Trump documents case faces further delay due to special counsel confrontation with Florida judge – live

Joe Biden spent the past month barnstorming swing states, while his campaign was busy staffing up, opening offices and reaching out to voters. Was it enough to boost his stubbornly low approval ratings, or help him overtake Donald Trump in the polls? A Wall Street Journal survey released today indicates it is not, with the president trailing his Republican challenger in six of the seven states seen as likely deciding the election – similar to other surveys taken in recent months showing Biden faring poorly against the candidate he bested in 2020. Perhaps more interesting is the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released today, which finds Americans largely agree on values, even if they are deeply divided over who they want as their leader.

Here’s what else happened:

• Jack Smith reportedly strongly objected to arguments judge Aileen Cannon is entertaining that Trump is immune from prosecution in the classified documents case, which potentially delay his trial.

• Trump held a rally in Michigan yesterday, where he told the crowd he had spoken to the family of a woman allegedly murdered by a man in the US illegally. But her relatives reportedly say none of them have talked to the former president.

• Robert F Kennedy, the anti-vaccine activist and independent presidential candidate, walked back a recent comment, where he said Biden was more of a threat to democracy than Trump.

• Taiwan is recovering from the strongest earthquake to strike the island in 25 years, with the death toll climbing to nine. Follow our live blog for more on this developing story.

• Two brothers pleaded guilty to an insider trading charge connected to Trump’s media company.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party say they raised more than $65.6m in March, the AP reports.

Trump and the Republican National Committee closed out the month with $93.1m in their campaign accounts. That’s a significant increase as they try to catch up to the fundraising of Joe Biden and the Democrats.

Biden and the Democratic National Committee haven’t released their fundraising numbers for March. But their political operation said they brought in $53m in February and closed that month with $155m cash on hand.

Earlier today, Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a press release: “Our campaign is making early investments to connect directly with voters on the issues that will define this election and to build the infrastructure we need to win.

“The difference between our ground game and Donald Trump’s nonexistent presence in the battleground states couldn’t be more clear – and the failing Trump campaign and the RNC can’t get this time back.”

A confrontation between special counsel Jack Smith and judge Aileen Cannon could further delay Donald Trump’s trial in Florida on charges related to unlawfully possessing classified documents, the Washington Post reports.

At issue is the possibility that Cannon, who Trump appointed to the federal bench in 2020 and who has been criticized for decisions that have slowed down the progress of the case, agrees that the former president is immune from prosecution, under a federal law dealing with presidential records.

Late yesterday, Smith signaled in a filing his strong disagreement with the argument, and that he would appeal to a higher court if necessary. That could further delay the start of the trial, potentially pushing it past the November presidential election.

Here’s more on that, from the Post:

Special counsel Jack Smith warned the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case that she is pursuing a legal premise that “is wrong” and said he would probably appeal to a higher court if she rules that a federal records law can protect the former president from prosecution.

In a near-midnight legal filing, Smith’s office pushed back hard against an unusual instruction from U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon — one that veteran national security lawyers and former judges have said badly misinterprets the Presidential Records Act and laws related to classified documents.

Smith’s filing represents the most stark and high-stakes confrontation yet between the judge and the prosecutor, illustrating the extent to which a ruling by Cannon that legitimizes the PRA as a defense could eviscerate the historic case. It sets up the possibility that a government appeal of such a ruling could delay the trial well beyond November’s presidential election, in which Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.

Last month, Cannon ordered defense lawyers and prosecutors in the case to submit hypothetical jury instructions based on two different, and very much contested, readings of the PRA.

In response, Smith said Cannon was pursuing a “fundamentally flawed legal premise” that the law somehow overrides Section 793 of the Espionage Act, which Trump is accused of violating by stashing hundreds of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and private club, after his presidency ended.

“That legal premise is wrong, and a jury instruction for Section 793 that reflects that premise would distort the trial,” Smith wrote. The Presidential Records Act, he said, “should not play any role at trial at all.”

Donald Trump is well on his way to winning the Republican presidential nomination, after last night’s victories in four states’ primaries. The same can be said for Joe Biden, though the president is also dealing with a rebellion from groups upset at his support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Here’s more about what yesterday’s primary results tell us about the contours of the presidential race, from the Guardian’s Joan E Greve and Léonie Chao-Fong:

Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump won primary elections in four states, including the crucial battleground state of Wisconsin.

Hundreds of delegates were up for grabs in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and Wisconsin on Tuesday, and Biden and Trump have already amassed enough delegates to win their respective nominations. But the turnout could provide more clues about the general election in November.

