Trump says lawyers had a “productive” meeting with the DOJ during the Jan. 6 investigation
GOP presidential candidate Will Hurd was booed off the stage after criticizing former President Donald Trump at a Republican dinner in Iowa.
Mr. Hurd, a former CIA officer and representative of Texas, was the only candidate to follow Mr. Trump at Friday’s event.
“Listen, I know the truth is hard. But if we elect Donald Trump, we’re willing to give Joe Biden four more years in the White House,” he said.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump didn’t hold back, launching into a tirade calling Florida Governor Ron DeSantis an “establishment globalist”.
Meanwhile, ironically, Mr Trump took to the stage to sing a lyric about going to jail. The former president vowed to continue running for president in 2024 from prison if necessary after the Mar-a-Lago box case became the subject of a superseding indictment late Thursday.
Former president and aide Walt Nauta has been indicted on new federal charges related to the alleged misuse of classified information after leaving the White House.
Federal prosecutors accuse him of withholding information for the defense and conspiring with club official Carlos De Oliveira to delete security footage to hide evidence of misconduct.
The mystery Mar-a-Lago employee mentioned in Trump’s superseding indictment has been identified
The unnamed “Trump 4 employee” mentioned in the superseding federal indictment against former President Donald Trump has been identified as Yusil Taveras, director of information technology at Mar-a-Lago.
CNN and NBC News revealed the name on Friday. Reports said Mr. Taveras had been watching footage from surveillance cameras at the property.
He had a conversation with the third co-defendant named in the superseding indictment — Carlos De Oliveira — who was a maintenance supervisor at Mar-a-Lago. He suggested that their conversation “remain between the two of them,” the indictment said. Mr. De Oliveira requested a private discussion in an “audio closet.”
Mr. De Oliveira then asked how long the server was storing footage, to which Mr. Taveras replied that he believed it was approximately 45 days. Mr De Oliveira then said the “boss” wanted the footage deleted.
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Kelly RiesmanJuly 29, 2023 9:15 p.m
VIDEO: Will Heard booed off stage for criticizing Trump
Gustav KilanderJuly 29, 2023 8:45 p.m
Trump speaks in all caps against Jack Smith and the Georgia DA
Gustav KilanderJuly 29, 2023 8:29 pm
Trump takes stage at Iowa event with lyrics about going to jail
Gustav KilanderJuly 29, 2023 8:15 p.m
GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie calls Trump ‘one-man crime wave’
On Thursday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers were told that a third indictment related to the Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the Capitol riot and the former president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election was likely imminent.
Mr. Christie appeared on Thursday’s episode of Pod Save America to discuss the 2024 election and the implications of Mr. Trump’s various criminal cases.
Host John Lovett asked Mr Christie if he had ever heard of anyone “facing between four and six trials within a few months on various legal issues”, referring to Mr Trump.
“No. No. Usually people like this commit separate crimes and end up with one trial,” quipped Mr. Christie. “This guy’s a one-man crime wave. Look, he’s earned every one of them. If look at it, every single one of them is self-inflicted. And so, you know, do I think prosecutors exercise discretion in some aspects that are questionable? Yes — and they always have. But what I tell people all the time it’s time, whether you agree or disagree with the prosecutors, look at the underlying behavior.
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Greig GraziosiJuly 29, 2023 7:45 p.m
Donald Trump is appealing a judge’s decision to keep the money case secret in New York state court
Donald Trump asked a federal appeals court on Friday to overturn a federal judge’s decision to keep his criminal money case secret in a New York state court, which the former president said was “very unfair” to him.
Trump’s lawyers filed a notice of appeal with the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan after U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein last week rejected his bid to move the case to federal court, where his lawyers were set to argue that he is immune from prosecution .
U.S. law allows prosecutions to be moved from state to federal court if they involve actions taken by federal government officials as part of their official duties, but Hellerstein ruled that the hush money case involved a personal matter, not presidential duties.
Trump’s notice of appeal came at the end of another busy week of legal action against the twice-impeached Republican as he seeks a return to the White House in next year’s election. On Thursday, he was indicted on new criminal charges in a separate case in Florida federal court involving allegations that he illegally stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago mansion.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is prosecuting the hush money case and fighting to keep it in state court, declined to comment on Trump’s complaint.
