her fellow inmates.” Esformes, he said, spent his time in prison “devoted to prayer and repentance and is in declining health,” and that others had raised claims of misconduct by prosecutors in his case. The presidential rationales did not hold much weight with those who had sought to hold Esformes and Negron accountable. “It is an incredible kick in the teeth to the agents and prosecutors who toil away every day under very difficult circumstances to achieve justice and some restitution to the taxpayers from the billions of dollars that has literally been stolen from them,” Pelletier said. His frustration is shared by many current and former Justice Department officials who spent years working on these cases, considered two of the most important taken up in the nationwide effort to combat widespread Medicare fraud. “It is disheartening, demoralizing,” said Wifredo A. Ferrer, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, speaking generally about presidential commutations in Medicare fraud cases. “We are doing these cases to control health care costs and save lives and make sure legitimate health care centers don’t have to compete with the crooks.” The wave of pardons and commutations issued by Trump in his final months in office has drawn criticism from prosecutors and federal agents involved in other types of cases as well. Most notably, his decision to pardon four Blackwater guards convicted in the killing of Iraqi civilians infuriated many involved in those complex, long-running and contentious prosecutions. Trump’s willingness to grant clemency in a string of Medicare cases has elicited particular outrage in Florida, a hotbed of this type of case and a focus of Justice Department efforts to combat fraud. Trump added to the anger Tuesday, when he commuted what was left of the prison sentence for Dr. Salomon E. Melgen, 66, who ran clinics in Florida that fraudulently diagnosed Medicare patients with eye diseases and then performed medically unnecessary tests and procedures, falsely billing the federal government at least $42 million, according to prosecutors. He was sentenced in 2018 to 17 years in prison and was not scheduled to be released from prison until 2031, according to Bureau of Prisons records. Roger H. Stefin, lead prosecutor on the Melgen case, said that he considered it to be the most important conviction of his nearly 32-year career at the Justice Department — and that he was outraged at what Trump did. “It is an insult and slap in the face to everybody,” said Stefin, 67, who retired last month, including “the patients who are getting needles stuck in their eyes and lasers blasting their retinas for treatments they did not even need.” He remains baffled at why Trump acted in this case. “Why do these rich and well-connected people — really bad people — get this special treatment?” he said. “Why do they deserve it when other people are languishing in the jails?” Negron, and lawyers for Melgen and Esformes, 52, argue that the commutations were justified. They said the Justice Department was overzealous in its prosecutions, either by using unethical practices during the investigation or by pushing for excessively long prison sentences and unrealistic restitution orders. “I was sentenced based on numbers that were not relevant to me,” Negron said this month in an interview, referring to her 35-year sentence and multimillion-dollar restitution requirement. She argued that her earnings from the scheme were not more than her salary of about $250,000 a year. Prosecutors said during the trial that much of the stolen money was still missing. Melgen’s case had become particularly high-profile because of his friendship with Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., who was accused of bribery and corruption for accepting gifts from Melgen while intervening in his case with federal officials. Menendez’s trial ended with a deadlocked jury; a judge subsequently dismissed some of the charges, and the Justice Department decided not to retry him. “Throughout this ordeal, I have come to realize the very deep flaws in our justice system and how people are at the complete mercy of prosecutors and judges,” Melgen said in a statement issued by his lawyer. Some lawyers have argued that Trump’s actions on the Medicare cases were justified. “There are a lot of health care cases that are very questionable, very questionable, and I think that’s been brought to the attention of the White House,” said Alan M. Dershowitz, a member of Trump’s legal team during his first impeachment and a supporter of clemency for Esformes. The cases involving Esformes and Negron were investigated by a special unit created in Miami in 2007 and led by Pelletier that targeted Medicare fraud. Pelletier and his colleagues said they were amazed at the depth of corruption they found. “We were ground zero for Medicare fraud,” Ferrer said. There were so many schemes unfolding in South Florida that prosecutors set up an office with two football fields’ worth of space to store documents seized during raids and house the dozens of prosecutors, FBI agents and personnel from the inspector general’s office at the Department of Health and Human Services assigned to the team. The team also included a nurse who could help them reverse-engineer falsified billing codes and data experts who could examine billing trends to help them identify surges in reimbursements that might merit further investigation. The program was eventually expanded to 14 other cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Houston and Chicago. In Negron’s case, investigators found that the network of mental-health clinics she helped run, known as American Therapeutic Corp., paid bribes and kickbacks to owners of nursing homes and halfway houses and to so-called patient brokers to deliver clients to their clinics. In many cases, those clients were not eligible for the services that the company then billed Medicare to supposedly provide. Negron and others made sure that patient files and therapist notes were altered to make it falsely appear that patients were being treated, with Negron at times signing files as if she was in two places at once. In total, at least $83 million in improper Medicare payments were made to the companies over eight years. Only a tiny share of the money was located after arrests were made. The case involving Esformes was even bigger, as the network of clinics he owned collected an estimated $1.3 billion in fraudulent Medicare claims, with Esformes extracting $38.7 million in payments from 2010 to 2016, according to prosecutors. They said he used the money to fuel a luxurious lifestyle that included a $360,000 watch; a $1.6 million Ferrari; a series of multimillion-dollar homes in Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles; and even bribes for a basketball coach to help his son get into college. Esformes, according to testimony during his trial, used code words like “fettuccine” for cash payments that would be placed in supermarket bags and delivered to a closet in the same Miami Beach home where he celebrated New Year’s Eve. The average prison sentence in Medicare fraud cases is four or five years, according to recent summaries of convictions. But the longest sentences are reserved for defendants like Esformes and Negron who are shown to have played key roles in organizing the schemes. The prosecutors intentionally sought long sentences both to punish them for the immense scale of the fraud and to send a deterrent message, Pelletier said. “If you are going to steal $250 million from Medicare, you are going to jail for 20 years,” he said. “I have no sympathy for these people. None.” Negron is now helping her husband run his pool construction business and looking after her two teenage sons. There was effectively no chance she would have managed to pay the government her share of the full restitution amount— $87.5 million split among several of the defendants. But now she will no longer have 10% of her monthly wages deducted to cover the debt. Negron gained the attention of Trump in part because she happened to serve time in federal prison with Alice Marie Johnson, who after lobbying on her behalf by Kim Kardashian West had a life sentence on nonviolent drug charges commuted by Trump and has gone on to advise the White House on other pardon and commutation candidates. Among those Johnson brought to the attention of the White House was Negron, given the length of her prison sentence, the fact that she had two children at home, and that this was her first criminal offense. Negron later visited the White House with Kardashian West and Johnson to thank Trump. Esformes’ release came after a lobbying campaign by the Aleph Institute, a group advised by Dershowitz and started by the Chabad-Lubavitch movement of Hasidic Jews, which seeks to help inmates facing long sentences. The movement has long-standing connections to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who helped oversee the pardon process. Rabbi Sholom Lipskar, founder and chairman of the Aleph Institute — which has collected $65,000 worth of donations from Esformes’ family since his 2016 arrest — officiated the wedding held at Esformes’ property on New Year’s Eve. Esformes is also still facing an order that he repay the federal government $5 million and forfeit another $38 million in illegal proceeds. But his lawyers are seeking to overturn those orders. Even though Esformes no longer faces any remaining prison time, his criminal conviction — and the resulting penalty — is being appealed, with his lawyers claiming prosecutorial misconduct. The festivities at Esformes’ home on New Year’s Eve, soon after his release, surprised some of his neighbors. Anticipating complaints, the bride and groom distributed gift baskets to neighbors with a note apologizing “for any noise from the celebration.” But one neighbor tweeted a photo of the gift basket, asserting that the lawn at Esformes’ home went uncut during his time in prison and expressing wonderment that Esformes so quickly “found the wherewithal to host a grand wedding for his daughter in his backyard tonight!” The neighbor added the hashtag #CrimePays.

For prosecutors, Trump’s clemency decisions were a ‘kick in the teeth’

If the United States’ failure to anticipate the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was one of imagination, missing the terrorist attack of Jan. 6, 2021, was a failure of perception — a persistent refusal at the highest levels of our government to acknowledge the empirical reality of the threat posed by right-wing terrorists.

Terrorism in the United States is overwhelmingly domestic and motivated by far-right ideologies, often racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant. In the past decade — indeed, in just about every year since 1990, other than 2001 — acts of right-wing domestic terrorism have been far more numerous and more lethal than acts of terrorism inspired or influenced by groups or movements overseas, according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, a research center at the University of Maryland. Far-right plots are also less likely to be disrupted by law enforcement; in the past decade about two-thirds of right-wing domestic terrorist plans have ended in “success,” according to the center, compared with 22% of terrorist plans hatched by international and affiliated actors.

So one of the most striking passages in President Joe Biden’s inaugural address Wednesday was also one of the most straightforward: He named the enemy. “Political extremism, white supremacy” and “domestic terrorism,” he said, are dangers “that we must confront and we will defeat.”

It was a quick line delivered without much flourish, and it may sound overgenerous to congratulate Biden simply for speaking plainly. Yet it is a sign of how reluctant American officials have been to take on right-wing violence that his line made history. He may be the first president to directly address white supremacy — a stain on the United States since before its founding — in an inaugural address.

Incantation alone cannot solve any problem, of course. But in the fight against far-right attacks, a president’s naming the menace might at least push the nation out of the ditch of inaction we’ve been stuck in for decades.

The primary reason that right-wing political violence persists in the United States is that it has rarely been prioritized by law enforcement, and the primary reason it has rarely been prioritized is political reluctance to do so. In the past decade, the lethal attacks kept coming — at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina; at a synagogue in Pittsburgh; at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas; at a protest against a racist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, — but under Donald Trump and even under Barack Obama, security officials continued to shower resources on addressing foreign threats rather than those closer to home.

The government’s lapse has now become obvious. In the months leading up to the Capitol riot, right-wing assailants hardly attempted to hide their intentions. Many promised in public that they were planning to attack the government. They photographed themselves preparing to attack the government. They posted the routes they planned to take on their way to attack the government. Some even practiced attacking the federal government by attacking state governments. Undoing their plot was not a matter of finding a needle in a haystack; this was more like searching for a porcupine in a haystack, unmissable by anyone who cared to take minimal notice.

