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      Donald Trump found guilty of hush-money plot to influence 2016 election

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      Donald Trump has been found guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in a criminal hush-money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.The verdict came after a jury deliberated for less than 12 hours in the unprecedented first criminal trial against a US president, current or former. It marks a perilous political moment for Trump, the presumptive nominee for the Republican nomination, whose poll numbers have remained unchanged throughout the trial but could tank at any moment.Trump was convicted by a jury of 12 New Yorkers of felony falsification of business records, which makes it a crime for a person to make or cause false entries in records with the intent to commit a second crime. He will be sentenced on 11 July at 10am ET.“This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt,” Trump said at the courthouse after the verdict was read. “This was a rigged trial, a disgrace.”Joe Biden’s campaign hit back in an email sent soon after the verdict.“In New York today, we saw that no one is above the law. Donald Trump has always mistakenly believed he would never face consequences for breaking the law for his own personal gain,” wrote communications director Michael Tyler.“But today’s verdict does not change the fact that the American people face a simple reality. There is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box. Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.””In Trump’s case, the Manhattan district attorney’s office alleged Trump falsely recorded the reimbursements he made to his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who paid the adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 for her silence about her affair with Trump, as “legal expenses”.The prosecution alleged the falsifications were made to conceal Trump’s violation of New York state election law, which makes it a crime to promote the election of any person to office through unlawful means.Prosecutors argued in part that those unlawful means were the $130,000 payment to Daniels, which was in effect an illegal campaign contribution, because it was done solely for the benefit of his 2016 campaign and exceeded the $2,700 individual contribution cap.The Manhattan district attorney’s office called 20 witnesses who, over the course of four weeks, gave evidence of how Trump plotted with the tabloid mogul David Pecker and Cohen to bury accounts of affairs with Daniels and the Playboy model Karen McDougal.The witnesses – some friendly to Trump, others openly hostile – said Trump’s worry over the Daniels story intensified after the October 2016 release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump was caught on a hot mic bragging about sexual assault.The recording featured Trump boasting about being able to grab women “by the pussy” without their consent because he was famous. Trial witnesses testified the Trump campaign worried that his efforts to dismiss the tape as “locker room talk” would fail if more boorish behavior came to light.When the Daniels story threatened to become widely known weeks before the 2016 election, Cohen moved into action and paid Daniels $130,000 to buy the exclusive rights to her story – in order to suppress its publication.After the 2016 election, prosecutors argued, Cohen worked out an illicit repayment plan in which he would be paid $420,000, an inflated sum that “grossed up” for tax reasons the $130,000 and other items Cohen billed.The trial saw prosecutors elicit testimony from Cohen, Daniels and a parade of Trump’s confidants and employees, as they sought to establish that Trump concealed the alleged payoff scheme in an effort to ensure he would not lose support from female voters.Cohen proved to be perhaps the most legally consequential witness for the prosecution, as he recounted how he used a home equity loan to raise the $130,000 he then wired to Daniels’ lawyer through a shell company. Cohen did so in the belief that Trump would reimburse him, he testified.In January 2017, Cohen said, he discussed with Trump and the former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg about being repaid for the $130,000, an overdue bonus and other expenses he incurred doing work that benefited the Trump 2016 campaign.Cohen produced 11 invoices seeking payment pursuant to a legal “retainer” that did not exist, according to Cohen, which led to 11 checks being cut to Cohen and the Trump Organization recording 12 entries for “legal expense” on its general ledger – totaling 34 instances of alleged falsifications.Cohen, who was the final witness for the prosecution, said that Trump was furious when he learned that Daniels was on the verge of going public – not least because Cohen had previously worked with Daniels’ lawyer Keith Davidson, in 2011, to remove the affair story from a gossip website.“Just take care of it,” Cohen recalled Trump saying. “This was a disaster, a fucking disaster. Women will hate me.”“Would you have made that payment to Stormy Daniels without getting a sign-off from Mr Trump?” prosecutor Susan Hoffinger asked Cohen.“No, because everything required Mr Trump’s sign-off. And on top of that, I wanted the money back,” Cohen said.Cohen said that he filed bogus invoices for legal services to cover up the reimbursements, and repeatedly said that Trump was the force behind the Daniels plot. He carried out the payoff “to ensure that the story would not come out, would not affect Mr Trump’s chances of becoming president of the United States”.In a watershed moment, Cohen told jurors these repayments started not long after an 8 February 2017 meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, where they talked about money. Cohen hadn’t been repaid anything for the payoff.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“So, I was sitting with President Trump and he asked me if I was OK, he asked me if I needed money, and I said: ‘No, all good’,” Cohen told jurors. “He said, ‘All right, just make sure you deal with Allen.’”“Allen” referenced Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer at the time, who was recently incarcerated for lying at Trump’s recent civil fraud trial. Weisselberg had previously pleaded guilty to tax crimes, for which he was also jailed.Cohen submitted $35,000 invoices for each month, listing the bill as for legal services. He said it was actually for “the reimbursement, to me, of the hush-money fee along with [another expense] and the bonus”.Hoffinger went through every invoice and pay document and asked Cohen whether it was for legal services – or false. Cohen repeatedly said that the descriptions of invoices and payments in emails and business documents were, in fact, false.“What I was doing was at the direction of and benefit of Mr Trump,” Cohen said at one point, among the many times he directly implicated Trump. “Everything required Mr Trump’s sign-off.”Daniels provided stunning testimony that undermined Trump’s denials that they had sex following a celebrity golf event in Lake Tahoe nearly two decades ago. After rejecting Trump’s invitation to dinner, Daniels decided to go at the advice of a colleague, who said: “It’ll make a great story.”Daniels said that she went to Trump’s hotel room, and they decided to chat before grabbing something to eat. He asked over and over about her work as an adult film actor, repeatedly asking her questions such as: “What about testing? Do you worry about STDs?” Had she been tested?“Yes, of course, and I volunteered it as well,” Daniels said. “He asked me, oh, well, have you ever had a bad test? I said: ‘Nope, I can show you my entire record.’”Trump started to show photos to Daniels at one point, including one of Melania, about which she commented that his wife was “very beautiful” – but allegedly added she should not worry about Melania because “we don’t even sleep in the same room”.They spoke about Trump’s show, The Apprentice, and Daniels remarked there would be no way she would make it on TV given her line of work.“You remind me of my daughter, she is smart and blonde and beautiful and people underestimate her as well,” Daniels remembered Trump saying.Daniels excused herself for the restroom, which was through a bedroom. When she came out, Trump was on the bed, in his underwear and a T-shirt.“At first I was just startled, like a jump scare,” Daniels said. “I just thought: oh my God, what did I misread to get here? The intention is pretty clear if someone’s stripped down to their underwear and on the bed.”Daniels tried to leave but he stood between her and the door, albeit “not in a threatening manner”, she said.“He said, I thought we were getting somewhere. I thought you were serious about what you wanted, if you want to get out of that trailer park … ” Daniels testified. “I was offended, because I never lived in a trailer park.” Daniels said they had sex.The description of the hotel room encounter was uncomfortable and cringe-inducing testimony, one of the prosecutors suggested in closing arguments. But that was precisely why Trump was so desperate to suppress the story – and conceal that he had done so.“This scheme, cooked up by these men, at this time, could very well be what got President Trump elected,” the prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said. More

