Trump News

'Extraordinary request': SCOTUS urged to hear case in effort to keep Trump trial on track

Special counsel Jack Smith filed motions aimed at keeping Donald Trump's criminal trial on schedule to start in March 2024.

The special counsel's office filed the motions Monday with the U.S. Supreme Court and a Washington, D.C., federal appeals court seeking to fast-track a hearing of Trump's appeal of a ruling against his claim that he has presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, reported The Messenger.

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Trump operatives 'just itching' to go after Nikki Haley's ethnicity: reporter

Journalist Tim Alberta thinks that former President Donald Trump and his campaign will be absolutely vicious toward Republican rival Nikki Haley should they consider she actually poses a threat to his bid to win the Republican Party's presidential nomination.

In an interview with Democratic operative David Axelrod, Alberta explained that Haley, as the daughter of Indian immigrants who rose up through the ranks of a white-dominated South Carolina Republican Party, had to learn how to be a "knife fighter" to survive politically.

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Mike Johnson's own words come back to haunt him as he pushes Biden impeachment

House Speaker Mike Johnson's support for an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden by the GOP majority House of Representatives has drawn renewed scrutiny into how he felt about Donald Trump's two impeachments and his remarkable change of heart about the "damage" — his words — it would inflict on the country.

The Louisiana Republican, who rose from obscurity to become the top Republican in the House after former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was dethroned by a far-right faction in his own caucus, was initially skeptical about a Biden impeachment back in November, reportedly agreeing with some colleagues "that Biden's poll numbers are already weak, so there's less of a need politically to impeach him."

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'Nervous' Trump insiders forced to put out fires after his 'lethal' comments: analyst

The two top officials heading up Donald Trump's third campaign for the presidency are being placed in the unenviable position of having to issue statements clarifying his planned policies because he can't stop talking about being a "dictator," according to a columnist Monday.

What started as comments by some of the ex-president's former aides about plans to use the power of the presidency to go after his perceived enemies in Congress and in the press has taken on a life of its own, wrote Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton.

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Trump says battle-hardened general praised Clinton debate: 'Bravest thing I’ve ever seen'

Donald Trump told a story about a general's supposed reaction to him debating Hillary Clinton after the "Access Hollywood" recording emerged.

The ex-president took the stage with his 2016 Democratic opponent shortly after an audio clip surfaced where he can be heard casually boasting about grabbing women, which prompted some Republicans to withdraw their endorsements.

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Threats in Trump fraud trial have dropped since gag order enforced: attorney general

Former President Donald Trump has been facing two separate gag orders — one in New York Attorney General Letitia James' fraud case, the other in special counsel Jack Smith's election interference prosecution.

Trump attorney Alina Habba has been angrily railing against the gag order in James' case, insisting that Trump's First Amendment rights are being violated. But James' office, according to Newsweek, has defended the gag order in a court filing, citing threats against Justice Arthur Engoron's staff as an important reason for it.

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'Least bad option': CNN expert explains why Trump ducked fraud trial appearance

Donald Trump decided against testifying in his own defense at his New York fraud trial, and CNN's Elie Honig said he made the right decision.

The former president had planned to take the stand again Monday in the $250 million fraud trial that threatens his real estate empire, but Honig said Trump faced mostly bad options in the case filed by attorney general Letitia James.

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'Potential dysfunction' of a second Trump presidency has Wall Street in a panic: report

With one Wall Street executive and GOP megadonor lamenting, "The street still hopes for somebody else,” Politico reports Monday that financiers and business executives are not pleased with the potential presidential candidate leaders — specifically Donald Trump.

As the report notes, one thing Wall Street prizes above all — besides profits — is stability, and based on Trump's wild swings on trade and finance during his first term, it was in short supply.

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Perjury traps loomed over Trump testimony — and a Forbes reporter has the receipts

Former President Donald Trump's last-minute decision to back out of testifying at his civil fraud trial in New York sparked speculation about what could have prompted him to change his mind.