And yet the counterterrorism community still missed this huge attack — just as experts had long predicted would happen.

“Many of us in the counterterrorism community were feeling frustrated that we couldn’t quite drive progress the way we thought it needed to be driven,” said Elizabeth Neumann, who was an assistant secretary of counterterrorism and threat prevention in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.

Much of this problem was instigated and exacerbated by Trump himself. With the president winking at and even encouraging right-wing violence while falsely claiming that left-wing groups were the real problem, it’s hardly surprising that federal law enforcement would downplay the issue. Last year a whistleblower charged that Homeland Security officials delayed publishing an assessment that declared white supremacy the “most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland” in order to align the agency’s message with Trump’s; the department finally published the document late last year.

Republican politicians and luminaries of conservative media have also cultivated cozy ties with the far-right. Gavin McInnes, a founder of the Proud Boys, an extremist group whose members took part in the Capitol riot, has appeared dozens of times on Fox News. A leader of Stop the Steal, one of the groups that organized the Capitol protest, has claimed that it coordinated with some Republican members of Congress — who now may face legal trouble. There is also right-wing gun culture, which has become intertwined with white supremacy. A 2017 ad by the National Rifle Association divides the country into “ours” and “theirs,” leaving little question about the skin color of “ours.”

But doubt about the threat posed by domestic terrorists extended beyond Trump and other conservatives. Neumann told me that there was a sense among many in law enforcement that Americans could not cause great harm — domestic terrorists were “lone wolves”; they were disorganized and uncoordinated; their danger was nothing existential. There was some truth to this belief, Neumann acknowledged, but the view was so fixed that it created its own warped reality.

In the absence of leaders declaring that “this is the threat that we’re facing, and we’re going to leverage all our tools in our tool kit to go after it,” Neumann said, misinformation and disinformation clouded the issue, which is why many so many Americans are unaware of the prevalence of far-right terrorist acts — which, in turn, is why there’s little political focus on it.

After acknowledging the problem, there are several practical steps the Biden administration might take to address right-wing violence. Many of these are obvious, following the lessons that counterterrorism officials have learned investigating Islamic terrorism.

Experts I talked to called for vigilant investigation and prosecution of the Capitol rioters; more resources for anti-radicalization programs, which have proved effective in countering jihadi recruitment; a much greater federal emphasis on investigating hate crimes, acts of ideologically motivated violence that often fly under the radar of terrorism investigators; continued deplatforming of right-wing agitators from mainstream media; and greater cooperation between the United States and other countries in tracking and preventing attacks and recruitment that crosses borders, a growing problem in a digital world.

But the most important political move Biden can make is simply to keep shining a bright light on this scourge. Trump often mocked Democrats for refusing to say the phrase “radical Islamic terror,” as if that were a spell that could make the Islamic State group vanish. It wasn’t — but asking Republicans to repeatedly and specifically disavow radical white terrorism wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

If the United States’ failure to anticipate the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was one of imagination, missing the terrorist attack of Jan. 6, 2021, was a failure of perception — a persistent refusal at the highest levels of our government to acknowledge the empirical reality of the threat posed by right-wing terrorists.

If the United States’ failure to anticipate the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was one of imagination, missing the terrorist attack of Jan. 6, 2021, was a failure of perception — a persistent refusal at the highest levels of our government to acknowledge the empirical reality of the threat posed by right-wing terrorists. Terrorism in the United States is overwhelmingly domestic and motivated by far-right ideologies, often racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant. In the past decade — indeed, in just about every year since 1990, other than 2001 — acts of right-wing domestic terrorism have been far more numerous and more lethal than acts of terrorism inspired or influenced by groups or movements overseas, according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, a research center at the University of Maryland. Far-right plots are also less likely to be disrupted by law enforcement; in the past decade about two-thirds of right-wing domestic terrorist plans have ended in “success,” according to the center, compared with 22% of terrorist plans hatched by international and affiliated actors. So one of the most striking passages in President Joe Biden’s inaugural address Wednesday was also one of the most straightforward: He named the enemy. “Political extremism, white supremacy” and “domestic terrorism,” he said, are dangers “that we must confront and we will defeat.” It was a quick line delivered without much flourish, and it may sound overgenerous to congratulate Biden simply for speaking plainly. Yet it is a sign of how reluctant American officials have been to take on right-wing violence that his line made history. He may be the first president to directly address white supremacy — a stain on the United States since before its founding — in an inaugural address. Incantation alone cannot solve any problem, of course. But in the fight against far-right attacks, a president’s naming the menace might at least push the nation out of the ditch of inaction we’ve been stuck in for decades. The primary reason that right-wing political violence persists in the United States is that it has rarely been prioritized by law enforcement, and the primary reason it has rarely been prioritized is political reluctance to do so. In the past decade, the lethal attacks kept coming — at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina; at a synagogue in Pittsburgh; at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas; at a protest against a racist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, — but under Donald Trump and even under Barack Obama, security officials continued to shower resources on addressing foreign threats rather than those closer to home. The government’s lapse has now become obvious. In the months leading up to the Capitol riot, right-wing assailants hardly attempted to hide their intentions. Many promised in public that they were planning to attack the government. They photographed themselves preparing to attack the government. They posted the routes they planned to take on their way to attack the government. Some even practiced attacking the federal government by attacking state governments. Undoing their plot was not a matter of finding a needle in a haystack; this was more like searching for a porcupine in a haystack, unmissable by anyone who cared to take minimal notice. And yet the counterterrorism community still missed this huge attack — just as experts had long predicted would happen. “Many of us in the counterterrorism community were feeling frustrated that we couldn’t quite drive progress the way we thought it needed to be driven,” said Elizabeth Neumann, who was an assistant secretary of counterterrorism and threat prevention in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. Much of this problem was instigated and exacerbated by Trump himself. With the president winking at and even encouraging right-wing violence while falsely claiming that left-wing groups were the real problem, it’s hardly surprising that federal law enforcement would downplay the issue. Last year a whistleblower charged that Homeland Security officials delayed publishing an assessment that declared white supremacy the “most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland” in order to align the agency’s message with Trump’s; the department finally published the document late last year. Republican politicians and luminaries of conservative media have also cultivated cozy ties with the far-right. Gavin McInnes, a founder of the Proud Boys, an extremist group whose members took part in the Capitol riot, has appeared dozens of times on Fox News. A leader of Stop the Steal, one of the groups that organized the Capitol protest, has claimed that it coordinated with some Republican members of Congress — who now may face legal trouble. There is also right-wing gun culture, which has become intertwined with white supremacy. A 2017 ad by the National Rifle Association divides the country into “ours” and “theirs,” leaving little question about the skin color of “ours.” But doubt about the threat posed by domestic terrorists extended beyond Trump and other conservatives. Neumann told me that there was a sense among many in law enforcement that Americans could not cause great harm — domestic terrorists were “lone wolves”; they were disorganized and uncoordinated; their danger was nothing existential. There was some truth to this belief, Neumann acknowledged, but the view was so fixed that it created its own warped reality. In the absence of leaders declaring that “this is the threat that we’re facing, and we’re going to leverage all our tools in our tool kit to go after it,” Neumann said, misinformation and disinformation clouded the issue, which is why many so many Americans are unaware of the prevalence of far-right terrorist acts — which, in turn, is why there’s little political focus on it. After acknowledging the problem, there are several practical steps the Biden administration might take to address right-wing violence. Many of these are obvious, following the lessons that counterterrorism officials have learned investigating Islamic terrorism. Experts I talked to called for vigilant investigation and prosecution of the Capitol rioters; more resources for anti-radicalization programs, which have proved effective in countering jihadi recruitment; a much greater federal emphasis on investigating hate crimes, acts of ideologically motivated violence that often fly under the radar of terrorism investigators; continued deplatforming of right-wing agitators from mainstream media; and greater cooperation between the United States and other countries in tracking and preventing attacks and recruitment that crosses borders, a growing problem in a digital world. But the most important political move Biden can make is simply to keep shining a bright light on this scourge. Trump often mocked Democrats for refusing to say the phrase “radical Islamic terror,” as if that were a spell that could make the Islamic State group vanish. It wasn’t — but asking Republicans to repeatedly and specifically disavow radical white terrorism wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

Finally, a president acknowledges White supremacy

A decision to turn a chilly underground parking garage into an overnight billet for National Guard troops in Washington to protect President Joe Biden's inauguration has stirred an uproar.

A number of the 25,000 troops standing guard around the US Capitol in recent days in the wake of the January 6 insurrection had been allowed to take breaks and naps in between long shifts on the floors of the building housing the US Congress.

But on Thursday afternoon, after the legislature resumed work a day after the Biden inauguration, someone decided instead to force them out to a nearby parking garage.

Photos that spread quickly over the internet showed guardsmen and women stretched out under flourescent lights in parking slots, with few toilets, outlets for charging phones, or other facilities available.

Many members of Congress, noting that many of the troops came from their constituencies, voiced outrage.

"This is an insult to all National Guard units that followed orders and served in the cold and rain through the night without fail.&nbsp;They protected our Capitol when we needed them most," said Representative Brendan Boyle on Twitter.

Lawmakers visited the troops and apologized early Friday.

"What happened was an outrage and it will never happen again," said Chuck Schumer, the new Senate Majority leader, as he walked in a hall in the Capitol with dozens of soldiers sleeping on both sides.

Schumer said nobody knew exactly who ordered the part-time soldiers moved to the garage.

Echoing the recriminations over responsibility for letting hundreds of violent supporters of then-president Donald Trump crash the Capitol on January 6, National Guard officials said Capitol Police told them to move to the garage, and the Capitol Police denied it.

They "did not instruct the National Guard to vacate Capitol building facilities," said Acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman in a statement.

"As of this morning, all Guardsmen and women have ben relocated to space within the Capitol complex."&nbsp;

A decision to turn a chilly underground parking garage into an overnight billet for National Guard troops in Washington to protect President Joe Biden's inauguration has stirred an uproar.

