Robinson hired attorney Jesse Binnall, who worked for Trump's campaign in 2016, WUNC's Colin Campbell first reported Tuesday. The announcement comes following an explosive CNN report that an account linked to Robinson posted comments more than a decade ago on a porn site messaging board in which he defended slavery and called himself a "Black Nazi."
"Now we have this stupid stuff where you can vote 45 days early," Trumptold his rally attendees. "I wonder what the hell happens during that 45. Let’s move — see these votes? We’ve got about a million votes in there. Let’s move them. We’re fixing the air conditioner in the room, right?"
He continued: "No, it’s terrible. What happened the last time was disgraceful, including right here. But we’re not going to let it happen again. You know too big to rig, right? That’s one way you do it."
After showing the clip, Tur confessed, "For the life of me, I don't know what he's talking about when he mentions air conditioning in that soundbite."
Trump urged his voters to cast their ballots early, then claimed that early voting is "a scam," Tur explained.
NBC News senior political editor Mark Murray told Tur that at least 51 percent of voters intend to cast ballots early either in person or by mail, according to the latest polls from their network.
Former White House adviser Kellyanne Conway desperately tried to defend Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump Tuesday after he could not stay on topic during what was supposed to be an economic speech in Georgia.
After Trump talked in Savannah for over 80 minutes, Fox News host John Roberts noted that the former president spoke three times longer than expected.
"That was quite a speech, almost an hour and a half," Roberts said. "I was following along with the prepared text, and I think the speech was three times as long as the prepared text because he kept ad-libbing and deviating so much."
Conway admitted Trump "did go off topic a little bit," but she insisted he outlined "very specific plans for the economy."
"I think the topic is the American economy, jobs, opportunity, prosperity, but it got very granular," she argued. "And it's a challenge to Kamala Harris to stop talking in generics and be more granular."
Williams, however, said he wanted to hear more specifics from Trump.
"You know, Kellyanne said he got granular," Williams observed. "I'm still waiting for the grain here, the granular pieces, because, to me, this was a speech in which he's trying to set out a new policy, I guess."
"But all I heard from him was attacks on Harris, comrade Kamala," he continued. "For an hour and a half, Kamala is a communist."
"Come on, Juan!" Conway interrupted. "You have the text in front of you. Don't say that."
"It was pretty much just an ad hominem personal attack," Williams replied. "And, you know, it made for like a rally-like atmosphere."
"But the reality is, you know, even as he attacks Harris, he ignores the fact the U.S. economy right now is growing even after COVID," he added. "It's the best on the globe. Manufacturing fell to its lowest under Trump."
Conway tried to convince the audience that Trump had stayed on topic.
"I just can't sit here and abide these lies," she complained.
"It's not a lie," Williams stated. "It's the absolute truth."
"Well, you sat there with five pages of his speech," Conway argued.
"Shortly after taking the oath of office, the first-term congressman hired his longtime fiancée’s daughter to work as a special assistant in his district office, eventually bumping her salary to about $3,800 a month, payroll records show," wrote the Times' Nicholas Fandos this week.
Then, the Congressman added Devin Faas, a woman with whom he allegedly shared a physical relationship. The report claims that she was paid $2,000 each month as part of a part-time job.
While being chased by reporters on Tuesday, D'Esposito revealed that he had not yet spoken with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) about the matter.
Another reporter asked, "Did you give your mistress a job?"
D’Esposito answered, "I did not."
He also said that he intends to win his election.
D’Esposito is already in an embattled congressional race, as his district voted in 2020 to support President Joe Biden to the tune of 58 percent over former President Donald Trump at 42 percent.
Former President Donald Trump said he opposed green energy Tuesday because hydrogen cars "explode."
During a speech in Savannah, Georgia, Trump lashed out at the green energy industry.
"We have the product for gasoline-powered cars under our feet and Hybrids, and we want to have electric cars," Trump said. "Hey, Elon Musk is great, right?"
