Trump is trying any legal defense he can get his hands on, and making up entirely new ones.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday outside his hush-money trial, Trump tried a new defense: Even if he’s found guilty, he didn’t commit a crime or at least shouldn’t be punished for it.
“I shouldn’t be in a courthouse,” said the former president, clearly spinning out over having to attend his first criminal court case of many.
“Even if he was guilty of something, there is no crime,” Trump told reporters outside the courthouse, speaking in the third person.
It’s unclear what Trump means here, but it’s clear he’s making it up on the fly. Trump is accused of 34 felony charges over falsifying business records for his payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, in exchange for their silence ahead of the 2016 election. Something that is absolutely a crime.
“We want delays,” Trump added in the press conference. Unfortunately, he won’t get them.
Judge Juan Manuel Merchan decided at the hearing on Thursday that the trial will begin March 25 as planned.
Meanwhile, the South Carolina Republican primary is less than 10 days away, and Trump is stressed about how to make it to all his court appearances and campaign stops.
“How can you run for election and be sitting in a courthouse in Manhattan all day long?”
We’re asking the same question.
After Republican Mazi Melesa Pilip lost the New York special election to replace George Santos’s empty House seat, Representative Matt Gaetz made sure to take time to tear down his fellow party member.
“It turns out DEI isn’t a real good strategy for Republican candidate recruitment,” Gaetz said in an interview with Newsmax.
Gaetz went on to trash Pilip, who was born in Ethiopia and holds both American and Israeli citizenship, calling her a “very foolish woman.” Donald Trump used the exact same words in a Truth Social post Tuesday night, and added that Pilip lost because she did not endorse him.
Similarly, Gaetz’s main line of attack, besides dog whistles, was criticizing Pilip for not fully embracing Trump. “Look, if you don’t want to run as a Donald Trump Republican, what are you even doing running in 2024 on our side? Get on board.”
“George Santos stood with President Trump, backed the America First agenda, and he ultimately prevailed, so now the very New Yorkers who threw George Santos out see their own ranks diminished and they welcome back Democrat Tom Suozzi,” Gaetz continued.
There are plenty of reasons Republicans lost this seat: Santos’s antics, the GOP’s do-nothing disaster of a term, or even the fact that the district often leans Democratic— but DEI isn’t the boogeyman Gaetz makes it out to be.
With Santos replaced by a Democrat, the House GOP majority will further shrink. The razor-thin majority means even more tension for Speaker Mike Johnson, who was already struggling to get his party to pass any legislation.
More on the New York election:
Things suddenly don’t look so good for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, whose statements on the duration of her relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade was directly contradicted by a friend taking the stand on Thursday.
Robin Yeartie, a college friend of Willis’s and former Fulton county district attorney’s office employee, told the court that Willis’s relationship with Wade began in 2019—three years earlier than the couple claims, and before Wade was hired on in the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants. Yeartie added that the couple’s relationship remained constant.
“You have no doubt that their romantic relationship was in effect from 2019 until the last time you spoke with her?” asked defense lawyer Ashleigh Merchant.
“No doubt,” Yeartie said.
Yeartie also mentioned that she had stopped speaking to Willis in March 2022 over a “situation” that led to the end of her friendship with Willis and a professional fork in the road—resign or be fired.
Meanwhile, Trump and several of his co-defendants have used the romantic entanglement as a legal basis to request that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee disqualify her and throw out the case entirely.
In a court filing, Trump’s legal team alleged that Willis and Wade had an “improper intimate personal relationship,” taking lavish vacations including Caribbean cruises paid for in part by $650,000 that Wade billed Willis’s office to prosecute the case.
Willis has denied those allegations, claiming that their relationship began in 2022, after Wade was introduced to the case, and that they each paid their own share of the vacation.
“The state has admitted a relationship existed, and so what remains to be proven is the existence and extent of any financial benefit, if there even was one,” McAfee said.
Willis’s removal from the case would be an incredible blow to one of four criminal trials that Trump is anticipated to undergo before the 2024 general election, adding an additional delay that may continue to prolong the amount of time before the former president is tried on racketeering charges related to his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.