A decision to turn a chilly underground parking garage into an overnight billet for National Guard troops in Washington to protect President Joe Biden's inauguration has stirred an uproar. A number of the 25,000 troops standing guard around the US Capitol in recent days in the wake of the January 6 insurrection had been allowed to take breaks and naps in between long shifts on the floors of the building housing the US Congress. But on Thursday afternoon, after the legislature resumed work a day after the Biden inauguration, someone decided instead to force them out to a nearby parking garage. Photos that spread quickly over the internet showed guardsmen and women stretched out under flourescent lights in parking slots, with few toilets, outlets for charging phones, or other facilities available. Many members of Congress, noting that many of the troops came from their constituencies, voiced outrage. "This is an insult to all National Guard units that followed orders and served in the cold and rain through the night without fail. They protected our Capitol when we needed them most," said Representative Brendan Boyle on Twitter. Lawmakers visited the troops and apologized early Friday. "What happened was an outrage and it will never happen again," said Chuck Schumer, the new Senate Majority leader, as he walked in a hall in the Capitol with dozens of soldiers sleeping on both sides. Schumer said nobody knew exactly who ordered the part-time soldiers moved to the garage. Echoing the recriminations over responsibility for letting hundreds of violent supporters of then-president Donald Trump crash the Capitol on January 6, National Guard officials said Capitol Police told them to move to the garage, and the Capitol Police denied it. They "did not instruct the National Guard to vacate Capitol building facilities," said Acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman in a statement. "As of this morning, all Guardsmen and women have ben relocated to space within the Capitol complex."

Outrage after troops protecting US Capitol forced to sleep in parking garage

The Twitter account of Iran's Supreme Leader on Friday carried the image of a golfer resembling former President Donald Trump apparently being targeted by a drone, vowing revenge over the killing of a top Iranian general in a U.S. drone attack.

WION Dispatch: Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei posts Trump-like golfer image

Former presidents and vice-presidents in the United States are usually guaranteed pensions, security, travel allowances and a raft of other entitlements after finishing up at the White House. And former US president Donald Trump is expected to inherit the same.

Trump formally left the White House, and Joe Biden took office on January 20 in a muted inauguration ceremony.

For the most part, the entitled perks remain available to Trump even if he is convicted by the Senate in a still-pending, looming impeachment trial.

Having said that, the Former Presidents Act remains an act of Congress that can be amended.

So Congress likely could strip Trump of the perks he enjoys as an ex-president.

In case, it does not, here are the perks that Trump stands to get once he re-enters life as a "regular" US citizen.

A life-long pension

The Former Presidents Act says former presidents "shall be entitled for the remainder of his life to receive from the United States a monetary allowance at a rate per annum ... which is equal to the annual rate of basic pay" (in this instance, we're looking at more than US$200,000) unless they're employed by the Federal Government in some other capacity.

Former presidents aren't entitled to this pension if they were convicted in an impeachment trial or removed from office — but only if either of those happened while still serving.

Because Donald Trump's potential impeachment conviction won't actually remove him from office, chances are he will get to keep his pension.

Access to classified briefings

Former presidents usually have access to routine intelligence briefings. But there have been strong calls to ensure Trump does not continue having access to classified intelligence.

Let's see what exactly happens and on what basis.

Security and protection

Former presidents also enjoy personal security protection. The stiputaled law says -- “under the direction of the Secretary of Homeland Security, the United States Secret Service is authorised to protect” a former president and their spouse.&nbsp;

Alternatively, presidents who do not receive Secret Service protection instead receive “up to $1,000,000 for each former President and up to $500,000 for the spouse of each former President each fiscal year for security and travel related expenses.”

The Department of Homeland Security, however, can deny Secret Service protection to Trump, or Congress can amend the law to strip Trump of his security protections.

Office and staff

The Former Presidents Act also funds office space and a modest staff for one-time chief executives. The total budget for such hires is $150,000 per year during the former president’s first 30 months out of office, and then $96,000 per year thereafter.

An ex-president may select the staff employed under this act. The administrator of general services, however, has the power to determine what kind of office space is “suitable” for Trump.

Allowance for his widow

The law provides this benefit to the “widow of each former President.”

If Trump dies before former first lady Melania Trump, then Melania is entitled to “a monetary allowance at a rate of $20,000 per annum,” provided that she does not remarry before turning 60 years old.

However, if the Trumps divorce, Melania would not be entitled to this allowance upon his death. If he were to remarry, his new spouse could potentially be eligible upon his death.

Ability to run for a second presidential term

If Trump is convicted, there's then an option to hold a separate vote on whether he should be allowed to have another crack at the presidency.

The Senate vote on whether he could run again would not need two-thirds of the Senate vote to go through.

Former presidents and vice-presidents in the United States are usually guaranteed pensions, security, travel allowances and a raft of other entitlements after finishing up at the White House.

Former presidents and vice-presidents in the United States are usually guaranteed pensions, security, travel allowances and a raft of other entitlements after finishing up at the White House. And former US president Donald Trump is expected to inherit the same. Trump formally left the White House, and Joe Biden took office on January 20 in a muted inauguration ceremony. For the most part, the entitled perks remain available to Trump even if he is convicted by the Senate in a still-pending, looming impeachment trial. Having said that, the Former Presidents Act remains an act of Congress that can be amended. So Congress likely could strip Trump of the perks he enjoys as an ex-president. In case, it does not, here are the perks that Trump stands to get once he re-enters life as a "regular" US citizen. A life-long pension The Former Presidents Act says former presidents "shall be entitled for the remainder of his life to receive from the United States a monetary allowance at a rate per annum ... which is equal to the annual rate of basic pay" (in this instance, we're looking at more than US$200,000) unless they're employed by the Federal Government in some other capacity. Former presidents aren't entitled to this pension if they were convicted in an impeachment trial or removed from office — but only if either of those happened while still serving. Because Donald Trump's potential impeachment conviction won't actually remove him from office, chances are he will get to keep his pension. Access to classified briefings Former presidents usually have access to routine intelligence briefings. But there have been strong calls to ensure Trump does not continue having access to classified intelligence. Let's see what exactly happens and on what basis. Security and protection Former presidents also enjoy personal security protection. The stiputaled law says -- “under the direction of the Secretary of Homeland Security, the United States Secret Service is authorised to protect” a former president and their spouse. Alternatively, presidents who do not receive Secret Service protection instead receive “up to $1,000,000 for each former President and up to $500,000 for the spouse of each former President each fiscal year for security and travel related expenses.” The Department of Homeland Security, however, can deny Secret Service protection to Trump, or Congress can amend the law to strip Trump of his security protections. Office and staff The Former Presidents Act also funds office space and a modest staff for one-time chief executives. The total budget for such hires is $150,000 per year during the former president’s first 30 months out of office, and then $96,000 per year thereafter. An ex-president may select the staff employed under this act. The administrator of general services, however, has the power to determine what kind of office space is “suitable” for Trump. Allowance for his widow The law provides this benefit to the “widow of each former President.” If Trump dies before former first lady Melania Trump, then Melania is entitled to “a monetary allowance at a rate of $20,000 per annum,” provided that she does not remarry before turning 60 years old. However, if the Trumps divorce, Melania would not be entitled to this allowance upon his death. If he were to remarry, his new spouse could potentially be eligible upon his death. Ability to run for a second presidential term If Trump is convicted, there's then an option to hold a separate vote on whether he should be allowed to have another crack at the presidency. The Senate vote on whether he could run again would not need two-thirds of the Senate vote to go through.

Pension and classified intel: Here are the perks Trump will get as former US president

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday (January 21) she will consult with fellow Democrats in coming days about the Senate's readiness to begin an impeachment trial on former President Donald Trump's alleged role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

US House Speaker Pelosi makes her case for Trump impeachment trial

After Trump’s first impeachment on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress on Dec. 18, 2019, the House didn’t transmit the articles until Jan. 15, 2020.

U.S. house speaker Nancy Pelosi vows action on Trump's impeachment trial

Rapper Lil Wayne thanked former US President Donald Trump for pardoning him in one of the final duties he did before leaving the White House.&nbsp; 
 
Trump issued a number of pardons and sentence commutations on Wednesday hours before he left the White House. Among the many cases, he pardoned- one involved Wayne. The rapper whose real name is Dwayne Michael Carter Jr was facing a weapons charge. 
 
The artist took to Twitter on Thursday, writing, "I want to thank President Trump for recognizing that I have so much more to give to my family, my art, and my community." 
 
The 38-year-old Grammy-winner also thanked his attorney, "I also want to thank @bradfordcohen for working so diligently to secure another chance for me. Love! - Dwayne Michael Carter Jr."

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I want to thank President Trump for recognizing that I have so much more to give to my family, my art, and my community. I also want to thank <a href="https://twitter.com/bradfordcohen?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@bradfordcohen</a> for working so diligently to secure another chance for me. Love! 
 
- Dwayne Michael Carter Jr.
— Lil Wayne WEEZY F (@LilTunechi) <a href="https://twitter.com/LilTunechi/status/1352278708422385667?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 21, 2021</a></blockquote>
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Wayne was charged in Florida on November 17 last year possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, a federal offence that carries a potential sentence of up to 10 years in prison.&nbsp;

The pardon comes months after Wayne faced criticism for supporting Trump ahead of the November election.&nbsp; 
 
On October 29, Wayne shared a picture of himself smiling next to Trump after meeting with him about his administration’s 'Platinum Plan,' which had aimed to create jobs and opportunities in the Black community.&nbsp;

Rapper Lil Wayne thanked former US President Donald Trump for pardoning him in one of the final duties he did before leaving the White House. Trump issued a number of pardons and sentence commutations on Wednesday hours before he left the White House.

Rapper Lil Wayne thanked former US President Donald Trump for pardoning him in one of the final duties he did before leaving the White House. Trump issued a number of pardons and sentence commutations on Wednesday hours before he left the White House. Among the many cases, he pardoned- one involved Wayne. The rapper whose real name is Dwayne Michael Carter Jr was facing a weapons charge. The artist took to Twitter on Thursday, writing, "I want to thank President Trump for recognizing that I have so much more to give to my family, my art, and my community." The 38-year-old Grammy-winner also thanked his attorney, "I also want to thank @bradfordcohen for working so diligently to secure another chance for me. Love! - Dwayne Michael Carter Jr." I want to thank President Trump for recognizing that I have so much more to give to my family, my art, and my community. I also want to thank @bradfordcohen for working so diligently to secure another chance for me. Love! - Dwayne Michael Carter Jr. — Lil Wayne WEEZY F (@LilTunechi) January 21, 2021 × Wayne was charged in Florida on November 17 last year possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, a federal offence that carries a potential sentence of up to 10 years in prison. The pardon comes months after Wayne faced criticism for supporting Trump ahead of the November election. On October 29, Wayne shared a picture of himself smiling next to Trump after meeting with him about his administration’s 'Platinum Plan,' which had aimed to create jobs and opportunities in the Black community.

