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House Republicans are trying to forge a new path under their new majority, but Donald Trump's looming indictment appears to be complicating that endeavor, NBC News reports.
At an annual retreat this week in Florida in which House Republicans had planned to hold substantive conversations about policy and messaging, talk has turned to the beleaguered ex-president who expects to be arrested Tuesday and is calling on his legions of supporters to protest on his behalf, the report said.
It's a familiar scenario for Republican, who the NBC News reports says have returned to “the same pattern they found themselves in during the four-year Trump presidency.”
So instead of focusing on serious issues such as the banking crisis and geopolitical uncertainty, Republicans are being forced to turn their attention to the legal plight of the former president and 2024 GOP frontrunner.
IN OTHER NEWS: Trump ally Robert Costello reveals what he told the Manhattan grand jury
“It is what it is — hush money for a porn star. I mean, I couldn’t survive that,” Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Mike McCaul (R-TX) told NBC News.
"It looks a little political, but I think we’re all exhausted from the drama of Trump.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), among other pro-Trump House lawmakers, are discouraging protests and urging people not to resort to violence.
But most House Republicans in attendance are uniting behind the former president.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is among those voices, and the judiciary chairman has sent a letter to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg requesting the prosecutor testify before congress, the report said.
Jordan called the Trump probe “politically motivated” “during a news conference called “Delivering on our Commitment to America."
“DOJ wouldn’t take the case. The Federal district of New York didn’t take the case. [Former Manhattan DA] Cy Vance wouldn’t take the case. Bragg didn’t want to take the case, and then what changed? President Trump announces he’s running for president and shazam!” Jordan said during a press conference in which lawmakers had planned to address questions over border security.
“We don’t think President Trump broke the law at all, but what concerns me is what they’re going to do based on what’s been reported."
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By Karen Freifeld and Luc Cohen
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Workers erected barricades around a Manhattan courthouse on Monday as New York City braced for a possible indictment of Donald Trump over an alleged hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 campaign.
It would be the first-ever criminal case against any U.S. president. On Saturday, Trump urged followers on social media to protest what he said was his looming arrest.
In his call for protests, Trump raised concerns for law enforcement that supporters might engage in violence similar to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
Fearing a trap, however, several far-right grassroots groups have opted not to heed his call, security analysts said.
A grand jury, which heard further testimony on Monday, could bring charges as soon as this week. Trump, who is seeking the Republican nomination for the White House again in 2024, had predicted he would be arrested on Tuesday.
On Monday the grand jury heard from a witness, lawyer Robert Costello, who said Trump's former fixer Michael Cohen had handled the hush-money payments without Trump's involvement.
"Michael Cohen decided on his own - that's what he told us - on his own, to see if he could take care of this," Costello told reporters after testifying to the grand jury at Trump's lawyers' request.
Cohen, who testified twice before the grand jury, has said publicly that Trump directed him to make the payments on Trump's behalf.
An indictment could hurt Trump's comeback attempt. Some 44% of Republicans say he should drop out of the presidential race if he is indicted, according to a seven-day Reuters/Ipsos poll that concluded on Monday.
The investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is one of several legal challenges facing Trump. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal campaign finance violations tied to his arranging payments to Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, and another woman in exchange for their silence about affairs they claimed with Trump.
Trump has denied that any such affairs took place.
NO SIGN OF UNREST
New York Mayor Eric Adams told reporters police were monitoring social media and keeping an eye out for "inappropriate actions" in the city. The New York Police Department said there were no known credible threats.
If charged, Trump would likely have to travel from his Florida home for fingerprinting and other processing. Law enforcement officials met on Monday to discuss the logistics, several media outlets reported.
Sources have said Bragg's office was presenting evidence to a grand jury about a $130,000 payment made to Daniels in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign.
Trump's fellow Republicans have widely criticized the probe as politically motivated.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump's rival for the Republican presidential nomination, said on Monday that Bragg was imposing a "political agenda" that compromised the rule of law, but he also took a veiled swipe at Trump.
"I don't know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair," he told reporters.
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives launched an investigation of Bragg's office with a letter seeking communications, documents and testimony related to the probe.