More on Trump in the courts:
Donald Trump’s recent memory failures sure do look like some kind of cognitive decline. In the last few months, Trump has mixed up President Joe Biden with former President Barack Obama, slurred his words, bragged about his favorite type of violent death and that he calls corn “non-liquid gold,” insisted you need voter ID to buy bread, and confused his GOP competitor Nikki Haley for California Representative Nancy Pelosi, claiming that the former failed to act during January 6.
But during a campaign rally on Wednesday, Trump had a new excuse for all that, claiming all of his short circuits are actually just sarcastic jokes.
“But when I say that Obama is the president of our country bah bah bah, they go, ‘He doesn’t know that Spiden [sic], he doesn’t know.’ So it’s very hard to be sarcastic,” Trump said.
“When I interpose—cause I’m not a Nikki fan, and I’m not a Pelosi fan. And when I purposely interpose names, they said, ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki. From Tricky Nikki. Tricky Nikki. He didn’t know.’ I interposed,” he added, seemingly forgetting the definition of the word “interpose,” which per Merriam-Webster means to put oneself between or intrude.
“And they make a big deal out of it. I said, ‘No, no, I think they both stink. They have something in common. They both stink.’ And remember this: When I make a statement like that about Nikki, that means she will never be running for vice president. She will never be running [unintelligible] vice president,” he added.
Trump: It’s very hard to be sarcastic. When I interpose— I’m not a Nikki fan and I’m not a Pelosi fan. When I purposely interpose names, they say he didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki. pic.twitter.com/UFjnRq4Qg6
— Acyn (@Acyn) February 15, 2024
Since a special counsel investigation accused 81-year-old President Joe Biden of having a feeble mind, Trump—who is just four years younger—has desperately been trying to reframe the narrative, accusing Biden of being “too incompetent” but “not too old.”
(Unfortunately) More on Trump:
Even Russian President Vladimir Putin wasn’t impressed by Tucker Carlson’s pathetic attempts to interview him.
The ousted Fox News host was in Moscow last week, when he sat down with Putin for what he claimed would be a hard-hitting, unbiased interview. In reality, it was anything but.
Speaking to Russian state television on Wednesday, Putin said that prior to the interview, he believed that Carlson would be an aggressive interviewer, a dangerous person who would “ask so-called sharp questions.”
“And I wasn’t just ready for that, I wanted it, because it would have given me the opportunity to respond sharply in kind,” Putin added. “But he chose a different tactic.”
“He tried to interrupt me several times, but still, surprisingly for a Western journalist, he turned out to be patient and listened to my lengthy dialogues, especially those related to history, and didn’t give me reason to do what I was ready for. So frankly, I didn’t get complete satisfaction from this interview.”
Indeed, as Putin claimed, the interview seemed more like a propagandistic history lesson than anything else.
The interview lasted over a grueling two hours, during which Carlson avoided topics like Russian war crimes in Ukraine, political prisoners, or even Russia’s upcoming presidential election. “Are we having a talk show or a serious conversation?” Putin asked.
Before the interview even hit the halfway mark, Putin was interviewing Carlson and mocking Carlson’s CIA dreams.
The whole thing was longer than Carlson’s previous self-published interviews with Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The only person Tucker Carlson’s interviewed for longer? Alleged rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate.
Carlson claimed the goal of the interview is to enable Americans to understand Russia’s view of the war. “He fulfilled his plan,” said Putin, “but how meaningful it was in the end is not for me to judge.”
More on this stupid interview:
GOP front-runner Donald Trump is officially headed to court next month, the first of his four upcoming criminal trials expected sometime this year.
On Thursday, Trump headed to New York for a court hearing on his hush-money case. Judge Juan Manuel Merchan ignored his requests for a delay and determined the trial would start on March 25, when jury selection will begin, and last approximately six weeks.
Trump is accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He’s facing 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.
Trump’s legal team tried to protest the decision to go to trial, citing the legal load attached to so many disparate criminal trials for one individual.