Rapper Lil Wayne thanks Donald Trump for the pardon before leaving office

Former President Donald Trump's favourite wooden box which beeped for a Diet Coke has been removed from US President <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/biden-suggests-removing-aliens-suggests-noncitizens-for-immigrants-358475">Biden's</a> famous Resolute desk at the Oval Office.

Watch:

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The famous desk has been used by successive US presidents at the White House which is built from oak timbers from HMS Resolute in the 1880s.

Trump had the button put on a wooden box next to his phone on the White House Resolute desk, whenever the ex-president pressed it a butler would enter the room carrying a bottle of Diet Coke on a silver platter.

The ex-US president would reportedly consume a dozen coke bottles a day. Biden has made other changes to his decor at the famous room with pictures of late son Beau <a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/bernie-sanders-opens-up-about-that-meme-moment-from-biden-harris-inauguration-i-was-just-trying-to-keep-warm-358470">Biden</a>, who died of brain cancer in 2015, including family photos of first lady Jill Biden behind the Resolute desk.

Reports say 46th commander-in-chief is a soda fan and prefers Coke Zero, including ice-cream with vanilla. An Ohio-based ice cream company brand had in fact launched a flavour which is Biden's favourite passion.

Trump was not the first sitting president to openly boycott his successor inauguration on Wednesday. In 1801 the second US president John Adams snubbed his successor Thomas Jefferson, leaving the White House at dawn after calling his former vice-president as "a mean-spirited, low-lived son of a half-breed Indian squaw".

His son John Quincy Adams won a disputed election in 1824 against Andrew Jackson, who claimed the vote had been stolen. Four years later Jackson turned the tables after a contentious campaign. Like his father, Adams junior left the White House the night before the inauguration.

Jackson, who brought his slaves to Washington with him, is a hero of Trump's. His portrait hangs by his desk in the Oval Office.

Former President Donald Trump's favourite wooden box which beeped for a Diet Coke has been removed from US President Biden's famous Resolute desk at the Oval Office.

Former President Donald Trump's favourite wooden box which beeped for a Diet Coke has been removed from US President Biden's famous Resolute desk at the Oval Office. Watch: The famous desk has been used by successive US presidents at the White House which is built from oak timbers from HMS Resolute in the 1880s. Trump had the button put on a wooden box next to his phone on the White House Resolute desk, whenever the ex-president pressed it a butler would enter the room carrying a bottle of Diet Coke on a silver platter. The ex-US president would reportedly consume a dozen coke bottles a day. Biden has made other changes to his decor at the famous room with pictures of late son Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015, including family photos of first lady Jill Biden behind the Resolute desk. Reports say 46th commander-in-chief is a soda fan and prefers Coke Zero, including ice-cream with vanilla. An Ohio-based ice cream company brand had in fact launched a flavour which is Biden's favourite passion. Trump was not the first sitting president to openly boycott his successor inauguration on Wednesday. In 1801 the second US president John Adams snubbed his successor Thomas Jefferson, leaving the White House at dawn after calling his former vice-president as "a mean-spirited, low-lived son of a half-breed Indian squaw". His son John Quincy Adams won a disputed election in 1824 against Andrew Jackson, who claimed the vote had been stolen. Four years later Jackson turned the tables after a contentious campaign. Like his father, Adams junior left the White House the night before the inauguration. Jackson, who brought his slaves to Washington with him, is a hero of Trump's. His portrait hangs by his desk in the Oval Office.

Now, Biden removes Trump's Diet Coke button from Oval desk

The former FLOTUS Melania Trump seems to have had enough of the media attention, and her husband and former reality TV star <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a>. An example of this was seen when Melania decided to abandon her husband infront of the media, immediately after his presidential term ended.

Upon her arrival in Florida, as soon as Trump couple stepped down from their aircraft, they were greete with a usual flurry of reporters with camera. However, while Donald Trump stopped to pose for the cameras, Melania chose to keep walking and let her husband have his spotlight.

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I made a gif. It’s just so funny. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MelaniaTrump?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#MelaniaTrump</a> <a href="https://t.co/e3lGva2q9X">pic.twitter.com/e3lGva2q9X</a>
— Better Late than Heather (@latethanheather) <a href="https://twitter.com/latethanheather/status/1352342251284918275?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 21, 2021</a></blockquote>
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This gave the twitter world a chance to launch all jokes on the complicated married life of the former President and his wife.&nbsp;

The video has once again sparked rumours of the two nearing a divorce — a rumour that has been doing the rounds for the past few months. Many believe it was only till the end of Trump's presidential term that the coupkle had decided to stay together, and now that the White House is not their residence anymore, Melania will soon be filing for a divorce, if not already done.

People took to twitter t make fun of the way Melania walked away from her husband, knowing that she is not bound by the duties of a FLOTUS anymore.

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If “I’m over it” were a person. <a href="https://t.co/CLA8WucyXX">pic.twitter.com/CLA8WucyXX</a>
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) <a href="https://twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1352260156495687680?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 21, 2021</a></blockquote>
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Oh dear.😂 <a href="https://t.co/EjJsrypr6z">https://t.co/EjJsrypr6z</a>
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) <a href="https://twitter.com/GeorgeTakei/status/1352421004195344385?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 22, 2021</a></blockquote>
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The moment you realize your hubby will now be working from home - all of the time! <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/melaniatrump?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#melaniatrump</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/trump?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#trump</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/failedpresident?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#failedpresident</a> <a href="https://t.co/DxbXDDdfmp">pic.twitter.com/DxbXDDdfmp</a>
— Chris Neilson, MBA, CPHR (@Chris_J_Neilson) <a href="https://twitter.com/Chris_J_Neilson/status/1352311036217475080?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 21, 2021</a></blockquote>
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After 4 long years, <a href="https://twitter.com/MELANIATRUMP?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@MELANIATRUMP</a> can finally smile again! Nature is healing. <a href="https://t.co/bRNoR5PBrh">pic.twitter.com/bRNoR5PBrh</a>
— 🌸Sleepy Moogle🌸 (@BaileysComet_xo) <a href="https://twitter.com/BaileysComet_xo/status/1352502155995799560?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 22, 2021</a></blockquote>
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Me after seeing all of the <a href="https://twitter.com/MELANIATRUMP?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@MELANIATRUMP</a> pics after the inauguration <a href="https://t.co/ba44J8uiEu">pic.twitter.com/ba44J8uiEu</a>
— Meg not Megan (@Meggamaiz) <a href="https://twitter.com/Meggamaiz/status/1352432343387000834?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 22, 2021</a></blockquote>
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My sentence is ova wit. No thank you notes and at 12 noon- <a href="https://twitter.com/MELANIATRUMP?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@MELANIATRUMP</a> was DONE. Helen Roper would have been so proud! <a href="https://t.co/3PHy2BFJxs">https://t.co/3PHy2BFJxs</a>
— whoareYOUmedia (@whoareyoumedia) <a href="https://twitter.com/whoareyoumedia/status/1352445054267305985?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 22, 2021</a></blockquote>
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<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MelaniaTrump?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#MelaniaTrump</a> said 'not today satan' 😂😂😂😂 <a href="https://t.co/dFlf2oUtNO">pic.twitter.com/dFlf2oUtNO</a>
— ZolaLeakes🇿🇦 (@NeneNLeakes) <a href="https://twitter.com/NeneNLeakes/status/1352270481320267779?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 21, 2021</a></blockquote>
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&nbsp;

The former FLOTUS Melania Trump seems to have had enough of the media attention, and her husband and former reality TV star Donald Trump. An example of this was seen when Melania decided to abandon her husband infront of the media, immediately after his presidential term ended.

The former FLOTUS Melania Trump seems to have had enough of the media attention, and her husband and former reality TV star Donald Trump. An example of this was seen when Melania decided to abandon her husband infront of the media, immediately after his presidential term ended. Upon her arrival in Florida, as soon as Trump couple stepped down from their aircraft, they were greete with a usual flurry of reporters with camera. However, while Donald Trump stopped to pose for the cameras, Melania chose to keep walking and let her husband have his spotlight. I made a gif. It’s just so funny. #MelaniaTrump pic.twitter.com/e3lGva2q9X — Better Late than Heather (@latethanheather) January 21, 2021 × This gave the twitter world a chance to launch all jokes on the complicated married life of the former President and his wife. The video has once again sparked rumours of the two nearing a divorce — a rumour that has been doing the rounds for the past few months. Many believe it was only till the end of Trump's presidential term that the coupkle had decided to stay together, and now that the White House is not their residence anymore, Melania will soon be filing for a divorce, if not already done. People took to twitter t make fun of the way Melania walked away from her husband, knowing that she is not bound by the duties of a FLOTUS anymore. If “I’m over it” were a person. pic.twitter.com/CLA8WucyXX — The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) January 21, 2021 × Oh dear.😂 https://t.co/EjJsrypr6z — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) January 22, 2021 × The moment you realize your hubby will now be working from home - all of the time! #melaniatrump #trump #failedpresident pic.twitter.com/DxbXDDdfmp — Chris Neilson, MBA, CPHR (@Chris_J_Neilson) January 21, 2021 × After 4 long years, @MELANIATRUMP can finally smile again! Nature is healing. pic.twitter.com/bRNoR5PBrh — 🌸Sleepy Moogle🌸 (@BaileysComet_xo) January 22, 2021 × Me after seeing all of the @MELANIATRUMP pics after the inauguration pic.twitter.com/ba44J8uiEu — Meg not Megan (@Meggamaiz) January 22, 2021 × My sentence is ova wit. No thank you notes and at 12 noon- @MELANIATRUMP was DONE. Helen Roper would have been so proud! https://t.co/3PHy2BFJxs — whoareYOUmedia (@whoareyoumedia) January 22, 2021 × #MelaniaTrump said 'not today satan' 😂😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/dFlf2oUtNO — ZolaLeakes🇿🇦 (@NeneNLeakes) January 21, 2021 ×

Watch: Melania Trump refuses to pose with Donald Trump after he leaves White House; Twitter laughs

Joe Biden began his presidency Wednesday with the same animating philosophy that guided his campaign: The center can hold.

