The Independent’s Eric Garcia says he knows a “weird energy” when he feels one. There was definitely a vibe shift within the last two weeks of the newly GOP-controlled House, he writes.

Donald Trump repeatedly attacked a woman who accused him of rape, according to a transcript from a newly unsealed deposition.

The former president described writer E Jean Carroll as a “nut job” and rejected claims that he assaulted her in the dressing room of a luxury department store in New York City in in the mid-1990s.

“She said that I did something to her that never took place,” Mr Trump said in testimony taken under oath that was made public on Friday.

A CNN supercut shows that Republican officials were very concerned about classified documents found at Joe Biden’s properties, but were notably less concerned when classified documents were found during the raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, months after federal agents had tried and failed to get the former president to return them.

Republicans who called for Attorney General Merrick Garland to name a special prosecutor to oversee a Department of Justice probe into how classified Obama-era documents ended up at Joe Biden’s Delaware home and his former office didn’t have to wait long to see their concerns addressed.

But Trump’s allies who are demanding “equal treatment” for Mr Biden and the twice-impeached ex-president — who is himself facing an ongoing investigation into his alleged unlawful retention of national defence information at his Florida beach club and alleged obstruction of that investigation — are likely to be extremely disappointed.

The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg reports:

ponymous company has been fined $1.6m after a New York City jury convicted two Trump Organization subsidiaries on charges stemming from what prosecutors described as a years-long scheme to avoid paying payroll taxes by compensating top executives with lavish untaxed perks.

The December verdict on 17 felony crimes followed an indictment filed last year against the Trump Corporation, the Trump Payroll Corporation, and the Trump Organization’s long-time chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, who was sentenced to five months in jail this week.

The former longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization had pleaded guilty to several tax crimes stemming from the criminal investigation into the former president’s business empire.

While the resulting fines amount to less than $2m, the convictions could be used as leverage for a blockbuster $250m lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who accused the former president of “grossly” inflating the value of his net worth by billions of dollars in an effort to fraudulently gain tax benefits and other benefits from insurers and financial institutions.

Members of the far-right nationalist gang the Proud Boys rallied a crowd to “take the f****** Capitol” as a joint session of Congress convened to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election on January 6, 2021.

In opening arguments in a trial for five members of the group charged with seditious conspiracy for their actions leading up to and during the attack, federal prosecutors showed video taken roughly 20 minutes before then-President Donald Trump addressed his supporters at a nearby rally.

Assistant US Attorney Jason McCullough said the group did not intend to listen to the president’s speech; they had always planned to lead a crowd to the Capitol to forcibly stop the transfer of presidential power.

“They hoped the ‘normies’ – that is, the civilians – would burn the city to ash,” he told jurors on 12 January.

A defence attorney for former longtime Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio blamed former president Donald Trump for “unleashing that mob” on 6 January, 2021, as a crowd of his supporters stormed the US Capitol.

Sabino Jauregui – whose client is charged with seditious conspiracy along with four other members of the far-right nationalist gang – said it was Mr Trump who told his supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell,” not Tarrio or members of his group.

“Enrique didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything to anybody on the grounds of the Capitol. He just happens to be the leader of the Proud Boys,” Mr Jauregui said in his opening arguments in US District Court on 12 January.

Five men, including Tarrio, are charged with seditious conspiracy for their roles in the Capitol riots.

Trump’s former top aide Kellyanne Conway wrote a column for The New York Times (”The Cases For and Against Trump”) arguing that it would be “foolish” to assume that the former president has a “smooth and secure” path to 2024.

“This is not 2016, when he and his team had the hunger, swagger and scrappiness of an insurgent’s campaign and the ‘history be damned’ happy warrior resolve of an underestimated, understaffed, underresourced effort,” she wrote.

“It’s tough to be new twice,” she said.

Ms Conway says Trump has both “political assets to carry him forward and political baggage holding him back” and will need to rely on “fewer insults and more insights” rather than endless grievances.

Newly elected House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he will take a look at his members’ requests to expunge one or both of Trump’s impeachments.

“I would understand why members would want to bring that forward,” he said during a press conference on Thursday. “We’d look at it.”

The former president was impeached twice while in office in the House but acquitted both times in the Senate. The House adopted two articles against him in his first impeachment – abuse of power and obstruction of Congress – following his attempts to withhold military aid to Ukraine in exchange for politically damaging information about his then-opponent Joe Biden. A second impeachment on a charge of incitement of insurrection involved his rhetoric and actions that fuelled the attack on the US Capitol.

In the last Congress, a group of more than 30 House Republicans attempted a resolution to expunge Trump’s impeachment, a measure supported by high-ranking Republican Elise Stefanik.

Journalist, author and columnist alleges former president raped her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s.