“We have been faced with compressed and expedited schedules in every one of those trials,” Todd Blanche, an attorney also representing Trump in his classified documents case, told the judge. “We—meaning myself, the firm and President Trump—have been put into an impossible position.”
Blanche also attempted to make a political argument against heading to trial, bemoaning the fact that Trump is “in primary season” and that “it is a different landscape” than it was during the last hearing.
But Judge Merchan wasn’t having any of it, quickly sidestepping Team Trump’s further attempts to delay the trial.
“You don’t have a trial date in Georgia. You don’t have a trial date in Florida,” he retorted.
Trump has already started his habitual mudslinging against the court and the trial itself, claiming over the last year that Merchan, who has acknowledged a $15 donation to President Joe Biden, is a Trump-hating judge appointed by a Democrat—even though all the judges in his trials have been randomly selected. Meanwhile, Trump has whined on TruthSocial that going to court for his alleged misdeeds counts as “election interference.”
“There was no crime here at all. This is just a way of hurting me in the election because I’m leading by a lot,” he told a crowd of reporters shortly before entering the courthouse. “They want to rush it because they want to get it desperately before the election.… They wouldn’t have brought this—no way—except for the fact that I’m running for president and doing well.”
Cohen, who is anticipated to be a star witness in this trial, has no doubts that the former president will be found guilty.
“I can tell you from everything I know about it, he’s going to be found guilty,” Cohen, the former Trump lawyer, said during The New Republic’s Stop Trump Summit in October.
“This is the Al Capone theory,” he added. “They didn’t get him on murder, extortion, racketeering, prostitution, etc., they got him on tax evasion. I truly believe the Alvin Bragg case is the easiest case to prove of all of the criminal cases.”
The dates for Trump’s three other indictments are not yet on the books. His January 6 election interference trial, which was originally slated for March 4, was postponed while the Supreme Court reviews appeals on Trump’s presidential immunity claim.
This article has been updated.
Frank Luntz foresees disaster for Republicans if they don’t course-correct following the brutal New York special election that cost them a House seat.
“Tonight is the final wakeup call for the @HouseGOP. If they ignore or attempt to explain away why they lost, they will lose in November as well,” the Republican pollster tweeted. “The issue agenda is on their side. Their congressional behavior is not.”
Democrat Tom Suozzi on Tuesday handily defeated Republican Nassau County legislator Mazi Pilip to reclaim his House seat after it was vacated by George Santos.
While it’s fair to question Luntz’s analysis that Republicans have winning issues, it’s hard to disagree with his comment on their recent actions in Congress.
On the campaign trail, Suozzi hit at Pilip for opposing the border deal brokered in the Senate, a position Pilip shared with House Speaker Mike Johnson and former President Trump. In doing so, some say, Suozzi outflanked Pilip on the issue of immigration, even as House Republicans have attempted to portray Democrats as overly soft on the border. The GOP Congressional Leadership Fund’s $1.5 million ad buy aimed to tar Suozzi as dismissive of the “migrant crisis,” but those attacks didn’t seem to stick.
This isn’t the first election postmortem to forecast doom for Republicans after disappointing results. In the aftermath of Democrats’ surprising fending-off of a predicted Republican bloodbath in the 2022 midterms, analysts blamed the GOP’s extremist slate of candidates and their doubling down on a cruel anti-abortion and anti-trans platform for their historic underperformance. Then Republican candidates did the same in 2023 and lost again.
Now, though, with Luntz, the call is coming from inside the house, and it’s not anti-trans hysteria but recalcitrance on passing bipartisan legislation that threatens to hurt Republicans in 2024.
The smart money is on House Republicans continuing to fearmonger about immigration, but will these attacks land now that their vote against a harsh border bill is on the record? Will House Republicans get their act together before November? Whatever the answer is, they won’t be able to say Luntz didn’t warn them.
More on House Republicans’ shenanigans:
After spending years attacking what he calls the “fake news media,” former President Donald Trump is now literally sharing fake news. In at least two instances, he has shared edited versions of Newsweek articles, quietly snipping away tidbits that he deems unnecessary.
On Wednesday, the president shared a screenshot of a Newsweek story—though something was undeniably off about its contents.
