Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
TARGET TRUMP
Ex-president could still face criminal charges as chief Republican hits out
He’s still liable.. he didn’t get away with anything yet MITCH MCCONNELL SENATE REPUBLICAN LEADER
If evidence fits the element of a crime, they’re going to be charged MICHAEL SHERWIN US ATTORNEY IN WASHINGTON
DONALD Trump’s celebrations of his second impeachment acquittal may be short-lived as he fears he could still face criminal charges.
His anxiety was said to have increased when the Senate Republican leader Mitch Mcconnell launched a blistering attack on the former US President.
One adviser close to Trump said of potential criminal charges being filed: “He is worried about it.”
Despite voting to acquit Trump of inciting last month’s Capitol riot, Mcconnell said he was “still liable for everything he did while he was in office”.
He added: “He didn’t get away with anything, yet.
“We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation, and former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.”
Addressing senators and referring to the number of voters who backed Trump, he said: “Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty.
“Anyone who decries his awful behaviour is accused of insulting millions of voters. That is an absurd deflection.
“Seventy-four million Americans did not invade the Capitol. Hundreds of rioters did. Seventy-four million Americans did not engineer the campaign of disinformation and rage that provoked it. One person did. Just one.”
All 50 Senate Democrats and seven Republicans voted to convict, 10 short of a two-thirds majority.
Mcconnell said he voted to acquit on Saturday because the charges were unconstitutional as Trump was no longer in office.
“Impeachment was never meant to be the final forum for American justice,” he added. Even some Senate
Republicans who voted not guilty warned the former president that criminal charges could be forthcoming.
Republican senator Thom Tillis said: “The ultimate accountability is through our criminal justice system where political passions are checked.
“No President is above the law or immune from criminal prosecution, and that includes former President Trump.”
President Joe Biden said: “While the final vote did not lead to a conviction, the substance of the charge is not in dispute.”
Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose team prosecuted Trump, lashed out at Mcconnell and “cowardly senators... afraid to defend their job”.
Only last month, the US attorney in Washington DC Michael Sherwin said federal prosecutors are open to investigating Trump’s role in inciting the riots during which five people died.
He said: “We’re looking at all actors here, and anyone that had a role. If the evidence fits the element of a crime, they’re going to be charged.”
Trump, who is staying in his Mar-alago home in Florida, said: “It is a sad commentary on our times that one political party in America is given a free pass to denigrate the rule of law.”
TV Editor ordon Ramsay is so confident his new BBC1 game show will be a massive hit he is comparing it with The Chase, The Wall and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? before it has even aired.
The chef, who first embarked on a TV career with Hell’s Kitchen and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares in 2004, is turning game show host with Gordon Ramsay’s Bank Balance.
But he admits to being nervous after BBC bosses decided to screen the untested format in prime time over three nights of the week – for three weeks.
“There’s something pretty dynamic about being given a show at 9pm, stripped across nine nights on the BBC,” he says. “You wake up in the morning and you s**t yourself.
“It’s very rare you get a chance to not just present your own show, but be part of that creative team. And that was the bit that got me out of bed every morning
Gat 5am. You look at the success of The Chase, The Wall, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? coming back, there’s definitely a need for that kind of connect. And Bank Balance offers that.”
Ramsay says the young team at his TV company Studio Ramsay dedicated hundreds of hours during lockdown to the development of the show, which “fingers crossed” will be “an amazing hit”.
“We were on it 12 hours a day, five days a week,” he says. “I’d never go in thinking it was a home run. There’s going to be a lot of eyeballs on this thing.”
PI wanted something sort of cutting edge... Make it a UK cool Britannia hit GORDON ON THE AMBITION AND VISION BEHIND BANK BALANCE
layers can win up to £100,000 by answering questions against the clock to earn the chance to balance bars across a precarious pyramid structure. One false move and it comes tumbling down.
Ramsay says: “You start off tiny and you start looking at the actual halfway size, and then you go up to 75%, and all of a sudden you’ve built this bloody thing and it’s like, ‘This is mega. Holy crap’.”
ITV’S The Chase, with Bradley Walsh, has gone from strength to strength with the new Beat the Chasers version while Phillip Schofield brought back his game show The Cube with a £1million prize.
And after years off air, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? returned, this time with Jeremy Clarkson asking the questions.
The BBC are also getting in on the