Attorneys for E. Jean Carroll, the woman suing former president Donald Trump for defamation in response to his denials of raping her, are fighting hard to keep who is bankrolling the lawsuit secret from the jury ahead of a trial scheduled to begin next week.
Carroll, who says Trump raped her in the changing room of a department store 35 years ago, is reportedly being funded by Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder and Democratic megadonor. That information was disclosed last week, according to the Daily Beast, which also reported that Carroll revealed additional details about the payment arrangement on Thursday.
"[O]n Friday, Carroll’s lawyer formally asked the judge to keep details about who’s paying for the lawsuit under wraps because 'the interest in public access here is minimal,'" the Daily Beast reported.
"Her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, argued that jurors have no business knowing who’s financially supporting the lawsuit, citing court precedent that says the circumstances of who’s paying the legal bills 'has nothing directly to do with the ultimate merits of a case,'" it added.
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The judge overseeing the case has purportedly been concerned about releasing the details into the public record just before trial. The judge also said it could be damaging to Carroll if too much focus is put on the financing question, and that the public has already had sufficient access to the
“Evidence that is inadmissible at trial should not be unnecessarily entered into the public record just before this highly watched trial is to begin,” Carroll wrote.
House Republicans who demanded massive spending cuts as part of the proposed debt ceiling increase are merely "politically postering," according to former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele, who said the whole debacle was completely avoidable.
Steele, who last month warned that the party he led over a decade ago doesn't currently have a direction or a message for voters, appeared on MSNBC's The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle late Thursday night. The host asked Steele if there was some disappointment among Democrats that Biden's student debt relief was taken off the table as part of the negotiations.
"The courts had been making it difficult for him. And there is no real clear path for its survival long term at this point," Steele said. "So, the president made a sacrifice here, as he had to, in order to get this done."
Steele also noted that the "fact of the matter is that this was highly avoidable," pointing to past circumstances where Republicans easily passed debt ceiling hikes.
"It was really avoidable, because all of the sanctimony from Republicans about the concern for the debt and the deficit was not there the three times that they raised it when Trump was president," Steele said. "In fact, the Democrats are like, we get the importance of not bankrupting the country, and we will give you a clean debt bill, which they did, three times: 17, 18, and 19."
Steele added that the "political posturing here is a little bit underwhelming for me."
Steele further called for the elimination of the entire debt ceiling debate.
"Eliminate this farce, this debt circus that we go through every 18 or so months. Just stop it. We are the only developed country outside of Denmark that does this stupid," he said, adding that Denmark "set the level so high they will never reach it."
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"So, the reality of it is, this is all political posturing," he said. "What all of us watching this program know -- and we need serious players in the Senate, in the House, to deal with the physical health of this country if we think we are going to grow an economy for the generation that his graduating this week, next week and weeks ahead."
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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and GOP leadership have a new plan to try to bring down Democrats: release the raw footage from the January 6 insurrection to even more people, including right-wing reporter John Solomon, pro-Trump writer Julie Kelly, and an unidentified "third source," in the hope the footage will exonerate the Capitol rioters.
This strategy is ill-fated, wrote Ja'han Jones for MSNBC's TheReidout Blog, calling Greene a "political dunce" who hasn't thought through any of this.
"You may remember [House Speaker Kevin] McCarthy previously released Jan. 6 footage to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who tried to downplay the threat posed by rioters by cherry-picking parts that don’t show violence. Here, we seem to have a similar scenario," wrote Jones. "The initial release was largely seen as a dud. And Carlson, whose team had hyped the footage as exculpatory for conservatives, seemingly acknowledged this by allowing the story to fall by the wayside. Nonetheless, it looks like Greene is pining for another go?"
Indeed, all that really came about from Carlson's release of out-of-context January 6 footage was that several Capitol rioters cited the footage in their trials, believing it to be exculpatory, when not only was it no such thing, the footage was already available to them in discovery.
The problem with these releases of footage, said Jones, is that "The assumption that the broad American public is interested in reliving Jan. 6 — one of the most traumatic and damaging political attacks in U.S. history — is the type of logic you’d expect from an alien who has never spent a moment interacting with actual humans in the United States. Or, perhaps, it’s just the twisted logic of Marjorie Taylor Greene."
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In other words, the plan could actually backfire and benefit Democrats, possibly by reminding voters that rioters tried to violently overthrow the 2020 election on behalf of Greene's party.
"When a right-wing Twitter account claimed Republicans were reneging on their promise to release the footage to the public, Greene offered a deranged excuse. People could use facial recognition software to identify people who were on the Capitol grounds that day and then 'ruin their lives,' she claimed," wrote Jones. "With Republicans like these, Democrats hardly need political advisers. Just paint Marjorie Taylor Greene as the brain of the operation and watch America shriek in terror."
Donald Trump on Thursday described the latest revelation that federal prosecutors are in possession of an audio recording in which the former president’s is heard admitting he understood he wasn’t allowed to keep the documents as “a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time.”
Fox News’ Sean Hannity hosted the town hall, which was Thursday night after being recorded in Clive, Iowa, earlier in the day.
The town hall was the second in which Trump appeared in a single month. The previous one was held in New Hampshire May 10 with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
The audience cheered “U.S.A.” at the former president as he entered the auditorium.
Hannity asked Trump if he knew anything about the report that the special counsel is in possession of an audio recording in which the ex-president acknowledged that he understood that the documents he had were classified.
“Do you know who this call may be with?” Hannity asked Trump.
“No, I don’t know anything about it,” Trump said.
“Everything I did was right. We have the Presidential Records Act, which I abided by 100%”
Trump quickly pivoted to making unfounded allegations that President Joe Biden committed more egregious offenses handling documents when he was vice president.
“Biden has 1,850 boxes with a lot of classified stuff that he's not supposed to have in his case,” Trump said.
“I have the right to declassify as president. He's got 1,850 boxes that he doesn't want anyone to see. He had seven or eight boxes in Chinatown in Washington D.C. where nobody even speaks English in Chinatown."
“Chinatown is very, it's in favor of China. And he has boxes in Chinatown. They took those boxes and they sent him to Boston to his lawyer so his lawyer could look through them, and probably do things that you're not supposed to do.”
Trump insisted the allegations against him are “about election interference.”
“It's a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time,” Trump said.
“It's a hoax, and it has to do more than anything else with trying to interfere with the election.”
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Trump added: “I've been going through this for seven years, Russia, Russia, Russia, all of it. The Mueller Report, which was no collusion, after two and a half years, there was no collusion with Russia. It was the worst thing.
“(Vladimir) Putin would say, ‘You know they say you like me. You are the worst guy that we've ever had to deal with.’”
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