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      Supreme court chief justice declines to meet US senators about Alito upside-down flag furor – as it happened

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      In a statement, the Biden campaign’s Black media director, Jasmine Harris, accused Donald Trump of racism after a former producer on The Apprentice accused him of using a racial slur on set:
      No one is surprised that Donald Trump, who entered public life by falsely accusing Black men of murder and entered political life spreading lies about the first Black president, reportedly used the N-word to casually denigrate a successful Black man. Anyone notice a pattern? Donald Trump is exactly who Black voters know him to be: a textbook racist who disrespects and attacks the Black community every chance he gets, and the most ignorant man to ever run for president. It’s why Black voters kicked him out of the White House in 2020, and it’s why they’ll make him a loser a second time this November.
      The Biden campaign launched a new attack against Donald Trump, accusing him of racism after a former producer on The Apprentice said he used an anti-Black slur on the set. Meanwhile, jury deliberations are ongoing in Trump’s business fraud trial in New York City, and a verdict could be delivered at anytime. Earlier in the day, the supreme court released a batch of new opinions, covering topics from banking regulation to free speech rights. But the conservative-dominated court did not yet weigh in on Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution over the 2020 election, or two abortion-related cases, all of which remain pending before the justices. Another batch of opinions is expected next Thursday.Here’s what else happened today:
      Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman and Trump antagonist, proposed a way to force conservative justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to recuse themselves from January 6 cases.
      John Roberts, the supreme court’s chief justice, declined a request for a meeting from two Democratic senators concerned over Alito’s flag flap.
      Do swing state voters care if Trump is convicted in his New York business fraud trial? Our reporters searched for the answer.
      Most evidence in the New York case seems to point to Trump’s guilt, but the jury could reach a variety of conclusions.
      Trump can sue his niece Mary Trump for potentially violating the terms of a settlement over his father’s estate, a New York state appeals court ruled.
      Should Donald Trump win the November election, the Guardian’s Robert Tait reports that his ally, speaker of the House Mike Johnson, is prepared to move quickly to pass his agenda through Congress. Here’s what Johnson told Semafor he is looking at:Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, is planning a sweeping ideological legislative drive that aims to make Donald Trump “the most consequential president of the modern era” if the Republicans win power in November.A far-reaching bill containing a range of policy priorities at once – including tax cuts worth trillions, border security and rolling back Obamacare – is being prepared to avoid the mistakes the GOP believed happened early in Trump’s first term, when Johnson says the party wasted time because its victory over Hillary Clinton took it by surprise.In an interview with Semafor, Johnson said he had already spoken to Trump about introducing an omnibus package immediately after he retakes office.“I told him that I believe he can be the most consequential president of the modern era, if we are focused on a policy and agenda-driven administration and Congress – and that’s our intention,” Johnson said.“We don’t want to make the mistake that we made in the past. Back in the 2017 timeframe and in previous years, we Republicans kind of took a single-subject approach. We did one round of healthcare reform, one round of tax reform. But for [fiscal year 2025], we want to have a much larger scope, multiple issues to address in addition to the expiration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.”For the second time in as many days, Donald Trump has defended supreme court justice Samuel Alito amid criticism from Democrats over his display of flags associated with rightwing causes.Alito, an appointee of Republican president George W Bush, is a reliably conservative vote on the court, and Trump has loudly denounced the Democratic lawmakers who have called for him to recuse himself from cases dealing with January. Here’s what the ex-president wrote, on Truth Social:
      ‘Playing the Ref’ with Justice Alito doesn’t work. It works with many others, but not with him!
      Here’s more from the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington about the firestorm around conservative supreme court justice Samuel Alito, and the rightwing flags found flying at his residences:Justice Samuel Alito is rejecting calls to step aside from supreme court cases involving the former president Donald Trump and January 6 defendants because of the controversy over flags that flew over his homes.In letters to members of Congress on Wednesday, Alito says his wife was responsible for flying an upside-down US flag over his home in 2021 and an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his New Jersey beach house last year.Neither incident merits his recusal, he wrote.“I am therefore duty-bound to reject your recusal request,” he wrote.The court is considering two major cases related to the 6 January 2021 attack by a mob of Trump supporters on the Capitol, including charges faced by the rioters and whether the former president has immunity from prosecution on election-interference charges.Alito has rejected calls from Democrats in the past to recuse on other issues.In his letter to the Democratic leaders of the Senate judiciary committee, supreme court chief justice John Roberts argued it would be inappropriate to meet with them.“I must respectfully decline your request for a meeting,” wrote Roberts, who was appointed by Republican president George W Bush, and is considered among the more moderate of the court’s conservative justices.He continued in the letter addressed to the committee’s chair Dick Durbin and senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who chairs the subcommittee on federal courts:
      As noted in my letter to Chairman Durbin last April, apart from ceremonial events, only on rare occasions in our Nation’s history has a sitting Chief Justice met with legislators, even in a public setting (such as a Committee hearing) with members of both major political parties present. Separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence counsel against such appearances. Moreover, the format proposed – a meeting with leaders of only one party who have expressed an interest in matters currently pending before the Court – simply underscores that participating in such a meeting would be inadvisable.
      Last week, the two Democrats had requested a meeting with Roberts, after reports emerged that conservative justice Samuel Alito had flown flags associated with rightwing causes at two of his properties.“We therefore call for Justice Alito to recuse himself from certain proceedings as outlined above, renew our call for the Supreme Court to adopt an enforceable code of conduct for Supreme Court justices, and request a meeting with you as soon as possible. Until the Court and the Judicial Conference take meaningful action to address this ongoing ethical crisis, we will continue our efforts to enact legislation to resolve this crisis,” Durbin and Whitehouse wrote to Roberts.John Roberts, the chief justice of the US supreme court, has rebuffed a request from senior Democratic US senators to meet as the lawmakers push for supreme court justice Samuel Alito to recuse himself from cases before the court that relate to Donald Trump and will ripple into the 2024 presidential election.Roberts declined an invitation to talk about supreme court ethics and the controversy over flags that flew outside homes owned by Alito, the Associated Press further reports.Roberts’ response came in a letter to Democratic senators Dick Durbin a day after Alito separately wrote to them and House of Representatives members to reject their demands that he recuse himself from major cases involving Trump and the January 6 rioters because of the flags, which are like those carried by some rioters at the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol.Senate judiciary committee chair Dick Durbin of Illinois and senator and committee member Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island had written Roberts a week ago to ask for the meeting and ask that Roberts take steps to ensure that Alito recuses himself from any cases before the court concerning the January 6 attack or former president Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.Trump, the Guardian adds, is being prosecuted in a federal criminal case on charges relating to election interference and obstructing an official proceeding. The supreme court will rule next month on two cases before it that have grave implications in that case, and for the election.A recap that a year ago a judge in New York threw out Donald Trump’s 2021 lawsuit accusing New York Times reporters of an “insidious plot” to obtain his tax records.Trump was ordered to pay all attorneys’ fees and legal expenses that the Times and its reporters had incurred. The lawsuit alleged that the newspaper sought out Trump’s niece Mary Trump and persuaded her “to smuggle the records out of her attorney’s office”.At the time, Trump’s claim against his niece had not been ruled on. Today, we learned that Donald is permitted to proceed with suing Mary.The Times’s 2018 Pulitzer-winning stories relied on information from Mary Trump to cast doubt on the ex-president’s claims that he was a self-made millionaire, showing that he had inherited hundreds of millions through “dubious tax schemes”. The series also revealed a history of tax avoidance.Robert Reed, the New York supreme court justice, said at the time of his ruling, in May 2023, that Trump’s claims “fail as a matter of constitutional law”, which allows for reporters to engage in legal, ordinary news-gathering. “These actions are at the very core of protected first amendment activity,” Reed wrote.Alina Habba, a lawyer for Donald Trump, said the former president looked forward to holding his niece, Mary Trump, “fully accountable for her blatant and egregious breach of contract” in her exchanges with New York Times journalists for a story about her uncle’s finances and evasive tax habits.Thursday’s decision upheld a June 2023 ruling by Justice Robert Reed of the New York state supreme court.Also, Reed had dismissed Donald Trump’s claims against the New York Times and three reporters, and in January ordered him to pay $392,639 of their legal fees, Reuters reports.In November 2022, Reed dismissed Mary Trump’s separate lawsuit accusing her uncle and two of his siblings of defrauding her out of a multimillion-dollar inheritance.The New York Times’ reporting challenged Donald Trump’s claim that he was a self-made billionaire. It said he received the equivalent of $413m from his father, largely the result of “dubious” tax schemes in the 1990s, including undervaluing his family’s real estate holdings. Donald Trump has denied wrongdoing.Mary Trump previously identified herself as a Times source in her 2020 tell-all bestseller Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.Here’s more on the news that a court has said Donald Trump can sue his niece Mary Trump.The court in New York ruled that the former president can sue Mary Trump, 59, a psychologist and writer, for supplying information to the New York Times as part of its coverage into the then president’s finances and his alleged effort to avoid taxes. The coverage won the Pulitzer prize.The appellate division in Manhattan found a “substantial” legal basis for Donald Trump to claim that his niece violated confidentiality provisions of a 2001 settlement over the estate of his father, Fred Trump Sr, Reuters reports.A five-judge panel said it was unclear whether Mary Trump’s disclosures were subject to confidentiality, or how long both sides intended the provisions to remain in effect. It also signaled that Donald Trump might deserve only minimal damages, not the $100m he sought.The court said:
      At a minimum, nominal damages may still be available on the breach of contract claim even in the absence of actual damages.
      Lawyers for Mary Trump said the lawsuit violated a state law barring frivolous cases designed to silence critics and “chill and retaliate against” their free speech. These cases are called strategic lawsuits against public participation, or Slapps.Anne Champion, Mary Trump’s lawyer, said in a statement:
      Mary has made valuable contributions to the public’s knowledge of the former president with her unique perspective as a family member. We are confident she will be vindicated as the case proceeds.
      Champion also said Donald Trump “can claim no injury for the publication of truthful information.”A New York state appeals court said Donald Trump can sue his niece Mary Trump for giving the New York Times information for its Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 probe into his finances and his alleged effort to avoid taxes.The appellate division in Manhattan found a “substantial” legal basis for Donald Trump to claim that his niece violated confidentiality provisions of a 2001 settlement over the estate of his father, Fred Trump Sr, Reuters reports.More to come on this. Adding from the Guardian, Trump originally sued his estranged niece and the New York Times in 2021 over a 2018 story about his family’s wealth and tax practices that was partly based on confidential documents she provided to the newspaper’s reporters, and there has been a whole legal odyssey ever since.The Biden campaign has launched a new attack against Donald Trump, accusing him of racism after a former producer on The Apprentice said he used an anti-Black racial slur on the set. Meanwhile, jury deliberations are ongoing in Trump’s business fraud trial in New York City, and a verdict could be delivered at anytime. Earlier in the day, the supreme court released a batch of new opinions, covering topics from banking regulation to free speech rights. But the conservative-dominated court did not yet weigh in on Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution over the 2020 election, or two abortion-related cases, all of which remain pending before the justices. Another batch of opinions is expected next Thursday.Here’s what else has happened today:
      Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman and Trump antagonist, proposed a way to force conservative justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to recuse themselves from January 6 cases.
      Do swing state voters care if Trump is convicted in his New York business fraud trial? Our reporters searched for the answer.
      Most evidence in the New York case seems to point to Trump’s guilt, but the jury could rule in any direction.
      In a statement, the Biden campaign’s Black media director, Jasmine Harris, accused Donald Trump of racism after a former producer on The Apprentice accused him of using a racial slur on set:
      No one is surprised that Donald Trump, who entered public life by falsely accusing Black men of murder and entered political life spreading lies about the first Black president, reportedly used the N-word to casually denigrate a successful Black man. Anyone notice a pattern? Donald Trump is exactly who Black voters know him to be: a textbook racist who disrespects and attacks the Black community every chance he gets, and the most ignorant man to ever run for president. It’s why Black voters kicked him out of the White House in 2020, and it’s why they’ll make him a loser a second time this November.
      In addition to handing the National Rifle Association a lifeline in its lawsuit against New York state, the supreme court also denied resentencing to an Arizona man on death row, the Guardian’s Joanna Walters reports:The US supreme court issued opinions on Thursday relating to free speech and the death penalty, in one case clearing the way for a National Rifle Association (NRA) lawsuit against a former New York state official.The court gave a boost to the influential gun rights group that has accused the official of coercing banks and insurers to avoid doing business with it and, in the process, violating the NRA’s free speech rights.The justices, in a unanimous decision from the nine-member bench, threw out a lower court’s ruling that dismissed the NRA’s 2018 lawsuit against Maria Vullo, a former superintendent of New York’s department of financial services.The NRA, in the case NRA v Vullo, claimed that Vullo unlawfully retaliated against it following a mass shooting in which 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida.The NRA was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the Biden administration argued some of its claims should go forward, an unusual alliance between often opposing parties considering the NRA is a strongly Republican-aligned organization.Meanwhile, the supreme court, in a 6-3 decision, struck down an appeals court ruling giving Danny Lee Jones a new sentencing hearing in a death penalty case in Arizona. The conservative supermajority decided that errors in Jones’s legal defense, in the case Thornell v Jones, did not justify him having a chance at resentencing.The supreme court just scheduled its next opinion release day.The court is expected to issue more decisions on Thursday, 6 June. Among the pending cases is Donald Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution over trying to overturn the 2020 election, and two lawsuits related to abortion access. More

