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      ‘A gamechanger’: this simple device could help fight the war on abortion rights in the US

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      Joan Fleischman has always had people flying in from across the world to her private abortion practice in Manhattan. In the two decades her clinic has been open, she has seen clients from far-flung places, such as Ireland, the Bahamas and Mexico, who couldn’t get abortions in their home countries. In the last year, that changed. Since the US federal right to abortion was overturned in June 2022, she is now more likely to see patients flying in from her own country.Often they are from Texas, sometimes Ohio, or Florida. Some with links to the city, others with none.After years of providing abortion care, Fleischman, 60, still finds these trips shocking. “Usually if somebody needs unusual medical care, they are willing to fly around the world for it – like for advanced neurosurgery or something. It’s always struck me as incredible that people are flying to me for the most simple procedure.”There’s a reason people fly to see Fleischman. She provides abortions through manual uterine aspiration – using a small, hand-held device to remove pregnancy tissue. The device is gentle enough that the tissue often comes out almost completely intact. It is also a quick and discreet procedure where a patient might be in and out of the door in less than an hour.Fleischman is co-founder of the MYA Network, a network of primary care clinics and clinicians in 16 states. They believe the tool could be radical in the hands of more primary care clinicians – clinicians they are amping up to train.The time to do that, they say, is now. The future of mifepristone, a major abortion pill used in more than half the abortions in the US, is in question due to a lawsuit brought by anti-abortion groups seeking to overturn the FDA’s approval of the drug. It could be determined by the same supreme court that ruled last year to overturn Roe v Wade. Manual aspiration is not new: it is used by many big abortion clinics across the US. But those are are notoriously over-stretched. In 2020, before Roe v Wade was overturned, 38% of reproductive-aged women lived in counties with no abortion provider at all.Especially given the threat to mifepristone, the MYA Network believes that primary care clinicians, who are vastly more common than abortion providers, are well-placed to help.But while more than 73% of primary care doctors believe abortion care to be within their scope of practice, a tiny fraction – less than 10% – of primary care doctors actually provide it.The network is planning to unveil an online curriculum and in-person trainings for the procedure, which many of the clinicians and institutions in the network have already been doing in their own states.“The number of clinicians who could be trained would be limitless,” says Michele Gomez, one of the doctors in the MYA network of clinicians.“There are so many clinicians out there who want to do something to help but just don’t know how, and this information and support could be a gamechanger.”As a young woman, Joan Fleischman often felt compromised. She frequently traveled overseas as a teenager to do basic aid work with a volunteer group, and would feel fear and humiliation from the unwanted sexual attention she would receive. That was the beginning of her understanding, as she describes it, of the constant vulnerability women walk around with.By the age of 18, Fleischman had her first abortion – an experience she describes as routine, mundane even. The pregnancy came as she started her first year at the University of Chicago, and was the least of her concerns. “It was a no brainer. I was like, ‘Pregnant? Nope, I’m going to be a doctor.’ So I went to Planned Parenthood and took care of it,” says Fleischman.It wasn’t until she started providing abortions that she even thought about the experience again.Fleischman was in her 30s, living in New York and already trained as a family practice doctor, when she saw an advertisement offering to teach doctors how to do surgical abortions.“I realized that after all these years in training, I’d never got to even see an abortion. I had saved lives, helped people at the height of the Aids crisis. I had delivered babies. These are things a family doctor does,” she says. “I was like, ‘why? That’s ridiculous.’ That’s where the passion started.”Fleischman took up more training, learning to perform abortions at a Planned Parenthood, in 1995.Planned Parenthood – as Fleischman pointed out herself – is the place where people “go to get it done”. It is a vital lifeline for many people, providing hundreds of thousands of abortions every year, many to low-income and uninsured clients.But the efficiency of their service contrasted with Fleischman’s training as a family doctor – which emphasizes the importance of the doctor-patient relationship. She was used to that relationship entailing a level of intimacy – her work involved home visits with patients, and entering lifelong relationships with them and their families.Fleischman recalls her Planned Parenthood training:“Women went station to station. They got their blood drawn, and then they sat in a little waiting room with other people. They got their ultrasound; they sat in another little waiting room, always with paper gowns on. They had been fasting for the whole night before. They saw a counsellor. Then they were in a bigger waiting room. And then they got called by name, to come in for their procedure. The surgeon went from room to room to room, doing 50-60 abortions a day.”She wanted to personalize the experience. For patients to be able to come in with their partners, to be talked through their options and their concerns, fully. “I just felt so disconnected. It seemed to me that the doctor was really a technician emptying uteruses,” she continues.