From 2h ago
Donald Trump has arrived in New York, where he will meet his lawyers this afternoon ahead of tomorrow’s historic arraignment on charges he covered up a hush money payment to an adult movie star.
The former president’s private jet landed at LaGuardia airport at 3.27pm ET after a flight of little more than three hours from Florida. It marks the start of what will be an extraordinary 24 hours never before seen in this country.
Trump, the only present or past president in US history to be charged with a crime, will surrender to authorities in Manhattan ahead of Tuesday afternoon’s appearance in New York state court. The hearing is expected to be brief, and Trump plans to head straight home to Palm Beach and deliver remarks from his Mar-a-Lago resort.
During the flight north, Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser, tweeted that his 2024 campaign for the Republican presidential nominated was boosted by “a record $7m” in the three days since the indictment was announced.
“The president views this a challenge he has to take on for the American people,” Miller told CNN in a text message.
Yet the projection that the American public is behind the twice impeached, one-term president is contrasted by a CNN poll released earlier Monday that revealed six in 10 approved of the indictment announced Thursday by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg after a grand jury investigation.
A “few dozen” vocal supporters were gathered, CNN reported, outside Trump Tower in Manhattan, where he will spend the night. At lunchtime, authorities in New York held a press conference to announce security arrangements that include road closures and more than 35,000 NYPD officers on duty.
The city’s mayor, Eric Adams, had a specific warning for Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a vocal Trump supporter who said she would join fellow republicans at a protest event.
“Although we have no specific threats, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is known to spread misinformation and hate speech, she stated she’s coming to town. While you’re in town, be on your best behavior,” Adams warned.
Here’s my colleague Chris Stein on today’s developments so far:
We’re closing the US politics blog now, after covering Donald Trump’s flight from Florida to New York ahead of his historic arraignment on Tuesday on charges he covered up a payment to an adult movie actress.
The former president made his way from LaGuardia airport to Trump Tower in Manhattan, where he will meet lawyers, then spend the night before surrendering to New York state court on Tuesday afternoon.
Judge Juan Merchan is currently weighing whether to allow cameras inside his courtroom tomorrow so Trump’s arraignment, set for late lunchtime, can be broadcast live.
Merchan has also yet to decide if the indictment, believed to include 30-35 charges, can be unsealed before the hearing.
Here are today’s other key developments:
Trump hired a new lead counsel, experienced white-collar crime attorney Todd Blanche, to represent him in the case brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
New York’s Mayor Eric Adams told Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene to “behave yourself” while she’s in the city tomorrow protesting Trump’s arraignment with young Republicans.
Commissioner Keechant Sewell said tens of thousands of uniformed New York police department officers would be on duty on Tuesday to keep the peace, if any protests threatened to turn violent. “Violence and destruction are not part of legitimate lawful expression,” she said.
Fox News reported that “multiple secret service agents connected to [the] former president” have received subpoenas to testify Friday to a Washington DC grand jury investigating Trump’s improper handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Republican governor and likely 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill allowing anyone in the state over 18 to carry a concealed firearm without need for a permit or training. Florida is third in the nation for mass shootings.
The blog is closed now, but stick with us for ongoing news coverage of the Trump arraignment. And please join us again tomorrow for what promises to be a momentous day on Tuesday.
And before you go, take a read of Simon Jenkins’ opinion piece on the Trump prosecution:
Joe Biden, speaking about his economic agenda this afternoon in Minnesota, has been completely ignoring the circus of his predecessor’s arrival in New York to face criminal charges.
An upbeat president extolled his administration’s successes during an appearance at a suburban Minneapolis facility of Cummins Inc, an engine maker that is investing more than $1bn in its plants in Indiana, North Carolina and New York.
“We’re turning things around in a big way,” Biden told the audience, listing investments of tens of billions of dollars by large tech and science companies he said were creating “tens of thousands of good-paying jobs.”