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      ‘It’s bullshit’: voters on what Trump’s hush-money case means to them

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      For Josh Ellis, a refrigerator technician from southern Wisconsin, Donald Trump’s trial in New York is a sideshow. He’s not convinced of the prosecution’s narrative, or the former president’s – and the verdict will probably not affect his vote in November anyway.“Biden’s running this country into the ground,” said Ellis, who said the economy was his main concern. At 49, Ellis has long viewed politicians as out of touch on economic issues; he used to vote for Democrats, but switched in 2016 to vote for Trump, who he saw as possibly offering a change.The jurors in Trump’s New York trial are deliberating over the question of whether or not Trump unlawfully falsified business records to hide a sex scandal before the 2016 election – and it’s not clear how much of an impact their verdict will have on voters, despite the historic nature of a possible conviction.Like Ellis, voters across the country seem ambivalent about Trump’s criminal charges.Denise White, who helps manage a social services agency in Atlanta, wears her cynicism about the trial like armor.“Privilege,” she said. “Patriarchy. All of that is on full display right now. And I am not confident that there will be a just outcome.”It doesn’t matter, politically, if he is convicted or not: people have made up their minds, White said. “They’re not going to look at him differently there. I think a lot of people are expecting him to be acquitted. If he’s found guilty, I feel like he’s still gonna have a strong support system. And they are going to stand by his side and they’re not going to believe that he was found guilty.”For Annie, a 60-year-old who lives in Tampa, Florida, who asked her last name not be used for privacy, a guilty verdict would demonstrate Trump’s victimhood and potentially galvanize his base. In contrast, a not guilty verdict could lead to increased scrutiny of the prosecution and the criminal justice system, she said.“It’s bullshit,” she said, laughing.“There is no case. He hasn’t committed a crime. It is legal for him to make an agreement with a consenting adult not to talk about something.”The Trump trial has prosecutors playing saints, she said, adding that the trial was reminiscent of something she might see where she was born in China before emigrating to the US. “I came to this country for a great America. I didn’t come to this country for a losing country.”Any verdict is likely to deepen polarization, she said. With an acquittal, “the ones who hate him, will hate him more,” she said. “The people who support him will support him more. But the people in the middle will see him as a victim.”During the Republican primaries, Trump’s initial indictment in the New York case had little impact on his popularity – even galvanizing Republican voters who saw the charges as unfair. A felony conviction, though, could play out differently during the general election, where Biden and Trump will be vying for a segment of independent and swing voters who could be sufficiently turned off by a guilty verdict to abandon Trump.In a 23 May poll by the Marquette University Law School, respondents across the country who were asked how they would vote in November if Trump is convicted leaned toward Biden by 4%. Given a “not guilty” verdict, Trump enjoyed a six-point advantage among a separate group polled.Charles Franklin, a professor of government and the director of the Marquette poll, cautioned that while its results provide some indication that a guilty verdict could affect Trump’s performance in November, “there are a couple of reasons to be skeptical” about polling on the trial’s overall impact on voters.“We’ve seen pretty substantial stability in opinion for the last 18 months that we’ve been following the presidential race,” said Franklin, who noted that during Trump’s first impeachment, polling revealed very little change in public opinion.“I actually added extra polls during [the impeachment] because I thought we should catch, for history, whatever opinion change took place,” said Franklin, “and – damn, no change at all.” More

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      ‘A coward’s violence’: Robert De Niro trolls Trump outside hush-money trial