“I was like, ‘I want to create a different model. I want people to have a different experience going through this’.”As the US is learning, ethical quandaries always arise when abortion is banned: what to do for the woman who turns up septic after a failed, self managed abortion? How to deal with life-threatening pregnancies that require intervention but also require an abortion? What about cases of rape, incest or pregnant children?Essentially: how much pain is the state willing to impose on people when it restricts reproductive freedom?In Bangladesh, a sort of answer to some of these questions came following the 1971 civil war, during which soldiers abducted Hindu and Bihari Muslim women and set up rape camps. Pregnancy as a result of rape skyrocketed; in the following years, suicide and maternal mortality also shot up. Abortions, of course, did not stop happening. In 1978, while abortion remained illegal, an estimated 800,000 abortions took place in the country, resulting in around 8,000 deaths.“Menstrual regulation”, as it came to be known – using the same manual aspiration technique that Fleischman now uses – became a sort of legal loophole, allowing safe abortions for early pregnancies.By 1974, menstrual regulation was legal and by 1979, Bangladesh started providing the procedure through its national family planning program.Now, one might walk through a busy street in Bangladesh and find a sign advertising menstrual regulation in a country where, at least officially, abortion is only allowed in life-threatening situations. A woman simply comes in and explains she has missed her period. She doesn’t take a pregnancy test before the procedure, and nobody asks her to. As long as she sees the clinician before 12 weeks, they will “restore her period” for her.“It’s just a clever policy, a wink and a nod – everybody knows what’s going on. It’s kind of a recognition that women need this care,” says Bill Powell, a senior medical scientist at IPAS, an international organization that trains medical professionals across the world to use manual aspiration.It also gives doctors discretion without explicitly violating the law. “They say: ‘I know if I don’t provide this care, this woman is going to go off and do something that is unsafe, and she’ll be back to my facility ill, needing emergency care, so therefore, I am saving her life by providing this procedure’,” Powell explains.Fleischman, who worked in Bangladesh in her youth, and her colleagues in the MYA network are adamant they are only proposing manual aspiration be used legally in the US – for abortion care where it is legal, and miscarriage management where it is not. But its use in ordinary medical settings could still provide a radical opportunity in the US, she says, by expanding the number of clinicians who can easily perform the procedure up until 12 weeks.Others have touted this idea, in a slightly different way: anyone can learn to use a manual aspiration device, and manage their own abortions, some activists argue. All they need to learn to do is to insert a cannula, which is like a large straw, through the natural opening of the cervix, and then attach the aspiration device. The device is like a syringe, which creates a vacuum. Once the pressure is released, the contents of the uterus are gently removed. The self-management option has other advantages – like cutting out the middle man in a climate where doctors are increasingly scared to provide abortion care, and equipping people with self knowledge when the future of access to abortion is unclear.Fleischman understands the necessity of self-managed abortion, especially in places where the procedure is illegal. But she believes that after receiving care, people should always be able to follow up with a clinician who knows their case if anything goes wrong, or even if it doesn’t. It dismays her that people are living in a climate in the US where they might not have that option; where people might be too scared to look for help; and where they may suffer with complications alone in the rare instances when something does go wrong.In states where abortion is legal, manual aspiration provides the opportunity to treat abortion like mainstream medicine, rather than something that’s siloed into abortion clinics, which are visible, small in number and under constant threat.The case brought by anti-abortion groups against the FDA’s approval of mifepristone – which is one of two abortion drugs used in more than half of all abortions in the US – will almost certainly be decided by the supreme court. The uncertainly over its future, Fleischman argues, could make the expanded use of manual aspiration critical to preserving abortion and miscarriage care.Some providers may switch to abortions using only the second drug, misoprostol. But misoprostol-only abortions are slightly less effective, and more often require care for incomplete abortions. That could result in straining already stretched abortion clinics, which will likely have more people knocking at their doors for both surgical abortions and follow-up care.With manual aspiration on the other hand, doctors can be mostly certain that the procedure is complete before the patient leaves the state.And in states with bans, clinicians could be trained to use the device to treat miscarriages. “It’s useful even where you are not allowed to provide induced abortion care … [to treat] miscarriage, or spontaneous abortion,” explains Ian Bennett, a