Donald Trump pays tribute to ‘extraordinary’ Queen Elizabeth II
A Florida federal judge has tossed out the wide-ranging lawsuit ex-president Donald Trump filed against Hillary Clinton and a host of other figures associated with the investigation into whether his presidential campaign had improper ties to the Russian government.
Meanwhile, the House select committee investigating the 6 January Capitol riot could meet again for a hearing as soon as 28 September, Punchbowl News reported Friday morning as Donald Trump took to Truth Social to rant at the Department of Justice.
Trump’s legal troubles continue to mount as a Washington DC grand jury empanelled to investigate the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and attempts to overturn the 2020 election has broadened its efforts by asking for information about his political action committee, Save America.
The Department of Justice said Thursday it’s appealing a federal judge’s ruling to authorise a special master to review documents the FBI seized from the ex-president’s Mar-a-Lago home. The federal agency made the move just three days after US District Judge Aileen Cannon approved his request for a third-party to sift through the seized materials.
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Biden does mocking impression of Republicans: ‘They ain’t got no shame’
President Joe Biden mocked Republicans for taking credit for the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats’ recent bill meant to tackle climate change and reduce prescription drug prices.
Democrats passed the bill last month through a process called budget reconciliation, which allowed it to pass on a party-line vote since they only have 50 Senate seat, while Vice President Kamala Harris broke the tie.
In the remarks, delivered while speaking at a Democratic National Committee summer meeting held in Maryland, Mr Biden proceeded to mock Republicans for touting the bill’s benefits.
“I see them out there, ‘and now we’re going to build this new bridge here, we’re all for it, and by the way this new road, and by the way we’re going to have this new internet,’” he said. ““I love ’em, man. They ain’t got no shame.”
Read the full report from my colleague Eric Garcia below:
Biden does mocking impression of Republicans: ‘They ain’t got no shame’
The remarks come amid a string of recent legislative wins for Democrats.
Johanna Chisholm9 September 2022 16:45
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Judge shreds Trump’s complaint, throws out Hillary Clinton lawsuit that ‘defies logic
A Florida federal judge has tossed out the voluminous and wide-ranging lawsuit ex-president Donald Trump filed against his 2016 election rival and a host of other figures associated with the investigation into whether his presidential campaign had improper ties to the Russian government.
US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks on Thursday dismissed the former president’s case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled, against most of the myriad defendants named in the lawsuit.
Mr Trump sued former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and numerous ex-FBI, Justice Department, and Democratic Party figures under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in March 2022. He sought millions of dollars in damages for having “maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty”.
Read the full report from my colleague Andrew Feinberg below:
Judge shreds Trump’s complaint, throws out Hillary Clinton lawsuit that ‘defies logic
A federal judge says Mr Trump’s claims were “unsupported by any legal authority”
Johanna Chisholm9 September 2022 16:28
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Department of Justice and Trump legal team to file list of special master candidates
A Friday deadline has been imposed for the Trump legal team and the Department of Justice to jointly file a list of possible candidates who could serve as a special master over the materials seized by the FBI from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August.
This week, a US district judge, appointed by Donald Trump, awarded the ex-president’s request for a third-party to review documents from the raid and filter through items that they believe should be kept from prosecutors, either because of attorney-client privilege or executive privilege.
The ruling temporarily prevents agents from reviewing the seized records as part of their criminal investigation.
At the same time that the pair of legal teams are drafting a list of hypothetical third-party candidates, the Department of Justice on Thursday has asked the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse the Trump-appointed district judge’s order.
Johanna Chisholm9 September 2022 16:15
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Fox host skewered for claiming the Queen ‘never had a better time’ than when she met Trump
Fox News Host Jesse Watters quoted former President Donald Trump saying that “there are those that say that the Queen never had a better time” than during Mr Trump’s visits.
Queen Elizabeth II passed away on Thursday at the age of 96.
“Joe Biden famously said the Queen reminded him of his mother, which I guess is a compliment,” Mr Watters said on his Fox News show on Thursday night. “Few presidents enjoyed their trips to Buckingham Palace more than Trump, who fell in love with the pomp and circumstance, of course.”