Biden has been touring the country in recent months promoting his Invest in America program, which he credits with helping a significant economic turnaround since the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The plan is to invest in America in a literal sense, not overseas, in America. Invest in ourselves, and it’s working. Here’s what it looks like across the country. A record 12,400,000 brand new jobs, including 800,000 manufacturing jobs, just since we came to office,” he said.
Biden mentioned Donald Trump once, but not by name, during a segment in which he claimed credit for reducing the national deficit by $1.7tn in two years. “The last guy who had this job, he increased it by $2tn,” he said.
Donald Trump has arrived in New York, where he will meet his lawyers this afternoon ahead of tomorrow’s historic arraignment on charges he covered up a hush money payment to an adult movie star.
The former president’s private jet landed at LaGuardia airport at 3.27pm ET after a flight of little more than three hours from Florida. It marks the start of what will be an extraordinary 24 hours never before seen in this country.
Trump, the only present or past president in US history to be charged with a crime, will surrender to authorities in Manhattan ahead of Tuesday afternoon’s appearance in New York state court. The hearing is expected to be brief, and Trump plans to head straight home to Palm Beach and deliver remarks from his Mar-a-Lago resort.
During the flight north, Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser, tweeted that his 2024 campaign for the Republican presidential nominated was boosted by “a record $7m” in the three days since the indictment was announced.
“The president views this a challenge he has to take on for the American people,” Miller told CNN in a text message.
Yet the projection that the American public is behind the twice impeached, one-term president is contrasted by a CNN poll released earlier Monday that revealed six in 10 approved of the indictment announced Thursday by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg after a grand jury investigation.
A “few dozen” vocal supporters were gathered, CNN reported, outside Trump Tower in Manhattan, where he will spend the night. At lunchtime, authorities in New York held a press conference to announce security arrangements that include road closures and more than 35,000 NYPD officers on duty.
The city’s mayor, Eric Adams, had a specific warning for Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a vocal Trump supporter who said she would join fellow republicans at a protest event.
“Although we have no specific threats, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is known to spread misinformation and hate speech, she stated she’s coming to town. While you’re in town, be on your best behavior,” Adams warned.
Here’s my colleague Chris Stein on today’s developments so far:
As we wait for Donald Trump to arrive in New York City, here’s some apposite reading from our contributor Lawrence Douglas, professor of law at Amherst College in Massachusetts, about the concurrent attempts to hold Trump and one of the leaders he most admires, Vladimir Putin, accountable for their actions…
Let’s not ignore the poetic justice: on 17 March, the international criminal court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin; a scant two weeks later, a grand jury in New York voted to indict Donald Trump.
Admittedly, the two cases are quite different. Putin is wanted for his role in orchestrating devastating war crimes. Trump stands accused of relatively minor crimes involving the payment of hush money to a former porn star. But there is a sense that these two men, so recently bound in mutual admiration of their bullying contempt for democratic norms and legal process, now find themselves in the clutches of the very systems of justice that they believed they could flout with impunity.
Of course, there is no guarantee that either man will ever be fully held to account. Those looking forward to the day of Putin’s reckoning before the ICC in The Hague should bear in mind that the only reason the allies succeeded in trying members of the Nazi leadership in Nuremberg was because Hitler’s Germany lay in ruins. Putin remains very much in power and presides over an arsenal of 6,000 nuclear warheads that he continues to recklessly brandish. Unless Putin finds himself ousted from power, his arrest warrant will remain a symbolic reminder that in the eyes of international law, the Russian leader is a pariah and a fugitive.
No such evasions will be possible for Trump. And yet the very legal system that Trump defames as hopelessly corrupt demands that an indictment have a coherent legal basis and that guilt be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. It is possible, then, that a court could dismiss the New York charges or, should the case go forward, the trial result in an acquittal.
Which is why I believe those interested in seeing Trump brought to justice should look past this indictment – based on an untested legal theory and involving a constellation of tawdry wrongdoings – and train their attention on Fulton county, Georgia, where Trump faces likely indictment for soliciting election fraud. Or else look to the Department of Justice, which continues to investigate Trump for his actions culminating in the January 6 insurrection and for his refusal to hand over classified documents illegally stored at his Mar-a-Lago residence.