family planning doctor who is part of the MYA network and a professor at the University of Washington.Bennett trains several dozen students a year in manual aspiration, teaching them the procedure as part of their regular medical training, and says students are actively seeking out this instruction in the new, post-Roe environment.Students “are selecting programmes where abortion care is integrated into their training, even over some that might be more prestigious,” he says.Clinicians in areas that border states with bans, which have seen big increases in demand for abortion services as a result, are also a target for training, as are “red parts of blue states”, explains Gomez. Clinicians in states where abortion is legal, who want to do something to fight the war on abortion could easily do so by integrating abortion into their practices, Fleischman and her colleagues say.“It’s done in a couple of minutes,” explains Fleischman.“When it’s done, you know that it’s done. There’s very few bleeding issues. You walk into an office, and an hour later, it’s resolved. I have people flying in and out of Dubai for this procedure. They schedule the appointment, they come in, and they depart that afternoon,” she continues.“There’s absolutely no reason this shouldn’t just be part of regular medicine.” More

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      George Santos, Republican who lied in his first election, announces second run

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      Disgraced Republican congressman George Santos, who has admitted to fabricating parts of his résumé in his successful bid for a seat in the House of Representatives, has announced he will stand for a second term representing his New York district.Santos, whose district is focused on New York City’s suburbs, is the subject of an inquiry by the House ethics committee, as well as complaints alleging sexual harassment and campaign finance violations.Shortly after he admitted to lying during his election campaign last year, Santos stepped down from all House committees. He is expected to face many challengers in the Republican primary for the district, which leans Democratic.Santos was characteristically forthright in his re-election announcement, ignoring the multiple scandals that have repeatedly emerged in the US media that range from puppy theft to lying about being a producer on a Broadway musical about Spider-Man and making claims to have lost family in the Holocaust.“Since the left is pushing radical agendas, the economy is struggling, and Washington is incapable of solving anything, we need a fighter who knows the district and can serve the people fearlessly, and independent of local or national party influence,” he said in a statement.He added: “Good is not good enough and I am not shy about getting the job done.”Santos has long faced calls to quit from fellow New York Republicans and voters in his Queens and Long Island district. Democrats are hopeful they will be able to grab the seat. More

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      Manhattan DA who indicted Trump sues Republican Jim Jordan over interference in case

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      Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg on Tuesday sued Republican congressman Jim Jordan to stop what Bragg called an “unconstitutional attack” on the ongoing criminal prosecution of former US president Donald Trump in New York.The lawsuit aims to block a subpoena of Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor who had led the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation of Trump. The subpoena, issued last week by the House of Representatives judiciary committee, which Jordan chairs, seeks Pomerantz’s appearance before the committee for a deposition.Trump pleaded not guilty last week to charges brought by Bragg’s office of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment made ahead of the 2016 election. The funds allegedly were used to buy adult film star Stormy Daniels’s silence about an affair she said she had with Trump, which the former president denies.Bragg, a Democrat, accused congressional Republicans of an “incursion” into a state criminal case.“Members of Congress are not free to invade New York’s sovereign authority for their or Mr Trump’s political aims,” Bragg’s office wrote in the lawsuit, accusing Jordan of searching for a pretext for “hauling Mr Pomerantz to Washington for a retaliatory political circus”.Pomerantz left his job at the district attorney’s office shortly after Bragg took over in early 2022, when the new DA declined to pursue an indictment of Trump based on a sprawling probe of his business practices.Earlier this year, Pomerantz published a book criticizing Bragg’s decision not to pursue those charges. He also said prosecutors had previously examined potential charges against Trump over the hush money payments, but were concerned the case would rest on a novel legal theory that may not hold up in court.In announcing the subpoena of Pomerantz last week, Jordan said Pomerantz’s public statements showed that Bragg’s prosecution of Trump was politically motivated. Bragg has said Pomerantz’s case was not ready.“If he wishes to argue that his prosecution is ‘politically motivated,’ he is free to raise that concern to the New York state criminal court,” Bragg’s office wrote in the lawsuit.“Chairman Jordan is not, however, free to unconstitutionally deploy Congress’s limited subpoena power for raw political retaliation, intimidation, or obstruction,” it added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe judiciary committee said on Monday it would hold a field hearing next week in New York about what it called “an increase in violent crime” caused by Bragg’s policies.Bragg said murder, shooting, burglary and robbery rates were all lower in Manhattan so far this year compared with last year.On Tuesday afternoon, Jordan, who represents Ohio, tweeted: “First, they indict a president for no crime. Then, they sue to block congressional oversight when we ask questions about the federal funds they say they used to do it.” More