"He makes an excellent car, an electric car, and he endorsed me at a level that you wouldn't believe," he continued. "But you have to have gasoline-powered cars, too. You have to have hybrids. You have to have everything."
The former president then issued a warning about hydrogen-fueled vehicles.
"You know, the new thing — and I'm sure Elon will get it if it's any good — got one little problem it explodes, hydrogen," Trump opined. "They say the new thing is hydrogen cars, but they're having a problem if it explodes you end up about seven blocks away. And you're dead."
"So personally, I don't know about you, but I'm gonna take a pass But maybe they'll figure it out," he added. "But right now I wouldn't recommend it."
According to Car and Driver magazine, about 17,000 hydrogen cars are on the road in California, the only state to authorize their use.
"Normal service for a hydrogen car that doesn't involve the hydrogen tanks, the fuel-cell stack, or the plumbing that connects them is just like any other vehicle," the magazine stated. "But if any of those components have to be handled, the state of California has a set of rules to ensure any escaping hydrogen doesn't run the risk of an explosion."
In one case, however, Ukrainian forces were able to convert a Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle into a bomb.
Writing in his Off Message newsletter, progressive Brian Beutler argued that Trump's thus-far unsuccessful attempts to drag Harris down to his level demonstrate that his "lie machine" appears "broken."
To illustrate his point, Beutler examined the attempts to run a "Swift Boat"-style campaign against Harris's running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, by attacking his military record.
"They plucked a handful of comments and innocent misstatements he made over his 20-year political career out of context to disparage his military service and portray him as a faker," he wrote.
"They lied about his gubernatorial record, and tried to insinuate that he was a predator and a pervert. They deployed the same kinds of tactics that helped Republicans defame and defeat John Kerry, Max Cleland, Hillary Clinton, and other high-profile Democrats over the years. And yet…. Today, Walz is the most favorably viewed of the four candidates at the top of the ticket, and the only one who’s been consistently popular. It all amounted to nothing."
What makes this particularly remarkable, wrote Beutler, is that Trump has not improved his own favorability numbers despite being the target of two separate assassination plots in recent months.
While a more cunning politician might express regret for past rhetoric and pledge to tone down his rhetoric, Trump has moved on to pushing lies about Haitian immigrants eating people's pets.
"The Trump we have, and the sleazy pretenders who mimic him, have taken the opposite tack of claiming Democrats keep trying to kill him," Beutler contended. "Let’s set aside that this is gross and untrue. The main thing is: Nobody outside Trump’s existing pool of supporters has time for his s--t anymore. Everyone at some level knows that he sowed the maelstroms that now threaten to sweep him into oblivion."
An Ohio law allowing citizens to file criminal charges is being used to target former President Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) over their comments about Haitians in Springfield.
"The criminal charges stem from the devastating harm of Trump's and Vance's baseless fearmongering that legal Haitian immigrants to the Ohio town are eating their neighbor's pets," Chandra Law Firm said.
Alliance's cofounder Guerline Jozef sought the "immediate arrest" of Trump and Vance for disrupting public service, making false alarms, committing telecommunications harassment, committing aggravated menacing, and violating the prohibition against complicity.
"The Haitian community is suffering in fear because of Trump and Vance's relentless, irresponsible, false alarms, and public services have been disrupted," lead counsel Subodh Chandra said in a statement. "Trump and Vance must be held accountable to the rule of law. Anyone else who wreaked havoc the way they did would have been arrested by now."
"There's nothing special about Trump and Vance that entitles them to get away with what they've done and are doing," the attorney added. "They think they're above the law. They're not."
Special counsel Jack Smith could drop a "bombshell" this week on former President Donald Trump if the judge overseeing his federal election interference case lets him, according to a new legal analysis.
New evidence could be revealed about Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election just weeks before he faces off against Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 race, Forbes reported Tuesday.
The problem? Trump's lawyers don't want the public to see it.