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Michael R. Sisak, APJuly 29, 2023 7:15 p.m
McCarthy dodges questions about Trump’s impeachment by pointing the finger at Biden
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy avoided answering questions about the additional charges leveled in the superseding indictment against former President Donald Trump and instead steered the conversation to President Joe Biden.
“What worries me is that you have a sitting president who has a similar situation, but worse, who had documents but nothing happened,” Mr. McCarthy told a CNN reporter.
He continued, referring to President Biden’s time in Congress: “The president, when he was a senator, took a document. How many years has it been since there was no prosecution?”
The House speaker was referring to Biden’s classified documents, some of which date back to when the president was in the Senate, Mr. Biden’s lawyer said in January.
According to CNN, the California Republican added, “That’s why everybody’s sitting there saying, ‘What are these two, two levels of justice?’ And then you look, everything when it comes to the Biden family, Inc., they get a whole different treatment.”
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Kelly RiesmanJuly 29, 2023 6:45 p.m
Election disinformation campaigns targeted voters of color in 2020. Experts expect 2024 to be worse
In the run-up to the 2020 election, Facebook ads targeting Latino and Asian voters have painted Joe Biden as a communist. A local station claims a Black Lives Matter co-founder is practicing witchcraft. Processed images show dogs urinating on Donald Trump campaign posters.
None of those claims were true, but they caught fire on social media sites that advocates say fueled misinformation about the election among communities of color.
As the 2024 election approaches, community organizations are bracing for what they expect to be a worsening onslaught of disinformation targeting communities of color and immigrant communities. They say personalized campaigns challenge assumptions about which voters are susceptible to election conspiracies and mistrust of voting systems.
“They’re getting more complex, more sophisticated and spreading like wildfire,” said Sarah Shah, director of policy and community engagement at the advocacy group Indian American Impact, which runs the fact-checking site Desifacts.org. “What we’ve seen in 2020, unfortunately, is likely to be quite soft compared to what we’ll see in the months leading up to 2024.”
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Christine Fernando, APJuly 29, 2023 6:15 p.m
The new allegations tie Trump even more closely to the cover-up effort. This could exacerbate his legal problems
It’s a stunning new allegation in an already serious case: Former President Donald Trump tried to delete Mar-a-Lago surveillance tapes to obstruct a Justice Department investigation into his handling of classified documents.
The latest criminal charges unsealed Thursday deepen Trump’s legal threat, alleging the former president played a more central role than previously known in a cover-up that prosecutors say was intended to prevent them from recovering top-secret documents he took with himself after leaving the White House. Coming as Trump prepares for possible additional charges related to attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the new charges bolster special counsel Jack Smith’s already strong case against Trump while undermining potential defenses offered by the former president. say experts.
“Prior to these new charges, maybe you could try some kind of defense that ‘it was all a mistake, it was my staff,’ or confusion about what documents he actually had,” said former federal prosecutor Randall Eliason, a law professor at the university George Washington.
“But especially now when you’re trying to destroy video footage,” he added, “it’s kind of the last nail in the coffin. I don’t see much in the way of protection, not real protection. All he can do is claim he’s being persecuted and hope for a jury that doesn’t recuse himself or something.
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Eric Tucker, Alanna Durkin Richer, APJuly 29, 2023 5:45 p.m
Elon Musk’s Twitter bans ad showing a Republican interrupting a couple in the bedroom
According to the Progress Action Fund, which aims to defeat Republicans in red states, the platform has “censored” its account, as well as an ad called “Keep Republicans Out of Your Bedroom.” In addition, the platform has “placed a ‘search ban’ and ‘search suggestion ban’ on the account.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, the account had not appeared on the social media platform, but the ad could still be seen on X through retweets from other accounts.
The Progress Action Fund said it contacted the platform’s legal department and “appealed the decision, which was denied.”
Joe Jacobson, founder and CEO of the Progress Action Fund, hit out at X’s owner: “Elon Musk loves free speech, but only when it’s convenient for him and his far-right political agenda.”
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Kelly RiesmanJuly 29, 2023 5:15 pm