Referring to Mr Trump, Mr Watters said, “and there are some people who say that the Queen never had a better time”.
Keep reading the full report from my colleague Gustaf Kilander below:
Fox host skewered for claiming Queen ‘never had a better time’ than with Trump
“And there are some people who say that Jesse Watters is in a cult that worships a spray-painted traitor:
Johanna Chisholm9 September 2022 16:00
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Michael Cohen accuses DoJ of ‘tiptoeing around Donald as if he was king’
Michael Cohen, a former lawyer and fixer for Donald Trump who has since become one of his fiercest critics, believes that it won’t be long before the ex-president is indicted by the Department of Justice for the materials seized from his Mar-a-Lago residence.
“I think that there is going to be an indictment, and relatively soon,” Mr Cohen said Thursday while speaking on MSNBC’s The Reidout. “I believe there will also be congressional hearings with Donald in the hot seat, you know, either he’ll come in willingly, which you know I don’t think he will, or via subpoena.”
The former lawyer for Mr Trump told host Joy Reid that he believes “the real questions they have to be asking right now is, you know, ‘Where are the documents that were in these empty top-secret files that were found at Mar-a-Lago?’”
“I mean, that’s really the big question, and who did Donald give them to or show them to?”
At one point in the interview, Mr Cohen seemed to express frustration with the pace at which the DoJ was handling Mr Trump’s alleged criminal activities, claiming that the federal agency had been “tiptoeing” around the one-term president as though he were a “supreme leader or monarch”.
When host Ms Reid expressed her opinion that she viewed Mr Trump as “untouchable”, Mr Cohen pushed back and said he didn’t believe that would be the case this time.
“I don’t agree with you in the fact that he’s not going to be held accountable for this,” Mr Cohen said. “This is too big at this point in time.”
Johanna Chisholm9 September 2022 15:45
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Officer beaten during Jan 6 riot says Pennsylvania troopers who posed with Trump ‘can go f*** all the way off’
After a picture began circulating online that showed former President Donald Trump posing with two dozen or more Pennsylvania state troopers last weekend, some of the officers who fought to protect the Capitol on 6 January – and nearly died doing so – have some harsh words for their brothers in uniform.
“That’s unacceptable. It alienates a lot of people,” said US Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn in an interview with the HuffPost this week. During the Capitol riot, Mr Dunn was beaten and subjected to racial threats.
“Taking a formal picture at a rally where he’s literally attacking the FBI and the DOJ, your brothers and sisters in law enforcement, by the way … that’s a slap in the face,” he added.
Michael Fanone, a former Washington police officer who also suffered severe health setbacks in his attempts to protect democracy on the day of the violent insurrection, including a heart attack and traumatic brain injury, offered up a sharper rebuke of the photo.
“Professionally? It’s unprofessional. It’s improper,” he said. “Personally? Those two or three dozen Pennsylvania state troopers, from the bottom of my heart, can go f*** all the way off.”
Johanna Chisholm9 September 2022 15:30
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Hillary Clinton jests at Melania Trump: ‘How’s your summer going?’
While appearing on Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live alongside her daughter to promote her own new TV program, Gutsy, Hillary Clinton took aim at several of her political adversaries, including former first lady Melania Trump.
During a section of the program, Mr Cohen fired at Ms Clinton a lightning round of questions where she was prompted to ask each person that Mr Cohen named one question.
“So starting with Melania Trump. What’s your first question?” the Bravo host asked his guest.
After a brief pause, Ms Clinton landed on asking Ms Trump, “How’s your summer going?” in an apparent reference to the FBI raid that descended on her and her husband’s Palm Beach residence at the beginning of August that has since prompted the Department of Justice to conduct a criminal investigation over the classified materials uncovered during that search.
Johanna Chisholm9 September 2022 15:15
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Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger says he has no option but to defend his actions to certify Joe Biden’s narrow victory against Donald Trump in the state in 2020.