"Trump’s lawyers pleaded with the court on Monday not to allow Smith to file the brief, claiming even before seeing it that it will be a “180-page false hit piece,” Forbes reported.
"[They argue] it’s 'fundamentally unfair' because it will lay out the government’s allegations against Trump before the election without giving the ex-president an immediate chance to respond."
The decision now lies with Tanya Chutkan, the Washington D.C. federal court judge who earlier this month expressed frustration with Trump's lawyers over their earlier attempts to stall Smith.
"This court is not concerned about the election schedule," she told his lawyers earlier this month. "This case has been pending for more than a year...we're hardly sprinting to the finish line."
Trump's previous delay tactic saw his defense argument reach the Supreme Court, who held onto the case for months before delivering the former president a win in the form of limited presidential immunity ruling.
Now Smith must once again make a case to prosecute Trump based what the new ruling allows, according to Forbes. The filing outlining that case — if Chutkan allows it — is due Thursday.
Her ruling is due "imminently," Forbes reported.
While Trump's lawyers argue the filing could taint the jury pool, former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance argued Sunday the filing is one Chutkan should and could make public.
"It would be judicial malpractice for the court to refuse to let Smith air his case for her consideration as Judge Chutkan prepares to rule on what, if any of it, escapes the broad grant of immunity ordered by the Supreme Court," Vance wrote in her Substack newsletter.
"The government is not required to put all of its case into an indictment but simply to put a defendant on notice of the charges against him that he must be prepared to defend against."
Ultimately though, as Forbes notes, it's all "up to Chutkan."
Former President Donald Trump's address to women voters sounded more like a "sex pest" gaslighting his victim than a presidential nominee courting a crucial voting bloc, a political analyst argued Tuesday.
New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait on Tuesday lambasted the speech Trump delivered in Pennsylvania Monday night and the assurance he gave women voters that he would be their "protector."
"What makes it so creepy is that he implicitly acknowledges that women are reluctant to support him," Chait wrote, adding, "he presumes women are crazy."
The Trump comment that caused Chait's jaw to drop was what he describes a "very weird" pitch the Republican nominee gave women on why they should vote for him in the upcoming presidential election.
"You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared," Trump said. "You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident, and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion."
Chait argued Trump's promise was predicated on his belief that women would be happier thinking and feeling less, and don't know enough to understand his ability to provide that contented state of being.
Trump also paralleled Sen. J.D. Vance's rhetoric condemning childless Americans when he asserted women are more "abandoned" and "lonely" than they were four years ago, the New York Magazine columnist argued.
"Their actual problem, he insists, is loneliness and abandonment, which will be resolved by giving themselves over to Trump," Chait wrote.
Despite what Chait describes as an implicit invitation to join Trump's "harem," he argues women voters should not expect bacchanals and orgies at the White House as the offer was likely metaphorical, if authoritarian.
"That is not an argument you’d make to free citizens," Chait wrote.
Instead, Chait argued, it's the argument an abuser would make to a victim he'd like to continue to dominate.
"You may think you don’t want to be with Trump," Chait wrote in his summary of the message. "But you are wrong, and you are crazy, and if you return to Trump, you’ll realize he was right, and you will leave the worrying to him."
The column concludes, "Why do I get the feeling Trump has made a version of this spiel in his personal life?"
Former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social media company has lost nearly 75 percent of its value in recent months as investors hedged their bets on his presidential campaign and stock prices tumbled, according to a new analysis.
Barron's revealed on Tuesday morning that Trump Media, trading as DJT, was worth just $2.4 billion when markets closed Monday night — a stark fall from the $8 billion valuation the Times stamped on the publicly traded company in March.
"The picture has darkened for the social media company that Trump hoped would rival X," Barron's reported. "Trump Media stock has had a terrible run."
Monday saw stock prices closing down at 10 percent at $12.15 Monday evening — months after the stock hit the market and peaked at $66 a share, Barron's reported.