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      It was a scenario that Donald Trump, in his pre-presidential celebrity days, might have relished; as he sat inside a Manhattan courtroom, Robert De Niro was waiting outside.But this was politics and De Niro, the pugnacious star of myriad Hollywood gangster films, was there not to pay homage to the former president as a fellow VIP, but to diss him in terms that might have been in place in Goodfellas or Mean Streets.The 80-year-old Oscar winner was present outside the New York courthouse where Trump’s hush-money trial was reaching its closing stages on Tuesday as an operative of Joe Biden’s re-election bid, deployed as a proxy while the president’s campaign made its first clear foray into his opponent’s complex legal woes.Introduced by the Biden campaign communications director, Michael Tyler, De Niro – a vitriolic critic of Trump, who has provided the voiceover for a new 30-second advertisement warning of the perils of his return – adapted to the role with professional aplomb.“This is my neighbourhood, downtown New York City. I grew up here and feel at home in these streets,” he said, before remarking on the strangeness of Trump being in a courtroom across the street, “because he doesn’t belong in my city”.The former president and presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee had been tolerated in the Big Apple, said the actor, when he was “just another grubby real estate hustler masquerading as a big shot”.But now the stakes had been raised and Trump, De Niro explained, had a vision of dictatorial power that had prompted him to step into the political arena, citing the mob violence from Trump’s supporters that accompanied the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.“That’s why I needed to be involved … in the new Biden-Harris ad, because it shows the violence of Trump,” he said.De Niro invoked the lessons of Monday’s Memorial Day holiday, held to celebrate the US’s fallen military heroes, and quoted Abraham Lincoln in saying they had died so that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth”.Stepping back into Hollywood gangland rhetoric, De Niro warned: “Under Trump, this kind of government will perish from the earth. I don’t mean to scare you. No, no, wait – maybe I do mean to scare you. If Trump returns to the White House, you can kiss these freedoms goodbye that we all take for granted. And elections? Forget about it.”But arguably the most belittling reference concerned Trump’s taste for political violence, which De Niro dismissed as “a coward’s violence”.“You think Trump ever threw a punch himself or took one?” he asked. “No way. He doesn’t get blood on his hands. He directs the mob to do his dirty work for him by making a suggestion, an inference.”The punch reference recalled Raging Bull, the 1980 biopic in which De Niro played Jake LaMotta, the turbulent boxer who was once world middleweight champion.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHis depiction of LaMotta’s sometimes menacing persona sprung to mind as the actor bristled at being heckled by a Trump supporter as he introduced two police officers, Michael Fanone and Harry Dunn, who had been present at the Capitol on 6 January 2021 as it was assailed by a mob trying to prevent Congress certifying Biden’s 2020 election victory.“They lied under oath,” said the out-of-camera-shot heckler, who was heard to add: “They’re traitors.”De Niro glared, then countered: “Excuse me, they lied under oath. What are you saying? They’re traitors. I don’t even know how to deal with you, my friend.“They stood there and fought for us, for you … they fought for you, buddy, you’re able to stand right here now. They are the true heroes.”Fanone, who served as a Washington DC police officer, recounted how he was violently attacked and beaten by members of the mob, one of whom tried to take his firearm. All had been “inspired by lies” told by Trump, he said.Coming to the microphone after De Niro had left the scene, Trump’s campaign adviser, Jason Miller, ridiculed both Biden and the Hollywood star.“The best that Biden can do is roll out a washed-up actor – and don’t worry, my remarks will be shorter than The Irishman,” he said, invoking one of De Niro’s later films, directed by Martin Scorsese. “I won’t make you suffer for three hours.” More

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      Donald Trump sells private jet to Republican donor amid cash squeeze

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      With more than $500m in court fines on his back, Donald Trump has sold one of the two private jets he owns to a major Republican donor.According to FAA records, the former US president transferred ownership of the 1997 Cessna Citation X on 13 May. While it is unclear how much he sold the plane for, the private aviation company evoJets estimates a Citation X costs about $8.5m to $10m.While FAA records do not name an individual who now owns the plane, the agency lists a Dallas-based holding company called MM Fleet Holdings LLC as the owner of the plane.The Daily Beast tied the company to Mehrdad Moayedi, an Iranian American real estate developer in Dallas.FEC records show that Moayedi donated nearly $250,000 to Trump’s re-election campaign in 2019 and 2020. Records show that he has also donated millions to other campaigns, including to Ted Cruz’s Senate re-election campaign and to the Republican National Committee.Trump’s website still boasts the Cessna Citation X as a “rocket in the sky” that also allows “for entry into smaller airports”. Trump still owns his Boeing 757, his main jet emblazoned with his name, along with a small fleet of helicopters.The extra cash for Trump will probably help him pay off his various court entanglements. Earlier this year, Trump spent over $200m paying off fines from two civil cases earlier this year. The first was a defamation case from the writer E Jean Carroll, in which Trump was ordered to pay $83.3m. The second was a civil fraud trial that ended in a $454m fine.In March, a Manhattan appeals court agreed to allow Trump to pay $175m – just a portion of the $454m as the fraud case is under appeal. Trump has said he has about $500m in cash, with the rest of his assets tied up in real estate holdings.Though Trump was able to pay the appeals bonds for both cases, and will get the money back entirely if his appeals are successful, the cases are just two on Trump’s court docket.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump is also facing a criminal trial for covering up hush-money payments during the 2016 election and is working through three other criminal trials. In total, the former president faces 88 criminal charges and is paying hefty legal fees to fight them.According to the New York Times, Trump has paid more than $100m in legal fees for the cases that have put him in court. While Trump has mostly used donations into political action committees, known as Pacs, to pay the fees, the money has been running out, and Trump’s legal bills continue to rack up. While Trump can tap into his 2024 campaign funds to pay the legal fees, the more he has to pay his lawyers means less money to spend on swaying voters. More

