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Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig was flabbergasted by the sheer number of times former President Donald Trump appears to have violated Judge Juan Merchan's gag order in his Manhattan criminal trial — and emphasized on a CNN panel on Thursday, that in all his years of trying cases, he had never seen anything like it.

Trump, who is charged with felony business fraud for trying to conceal alleged hush payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels to effectively defraud the 2016 presidential election, has been barred from attacking witnesses in the case — but has repeatedly gone after several of them anyway, including his former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen.

Former President Donald Trump cracked a smile Thursday as his old friend and now witness for the prosecution, ex-National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, regaled jury with tales of past exploits.

According to CNN, Pecker described a meeting at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan in January 2017.

Former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker shared the information that elevates Donald Trump's criminal charges from misdemeanors to felonies on Thursday, ex -Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann revealed.

Speaking to MSNBC after Pecker broke from testifying, Weissmann noted that violation of campaign finance laws elevates the falsification of business records charges from misdemeanors to felonies.

The conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court seems set to "narrow the scope" of the criminal case against Donald Trump which alleges that he conspired to subvert the 2020 election, according to a new report.

If Trump’s argument that he is immune from prosecution because he was president is accepted, even in part, by the court, it would "most likely send the case back to the trial court to draw distinctions between official and private conduct," making it much harder to carry out the trial before the 2024 election, The New York Times reported.

Donald Trump frequently complains that his New York hush money trial is keeping him off the campaign trail, but he used this week's day off to hit the links instead of meet voters.

Justice Juan Merchan ordered the former president to attend each day of his trial, but the judge does not hold court on Wednesdays. Trump spent the day golfing at his Bedminster, New Jersey, club instead of visiting battleground states or making his case for the 2024 election, sources told CNN.

David Pecker, former publisher of the National Enquirer, poked a hole in Donald Trump's defense in his hush money case Thursday by testifying that the former president made the payments to benefit his 2016 presidential campaign.

At a Manhattan court hearing, Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass asked Pecker about a practice called "catch and kill," in which the magazine would purchase negative stories on behalf of Trump to keep them out of the public eye.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's extended grilling of attorney Michael Dreeben, who is representing special counsel Jack Smith in Donald Trump's presidential immunity case, hit a sour note when he blew off an answer from the lawyer with a sharp, "I'm not talking about the particular facts of this case."

That led to a chorus of complaints from legal experts who piled on the conservative justice for not caring about a Dreeben answer in which he talked about a president "making a mistake" that the DOJ attorney claimed wouldn't necessarily lead to criminal charges.

A federal court shot down Donald Trump's request for a new trial or a reduced penalty in E. Jean Carroll's defamation case.

U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan found the ex-president's motion for a new trial to be without merit, saying that jurors could see for themselves during the course of the trial that Carroll had proven her case and that Trump had acted with malice.

American historian and expert on authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat said Donald Trump's MAGA movement had won by getting the former president's immunity hearing before the Supreme Court — no matter how the justices rule.

Taking to social media, she wrote, "Whatever the Court does, having this case heard and the idea of having immunity for a military coup taken seriously by being debated is a big victory in the information war that MAGA and allies wage alongside legal battles. Authoritarians specialize in normalizing extreme."

Donald Trump and his lawyers are accusing special counsel Jack Smith of failing to provide them with a "comprehensive set of functional video" stemming from security footage at the former president's Mar-a-Lago resort.

Trump and co-defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveria say they want "access to workable video" in order to "properly investigate the facts and represent their clients," Newsweek reported.

Donald Trump has seemingly locked up the Republican Party's presidential nomination, but a veteran White House reporter said some of his allies are growing concerned that he's incapable of serving another term.

Brian Karem, former senior White House correspondent for Playboy, wrote a new column for Salon revealing that some MAGA insiders share his concerns about Trump's mental decline, which he said was on full display at the Manhattan courthouse where he "seems to be melting into a puddle of his own makeup and sweat."

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito complained Thursday about the concept that a "special" former officeholder like Donald Trump could be expected to be "subject to the criminal laws just like anybody else."

Alito made the remarks to special counsel attorney Michael Dreeben during oral arguments in Trump's presidential immunity appeal to the high court. Trump's attorneys had argued the former president could not be charged with election interference because the office gave him immunity.

Faced with withering questions from both conservatives and liberal members of the Supreme Court, Donald Trump's lawyer went so far as to suggest that a president could have a political rival killed or order a coup as long as it was an "official act."

In one exchange, attorney John Sauer was asked if a president felt his rival was "corrupt," would it be allowable for him to order the military to kill the opponent.