That’s a big wager. American society is more brittle now than it has been in years. It is unequal, unhealthy and politically radicalized. A pandemic is raging nearly unchecked. The economy is in tatters. The climate is in crisis. Residents of red and blue America can’t even agree on the reality before their eyes, let alone demarcate the common ground they share.

Biden, now the 46th president, acknowledged all that in his inaugural address, calling for comity. “Let’s begin to listen to one another again, hear one another, see one another,” he said. “Show respect to one another. Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war, and we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.”

It was a sanguine message to deliver from the steps of the U.S. Capitol, two weeks to the day after the building was sacked by a mob trying to overturn the results of the election. Because of the continued threat of violence, tens of thousands of National Guard troops were on hand Wednesday to provide security for a crowd that was sparse because of the coronavirus contagion.

Biden spoke to the bleak gravity of the moment, noting that democracy is as precious as it is fragile. “Without unity, there is no peace,” Biden said, “only bitterness and fury, no progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos.”

The past four years have been nothing if not exhausting and chaotic. Donald Trump began his term from the same rostrum in 2017, decrying the “American carnage” caused by urban poverty, lost manufacturing jobs, drugs and crime. After four years of Trump waging ceaseless battle against his political opponents, the country is still shot through with all those maladies and is even more unmoored from the political traditions that once bound it together.

In his last act as president, Trump and the first lady flew to Florida rather than share the stage with Biden and participate in the pageantry of a peaceful transition of power. But there was the faintest flicker of decency. “I wish the new administration great luck and great success,” Trump told supporters who watched his departure from Joint Base Andrews. “I think they’ll have great success. They have the foundation to do something really spectacular.”

Inaugurations are, by their nature, the closing of one chapter in the nation’s story and the beginning of another. Now at the helm of the executive branch, along with Kamala Harris — the country’s first female vice president, first Black vice president and first Asian American vice president — Biden has a chance to test the firmness of common ground. For the new president and the nation to succeed, there must be enough like-minded leaders willing to put prosperity over party and the good of the nation above all else.

Biden’s call for unity was not a demand that Americans agree but rather that they live in mutual tolerance, recommitted to the democratic process and to peacefully adjudicating their differences until the next inauguration. All Americans should be able to agree on that.

&lt;b&gt;The World Deserves Answers From China&lt;/b&gt;

The terrible ravages of the coronavirus pandemic are evident in every corner of the world, so it should seem self-evident that every effort must be made to find out where and when the virus made its fateful leap from animal to human. That is why a team from the World Health Organization last week arrived in Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus was first identified.

Alas, the Chinese Communist Party has consistently demonstrated that it is far more concerned with maintaining some myth of infallibility than with helping find the source of the scourge. In doing so, it is obstructing efforts to prevent other pandemics and endangering all humanity.

Just getting into China has taken the WHO’s international team of scientists more than a year, considerably lowering the odds of finding any clues about the origins of the virus. Even after permission was granted for the team to arrive in the first days of the new year, China procrastinated, prompting the director-general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, to express disappointment — a sentiment that in the politically charged lexicon of the organization amounts to a sharp rebuke.

When the team finally reached Wuhan on Thursday, China promptly planted more obstacles in its way. Two scientists remained in Singapore after they tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, and the remaining 13 were ordered to quarantine for two weeks in Wuhan, although all 15 tested negative for the virus before setting off.

When they do finally get to work, the going is not likely to get any easier. While the Chinese government publicly claimed it has cooperated with the WHO team from the outset “in an open, transparent and responsible attitude,” it has not. Instead it has repeatedly thrown out red herrings suggesting that the source of the virus was not China or that it might have had more than one source. Chinese officials have suggested at various times that the WHO should also go to Spain and other countries.

The Trump administration did not help. When he was president, Donald Trump contributed to the politicization of the pandemic by regularly referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” and suggesting that it might have escaped from a Chinese laboratory.

Trump also withdrew the United States from the WHO after accusing the organization of not being sufficiently critical of China. In fact, the WHO is politically constrained from publicly criticizing any of its member states. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s withdrawal from a global organization critical to the struggle against a pandemic was widely condemned as the height of folly. President Joe Biden is expected to promptly rejoin.

It is China, however, that bears the primary responsibility for tracing the origins of the deadly pathogen first identified on its territory. Instead, China first sought to quell reports of a new disease. Then China slapped stern control over any information about it while putting out unsubstantiated claims and touting its handling of the outbreak.

An investigation by The Associated Press found that as the pandemic gained momentum, President Xi Jinping gave direct orders that any information had to be cleared by a government task force and that anyone publishing without permission, “causing serious adverse social impact, shall be held accountable.” As a result, little has been made public, and the WHO team is not likely to get the direct access to data and research that is critical for its investigation.

Without cooperation and transparency in China, there is little the WHO can learn. The sprawling Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, which peddled game meat and live animals and to which many of the first infections were traced, has been closed and disinfected. The samples and information gathered there are locked away at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and no researchers will dare speak with the international team without explicit permission — and a carefully vetted narrative — from the government.

Whether that first germ came from a bat or a pangolin or a civet or a neighboring country is likely to remain a mystery, and the search for ways to stop such transmission will remain handicapped.

The WHO, which is beholden to each of its 194 member states, has little leverage with China. But the rest of the world should raise its voice and demand that Beijing share everything it knows with the WHO experts and the world. It should be made clear to Xi that to treat a disease that has sickened 94 million people and killed 2 million as a propaganda problem is dangerous and unworthy of a country with pretensions to global influence and power.

Joe Biden began his presidency Wednesday with the same animating philosophy that guided his campaign: The center can hold. That’s a big wager. American society is more brittle now than it has been in years.

Joe Biden began his presidency Wednesday with the same animating philosophy that guided his campaign: The center can hold. That’s a big wager. American society is more brittle now than it has been in years. It is unequal, unhealthy and politically radicalized. A pandemic is raging nearly unchecked. The economy is in tatters. The climate is in crisis. Residents of red and blue America can’t even agree on the reality before their eyes, let alone demarcate the common ground they share. Biden, now the 46th president, acknowledged all that in his inaugural address, calling for comity. “Let’s begin to listen to one another again, hear one another, see one another,” he said. “Show respect to one another. Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn’t have to be a cause for total war, and we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.” It was a sanguine message to deliver from the steps of the U.S. Capitol, two weeks to the day after the building was sacked by a mob trying to overturn the results of the election. Because of the continued threat of violence, tens of thousands of National Guard troops were on hand Wednesday to provide security for a crowd that was sparse because of the coronavirus contagion. Biden spoke to the bleak gravity of the moment, noting that democracy is as precious as it is fragile. “Without unity, there is no peace,” Biden said, “only bitterness and fury, no progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos.” The past four years have been nothing if not exhausting and chaotic. Donald Trump began his term from the same rostrum in 2017, decrying the “American carnage” caused by urban poverty, lost manufacturing jobs, drugs and crime. After four years of Trump waging ceaseless battle against his political opponents, the country is still shot through with all those maladies and is even more unmoored from the political traditions that once bound it together. In his last act as president, Trump and the first lady flew to Florida rather than share the stage with Biden and participate in the pageantry of a peaceful transition of power. But there was the faintest flicker of decency. “I wish the new administration great luck and great success,” Trump told supporters who watched his departure from Joint Base Andrews. “I think they’ll have great success. They have the foundation to do something really spectacular.” Inaugurations are, by their nature, the closing of one chapter in the nation’s story and the beginning of another. Now at the helm of the executive branch, along with Kamala Harris — the country’s first female vice president, first Black vice president and first Asian American vice president — Biden has a chance to test the firmness of common ground. For the new president and the nation to succeed, there must be enough like-minded leaders willing to put prosperity over party and the good of the nation above all else. Biden’s call for unity was not a demand that Americans agree but rather that they live in mutual tolerance, recommitted to the democratic process and to peacefully adjudicating their differences until the next inauguration. All Americans should be able to agree on that. The World Deserves Answers From China The terrible ravages of the coronavirus pandemic are evident in every corner of the world, so it should seem self-evident that every effort must be made to find out where and when the virus made its fateful leap from animal to human. That is why a team from the World Health Organization last week arrived in Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus was first identified. Alas, the Chinese Communist Party has consistently demonstrated that it is far more concerned with maintaining some myth of infallibility than with helping find the source of the scourge. In doing so, it is obstructing efforts to prevent other pandemics and endangering all humanity. Just getting into China has taken the WHO’s international team of scientists more than a year, considerably lowering the odds of finding any clues about the origins of the virus. Even after permission was granted for the team to arrive in the first days of the new year, China procrastinated, prompting the director-general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, to express disappointment — a sentiment that in the politically charged lexicon of the organization amounts to a sharp rebuke. When the team finally reached Wuhan on Thursday, China promptly planted more obstacles in its way. Two scientists remained in Singapore after they tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, and the remaining 13 were ordered to quarantine for two weeks in Wuhan, although all 15 tested negative for the virus before setting off. When they do finally get to work, the going is not likely to get any easier. While the Chinese government publicly claimed it has cooperated with the WHO team from the outset “in an open, transparent and responsible attitude,” it has not. Instead it has repeatedly thrown out red herrings suggesting that the source of the virus was not China or that it might have had more than one source. Chinese officials have suggested at various times that the WHO should also go to Spain and other countries. The Trump administration did not help. When he was president, Donald Trump contributed to the politicization of the pandemic by regularly referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” and suggesting that it might have escaped from a Chinese laboratory. Trump also withdrew the United States from the WHO after accusing the organization of not being sufficiently critical of China. In fact, the WHO is politically constrained from publicly criticizing any of its member states. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s withdrawal from a global organization critical to the struggle against a pandemic was widely condemned as the height of folly. President Joe Biden is expected to promptly rejoin. It is China, however, that bears the primary responsibility for tracing the origins of the deadly pathogen first identified on its territory. Instead, China first sought to quell reports of a new disease. Then China slapped stern control over any information about it while putting out unsubstantiated claims and touting its handling of the outbreak. An investigation by The Associated Press found that as the pandemic gained momentum, President Xi Jinping gave direct orders that any information had to be cleared by a government task force and that anyone publishing without permission, “causing serious adverse social impact, shall be held accountable.” As a result, little has been made public, and the WHO team is not likely to get the direct access to data and research that is critical for its investigation. Without cooperation and transparency in China, there is little the WHO can learn. The sprawling Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, which peddled game meat and live animals and to which many of the first infections were traced, has been closed and disinfected. The samples and information gathered there are locked away at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and no researchers will dare speak with the international team without explicit permission — and a carefully vetted narrative — from the government. Whether that first germ came from a bat or a pangolin or a civet or a neighboring country is likely to remain a mystery, and the search for ways to stop such transmission will remain handicapped. The WHO, which is beholden to each of its 194 member states, has little leverage with China. But the rest of the world should raise its voice and demand that Beijing share everything it knows with the WHO experts and the world. It should be made clear to Xi that to treat a disease that has sickened 94 million people and killed 2 million as a propaganda problem is dangerous and unworthy of a country with pretensions to global influence and power.

