Elections

National security expert Marcy Wheeler has a theory about where Donald Trump's suspicion of the "deep state" comes from.

In her podcast "Ball of Thread," she claimed connections of Trump's allies with foreign governments, particularly Russia, left him reeling as he tried to become president — and filled with conspiracy theories about secretive "deep state" dealings.

Trump team members Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn were all targets of FBI investigations into ties between Trump's campaign and Russia....

Donald Trump told Fox in an extensive interview that not only did he never say that Hillary Clinton should be locked up, but that he never pursued prosecuting her.

Multiple videos showed the first claim to be false, and on Wednesday former special counsel for the Department of Defense Ryan Goodman, blew the second out of the water too.

He claimed special counsel Robert Mueller's final report on the Russian investigation revealed that Trump did pressure his then-attorney general to go after Clinton....

Former federal prosecutor Harry Litman, who now serves as a legal analyst for the Los Angeles Times, pinpointed one witness he believes will be the "most devastating" in Donald Trump's hush money criminal case.

Speaking to MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace on Thursday, Litman addressed longtime Trump loyalist Hope Hicks, who had been with the ex-president from his company into the final weeks of his White House.

Trump, who faces 34 federal indictments in New York over the hush-money scheme in 2016, had few staffers around him at that time in the 2016 campaign, according to experts....

Special counsel Jack Smith is to blame for the ongoing delay in former President Donald Trump's federal election interference case, according to Washington Post columnist Jack Willick.

Willick laid into Smith for bringing a "flashier" charge he believes allowed Trump to cry presidential immunity and take that claim all the way to the Supreme Court.

"Smith — apparently fearful that the Supreme Court might recognize some presidential immunity for official acts — says that allegations of Trump’s 'private misconduct are more than sufficient to support the indictment,'" writes Willick. ...

While Democrats were celebrating their stop to the so-called "red wave" in 2022, Donald Trump was stewing in anger in a Versailles-inspired ballroom in Florida as a hurricane bore down, a writer revealed in a new book.

Isaac Arnsdorf's "Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy" details the movement's rise to power and its success outside of Donald Trump. After his reign, Trump attempted to recruit candidates he thought could follow his MAGA playbook and win in the 2022 Midterms.

It was an embarrassing failure for the ex-president, Arnsdorf wrote....

Judge Juan Merchan has denied Donald Trump's latest claim of presidential immunity.

The New York election interference case about the hush money scheme involving Stormy Daniels may have unfolded before Trump was elected to the White House, but since he wrote the check reimbursing Michel Cohen while in the White House, he contends presidential immunity protects him.

"This Court finds that Defendant had myriad of opportunities to raise the claim of presidential immunity well before March 7, 2024. Defendant could have done so in his omnibus motions on September 29, 2023, which he filed a mere six days before he briefed the same issue in his Federal Insurrection Matter and several months after he brought his motion for removal to federal court on May 4, 2023," wrote the judge. ...

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) suggested over the weekend that a Trump administration official may have quietly contacted a federal appeals judge to stall a contempt inquiry, and the legal analyst interviewing him declared that if so, “people are going to jail.”

In a clip flagged by political video aggregator Acyn Torabi from the Legal AF podcast, Whitehouse laid out a hypothetical involving D.C. Circuit Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee.

“If some MAGA official communicated to Judge Rao or her chambers and that resulted in the administrative stay that held the door open and kept the facts from the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation and stalled investigation into misconduct by the DOJ,” Whitehouse began, “ask any judge how big a deal that is.”...

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) bragged about a road salt win at a Maine Senate debate, and her challenger's comeback had observers cheering.

On Tuesday, Collins faced Democratic challenger Troy Jackson in a debate weeks before the midterms. Asked what she would do about President Donald Trump's tariffs on Canada, Collins pointed to a specific victory.

"I was successful at getting road salt removed from the tariff list," Collins said. Jackson responded by pouncing on the answer....

Former MLB superstar Roger Clemens fact-checked President Donald Trump during his Texas rally Wednesday night.

Trump traveled to San Antonio, Texas, to stump for Republicans like Tano Tijerina in his race against Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), whom Trump attacked for what he considered to be a "disloyal act" by not becoming a Republican after Trump pardoned him. At the rally, Trump invited Clemens on stage to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, because Clemens had not yet been elected to the Hall of Fame.

In typical Trump fashion, the president also rattled off a fact about Clemens that the former big league pitcher was quick to correct. ...