“We are all held accountable by the voters,” the Republican said as he seeks a second term, noting that he hears from voters who backed Trump’s effort to overturn the election and those aghast at the former president’s actions.
Elsewhere in the state, such as within the campaigns of Governor Brian Kemp and Senate nominee Herschel Walker, the pair stay relatively mum about the 2020 election or the man who lost it.
The varied approaches reflect perilous fault lines for Republicans as they weigh the former president’s influence against Democrats’ assertions that a Trump-dominated party threatens democracy. Trump’s serial lies that the election was stolen cast a pall nationwide.
But nowhere is the dynamic trickier than Georgia, epicenter of Trump’s plan after he personally pressured Mr Raffensperger to “find” more votes. Winning battleground-state elections amid the fallout means coaxing votes from Trump sympathizers and more moderate voters he’s alienated.
Read the full report from The Independent here:
GOP candidates in Georgia split over Trump’s election lies
The shadow of Donald Trump’s tampering with the 2020 election in Georgia lands differently for the various Republicans running for office in 2022
Johanna Chisholm9 September 2022 15:00
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MSNBC host Joe Scarborough attempted to connect Steve Bannon’s state charges of money laundering, conspiracy, and fraud related to a border wall fundraising scheme, which he has plead not guilty to, to Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign,
On Thursday, the former White House adviser handed himself in at the Manhattan district attorney’s office in New York.
On Friday morning, the Morning Joe host made the comparison between the two men’s fundraising activities, noting: “If you’re stealing like a couple million dollars from people because you’re lying about building a wall and you don’t build a wall, well, what would you say about somebody who, oh, I don’t know, raised hundreds of millions of dollars lying to people, telling them that you were going to use their money for Stop the Steal?”
“Yesterday, I asked the question, well, wait a second, I don’t understand, Trump did it but on a much larger scale. Is this another example of where the Justice Department is just going to look the other way?” he added. “The answer apparently, is no.”
A federal grand jury is reportedly seeking information about Mr Trump’s Save America leadership PAC, ABC News first reported on Thursday, which included subpoenas that have asked recipients about the political action committee’s formation, its fundraising activities and its spending.
“If you take a million bucks, as Steve Bannon is accused of doing in this Build the Wall thing, what about $250 million for Stop the Steal?” asked co-host Willie Geist.
Johanna Chisholm9 September 2022 14:45
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Former chief of staff John Kelly slams Mark Meadows for not standing up to Trump
John Kelly, who served in the Trump administration as chief of staff from July 2017 to January 2019, told The Hill’s contributing columnist Myra Adams that he believes that his successor to the role, Mark Meadows, did an insufficient job of reining in the ex-president.
What could Mr Meadows have done to stop the former president from engaging in allegedly illegal activities, Ms Adams asked Mr Kelly in a phone call this week.
“A chief of staff must be willing to go to the mat. To say to the president, ‘If you insist on doing this, I will resign, and that alone will cause an explosion in this city. And, I will tell people why I am resigning.’ Meadows could and should have done that but elected not to do the right thing,” Mr Kelly replied.
Mr Meadows, who held the position of chief of staff in Trump’s White House from March 2020 to January 2021, would also have been aware of the classified documents that Mr Trump was allegedly hoarding at Mar-a-Lago, Mr Kelly contended in the interview.
“It is just about impossible for a chief of staff not to know that the president was stuffing boxes with highly classified material,” an incredulous Mr Kelly told his interviewer.
He went on to explain how there was a secure, numbered system with federal security employees overseeing the protocol. “You have to account for everything in the vault,” he said, noting that those exact federal employees “would have gone to Meadows; he had to have known that classified docs were missing.”
This final act, Mr Kelly noted, was a prime example of what he saw as Mr Meadows’ conduct as chief of staff, which was a submissive “let Trump be Trump” attitude.
“Meadows is thinking, ‘If Trump wants to keep this stuff in a box, I don’t care, he is the president,’” Mr Kelly speculated.
Johanna Chisholm9 September 2022 14:30