Biden bets on unity

US President&nbsp;Joe Biden has said his predecessor Donald Trump has left him a "very generous" letter in the Oval Office before departing the White House.

Biden told reporters that he will not reveal the content of the letter as it was private but he plans on talking to Trump about it.

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It is customary for outgoing presidents to write their successors a letter and leave it for them on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

However, given that the former president broke several of the past traditions, including by opting to skip Biden's inauguration ceremony and never formally congratulated him on his election win, it was unclear until Wednesday whether Trump would maintain the tradition of outgoing presidents leaving notes for their successors.

In her maiden news briefing on Wednesday night, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that she was with Biden when he was reading the letter in the Oval Office right before he signed the executive actions.

However, she declined to offer more details on the letter, saying, it "was private, as he (Biden) said to you all".

"It was both generous and gracious, and it was just a reflection of him not planning to release the letter unilaterally, but I wouldn't take it as an indication of a pending call with the former president," Psaki said.

Psaki&nbsp;addressed other issues during the Biden administration's first White House briefing. She told reporters she has a "deep respect for the role of a free and independent press in our democracy."

She also said Biden will leave the mechanics of how to proceed with former President Donald Trump's impeachment trial to the US&nbsp;Senate.

"We are confident that ... the Senate ... can do their constitutional duty while continuing to conduct the business of the American people,"&nbsp;Psaki&nbsp;told reporters. "He's going to leave the mechanics, the timing and the specifics of how Congress moves forward on impeachment to them."

Biden, a Democrat, was sworn in earlier on Wednesday, a week after the US&nbsp;House of Representatives impeached Trump for a second time, charging him with inciting an insurrection in the deadly rampage at the Capitol on January&nbsp;6.

US President Joe Biden has said his predecessor Donald Trump has left him a "very generous" letter in the Oval Office before departing the White House. Biden told reporters that he will not reveal the content of the letter as it was private but he plans on talking to Trump about it.

US President Joe Biden has said his predecessor Donald Trump has left him a "very generous" letter in the Oval Office before departing the White House. Biden told reporters that he will not reveal the content of the letter as it was private but he plans on talking to Trump about it. It is customary for outgoing presidents to write their successors a letter and leave it for them on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. However, given that the former president broke several of the past traditions, including by opting to skip Biden's inauguration ceremony and never formally congratulated him on his election win, it was unclear until Wednesday whether Trump would maintain the tradition of outgoing presidents leaving notes for their successors. In her maiden news briefing on Wednesday night, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that she was with Biden when he was reading the letter in the Oval Office right before he signed the executive actions. However, she declined to offer more details on the letter, saying, it "was private, as he (Biden) said to you all". "It was both generous and gracious, and it was just a reflection of him not planning to release the letter unilaterally, but I wouldn't take it as an indication of a pending call with the former president," Psaki said. Psaki addressed other issues during the Biden administration's first White House briefing. She told reporters she has a "deep respect for the role of a free and independent press in our democracy." She also said Biden will leave the mechanics of how to proceed with former President Donald Trump's impeachment trial to the US Senate. "We are confident that ... the Senate ... can do their constitutional duty while continuing to conduct the business of the American people," Psaki told reporters. "He's going to leave the mechanics, the timing and the specifics of how Congress moves forward on impeachment to them." Biden, a Democrat, was sworn in earlier on Wednesday, a week after the US House of Representatives impeached Trump for a second time, charging him with inciting an insurrection in the deadly rampage at the Capitol on January 6.

Trump wrote a 'very generous' letter before departing White House: Biden

The newly formed administration in the United States, led by Joe Biden, unveiled a detailed Covid-19 roadmap Thursday to boost vaccinations and testing while centering scientific expertise.

President Biden, during his inaugural speech on Wednesday, warned the pandemic was entering its "deadliest period."&nbsp;His presidency will initially be shaped by his response to Covid-19 and the associated economic emergency.

Whereas Trump seldom acknowledged the tragic toll the virus was inflicting on Americans, Biden paused in his inaugural address -- which the public was essentially barred from attending due to the pandemic -- to offer a moment's silent prayer for its victims.

Officials said Biden would immediately sign 10 executive orders and other directives to jumpstart the national strategy, which experts said was sorely missing under his predecessor Donald Trump.

The US is the world's hardest-hit country with more than 405,000 deaths, and government models suggest the B.1.1.7 variant imported from Britain could supercharge the outbreak's trajectory in the coming months.

"For almost a year now, Americans could not look to the federal government for any strategy, let alone a comprehensive approach to respond to Covid," Jeff Zients, a former management consultant who is Biden's new Covid-19 task force coordinator, told reporters.

Biden's plan has organised goals like restoring the trust of the American people, surging the vaccination campaign, and mitigating viral spread through aggressive masking and testing, while expanding the public health workforce.

It also seeks to expand emergency relief and invoke emergency legislation to increase industrial production;&nbsp;safely reopen schools, businesses and travel; protect the most vulnerable and advance racial equity; and restore US global leadership with future pandemic preparedness.

The administration is seeking $1.9 trillion from Congress for its plans, which includes $20 billion for vaccines and $50 billion for testing.

A few measures were already announced in recent days, including recommending that the eligibility criteria for vaccine priority groups be widened and simplified in order to increase the rate of shots being injected.

As it stands, the federal government has overseen the allocation of 35.9 million doses to states, of which 16.5 million have been used -- or 46 per cent.&nbsp;

The administration will also continue the policy of rolling out vaccine doses for Pfizer and Moderna's two-shot regimes as soon as they become available.

The Trump team had initially set aside the booster as reserve, but later changed course after running low on supply.

Executive orders would also be advanced to establish a pandemic testing board, to boost research efforts into treatments, and create a Health Equity Task Force.

This group, headed by Yale associate professor Marcella Nunez-Smith, will advise the president on allocating resources and funding in communities affected by inequities linked to race, geography and disability.

The administration also plans to invoke the Defence Production Act to boost supply of personal protective equipment, lab equipment and to maximize vaccine production.&nbsp;

Tim Manning, who will coordinate supply chain issues, told reporters he had identified 12 supply shortfalls where the law could be invoked.

Biden's team has relentlessly criticised the Trump administration in recent weeks over its failure in particular to adequately plan for the last mile of its Covid response and get vaccines developed at record speed into arms.

An early test will be whether they achieve their own goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans within Biden's first 100 days in office, by April 20.

(with inputs from agencies)

The newly formed administration in the United States, led by Joe Biden, unveiled a detailed Covid-19 roadmap Thursday to boost vaccinations and testing while centering scientific expertise.

The newly formed administration in the United States, led by Joe Biden, unveiled a detailed Covid-19 roadmap Thursday to boost vaccinations and testing while centering scientific expertise. President Biden, during his inaugural speech on Wednesday, warned the pandemic was entering its "deadliest period." His presidency will initially be shaped by his response to Covid-19 and the associated economic emergency. Whereas Trump seldom acknowledged the tragic toll the virus was inflicting on Americans, Biden paused in his inaugural address -- which the public was essentially barred from attending due to the pandemic -- to offer a moment's silent prayer for its victims. Officials said Biden would immediately sign 10 executive orders and other directives to jumpstart the national strategy, which experts said was sorely missing under his predecessor Donald Trump. The US is the world's hardest-hit country with more than 405,000 deaths, and government models suggest the B.1.1.7 variant imported from Britain could supercharge the outbreak's trajectory in the coming months. "For almost a year now, Americans could not look to the federal government for any strategy, let alone a comprehensive approach to respond to Covid," Jeff Zients, a former management consultant who is Biden's new Covid-19 task force coordinator, told reporters. Biden's plan has organised goals like restoring the trust of the American people, surging the vaccination campaign, and mitigating viral spread through aggressive masking and testing, while expanding the public health workforce. It also seeks to expand emergency relief and invoke emergency legislation to increase industrial production; safely reopen schools, businesses and travel; protect the most vulnerable and advance racial equity; and restore US global leadership with future pandemic preparedness. The administration is seeking $1.9 trillion from Congress for its plans, which includes $20 billion for vaccines and $50 billion for testing. A few measures were already announced in recent days, including recommending that the eligibility criteria for vaccine priority groups be widened and simplified in order to increase the rate of shots being injected. As it stands, the federal government has overseen the allocation of 35.9 million doses to states, of which 16.5 million have been used -- or 46 per cent. The administration will also continue the policy of rolling out vaccine doses for Pfizer and Moderna's two-shot regimes as soon as they become available. The Trump team had initially set aside the booster as reserve, but later changed course after running low on supply. Executive orders would also be advanced to establish a pandemic testing board, to boost research efforts into treatments, and create a Health Equity Task Force. This group, headed by Yale associate professor Marcella Nunez-Smith, will advise the president on allocating resources and funding in communities affected by inequities linked to race, geography and disability. The administration also plans to invoke the Defence Production Act to boost supply of personal protective equipment, lab equipment and to maximize vaccine production. Tim Manning, who will coordinate supply chain issues, told reporters he had identified 12 supply shortfalls where the law could be invoked. Biden's team has relentlessly criticised the Trump administration in recent weeks over its failure in particular to adequately plan for the last mile of its Covid response and get vaccines developed at record speed into arms. An early test will be whether they achieve their own goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans within Biden's first 100 days in office, by April 20. (with inputs from agencies)

Biden unveils ambitious Covid strategy on first day of office

Joe Biden took office&nbsp;as the 46th president of the United States on Wednesday. At a scaled-back ceremony in Washington that was largely stripped of its usual pomp and circumstance, Biden assumed the helm of a country beset by deep political divides and battered by a raging coronavirus pandemic.