These investigations, particularly in Georgia and over January 6, involve far weightier allegations of criminal wrongdoing, allegations less vulnerable to attack as simply an exercise in political score-settling.
Read on…
A minor scare for the first lady, Jill Biden, has passed without incident, after her flight to Michigan from Denver today was turned back “due to an aircraft issue”.
Biden’s press secretary, Vanessa Valdivia, reports: “Everyone is safe. We’re back on the ground in Denver.”
The first lady’s planned visit to Michigan has been postponed.
CBS is under fire after devoting an interview on its flagship current affairs show, 60 Minutes, to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right pro-Trump congresswoman from Georgia who has espoused conspiracy theories and faced censure for threatening behaviour towards Democrats.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York progressive among those threatened by Greene, told Semafor: “These kinds of extreme and really just unprecedented and dangerous notions are getting platforms, without much pushback or real kind of critical analysis.”
Matthew Gertz, of the progressive watchdog Media Matters, told the same outlet: “Anyone who believes that the congresswoman from QAnon is serious about renouncing far-right radicalism and conspiracy theories should make me an offer on my Jewish space laser.”
Greene memorably suggested California wildfires could be caused by solar technology connected to the Rothschild family, giving rise to the “Jewish space laser” meme.
Gertz also pointed to Greene’s support of Donald Trump, who last week became the first former US president ever to be criminally indicted after a New York grand jury handed up charges against him.
On Tuesday, Greene is set to address a protest in support of Trump outside the New York courthouse where the former president will be arraigned.
Gertz said: “Less than 48 hours after CBS News gives her a mainstream platform to airbrush her image, Marjorie Taylor Greene will be rallying with Jack Posobiec of Pizzagate fame and the quasi-fascists of the New York Young Republican Club to defend Donald Trump from what she calls the ‘political persecution’ of a ‘Soros-backed’ district attorney.”
Gertz also said Greene was “a rightwing extremist us[ing] a credulous mainstream press outlet”.
CBS did not comment. The network did receive support from public figures.
David Hogg, a Parkland school shooting survivor and campaigner for gun reform who has been harassed by Greene, said he was “glad 60 minutes gave Marjorie Taylor Greene airtime.
It’s important to interview one of the main leaders of the Republican party so the American people know everything and I mean everything they support. Including denying school shootings.”
Asked how she thought the interview went, Greene told Semafor: “I thought it was pretty good.”
Full story:
Joe Biden has arrived in Minnesota, where he is touring a clean energy technology manufacturer in suburban Minneapolis. It is, according to the Associated Press, part of his effort to highlight his investment agenda ahead of an expected reelection campaign.
Biden will highlight job growth and investments nationwide while pushing clean energy and manufacturing in the US during his visit to engine maker Cummins Inc, the AP says.
The company intends to announce it’s investing more than $1bn in its engine manufacturing network in Indiana, North Carolina and New York to update facilities so they can produce low- to zero-carbon engines.
According to the White House, Biden’s economic plan has led to $2.7bn in federal funding for roughly 182 infrastructure projects across Minnesota, including transportation projects and better access to clean water.
Joe Biden has congratulated four Nasa astronauts who were named on Monday to become the first humans to return to the moon in more than half a century.
The space agency identified Americans Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen, all experienced astronauts aged in their 40s, as the crew of Artemis II, which is scheduled to make a 10-day flight around the moon and back, without landing, in late 2024.
“I want to thank you for your incredible service. The mission you’re about to go on, the US can return people to the moon, it’s hard to believe, for the first time in over 50 years,” Biden told the quartet by phone on Monday morning.
“The world just holds their breath when things like this happen. The work you’re doing is going to inspire countless people around our country and the world.”
He invited the astronauts and their families to the White House at the conclusion of the mission.
The uncrewed Artemis I made a successful test flight in November. Artemis III, scheduled for sometime in 2025, aims to land the first woman on the lunar surface, and the first humans since the final Apollo mission in December 1972.
It’s lunchtime on an historic Monday in which a former president of the United States is for the first time on his way to face a criminal reckoning for alleged crimes.