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      Trump’s indictment and the return of his biggest concern: ‘the women’

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      In August 2015, at Trump Tower in New York, Donald Trump met with Michael Cohen, then his lawyer and fixer, and David Pecker, then chief executive of American Media, owner of the National Enquirer. According to the indictment of the former president unsealed in New York this week, Pecker agreed to help with Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination, “looking out for negative stories” about Trump and then alerting Cohen.It was a “catch and kill” deal, a common tabloid practice in which Pecker would buy potentially damaging stories but not put them in print.Pecker “also agreed to publish negative stories” about Trump’s competitors. The media this week seized on that passage in the indictment, noting how the Enquirer baselessly linked the father of Ted Cruz, the Texas senator and Trump’s closest rival for the nomination, to Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who killed John F Kennedy.Last year, however, a New York Times reporter got to the heart of the matter. In her book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, Maggie Haberman says that around the same time as the meeting with Pecker and Cohen, Sam Nunberg, a political adviser, asked Trump for his “biggest concern” about running.“Trump had a simple reply: ‘The women.’”Trump now faces 34 counts, all felonies, of falsifying business records with intent to conceal another crime: breaches of campaign finance laws. All the charges relate to the $130,000 Cohen paid Stormy Daniels, the adult film star and director who claims an affair Trump denies, and how Cohen was repaid $420,000 including $50,000 for “another expense” Cohen has said was for rigged polls, another $180,000 to cover taxes and a $60,000 bonus.But the New York indictment is not the only form of legal jeopardy Trump now faces. As well as state and federal investigations of his election subversion, a federal investigation of his retention of classified records and a civil lawsuit over his business practices, he faces a civil defamation suit arising from an allegation of rape.Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct or assault by at least 26 women. One of them, the writer E Jean Carroll, says Trump raped her in a department store changing room in New York in the mid-1990s.Trump denies the allegation. Carroll has sued him twice: for defamation and for defamation and battery, the latter suit under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law which gave alleged victims of crimes beyond the statute of limitations a year to bring civil claims. In the defamation case, trial has been delayed. The case under the Adult Survivors Act is due to go to trial on 25 April.To the New York writer Molly Jong-Fast, host of the Fast Politics podcast, there is a some sense of poetic justice in Trump finally facing a legal reckoning in cases arising from his treatment of women.But, Jong-Fast says: “The thing I’m sort of struck by is, like, how much women continually are dismissed, even in this situation.“There’s so much talk about the Stormy Daniels case, there was so little talk about actually what happened, right? There was almost nothing about how he was married to his third wife [Melania Trump], and she had just had a child [Barron Trump], and he had this affair. He denies the affair but the affair is pretty much documented.“That’s as close to truth in Trumpworld as possible. But we’re discussing the nuances of who paid the hush money and whether or not that’s a campaign contribution, and whether that rises to a federal crime.“That can be argued, but I was surprised at how little focus women had in it. How nobody was talking about like, this is a serial philanderer who has the kind of problems that serial philanderers have.“The filing talked about how he had paid off this doorman, about the illegitimate child. I guess that may have been not true … but like, you don’t pay off somebody unless you have a sense that this could actually be true.”As Jong-Fast indicates, the New York indictment detailed two other “catch and kill” deals which prosecutors said also showed “illegal conduct” admitted by Pecker and Cohen but directed by Trump himself.In late 2015, American Media paid $30,000 to a former Trump World Tower doorman who was trying to sell a story about Trump fathering a child out of wedlock.In September 2016, Cohen taped Trump talking about a payment to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who claims an affair Trump also denies.