The financial magazine linked stock prices to Trump's perceived likelihood of winning the 2024 presidential election and concerns over future losses.
"Investors’ fears that Trump’s chances at winning a second term in the White House are diminishing, as well as concerns that the ex-president and other big investors may soon sell shares, have likely weighed on the stock price," Barron's reported.
"Signs that Trump’s chances in the election are improving, or that the social media site will receive more investment, could reverse the bad streak."
Trump Media stock prices surge after the failed assassination attempt on Trump's life in July, but tumbled after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and the company reported a $16.4 million net loss in the year's second quarter, Barron's reported.
"Since the stock’s opening price of $46.20 on July 15—the first trading day after the July 13 assassination attempt," Barron's reported, "the stock has lost 74% of its value."
Sen. J.D. Vance isn't that hard to understand if you know one thing about him, according to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Buttigieg made this claim to the New York Times journalist Ezra Klein in a newly released interview about playing Vance to help Vice President Kamala Harris' running mate Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) prepare to debate former President Donald Trump's running mate on Oct. 1.
"There’s a real contradiction in him," Buttigieg said. "But I think sometimes we make these things way more complicated than they are."
Buttigieg told Klein that some basic similarities with Vance — namely midwest roots and an early ascent into national politics — helped him enter into the head of what Klein described as his "occasional foil."
Both purport to push policies that would benefit the industrial Midwest, but Vance holds a vastly different "faux populism" perspective that Buttigieg said he found easy to understand.
"He achieves a certain credibility by criticizing both parties," Buttigieg said. "But then all the prescriptions he seems to be ready to vote for, or act for, are ... good old-fashioned Republican policy."
That policy Buttigieg again finds easy to simplify, and to tear down.
"The problem is, what he’s saying is, 'These institutions don’t work for you, the people, so we’re going to take them back," Buttigieg said. "But what he means is, 'These institutions don’t work for me, a right-wing politician. And so we’re going to put them under the control of right-wing politicians.'"
Klein argued there was a deeper complexity to Vance, whom he described as a frustrated man who shouldn't be, considering his meteoric rise from "hillbilly" to Silicon Valley venture capitalist to a potential future vice president.
"He became angrier and resentful and contemptuous of people who disagree with him — at the same time that things were going really well for him personally," Klein said. "His book was a best-seller. He was the toast of the town."
But when Klein asked Buttigieg what this said about Vance's temperament, Walz's debate prep partner effectively shrugged.
"He is simultaneously the Republican who’s supposed to explain a new kind of conservatism to the world, including New York Times readers, and he’s supposed to embody this kind of angry populism and this facts-don’t-matter nihilism of what Trump represents," Buttigieg said.
Then Buttigieg ascribed to Vance one simple motivation — that could have potentially disastrous results for the Ohio senator.
"There’s a bunch of people, including him, who know deep down how bad Donald Trump is for the country but realize that they could gain power by attaching themselves to him," Buttigieg said.
"That’s one thing that he has in common with a very different Midwesterner, Mike Pence. It worked out really poorly for Mike Pence."
Republicans are teeing up a legal challenge before three judges appointed by Donald Trump in deep-red Mississippi that could boost similar lawsuits in more competitive states.
The Republican National Committee and other plaintiffs argue that Mississippi is violating federal law by counting mail ballots that arrive within five days after Election Day, which resembles statutes on the books in nearly two dozen other states and jurisdictions. A ruling in their favor could help them in similar cases elsewhere, reported CNN.
“It’s a clever strategy,” said Derek Muller, a Notre Dame Law School professor who specializes in election law. “You’re looking for the circuits that are going to be most hospitable to your claims.”
Republicans say that Mississippi’s mail ballot policy violates a 19th Century federal law establishing Election Day for the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, arguing that the law requires ballots to be placed in the custody of election officials by that congressionally mandated date, although the Justice Department and the Democratic National Committee dispute that reading in friend-of-the-court briefs.
