After a damning interview with 60 Minutes in which his former defence chief claimed that he stopped his boss from doing “terrible things” during his last year in office, Donald Trump fired back in a lengthy letter to CBS News painting the former official as “weak” while refusing to even address some of his remarks.

“Mark Esper was weak and totally ineffective, and because of it, I had to run the military. I took out ISIS, Qasem Soleimani, al­ Baghdadi, rebuilt the military with $2.5 trillion, created Space Force, and so much more. Mark Esper was a stiff who was desperate not to lose his job,” he argued.

Read more from The Independent’s Maroosha Muzaffar:

As the news cycle around Mark Esper’s book continues to swirl, journalist and Trump video-clipper extraordinaire Aaron Rupar has dug up this footage of Mr Esper delivering a remarkably fawning speech thanking the then-president for his leadership during the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This footage may be jarring, but it doesn’t make Mr Esper an outlier. Many Trump administration alumni who have taken a hard line against their ex-boss since he left office were equally effusive when speaking about him during their time in his employ, especially whether he was in the room.

Even as more than 800 people have been arrested in connection with the riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, many more remain at large – and along with the mysterious person who left pipe bombs outside the DNC and RNC headquarters, one in particular stands out: Florida man Jonathan Daniel Pollock.

Mr Pollock is accused of assaulting multiple police officers with a deadly weapon, and the FBI says its officers have been trying to locate him since last summer.

In response to warnings of a surge in Covid-19 infections, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo has opened up a new line of critique: the allegation that Democrats are hatching a plot to somehow frighten people into voting for them in November. (The process by which this would help the Democrats is unclear.)

However, the phrase isn’t actually new: it was rolled out by GOP Congressman Ronny Jackson last year.

After Mark Esper claimed that he wanted to send 10,000 troops to the streets of Washington, DC, Donald Trump was ready to punch back with a different story.

“Wrong. I wanted to send at least 10,000 troops for January 6, because I knew many people were coming to Washington that day to protest the corrupt Presidential Election of 2020,” Mr Trump wrote in a letter. “Nancy Pelosi and the DC Mayor turned me down.”

The claim that Nancy Pelosi and DC authorities were responsible for leaving the Capitol unsecured has become a talking point for House Republicans in particular, eager as they are to move the conversation away from their own members’ alleged connections to various individuals and groups who took part in the insurrection.

When the bombshell draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v Wade leaked last week, many Republicans immediately began trying to divert attention toward the question of who leaked it, with the running assumption on the right being that it must have been someone on the liberal side keen to disrupt the progress of the case.

However, National Public Radio legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg, who has covered the court since the 1970s, takes a different view. According to her, many observers are increasingly persuaded that the likeliest cuplrit was a conservative clerk or staff member who wanted to keep the court’s right-wing justices from joining a more moderate opinion written by a different colleague.

The pressure on the Democrats to reform the Senate’s arcane procedures has never been higher. Among those still resisting demands to eliminated the filibuster, the main argument in opposition is that doing so would allow the Republicans to run riot once they get a majority in the upper chamber (which could happen as soon as this November).

However, Mitch McConnell himself has also insisted he will not throw the filibuster out. Here’s Eric Garcia to explain why the Republican leader has as much to lose from abolishing it as he has to gain.

The recent Ohio primaries threw up one particularly shocking result at congressional level: the nomination of Republican JR Majewski to challenge veteran Democratic Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur.

Mr Majewski is controversial even by the standards of pro-Trump candidates, not just because of his outspoken belief in the former president’s various falsehoods but because of his previously expressed support for the unhinged QAnon conspiracy theory.

As detailed by CNN, this support appears to have gone on far longer and been far more enthusiastic than the candidate now admits.

Some of the revelations from Mark Esper’s book are downright frightening, but others are more at the bizarre end of the scale – chief among them that Donald Trump suggested launching patriot missiles to target drug labs operating in Mexico, all without asking the Mexican government first.

In his rebuttal of Mr Esper’s various claims yesterday, Mr Trump scornfully dismissed most of them. But when it came to the bizarre missile story, he simply wrote: “no comment”.

Read more from Johanna Chisholm.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who has previously had to walk back comments referring to the 6 January Capitol attack as an act of “terrorism”, yesterday complained to Fox Business host and Trump devotee Maria Bartiromo that those advocating the survival of Roe v Wade were prepared to use “mob violence” to achieve a “partisan outcome”.

The standard narrative on Fox’s various channels has become that 6 January was no such thing, instead being either a benign protest where a handful of people got out of control or a nefarious plot by federal agents.