Forbes reporter Dan Alexander reacted to this news by posting a lengthy thread on Twitter in which he outlined the multiple perjury traps Trump faced if he had decided to go through with his testimony, and he cited his own publication's work to show questions prosecutors could have used to trip up the former president.

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Trump's attempt to 'graymail' Jack Smith into dropping charges will flop: expert

Donald Trump's attempts to use discovery to access sensitive government documents in the Washington D.C. trial for attempts to subvert the 2020 election results is nothing more than a ploy to get Jack Smith to drop charges against the former president, writes former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance.

In a posting to her Substack platform, Vance agreed with Smith's office that the ex-president's legal team is engaging in a fishing expedition in its requests for evidence complied by the government-related to outside interference in the election Trump lost by over 7 million votes.

According to Vance, Trump and his people are engaging in what is known as "graymail" in an effort to get the special counsel to back off — and that it will go nowhere with Smith.

"The defendant [Trump] demands an unprecedented expansion of the Government’s discovery obligations that would provide special treatment for him and result in delay," wrote Smith in a recent filing. "He asks this Court to find that a wide array of entities both inside and outside the Executive Branch are part of the Government’s prosecution team."

Vance went on to explain what Trump could be really trying to achieve with this filing.

"There’s a concept called graymail. That’s what happens when a defendant demands that the government handover classified material in discovery, in hopes that rather than expose important national secrets, prosecutors will dismiss some or all of the charges against them," she wrote before adding, "Smith works through all of Trump’s allegations regarding election fraud—everything from allegations of infrastructure compromise to allegations there were government agents at the Capitol on January 6—in a meticulous fashion, demonstrating that there is no evidence to be had because there was no fraud."

Predicting the judge would deny the former president's move, she added, "The bottom line is that his efforts to expand the universe of entities within the prosecution team is baseless and he fails to show that information he seeks would be material."

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'Ongoing security risks' due to Trump detailed in new Letitia James filing

Late Sunday the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James issued a new filing aimed at tightening up the gag order imposed on Donald Trump citing the continuing flood of threats being faced by court employees and her staff.

According to a report from Newsweek's Sean O'Driscoll, the filing takes pains to point out that the former president's untrammeled attacks are directly responsible "ongoing security risks."

The filing made to the New York First Division Appellate Court makes liberal use of a statement from Charles Hollon, of New York's Judicial Threats Assessment Unit which pointed to, "the hundreds of threatening, harassing, and anti-Semitic messages that Supreme Court and its staff have received as an evident result of the personal attacks that triggered the [gag] orders."

Cleland B. Welton II, an assistant solicitor general in the AG's office wrote Trump's "asserted free-speech injuries are insubstantial in light of the narrow scope of the challenged orders. Those orders do not prevent petitioners or their counsel from criticizing the [New York] Supreme Court, the presiding justice, the plaintiff, the witnesses, or the substance of the proceedings."

Welton also noted, for the court's consideration that the earlier gag order "led to a decrease in the number of threatening messages that the court and its staff received," while asking the court to keep the gag order in place.

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Trump is demanding prosecutors find 'evidence that probably doesn't exist': legal expert

Former President Donald Trump recently made a demand that special counsel Jack Smith turn over evidence as part of the discovery process to help him prove the 2020 election was really "stolen" from him.

While such evidence would likely be helpful to Trump at his upcoming election subversion trial, it also is highly unlikely to actually exist since multiple recounts and audits have repeatedly affirmed that Trump legitimately lost the 2020 election.

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'All hat, no cattle' Trump likely ducked testimony to avoid embarrassing himself: expert

Donald Trump's last-minute decision to not appear as a witness for his own defense in the $250 million financial fraud trial being conducted in a Manhattan courtroom was likely due to his fears of having to plead the 5th Amendment while being grilled by prosecutors.

That is the opinion of former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, who suggested the former president and his legal team talked a big game up until it was go-time before pulling the plug on Monday's court appearance.

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