Biden, 78, has become the oldest US president in history. And this is only one of the many firsts the ceremony will boast of for generations to come.

For Biden, who long harboured presidential ambitions, the inauguration was the zenith of a five-decade career in public service that included more than three decades in the US Senate and two terms as vice-president under former president Barack Obama.

Biden is the first and likely to be the only Silent Generation president. He&nbsp;is the first president to be born between 1928 and 1945. In other words, Biden is the first president to be born before the end of World War II in almost 30 years. Every president starting with Bill Clinton is a member of the Baby Boomer generation.&nbsp;

Every president from John F&nbsp;Kennedy to George HW&nbsp;Bush was born between 1901 and 1927 (i.e. the Greatest Generation).&nbsp;&nbsp;

Biden succeeded where other members of the Silent Generation (e.g. Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale and John McCain) had failed before him.&nbsp;

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/joe-biden-sworn-in-as-46th-president-of-united-states-358118">Also read |&nbsp;Joe Biden sworn in as 46th President of United States</a>

The ceremony unfolded in front of a heavily fortified US Capitol, where a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building two weeks ago, enraged by his false claims that November’s election was stolen with millions of fraudulent votes. The violence prompted the Democratic-controlled US House of Representatives to impeach Trump last week for an unprecedented second time.

The ceremony was hence itself a herculean task to be accomplished. Thousands of National Guard troops were called into the city after the siege, which left five people dead and briefly forced lawmakers into hiding.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/harris-inauguration-news-kamala-harris-breaks-barriers-as-americas-first-black-south-asian-woman-vice-president-358140">Also read |&nbsp;Kamala Harris breaks barriers as America's first Black, South Asian woman Vice President</a>

Instead of a throng of supporters, the National Mall was covered by nearly 200,000 flags and 56 pillars of light meant to represent people from US states and territories.

Biden, who had vowed to “restore the soul of America,” called for American unity at a time of crisis in his inaugural address. He possibly became the first president of the nation to mention racism and White supremacy in his inaugural address.

He said the United States must confront and defeat the rise of white supremacy and domestic extremism, adding, "I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real. But I also know they are not new. Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal, and the harsh ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, demonisation have long torn us apart."

The norm-defying Trump flouted one last convention on his way out of the White House when he refused to meet with Biden or attend his successor’s inauguration, breaking with a political tradition seen as affirming the peaceful transfer of power.

Trump, who never conceded the November 3 election, did not mention Biden by name in his final remarks as president on Wednesday morning, when he touted his administration’s record and promised to be back “in some form.” He then boarded Air Force One for the last time and flew to his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/photos/a-day-of-many-firsts-highlights-from-us-presidential-inauguration-358179">A day of many firsts: Highlights from US presidential inauguration</a>

Vice-President Mike Pence, former US presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and both McCarthy and McConnell all however attended Biden’s inauguration ceremony.

President Joe Biden took a moment to jog over to a press area, while he was walking to the White House, and fist bumped a member of the press, according to CNN. "Keep doing what you're doing," Biden said.

Biden's running mate, Kamala Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, became the first Black person, first woman and first Asian American to serve as vice-president after she was sworn in by US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s first Latina member.

A US senator from California the past four years, Harris has shattered many a glass ceiling. She served as San Francisco’s first female district attorney and was California’s first woman of color to be elected attorney general.

As the Senate’s only Black woman, Harris emerged as a leading voice on racial justice and police reform after Minneapolis police killed African-American man George Floyd in May. She marched with protesters on the streets of Washington and won over some liberal skeptics.

There are obvious differences between Biden and Harris -- when it comes to race and gender, but it’s really worth thinking how similar their journeys have been.

Biden has waited forever for this moment. He first ran for president more than 30 years ago. He was first elected to the Senate nearly 50 years ago.&nbsp;

Harris’ trek to the vice presidency was much shorter in political life. But her scale of achievement has been no less.

Usually, presidents choose vice-presidents who have more experience than they do. But Biden chose a younger, Black woman.

Asked on the CBS programme “60 Minutes” last year why, given Biden’s age, he believed Harris would be ready to step into the presidency if something happened to him, Biden rapidly fired off five reasons.

“Number one, her values. Number two, she is smart as a devil, and number three, she has a backbone like a ramrod. Number four, she is really principled. And number five, she has had significant experience in the largest state in the union in running the justice department that’s only second in size to the United States Justice Department. And obviously, I hope that never becomes a question,” Biden said.

Biden takes office at a time of deep national unease, with the country facing what his advisers have described as four compounding crises: the pandemic, the economic downtown, climate change and racial inequality. He has promised immediate action, including a raft of executive orders on his first day in office.

Biden will waste little time trying to turn the page on the Trump era, signing 15 executive actions on Wednesday on issues ranging from the pandemic to the economy to climate change.

The orders include mandating masks on federal property, rejoining the Paris climate accord and ending Trump’s travel ban on some Muslim-majority countries.

Joe Biden took office as the 46th president of the United States on Wednesday. At a scaled-back ceremony in Washington that was largely stripped of its usual pomp and circumstance, Biden assumed the helm of a country beset by deep political divides and battered by a raging coronavirus pandemic.

Joe Biden took office as the 46th president of the United States on Wednesday. At a scaled-back ceremony in Washington that was largely stripped of its usual pomp and circumstance, Biden assumed the helm of a country beset by deep political divides and battered by a raging coronavirus pandemic. Biden, 78, has become the oldest US president in history. And this is only one of the many firsts the ceremony will boast of for generations to come. For Biden, who long harboured presidential ambitions, the inauguration was the zenith of a five-decade career in public service that included more than three decades in the US Senate and two terms as vice-president under former president Barack Obama. Biden is the first and likely to be the only Silent Generation president. He is the first president to be born between 1928 and 1945. In other words, Biden is the first president to be born before the end of World War II in almost 30 years. Every president starting with Bill Clinton is a member of the Baby Boomer generation. Every president from John F Kennedy to George HW Bush was born between 1901 and 1927 (i.e. the Greatest Generation). Biden succeeded where other members of the Silent Generation (e.g. Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale and John McCain) had failed before him. Also read | Joe Biden sworn in as 46th President of United States The ceremony unfolded in front of a heavily fortified US Capitol, where a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building two weeks ago, enraged by his false claims that November’s election was stolen with millions of fraudulent votes. The violence prompted the Democratic-controlled US House of Representatives to impeach Trump last week for an unprecedented second time. The ceremony was hence itself a herculean task to be accomplished. Thousands of National Guard troops were called into the city after the siege, which left five people dead and briefly forced lawmakers into hiding. Also read | Kamala Harris breaks barriers as America's first Black, South Asian woman Vice President Instead of a throng of supporters, the National Mall was covered by nearly 200,000 flags and 56 pillars of light meant to represent people from US states and territories. Biden, who had vowed to “restore the soul of America,” called for American unity at a time of crisis in his inaugural address. He possibly became the first president of the nation to mention racism and White supremacy in his inaugural address. He said the United States must confront and defeat the rise of white supremacy and domestic extremism, adding, "I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real. But I also know they are not new. Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal, and the harsh ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, demonisation have long torn us apart." The norm-defying Trump flouted one last convention on his way out of the White House when he refused to meet with Biden or attend his successor’s inauguration, breaking with a political tradition seen as affirming the peaceful transfer of power. Trump, who never conceded the November 3 election, did not mention Biden by name in his final remarks as president on Wednesday morning, when he touted his administration’s record and promised to be back “in some form.” He then boarded Air Force One for the last time and flew to his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida. A day of many firsts: Highlights from US presidential inauguration Vice-President Mike Pence, former US presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and both McCarthy and McConnell all however attended Biden’s inauguration ceremony. President Joe Biden took a moment to jog over to a press area, while he was walking to the White House, and fist bumped a member of the press, according to CNN. "Keep doing what you're doing," Biden said. Biden's running mate, Kamala Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, became the first Black person, first woman and first Asian American to serve as vice-president after she was sworn in by US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s first Latina member. A US senator from California the past four years, Harris has shattered many a glass ceiling. She served as San Francisco’s first female district attorney and was California’s first woman of color to be elected attorney general. As the Senate’s only Black woman, Harris emerged as a leading voice on racial justice and police reform after Minneapolis police killed African-American man George Floyd in May. She marched with protesters on the streets of Washington and won over some liberal skeptics. There are obvious differences between Biden and Harris -- when it comes to race and gender, but it’s really worth thinking how similar their journeys have been. Biden has waited forever for this moment. He first ran for president more than 30 years ago. He was first elected to the Senate nearly 50 years ago. Harris’ trek to the vice presidency was much shorter in political life. But her scale of achievement has been no less. Usually, presidents choose vice-presidents who have more experience than they do. But Biden chose a younger, Black woman. Asked on the CBS programme “60 Minutes” last year why, given Biden’s age, he believed Harris would be ready to step into the presidency if something happened to him, Biden rapidly fired off five reasons. “Number one, her values. Number two, she is smart as a devil, and number three, she has a backbone like a ramrod. Number four, she is really principled. And number five, she has had significant experience in the largest state in the union in running the justice department that’s only second in size to the United States Justice Department. And obviously, I hope that never becomes a question,” Biden said. Biden takes office at a time of deep national unease, with the country facing what his advisers have described as four compounding crises: the pandemic, the economic downtown, climate change and racial inequality. He has promised immediate action, including a raft of executive orders on his first day in office. Biden will waste little time trying to turn the page on the Trump era, signing 15 executive actions on Wednesday on issues ranging from the pandemic to the economy to climate change. The orders include mandating masks on federal property, rejoining the Paris climate accord and ending Trump’s travel ban on some Muslim-majority countries.