Voters also had a chance to register their discontent with the nominees. Connecticut and Rhode Island gave voters the opportunity to vote “uncommitted” in the primary, while Wisconsin offered a similar option of “uninstructed delegation”. Wisconsin Democrats will be closely watching the turnout for “uninstructed delegation” after progressive activists launched a campaign encouraging voters to withhold support from the US president to protest against his handling of the war in Gaza.

The Listen to Wisconsin campaign, based on similar efforts in states like Michigan and Minnesota, has attracted support from some rank-and-file union members as well as an influential group of low-wage and immigrant workers in the state.

There’s quite the swirl of legal entanglements surrounding Donald Trump’s foray into the media world. The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports that the former president has sued two former contestants from The Apprentice who became co-founders of Trump Media:

Donald Trump sued two former contestants on The Apprentice, his hit NBC reality show, who became co-founders of Trump Media and Technology Group, claiming they failed to set up the venture properly and should not get promised stock worth more than $400m.

Trump fronted The Apprentice, in which contestants competed for a job at the Trump Organization, from 2004 to 2015. The show coined Trump’s catchphrase, “You’re fired!”, though he ended up fired himself, after entering Republican presidential politics and making racist comments about Mexicans.

Wesley Moss and Andrew Litinsky met as Apprentice contestants in 2004. In 2021, after Trump was thrown off major social media platforms for inciting the January 6 Capitol attack, as he sought to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden, the two men pitched Trump on starting his own platform, which became Truth Social.

“This was a phenomenal opportunity for Moss and Litinsky,” said the suit filed by Trump in Florida in late March and first reported by Bloomberg News on Tuesday.

Though the two men were “riding President Trump’s coattails”, the suit said, “all [they] needed to do was diligently, faithfully and loyally execute on a short-term plan: get TMTG’s corporate governance established, get Truth Social ready to launch, and find a suitable special purpose acquisition company to take the new company public and access capital to advance TMTG’s business plan”.

Reuters reports that two men have entered guilty pleas today to an insider trading scheme connected to Donald Trump’s media company.

Here’s more, from Reuters:

Two men pleaded guilty on Wednesday to insider trading in securities in the company that ultimately took Donald Trump’s media business public.

Michael Shvartsman, 53, head of Miami-based venture capital firm Rocket One Capital, and his brother Gerald Shvartsman, 46, each pleaded guilty to one count of securities fraud before Lewis Liman, the US district judge, in Manhattan.

Rocket One’s chief investment officer, Bruce Garelick, is scheduled to face trial on related charges on 29 April.

Prosecutors charged the trio last year with illegally trading on inside information about Trump Media & Technology Group’s (TMTG) plan to go public through a merger with a blank-check company. TMTG operates Truth Social, Trump’s main social media platform.

Prosecutors said the trio signed confidentiality agreements in June 2021 when they were approached to become early investors in Digital World Acquisition, the blank-check company. The agreements required them to keep information they learned confidential and not trade the company’s securities in the open market, prosecutors said.

After hearing the company was in merger talks with TMTG, prosecutors said the trio tipped others and bought Digital World securities, selling them after the deal was announced on 20 October 2021, to make a total of $22m in illegal profit.

Speaking of Democrats and the Senate, the party is already expected to have a difficult time keeping their majority in Congress’s upper chamber in the November elections.

But one prominent political forecaster thinks the job is even more difficult than it appears. The Cook Political Report has moved the Nevada Senate seat represented by Jacky Rosen into its “toss up” column, from “lean Democratic”.

“We are moving this race because of the unique forces at play in Nevada. A combination of a newer electorate that Rosen must win over, Biden’s lagging numbers and the unique post-COVID economic hangover in Nevada make this race a Toss Up,” said Jessica Taylor, Cook’s Senate and governors editor.

Besides Nevada, which has voted Democratic in recent presidential elections but has seen the GOP make inroads lately, Democrats are defending Senate seats representing Ohio and Montana, both red states. The outcome of those races will likely decide Senate control, in addition to whether or not Joe Biden wins re-election.

Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee, did not quite tell NBC they agreed with growing calls for the supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire, so Joe Biden can nominate a younger liberal replacement. But they nearly did.

“I’m very respectful of Justice Sotomayor,” Blumenthal said. “I have great admiration for her. But I think she really has to weigh the competing factors. We should learn a lesson. And it’s not like there’s any mystery here about what the lesson should be. The old saying – graveyards are full of indispensable people, ourselves in this body included.”

That lesson – a harsh one for anyone to contemplate – springs from the case of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the great liberal justice who declined to retire in 2014, when she was 81 and when Democrats held the White House and the Senate, then died in September 2020, at 87 and with Republicans in control.