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      Closing arguments begin in Donald Trump’s criminal hush-money trial

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      Donald Trump’s hush-money trial enters its final stages on Tuesday as closing arguments begin in court.For weeks, testimony has gripped America and the world amid the prospect that the former US president could be found guilty of the criminal charges. Trump, who is almost certain to secure the Republican presidential nomination, is charged with falsifying business records related to paying the adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 for her silence about an alleged sexual liaison.Prosecutors argue that the payments amount to election interference as Trump was running in the 2016 race for the White House at the time and seeking to cover up a potentially damaging scandal.But as details of the case and Trump’s liaison with Daniels have been brought before a Manhattan jury, they have had seemingly little impact on the 2024 race – where Trump still often narrowly leads Joe Biden in head-to-head polls and is performing strongly in the swings states that are crucial to victory.Trump denies all the charges.The trial has played out in remarkable scenes where Trump has been in court and largely kept off the campaign trial, except at weekends and some events in and around New York City. Despite admonishments from the court, he has continued to rail against his prosecutors, and Judge Juan Merchan, on social media, labelling the trial as a “witch hunt”.Central to the case is the testimony of Trump’s former lawyer and once-feared fixer Michael Cohen. Cohen gave vital evidence for the role that Trump played in the alleged hush-money scheme, but was also brutally grilled by Trump’s lawyers for his previous history of lying and his evident dislike of his former boss and desire to see him behind bars.What weight the jury places on the reliability of Cohen’s testimony is likely to decide the case one way or the other. If found guilty, Trump could face the prospect of jail, though that is mostly seen as unlikely. Any guilty verdict would also almost certainly trigger a lengthy series of appeals.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump also faces three other criminal trials: one for trying to sway the 2020 election in Georgia, another for his conduct around the January 6 attack on the Capitol and a third one related to his treatment of sensitive documents after he left the White House. However, all three have been seriously delayed and none are seen as likely to conclude – or even start – before November’s presidential election. More

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      ‘Heads, we win; tails, you lose’: how rightwing hush-money trial coverage boosts Trump