“To have people’s votes discounted and disregarded — at no fault of their own — because the Postal Service or a storm or something happens that interferes with the timely delivery of mail – that happens in red states as much as it happens in blue states,” said District of Columbia attorney general Brian Schwalb, a Democrat who supports the Mississippi statute.
Lower courts have upheld the Mississippi policy being challenged Tuesday before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which could wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court before November's election, and that could bolster challenges in other states to block post-election receipt deadlines if the justices refuse to pause a ruling in the RNC's favor before Election Day.
The Mississippi lawsuit is “part of a very shrewd and misplaced strategy by the RNC to try to suppress the vote by filing lawsuits in courts where they think they’re going to be successful, and rolling it out to a broader audience, either through the Fifth Circuit or up to the Supreme Court to create national precedent," Schawlb said.
The Georgia State Election Board voted Monday to investigate claims that several county election boards are failing to properly investigate challenges disputing voter eligibility.
Three State Election Board members loyal to former President Donald Trump agreed to request that the board’s executive director look into whether eight election boards in counties led by Democrats are improperly dismissing complaints questioning if tens of thousands of voters are eligible to vote.
The mass voter challenge controversy has been a mainstay in Georgia over the last several years since the feverish push to overturn the 2020 presidential election results after Trump narrowly lost to Democrat Joe Biden in Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes.
Many conservatives have argued that voter registration lists need to be purged of ineligible votes, while Democrats and progressive activists have argued that mass voter challenges aim to intimidate and remove voters who should remain eligible to cast ballots.
The Georgia board requested Executive Director Mike Coan report findings by the time the election board plans to hold its next meeting Oct. 8.
DeKalb County Republican Party Chairwoman Marci McCarthy requested that the board carefully examine how several counties handle voter eligibility cases. A lawsuit filed by the DeKalb County Republican Party and a DeKalb resident argues that the county election board has failed to address complaints challenging the status of over several thousand registered voters regarding issues such as whether residential addresses are correct and potential double registrations.
McCarthy said the DeKalb board did not follow its duties to investigate challenges of voters registered at non-residential addresses, voters who may have moved out of the county and others who have not been in touch with election officials for over a decade.
“There’s a 90-day period before an election that certain voters should not be removed from the voter list,” McCarthy said. “In particular are voters that just haven’t recently voted. However, as you might guess, voters who have died, been convicted of a felony or moved away more than 30 days ago to another county or state, do not belong in the voter rolls for that county, they are ineligible to vote.”
Federal law mandates a 90-day hiatus prior to an election that prevents certain voter list purges. However, Georgia law prohibits voter removal within 45 days of the upcoming election. Georgia’s Election Day is Nov. 5.
Earlier this month, DeKalb election officials passed a measure declaring it would follow the 90-day moratorium on voter list maintenance as prescribed under federal law.
According to state law, election boards must consider it sufficient probable cause to move forward with an investigation when a voter does not appear to reside at the same address, lists a non-residential address on their registration, or has other reasons that could disqualify them.
Georgia Election Board member Janice Johnston said Monday that it appears that a number of election officials in Georgia have been concerned about investigating voter challenges after Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias sent letters threatening legal action if challenges were upheld.
“This appears to have interfered with the duty of registrars to hear challenges and review the qualifications of voters in On the county voter list,” she said.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported this week that since July, county election boards in the metro Atlanta region have rejected more than 45,000 voter eligibility challenges filed by conservative activists. Their analysis found that since July fewer than 50 voters were removed from the rolls in Gwinnett, Fulton, Cobb and DeKalb counties.
A federal judge in Atlanta ruled in January that right-wing True the Vote did not violate the Voting Rights Act as alleged in a Fair Fight Action lawsuit that said the group’s intended to intimate voters as it challenged the eligibility of thousands of Georgian voters leading up to a pair of U.S. Senate runoffs in early 2021.
Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and X.