Trump was impeached twice by the House during his presidency, once in 2019 over his conduct regarding Ukraine and again in 2021 over the attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters. He was acquitted by the Senate both times.
SEVERAL MORE LEGAL CHALLENGES REMAIN
Bragg won a conviction last December against Trump's business on tax fraud charges.
But legal analysts say the hush-money case may be more difficult. Bragg's office will have to prove that Trump intended to commit a crime, and his lawyers will likely employ a range of counterattacks to try to get the case dismissed, experts say.
Trump meanwhile has to contend with other legal challenges, raising the possibility that he will have to shuttle between campaign stops and courtrooms before the November 2024 election.
Trump's lawyers on Monday asked a Georgia court to quash a special grand jury report detailing its investigation into his alleged efforts to overturn his 2020 statewide election defeat.
The filing in Fulton County Superior Court also seeks to have the county district attorney, Fani Willis, recused from the case, arguing that her media appearances and social media posts demonstrated bias against Trump.
Trump is also seeking to delay a civil fraud trial, scheduled for Oct. 2, brought by the New York attorney general that alleges a decade-long scheme to manipulate the value of his assets to win better terms from bankers and insurers.
Trump faces two civil trials involving former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll, who claims that Trump defamed her by denying he raped her. A federal judge on Monday denied a request from both sides to combine the two cases into one.
(Additional reporting by Kaniska Singh, Jason Lange and David Morgan; Writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Scott Malone and Howard Goller)
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By Andrew Chung
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court should dismiss a major case from North Carolina that could give more power over federal elections to state politicians because the matter is being reconsidered by a lower court, North Carolina said in a filing on Monday, while the Republican lawmakers at the center of the dispute disagreed.
The disagreement over the future of the case is the latest flashpoint in litigation that could have a significant impact on U.S. elections in the coming years and decades. The case began as a legal fight over a map drawn by Republican state legislators of North Carolina's 14 U.S. House of Representatives districts - one that a lower court blocked as unlawfully disadvantageous for Democrats.
The state's Department of Justice, headed by Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein, said that a decision by the North Carolina Supreme Court to revisit its ruling last year invalidating the Republican-drawn map means there is not a final judgment typically needed to trigger a review by the top U.S. judicial body.
The justices should "dismiss this case for lack of jurisdiction" given that the "decisions on review are nonfinal," the state said.
Democratic President Joe Biden's administration, which had argued against the Republican position when the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case in December, also suggested that the justices have reason to avoid a decision.
The state lawmakers who defended the Republican-drawn map and some of the plaintiffs who challenged its legality urged the justices to press ahead and issue a ruling in the case.
The Republican lawmakers had urged the U.S. Supreme Court to embrace a once-marginal legal theory now embraced by many conservatives that would remove any role of state courts and state constitutions in regulating presidential and congressional elections.
The legal theory, called the "independent state legislature" doctrine, is based in part on the U.S. Constitution's statement that the "times, places and manner" of federal elections "shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof."
In its filing on Monday, Biden's administration said that the state court's action could "effectively moot" the part of the case linked to that language in the Constitution.
Neal Katyal, an attorney for Common Cause, a voting rights group that was among the challengers to the map, disagreed: "The court should, if at all possible, decide this question now, rather than on an emergency basis during the 2024 election cycle."
The justices indicated on March 2 that they were mulling the effect of the lower court's decision to rehear the case on their ability to issue a decision, and asked the various parties to weigh in on the matter. If the justices decide they no longer have jurisdiction, they could dismiss the case.
Since its decision invalidating the map, the state court has undergone a change in its ideological makeup. In November's elections, it flipped from a 4-3 Democratic majority to a 5-2 Republican majority.
At the rehearing last week, several of its conservative members appeared sympathetic toward the Republicans, who control the state legislature and the map-drawing process. An outcome favoring them would boost the party's chances of maintaining its slim U.S. House majority next year.
During the arguments in December, the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority appeared inclined to rule in favor of the Republicans and limit state judicial power to overrule voting policies crafted by state politicians, though perhaps without going as far as the lawmakers wanted.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in Washington. Additional reporting by John Kruzel.)
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