Donald Trump’s private jet took off within the last hour from Palm Beach international airport in Florida, en route to New York, where he will be arraigned on Tuesday for allegedly covering up an illicit payment to an adult movie star.
Here are the day’s other developments so far:
Trump has hired a new lead counsel, experienced white-collar crime attorney Todd Blanche, to represent him in the case brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
New York’s Mayor Eric Adams has told Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene to “behave yourself” while she’s in the city tomorrow protesting Trump’s arraignment with young Republicans.
Commissioner Keechant Sewell said tens of thousands of uniformed New York police department officers would be on duty on Tuesday to keep the peace, if any protests threatened to turn violent. “Violence and destruction are not part of legitimate lawful expression,” she said.
Fox News reported that “multiple secret service agents connected to [the] former president” have received subpoenas to testify Friday to a Washington DC grand jury investigating Trump’s improper handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Republican governor and likely 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill allowing anyone in the state over 18 to carry a concealed firearm without need for a permit or training. Florida is third in the nation for mass shootings.
Donald Trump has hired a new lead counsel one day ahead of his historic arraignment in New York on criminal obstruction charges, Politico is reporting.
He is Todd Blanche, a leading white-collar criminal defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor, the news outlet says.
Blanche was until recently a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. He said in an email obtained by Politico that he was resigning because: “I have been asked to represent Trump in the recently charged DA case, and after much thought/consideration, I have decided it is the best thing for me to do and an opportunity I should not pass up.”
He is a former assistant US attorney in the Manhattan US attorney’s office, and previously represented Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager and acolyte who served a prison term for unregistered lobbying, tax fraud, bank fraud and money laundering before Trump pardoned him in December 2020.
Another former client was Igor Furman, as associate of Rudy Giuliani. Furman pleaded guilty in a campaign finance case brought by the Manhattan US attorney’s office.
The former president’s private jet, a Boeing 757 somewhat grandiosely nicknamed Trump Force One, has just taken off from Palm Beach international, after a couple of slight delays.
No longer in office, Trump’s loss of power was evident on both the trip from his Mar-a-Lago resort and on the taxiway.
His Secret Service motorcade was forced to stop at least once for a red light, something that would never happen to a sitting president; and then, approaching the runway, Trump’s jet was held up behind at least four other planes heading for various places.
As commander-in-chief, Trump’s pathway was cleared of all obstacles. As a former president, the first to be criminally charged, it seems he has to wait in line like everybody else.
His flight is expected to touch down in New York somewhere around 3pm ET.
Officials in New York have just updated reporters on security arrangements for Donald Trump’s court appearance tomorrow, including a stark warning to Republican firebrand congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene to behave herself.
The Georgia politician and election denier, one of the former president’s most vocal supporters, has said she’ll be joining New York’s Young Republicans club for a “peaceful protest” in Manhattan ahead of Trump’s arraignment.
But sensing the potential for any protests to turn violent, Eric Adams, had a blunt warning for Taylor Greene, who has called for the arrest of Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg who brought the case against Trump:
While there may be some rabble rousers thinking about coming to our city tomorrow, the message is clear and simple: control yourselves. Your city is our home, not a place for your misplaced anger.
We are the safest large city in America because we respect the rule of law in New York city. And although we have no specific threats, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is known to spread misinformation and hate speech, she stated she’s coming to town. While you’re in town, be on your best behavior.
As always, we will not allow violence or vandalism of any kind. And if one is caught participating in any act of violence, they will be arrested and held accountable, no matter who you are.
About 35,000 uniformed New York city police officers will be on duty on Tuesday, ready to deal with any threat of violence or unrest by Trump supporters, police commissioner Keechant Sewell told the briefing.
There will be street closures around the courthouse and on other streets she said:
As always, the NYPD is prepared to ensure that everyone is able to have their voices heard peacefully while exercising their first amendment rights.
But I will remind everyone that violence and destruction are not part of legitimate lawful expression. And that will never be tolerated in our city.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