Why Biden inauguration was a landmark day in political history of US

Joe Biden on Wednesday took oath to become 46th President of United States of America. Soon after his swearing-in, he delivered the inaugural speech, that is, his first address as US President. Former US President Donald Trump gave the inauguration ceremony a miss. However, Biden's inaugural speech did not have any hint of resentment. His speech appealed all Americans to come together. He tackled issues such as racism, social injustice, environment, US economy, coronavirus and much more. Check out what he said.

Joe Biden inaugural speech full text:

<blockquote>
"This is democracy’s day.

A day of history and hope.

Of renewal and resolve.

Through a crucible for the ages America has been tested anew and America has risen to the challenge.

Today, we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause, the cause of democracy.

The will of the people has been heard and the will of the people has been heeded.

We have learned again that democracy is precious.

Democracy is fragile.

And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.

So now, on this hallowed ground where just days ago violence sought to shake this Capitol’s very foundation, we come together as one nation, under God, indivisible, to carry out the peaceful transfer of power as we have for more than two centuries.

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&nbsp;

We look ahead in our uniquely American way – restless, bold, optimistic – and set our sights on the nation we know we can be and we must be.

I thank my predecessors of both parties for their presence here.

I thank them from the bottom of my heart.

You know the resilience of our Constitution and the strength of our nation.

As does President Carter, who I spoke to last night but who cannot be with us today, but whom we salute for his lifetime of service.

I have just taken the sacred oath each of these patriots took — an oath first sworn by George Washington.

But the American story depends not on any one of us, not on some of us, but on all of us.

On ‘We the People’ who seek a more perfect Union.

This is a great nation and we are a good people.

Over the centuries through storm and strife, in peace and in war, we have come so far. But we still have far to go.

We will press forward with speed and urgency, for we have much to do in this winter of peril and possibility.

Much to repair.

Much to restore.

Much to heal.

Much to build.

And much to gain.

Few periods in our nation’s history have been more challenging or difficult than the one we’re in now.

A once-in-a-century virus silently stalks the country.

It’s taken as many lives in one year as America lost in all of World War Two.

Millions of jobs have been lost.

Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed.

A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.

A cry for survival comes from the planet itself. A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear.

And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.

To overcome these challenges – to restore the soul and to secure the future of America – requires more than words.

It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity.

In another January in Washington, on New Year’s Day 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

When he put pen to paper, the president said, “If my name ever goes down into history it will be for this act and my whole soul is in it.”

My whole soul is in it.

Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this:

Bringing America together.

Uniting our people.

And uniting our nation.

I ask every American to join me in this cause.

Uniting to fight the common foes we face:

Anger, resentment, hatred.

Extremism, lawlessness, violence.

Disease, joblessness, hopelessness.

With unity we can do great things. Important things.

We can right wrongs.

We can put people to work in good jobs.

We can teach our children in safe schools.

We can overcome this deadly virus.

We can reward work, rebuild the middle class, and make health care secure for all."
</blockquote>

Joe Biden on Wednesday took oath to become 46th President of United States of America. Soon after his swearing-in, he delivered the inaugural speech, that is, his first address as US President.

Joe Biden on Wednesday took oath to become 46th President of United States of America. Soon after his swearing-in, he delivered the inaugural speech, that is, his first address as US President. Former US President Donald Trump gave the inauguration ceremony a miss. However, Biden's inaugural speech did not have any hint of resentment. His speech appealed all Americans to come together. He tackled issues such as racism, social injustice, environment, US economy, coronavirus and much more. Check out what he said. Joe Biden inaugural speech full text: "This is democracy’s day. A day of history and hope. Of renewal and resolve. Through a crucible for the ages America has been tested anew and America has risen to the challenge. Today, we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause, the cause of democracy. The will of the people has been heard and the will of the people has been heeded. We have learned again that democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile. And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed. So now, on this hallowed ground where just days ago violence sought to shake this Capitol’s very foundation, we come together as one nation, under God, indivisible, to carry out the peaceful transfer of power as we have for more than two centuries. × We look ahead in our uniquely American way – restless, bold, optimistic – and set our sights on the nation we know we can be and we must be. I thank my predecessors of both parties for their presence here. I thank them from the bottom of my heart. You know the resilience of our Constitution and the strength of our nation. As does President Carter, who I spoke to last night but who cannot be with us today, but whom we salute for his lifetime of service. I have just taken the sacred oath each of these patriots took — an oath first sworn by George Washington. But the American story depends not on any one of us, not on some of us, but on all of us. On ‘We the People’ who seek a more perfect Union. This is a great nation and we are a good people. Over the centuries through storm and strife, in peace and in war, we have come so far. But we still have far to go. We will press forward with speed and urgency, for we have much to do in this winter of peril and possibility. Much to repair. Much to restore. Much to heal. Much to build. And much to gain. Few periods in our nation’s history have been more challenging or difficult than the one we’re in now. A once-in-a-century virus silently stalks the country. It’s taken as many lives in one year as America lost in all of World War Two. Millions of jobs have been lost. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed. A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer. A cry for survival comes from the planet itself. A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear. And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat. To overcome these challenges – to restore the soul and to secure the future of America – requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity. In another January in Washington, on New Year’s Day 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. When he put pen to paper, the president said, “If my name ever goes down into history it will be for this act and my whole soul is in it.” My whole soul is in it. Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this: Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation. I ask every American to join me in this cause. Uniting to fight the common foes we face: Anger, resentment, hatred. Extremism, lawlessness, violence. Disease, joblessness, hopelessness. With unity we can do great things. Important things. We can right wrongs. We can put people to work in good jobs. We can teach our children in safe schools. We can overcome this deadly virus. We can reward work, rebuild the middle class, and make health care secure for all."

US President Joe Biden inaugural speech full text

Former US President Donald Trump pardoned an engineer who has stolen Google's trade secrets on his final day as the president. Adam Lewandowski the engineer had pled guilty to stealing secrets from Google's self-driving car program. Trump granted Lewandowski a full pardon.

Lewandowski was a founding member of "Chauffeur" an autonomous vehicle project of Google.

Several years later Levandowski began thinking of leaving Google for another self-driving endeavor that was eventually named "Otto," the plea deal said.

He began negotiations with Uber to invest in or buy Otto while he was at Google. Lewandowski admitted to have downloaded whole series of documents few years before resigning in January 2016.

"Prior to my departure, I downloaded thousands of files related to Project Chauffeur," Levandowski said in court documents when the plea deal was reached last year.

Levandowski was sentenced to prison for theft of trade secrets. Prosecutors dropped other charges filed against him in the deal that avoided a trial, the court filing showed.

"Mr. Levandowski has paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good," read a statement from the outgoing president's press secretary that summarized 73 last-minute pardons granted by Trump.

(With agency inputs)

Former US President Donald Trump pardoned an engineer who has stolen Google's trade secrets on his final day as the president. Adam Lewandowski the engineer had pled guilty to stealing secrets from Google's self-driving car program.

Former US President Donald Trump pardoned an engineer who has stolen Google's trade secrets on his final day as the president. Adam Lewandowski the engineer had pled guilty to stealing secrets from Google's self-driving car program. Trump granted Lewandowski a full pardon. Lewandowski was a founding member of "Chauffeur" an autonomous vehicle project of Google. Several years later Levandowski began thinking of leaving Google for another self-driving endeavor that was eventually named "Otto," the plea deal said. He began negotiations with Uber to invest in or buy Otto while he was at Google. Lewandowski admitted to have downloaded whole series of documents few years before resigning in January 2016. "Prior to my departure, I downloaded thousands of files related to Project Chauffeur," Levandowski said in court documents when the plea deal was reached last year. Levandowski was sentenced to prison for theft of trade secrets. Prosecutors dropped other charges filed against him in the deal that avoided a trial, the court filing showed. "Mr. Levandowski has paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good," read a statement from the outgoing president's press secretary that summarized 73 last-minute pardons granted by Trump. (With agency inputs)

On last day as US President, Trump pardons engineer who stole Google secrets

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's inauguration preparations are underway in Washington DC amid tight security. White officials were seen making arrangements for the inauguration event. WION brings you a report.

Preparations underway for Biden-Harris inauguration in Washington DC

China sanctions Pompeo, Trump officials for violating 'sovereignty'

China is sanctioning more than two dozen officials and members of former US president Donald Trump's cabinet, including his secretary of state Mike Pompeo, for violating the country's "sovereignty".

The foreign ministry said Wednesday, "China has decided to sanction 28 persons who have seriously violated China's sovereignty."

This came close on the heels of the inauguration of Trump's successor President Joe Biden in Washington.

Beyond Pompeo, those sanctioned include Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro, national security advisor Robert O'Brien, assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs David Stilwell, health secretary Alex Azar and UN envoy Kelly Craft.&nbsp;

Beijing also sanctioned former Trump national security advisor John Bolton and former advisor Stephen Bannon.

China sanctions Pompeo, Trump officials for violating 'sovereignty' China is sanctioning more than two dozen officials and members of former US president Donald Trump's cabinet, including his secretary of state Mike Pompeo, for violating the country's "sovereignty".

China sanctions Pompeo, Trump officials for violating 'sovereignty' China is sanctioning more than two dozen officials and members of former US president Donald Trump's cabinet, including his secretary of state Mike Pompeo, for violating the country's "sovereignty". The foreign ministry said Wednesday, "China has decided to sanction 28 persons who have seriously violated China's sovereignty." This came close on the heels of the inauguration of Trump's successor President Joe Biden in Washington. Beyond Pompeo, those sanctioned include Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro, national security advisor Robert O'Brien, assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs David Stilwell, health secretary Alex Azar and UN envoy Kelly Craft. Beijing also sanctioned former Trump national security advisor John Bolton and former advisor Stephen Bannon.

China sanctions Pompeo, Trump officials for violating 'sovereignty'

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