That allowed Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell to ram through a hardline replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, and tilt the court firmly right, 6-3.

That court has issued major rulings including removing the federal right to abortion, striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions and loosening gun rights. Progressives fear more such rulings to come.

Sotomayor is 69 and suffers from diabetes. She recently remarked on feeling “tired” while “working harder than I ever had”.

Blumenthal said Sotomayor was “a highly accomplished and, obviously, fully functioning justice right now. Justices have to make their personal decisions about their health, and their level of energy, but also to keep in mind the larger national and public interest in making sure that the court looks and thinks like America.”

Whitehouse said he was “not joining any calls” for Sotomayor to step down. But he also offered a stark warning: “Run it to 7-2 and you go from a captured court to a full Maga court. Certainly I think if Justice Ginsburg had it to do over again, she might have re-thought her confidence in her own health.”

Sotomayor did not comment. Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, told NBC: “President Biden believes that decisions to retire from the supreme court should be made by the justices themselves and no one else.”

Voters in Oklahoma have kicked out a local official who has ties to white nationalist groups.

The Guardian’s Ed Helmore reports:

Voters in Enid, Oklahoma, have decisively kicked out a city council member with a history of ties to white nationalist groups from the elected body almost a year after he was admitted.

Judd Blevins lost his position as Enid’s ward 1 council member, according to Oklahoma’s state election board. The move comes months after Blevin was shown to have attended a deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and was later shown to have led an Oklahoma chapter of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa.

Blevins denied he was or ever had been a white supremacist, and said he was motivated by “the same issues that got Donald Trump elected in 2016”.

A small group of 36 Blevins supporters had won him election last year, but he lost Tuesday’s vote to fellow Republican candidate Cheryl Patterson who had campaigned on a platform of returning Enid to “normalcy” and appears to have defeated Blevins by a 20-point margin, or 268 votes.

For the full story, click here:

In a new interview on Jimmy Fallon, Hillary Clinton told voters who are upset over Joe Biden and Donald Trump being the two presidential choices to “get over yourself”.

Clinton, who ran against Trump in 2016, said:

“It’s kind of like, one is old and effective and compassionate, has a heart and really cares about people. And one is old and has been charged with 91 felonies.”

She went on to add:

“I don’t understand why this is even a hard choice. Really, I don’t understand it … Hopefully, people will realize what’s at stake because it’s an existential question. What kind of country we’re going to have? What kind of democracy we’re going to have. People who blow that off are not paying attention because it’s not like Trump, his enablers, his empowerers, his allies are not telling us what they want to do. I mean, they’re pretty clear about what kind of country they want.”

Sherrod Brown’s campaign is celebrating a strong fundraising display, as the leftwing Democrat gears up for his Ohio re-election fight with the Trump-endorsed Republican Bernie Moreno, one of a number of contests expected to decide control of the Senate later this year.

Friends of Sherrod Brown, the three-term senator’s principal campaign committee, says it raised more than $12m in the first quarter of the year.

Rachel Petri, campaign manager for the group, said: “While Sherrod’s opponent makes it clear he’s only out for himself and is using his millions to try to buy Ohio’s Senate seat, Sherrod has unprecedented grassroots support behind his reelection campaign.

“Sherrod and Connie [Schultz, the senator’s wife] are thankful to every member of this movement working to send Sherrod back to the Senate to continue fighting for Ohioans and the dignity of work.”

Moreno made his millions in cars, then made his bones in Donald Trump’s Republican party by moving from the establishment to the populist right. His victory in the primary was not without its surprises. His campaign trail rhetoric is not without its questionable claims. Some further reading follows…

Joe Biden spent the past month barnstorming swing states, while his campaign was busy staffing up, opening offices and reaching out to voters. Was it enough to boost his stubbornly low approval ratings, or help him overtake Donald Trump in the polls? A Wall Street Journal survey released today indicates it is not, with the president trailing his Republican challenger in six of the seven states seen as deciding the election – similar to other surveys taken in recent months showing Biden faring poorly against the candidate he bested in 2020. Perhaps more interesting is the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released today, which finds Americans largely agree on values, even if they are deeply divided over who they want as their leader.

Here’s what else is going on:

• Trump held a rally in Michigan yesterday, where he told the crowd he had spoken to the family of a woman allegedly murdered by a man in the US illegally. But her relatives reportedly say none of them have spoken to the former president.

• Robert F Kennedy, the anti-vaccine activist and independent presidential candidate, walked back a recent comment, where he said Biden was more of a threat to democracy than Trump.

• Taiwan is recovering from the strongest earthquake to strike the island in 25 years, with the death toll climbing to nine. Follow our live blog for more on this developing story.