“So what do we got to pay for this?” Trump asked. “One fifty?”American Media paid McDougal $150,000 to stay silent.After Trump won the presidency, the indictment says, American Media “released both the doorman and [McDougal] from their non-disclosure agreements”.That speaks to the central contention made by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, in his charges over the Daniels payment: that Trump concealed it because he feared it could derail his campaign.According to Bragg’s indictment, in the McDougal case Trump “was concerned about the effect it could have on his candidacy”. In the case of the doorman, Cohen instructed Pecker “not to release [him] until after the presidential election”. Regarding Daniels, Trump is said to have directed Cohen “to delay making a payment … as long as possible … [because] if they could delay payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public”.In short, prosecutors contend that Trump did not make and conceal hush-money deals because he wanted to avoid embarrassment or hurting his wife – the argument successfully pursued by John Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidate who made hush-money payments in 2008 but avoided conviction four years later. The case against Trump is built on the contention he broke state and federal campaign finance laws.Observers argue over whether Bragg has built a case he can win. Some expect Trump to wriggle off the hook. Others think the first prosecutor to indict a president has a good chance of securing a conviction. In either case, the indictment has brought Trump’s treatment of women back to the national spotlight.So has Trump himself. As Jong-Fast points out, as the former president this week attacked the judge in New York, who subsequently became subject to threats to his safety, so too Trump went after the judge’s wife and daughter.“If you see interviews with Stormy Daniels, she has had terrible experiences as a result of her brush with Trump. Even the judge in that case, the judge’s daughter, Trump went after them. You go after Trump, you get it. He’s like a mob boss. That’s just how he does it.” More

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      The case(s) against Trump: New York charges only beginning of legal woes

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      It was the day that Donald Trump got mugged by reality. After years of dodging legal accountability, the former US president found himself being driven towards a New York courtroom where he would be charged with a crime.“WOW, they are going to ARREST ME,” he wrote on his Truth Social media platform, the true scale of his predicament finally dawning on him. “Can’t believe this is happening in America.”But dramatic as the day was, as Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records relating to hush money payments, it represented only the first drop of rain in what could be a legal thunderstorm. Several more cases are fast approaching and some are potentially far more devastating.Whereas the ex-president has so far been able to spin the hush money indictment to his political advantage as he seeks to win back the White House in 2024, experts suggest that the quantity and gravity of the upcoming investigations could ultimately bury him and his electoral chances.Tuesday’s court appearance, in which Trump – the first former US president in history to be arrested and arraigned on criminal charges – had to answer meekly to a judge and found there was no one to hold doors open for him, was the humbling and sobering moment that he discovered his legal troubles are no longer theoretical.Michael D’Antonio, a political commentator and author of The Truth About Trump, said: “His attitude prior to this has always been obstinance and a chin-jutting pride and refusal to appear to be affected. But he sure appeared to be affected this time. There was a quality of a cow being led to the slaughter.”He added: “He must realise that he’s in trouble and that the situation is grave and that showed on his face. He doesn’t care as much about the proceedings politically as he cares about the story that he can tell about them. He is a storyteller above all and a fabulist. If he can tell a story that motivates his base and also manage to stay out of prison, he will argue that it’s a victory over a corrupt system.”Trump himself will not be in jeopardy when Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against Fox News goes to trial, currently scheduled for 17 April. But the case, which could hear testimony from the Fox Corporation executives Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and an array of Fox News hosts, could provide some deeply embarrassing details about how the ex-president is perceived by the network.Then, on 25 April, a civil trial in a New York lawsuit involving Trump is scheduled to begin. E Jean Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, accuses Trump of defaming her by denying he raped her in New York’s Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in late 1995 or early 1996. Carroll is seeking monetary damages and it is not known whether Trump will testify.Another important trial is set for 2 October. Letitia James, the New York attorney general, is suing Trump and his Trump Organization for fraud. James has said her office found more than 200 examples of misleading asset valuations between 2011 and 2021, and that Trump inflated his net worth by billions of dollars.James said the scheme was intended to help Trump obtain lower interest rates on loans and better insurance coverage. The civil lawsuit seeks to permanently bar Trump and three of his adult children from running companies in New York state, and recoup at least $250m obtained through fraud.Before then, there may have been developments in Georgia, where a prosecutor is investigating Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in that state. Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who will ultimately decide whether to pursue charges, told a judge in January that a special grand jury had completed its work and that decisions were “imminent”.If convicted, Trump would not be able to seek clemency from a future Republican president since such pardons do not apply to state offences. Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said: “The most perilous is probably the case out of Georgia because it relates to election interference and because there is no ability for Trump, if he becomes president again, to pardon himself.“We know the grand jury foreperson said that they were recommending indictments of more than a dozen people and she strongly hinted one of those people was Trump. That one might pose the most danger to him at the moment.”Meanwhile the justice department has investigations under way into both Trump’s actions in the 2020 election, including lies that led to the January 6 insurrection, and his retention of highly classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021. Both are overseen by Jack Smith, a war crimes prosecutor and political independent.When he returned to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Tuesday night and hurled abuse at the investigators one by one, Trump devoted the lion’s share of his comments – and patent falsehoods – to the classified documents case, implying that he recognises it as posing the maximum danger.The FBI seized 13,000 documents from Mar-a-Lago last August; about 100 documents were marked classified and some were designated top secret. Earlier this week the Washington Post newspaper reported that investigators have fresh evidence pointing to possible obstruction of justice by the former president as he resisted a subpoena demanding the return of all classified documents.As for the charges over hush money payments during the 2016 election campaign, Trump is expected back in court in New York on 4 December – about two months before the official start of the 2024 Republican presidential primary calendar.Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “The moment he set foot into official custody in New York probably was a chilling realisation for him of the difficulties that lie ahead, and not just in this case, although it’s serious.“It’s that feeling of the walls closing in from every direction. He’s got a lot of serious problems on his hands. Even in a Republican primary, the compound of all of these challenges will be very deleterious because Republican primary voters are going to ask: can he win?”Asked if the 45th president could end up in prison, Eisen, author of Overcoming Trumpery: How to Restore Ethics, the Rule of Law, and Democracy, replied yes. “It won’t be easy, it may not be fast but it’s certainly possible,” he said.Beneath the cries of a witch-hunt by Democrats and the “deep state”, and despite a bounce in primary polls as Republicans rally in his defence, Trump, 76, may no longer be sleeping easy at Mar-a-Lago. Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, commented: “He looked like a man with pins sticking into his torso. He is scared stiff.“Sure, he’s going to bluster and express bravado and confidence, but he is terrified of being confined. No doubt about that. This is the beginning of the first day of the rest of his life. The issues are just going to pile on. It’s extraordinary. Outside of the mafia, it’s hard to find any American with such legal problems.” More

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      New York judge in Trump arraignment reportedly receives ‘dozens’ of threats

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      The New York judge who presided over the arraignment of Donald Trump and the judge’s family have reportedly received multiple threats following the historic arrest of the former president.In court in Manhattan on Tuesday, Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts related to his hush money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels.NBC was among outlets to report that the judge, Juan Merchan, and his family subsequently received “dozens” of threats.Citing two sources familiar with the matter, NBC said the threats, like those recently directed towards the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and other officials, had come in the form of calls, emails and letters.In addition to increased security surrounding Merchan and the court, New York police were providing “extra security to all affected staff members”, NBC said. Biographies of employees at Bragg’s office had been removed from the district attorney’s website.The New York Daily News also reported threats to Merchan and his family, a source telling the paper “the content of the calls, emails and letters was … harassing and defamatory, with most of the trolls calling from out of state”.Lucian Chalfen, a spokesperson for the New York office of court administration, told the paper: “We continue to evaluate and re-evaluate security concerns and potential threats. We have maintained an increased security presence in and around courthouses and throughout the judiciary and will adjust protocols as necessary.”Elsewhere, J Michael Luttig, the retired conservative judge and adviser to the former vice-president Mike Pence who came to national prominence with testimony to the House January 6 committee, warned Trump he risked a gag order over his attacks on Judge Merchan.