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      Donald Trump has retained much of his political support amid his ongoing hush-money trial in part due to a combination of the courtroom’s ban on cameras and conservative media echoing his claims that both the prosecutor and judge are corrupt, media analysts say.The experts suggest that the former president could retain political support on the right even if the jury determines he is guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records related to his reimbursements to Michael Cohen for a payment to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign.Conservative media like Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network are “running a sort of ‘heads, we win; tails, you lose’ play”, said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a leftwing advocacy group. They are portraying the trial as a “witch-hunt ginned up by Joe Biden, and obviously because of that”, they say “he will be found not guilty, but at the same time, they are arguing that if he is found guilty, it will be because the jury and the judge are partisan and corrupt”.The trial in New York concerns one of four criminal indictments Trump faces, but will probably be the only one that concludes before the November election.As of this month, Trump leads Biden in several recent polls.A camera ban in the Manhattan courtroom is hardly unique to the Trump hush-money case. In the US, only the District of Columbia is more restrictive than New York in terms of allowing audio-visual coverage of court proceedings, among 48 jurisdictions reviewed in a report by the Fund for Modern Courts. And a shortage of in-house visuals means the public has to rely on courtroom sketches and secondhand accounts of what occurred during trial proceedings.“You know the saying, ‘The camera never blinks,’ I think if you just had a fixed camera in the courtroom, it wouldn’t interpret; it would just be what is in front of the camera,” said Howard Polskin, president of The Righting, a newsletter and website that monitors conservative media.Both Polksin and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania communications professor and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which publishes Factcheck.org, contrasted coverage of the Trump trial with that of the OJ Simpson murder trial in 1995. The judge allowed live camera coverage of the courtroom, and the case captivated the nation.“When we are actually observing something, we are making judgments in the moment that are potentially very powerful in shaping perceptions,” said Jamieson. “When someone recounts something to us, the effect is less vivid, less immediate.”Since a retelling makes for less dramatic content than photos and videos of, for example, recent protests on college campuses concerning the war in Gaza, analysts said that cable news networks – particularly Fox News – have devoted less time to it.From 15 April to 17 May, Fox News mentioned the trial about half as much as CNN and MSNBC, according to calculations provided by Roger Macdonald of the Internet Archive TV News in a Politico report.During the first week of the trial, 55% of Americans said that they were not closely following or not watching it at all, according to a poll from the PBS NewsHour, NPR and Marist.“It’s Christmas in May for Trump,” Polskin said. “It was a gift for Trump that there were no cameras in the courtroom. I think there would have been a lot more coverage on both left, right and mainstream if that were the case.”That void then provided more space for Trump to shape the narrative, Jamieson said.Trump has repeatedly ignored a gag order imposed by Judge Juan Merchan in March after the former president attacked people including the judge, the judge’s daughter, Cohen, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and members of the jury.On his social media platform Truth Social, Trump has shared posts in which he quoted the Fox News host Jesse Watters describing potential jurors as “undercover liberal activists” and a New York Post story that labeled Cohen a “serial perjurer”.While Trump refrained from violating the order in recent weeks of the trial, high-profile supporters have instead leveled similar charges outside the courtroom. Sean Hannity and other cable news hosts followed suit.“Tonight, as your mentally vacant president shuffles through the halls of the White House in his maximum-stability sneakers, lawyers and bureaucrats in the Democratic Party – they are hard at work,” Hannity said at the start of his Fox News show on 21 May. “You see, they are determined to get Donald Trump by any means necessary and are using America’s system of justice as a political weapon.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHannity also hosted legal analysts such as Gregg Jarrett and Alan Dershowitz, who have described it as a “corrupt case” and called Stormy Daniels a “shakedown artist”.Trump later repeated such assertions when he spoke outside the courtroom.“There is a kind of feedback loop that happens between Fox News and Trump’s public-facing legal commentary in which he is quoting figures like [Jarrett and Dershowitz] and then saying, ‘This is what all the experts are saying,’ just the experts [are] from Fox News,” Gertz said.Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network have also frequently described the criminal charges against Trump as “lawfare” committed by Democrats. (And it’s not just the cable news personalities – Hannity quoted the film-maker Oliver Stone, who described the lawfare as a “new form of warfare”.)The goal, Polskin said, was to convey that the trial is “completely politically motivated”.Still, is it possible that rather than Fox News devoting too little time to the trial, CNN and MSNBC are devoting too much time to it?The Daily Show host Jon Stewart critiqued the media for its coverage of events at the start of trial, such as the former president driving from Trump Tower to the courtroom. During the 2016 presidential election, networks drew big ratings by airing his rallies live and uninterrupted and later faced criticism for giving the candidate free airtime.“Perhaps if we limit the coverage to the issues at hand and try not to create an all-encompassing spectacle of the most banal of details. Perhaps that would help,” Stewart said of the early trial coverage.On whether CNN and MSNBC were again spending too much time on Trump, Jamieson said: “The question always is, what else is in the news agenda? And as a result, what aren’t you covering? We are in a relatively quiet period legislatively in the United States, so it’s hard to make the argument that there is some big major story that’s being downplayed.”Gertz, of Media Matters for America, points out that Trump has spent the last nine years engaged in a cycle of saying and doing shocking things, followed by rightwing media hosts and pundits condemning backlash against Trump as unfair, so their handling of the trial is not particularly novel.“They know that every alleged infraction or crime committed by Trump is an opportunity for them to prove that they are onboard with the Maga movement and with Trump specifically,” he explained, “by loudly saying that he did nothing wrong and that his pursuers are in fact the real criminals.” More

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      Trump prosecutor Fani Willis wins Georgia primary election

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      Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney overseeing Georgia’s expansive criminal case against Donald Trump and his allies for attempting to overturn the 2020 election, has won her Democratic primary bid for re-election with nearly 90% of the vote.Willis and Judge Scott McAfee – who won his primary election on Tuesday – are central figures in the prosecution against the former president and associates in his orbit accused of conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election.Willis will now face Republican lawyer Courtney Kramer in November. With her high name recognition, the advantages of incumbency and a hefty fundraising haul, Willis’s victory in the primary was not terribly surprising.The most prominent – and sweeping – charge handed down in an indictment by a grand jury in August 2023 alleged Trump and 18 co-defendants violated Georgia’s racketeering law in a criminal conspiracy to unlawfully change the results of the election.Trump allies, including the attorneys Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, were also charged with forgery in connection with their efforts to send false pro-Trump electors to represent swing states that had in fact elected Joe Biden.Willis’s role in pursuing the most comprehensive prosecution against Trump has drawn her intense scrutiny. In March, the prosecutor who Willis hired to lead the case, Nathan Wade, resigned after revelations about a romantic relationship between him and Willis threatened to derail the prosecution.Last week, the Georgia court of appeals agreed to consider an appeal from Trump’s defense seeking to toss Willis from the case amid the allegations of unethical conduct.Amid the prosecution, Willis has also faced a barrage of threats and harassment. In May, a California resident was charged with threatening to injure Willis for her role in prosecuting Trump and his allies.The Associated Press contributed reporting More