Trump’s version, shared on his Truth Social account, omits a lede reference to the outcome of the 2020 election (which Joe Biden won), and cuts a line about the “81-year-old” Biden being seen as too old to run for president. Trump is 77 years old.
And on Tuesday, MeidasTouch caught him altering another piece by the weekly news magazine, posting screenshots of an article titled “Donald Trump Poised to Be First Republican to Win Popular Vote in 20 Years,” removing several sections from the original story that referenced Biden’s strengths as a candidate, Biden’s predicted wins, and Trump’s failures. The only indication that he heavily edited the piece was some ellipses.
Among Trump’s myriad revisions included the exclusion of a line stating that Newsweek had reached out to Trump representatives for a comment. He also conflated two paragraphs from the original into one. In the process, he removed a detail that he “notably failed to secure” the popular vote against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election; removed another line on how George W. Bush was the last Republican president to secure the popular vote; and snipped comments from several academics, including one by University of Surrey professor Dr. Mark Shanahan dubbing Trump’s goal of winning the popular vote a “pipe dream.”
Further into the article, Trump removed an NBC poll reference that found Biden will be seen as “competent and effective” and lead with two points if Trump is convicted of a felony.
In recent months, Trump has increasingly shared content onto his social media platform from far-right outlets like Newsmax and Right Side Broadcasting Network. Considering his 91 criminal charges, recent major trial losses, and rickety political platform, perhaps media manipulation is the only way the GOP front-runner can get the kind of press he desires in well-regarded outlets.
(Unfortunately) More on Trump:
Be still, my heart: Donald Trump’s Valentine’s Day card to Melania has leaked. It’s a fundraising email.
“Dear Melania, I LOVE YOU!” writes Trump. “Even after every single INDICTMENT, ARREST, AND WITCH HUNT, you never left my side.”
It’s heartwarming stuff from the former president, whom Melania has “always supported … through everything,” according to the email.
That includes two impeachments, four indictments, and other sundry legal troubles to which he presumably alludes. A modern-day Bonnie and Clyde they are not, but who among us doesn’t list our various criminal cases in our love letters?
“You will always mean the world to me,” says one-half of America’s favorite couple. “I wouldn’t be the man I am today without your guidance, kindness, and warmth.”
A judge recently ruled that Trump owes writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her after he was found liable for sexually abusing her in the 1990s.
“From your husband with love,” Trump closes, “Donald J. Trump.” An interesting pet name, to be sure.
(Unfortunately) More on Trump:
People are really starting to tack the hate onto Taylor Swift—namely, Republicans.
According to a Monmouth University Poll, 32 percent or roughly one in three Republicans believe a conspiracy theory peddled by far-right influencers about the singer, agreeing that Swift is a CIA psyop and part of a covert government effort to help president Joe Biden win re-election in 2024. That’s against 57 percent of Republicans who responded that they didn’t believe the theory, and 11 percent who responded that they don’t know.
Conversely, of those who said they believed in the conspiracy theory, 71 percent identified with the Republican Party, while 83 percent said they were likely to support Donald Trump in the upcoming general election, according to the survey.
Equally telling, nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of those who believed in the Swift conspiracy theory also believed the 2020 election outcome was fraudulent.
Conservative respondents were also equally split on whether they supported Swift encouraging people to vote, with 47 percent approving and 44 percent disapproving.
“The supposed Taylor Swift PsyOp conspiracy has legs among a decent number of Trump supporters. Even many who hadn’t heard about it before we polled them accept the idea as credible. Welcome to the 2024 election,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.
Swift’s boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs captain Travis Kelce, had just one thing to say for the outlandish theory’s believers.
“They’re all crazy. Every last one of you are crazy,” he said during a segment that aired during Super Bowl 2024.
In total, 1 in 5 Americans believe the Swift psyop conspiracy theory.
Take note, there are other, totally legit reasons to condemn the “Bad Blood” singer—perhaps most egregiously for topping a list of celebs with the highest carbon emissions, or for recently bringing her mighty team of lawyers down on a college student who tracks celebrities’ private jet usage on Twitter via publicly available data.
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