“There is no court that would want to impose a gag order on a president of the United States,” Luttig told Axios. But “if the former president forces the Manhattan criminal court, the court will have no choice”.Mike Scotto, a former rackets bureau chief for the Manhattan district attorney, told the same site: “A gag order is used to protect the defendant’s rights to a fair trial and also the government’s rights to a fair trial, so that the potential jurors don’t learn anything about the case that they’re not going to learn in court.”Luttig is an influential voice in conservative circles, widely deemed unlucky not to have reached the supreme court. He has predicted “the beginning of the end of Donald Trump”.But the former president enjoys comfortable leads in polling regarding the Republican nomination in 2024 and senior party figures have rallied round him in response to his historic indictment.Before his arraignment in the New York case, Trump stoked controversy with inflammatory social media posts about the case and Bragg and calls for protest.On Tuesday, the far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene led a rally for Trump in a park outside the court in Manhattan.Inside the court, Merchan warned Trump to “refrain from making statements that are likely to incite violence and civil unrest”. He also told a Trump lawyer: “I don’t share your view that certain language is justified by frustration.”Hours later, in a speech at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, Trump called Merchan “a Trump-hating judge”; attacked the judge’s family (“I have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris”); and went after Bragg (“a criminal”) and other prosecutors overseeing investigations of his behaviour in the White House and out of power.Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton county, Georgia, is investigating Trump’s election subversion attempts there, with an indictment believed likely.Trump called her “a local racist Democrat”.At the US justice department, the special counsel Jack Smith is overseeing investigations of Trump’s election subversion and incitement of the Capitol attack, and of Trump’s retention of classified records.Trump called him “a radical-left lunatic known as a bomb-thrower”.The Lincoln Project, a group formed by anti-Trump Republicans, condemned what it called “a paranoid and delusional speech cheered on by fanatical cult members who do not care about democracy and American values”.“Trump got the circus he wanted,” the group said. “The rest of the GOP has fallen in line.” More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene calls New York City disgusting, filthy and repulsive

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      The far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene risked stoking the wrath of New Yorkers for a second time this week, calling their city “disgusting”, “filthy”, “repulsive” and a “terrible place”.“I compared it to what I called Gotham City,” the Georgia Republican told Fox News. “The streets are filthy, they’re covered with people basically lying, on drugs. They can’t even stand up. They’re falling over. There’s so much crime in the city. I can’t comprehend how people live there.”The blogger Aaron Rupar responded: “Imagine if [the New York progressive] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on MSNBC and said this about a town in Marjorie Taylor Greene‘s district. Republicans would try to expel her from Congress.”Mehdi Hasan, the MSNBC host, said: “No Democratic politician from the coasts could ever go visit a Republican-led city in the south and then go on a liberal media outlet and call it repulsive, smelly and disgusting. No way.”Greene’s comments, Hasan said, were “a reminder of the double standards, and asymmetry, in our politics and our media”.Greene is a conspiracy theorist and controversialist who has made antisemitic and racist claims and was barred from committees by Democrats after threatening fellow members of Congress. She was restored to key assignments by Kevin McCarthy when the Republican became House speaker in January, dependent on far-right support.Greene visited New York on Tuesday, to protest in support of Donald Trump as the former president – and former New Yorker – pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts related to his hush money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels.Greene attempted to speak in a park outside the courthouse in downtown Manhattan. She was jostled and drowned out by whistles blown by counter-protesters.“It was absolute chaos,” she told Tucker Carlson on Wednesday. “And that’s what the mayor of New York City wanted to happen to me.”Eric Adams had warned Greene to “be on your best behavior”.“He threatened me and basically put on a dog whistle for violence against me,” Greene claimed, also claiming the protest against her was “against the law, by the way, Tucker.“You see, they didn’t want me to be able to protest and use my first amendment right. And they wanted violence. I think they wanted that to happen, because they want to repeat January 6 all over again, want all of us Trump supporters, Maga, basically Republicans and just good Americans to look like criminals, and that’s what they do in communist countries.”On 6 January 2021, supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” to overturn his election defeat stormed the US Capitol. Nine deaths are now linked to the riot, including law enforcement suicides. More than a thousand arrests have been made and hundreds of convictions won, some for seditious conspiracy. With other Republicans, Greene has visited January 6 rioters in jail.On Fox News, Greene called Democrats “fascists … in hysterics” over Trump. But she wasn’t finished with New York.Carlson, whose network is based in midtown Manhattan but who built a home studio in Maine, said: “Mayor Adams describe New York as quote his ‘home’. How did his home look? Pretty neat and tidy?”Greene made her comparison to Gotham City – where Batman lives – and added: “It was repulsive, it smells bad. And I just, I think it’s a terrible place.”Perhaps thinking of his bosses in midtown, at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, Carlson said: “Yeah, with some nice people. I will say that.” More