Trump, Donald J

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      Pro-Trump PAC Joins TikTok Amid Fight Over Its Chinese Ownership

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      The main political action committee backing former President Donald J. Trump joined TikTok on Wednesday, jumping onto the popular social media platform while it is at the center of a political battle over its ownership by a Chinese corporation, ByteDance.The super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., is independent of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, but the move to TikTok — using the handle @MAGA — signals a shift in strategy nearly three months after President Biden’s re-election campaign joined the social media platform.“There’s millions of voters on TikTok, and @MAGA will deliver President Donald J. Trump’s pro-freedom, pro-America agenda every day with the facts and stories that matter,” Taylor Budowich, the chief executive of the PAC, said in a statement. “We aren’t trying to set policy, we are trying to win an election.”The TikTok account, which had about 300 followers as of Wednesday evening, has posted five videos so far, four attacking Mr. Biden and one attacking Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate, as a “radical leftist.”Mr. Biden signed a law in April that would force a sale of TikTok by ByteDance, which sued the federal government on Tuesday in an effort to block the law. Under the terms of the law, ByteDance has about nine months to sell the app or it will be banned in the United States. The president can extend that time frame to a year.Mr. Trump had also tried to ban the app during his term, ordering ByteDance in August 2020 to divest the app. A federal judge blocked the attempted ban the next month, and Mr. Trump left office a few months later.But when House Republicans moved to force the sale of the app via legislation, Mr. Trump came out against the bill, saying that ByteDance’s ownership was still a national security threat but that a potential ban would anger young Americans.“Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it,” Mr. Trump said in an interview on CNBC. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”Mr. Trump himself is not on TikTok — preferring to use his own social media site, Truth Social — and neither is his campaign. With TikTok still operating in the United States, for now, and with Mr. Biden’s campaign using the app, Mr. Budowich said that Mr. Trump’s message should be “brought to every corner of the internet.”“We will not cede any platform to Joe Biden and the Democrats,” he said. More

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      Georgia Appeals Court to Weigh Whether Trump Prosecutor Should Be Disqualified

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      The decision to hear the appeal reopens the possibility that Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, could be disqualified from prosecuting Donald Trump and 14 allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The Georgia Court of Appeals will hear an appeal of a ruling that allowed Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, to continue leading the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump on charges related to election interference, the court announced on Wednesday.The decision to hear the appeal, handed down by a three-judge panel, is likely to further delay the Georgia criminal case against Mr. Trump and 14 of his allies, making it less likely that the case will go to trial before the November election.The terse three-sentence announcement reopens the possibility that Ms. Willis could be disqualified from the biggest case of her career, and one of the most significant state criminal cases in the nation’s history.At issue is a romantic relationship she had with Nathan Wade, a lawyer she hired to handle the prosecution of Mr. Trump. Defense lawyers argued that the relationship amounted to an untenable conflict of interest, and that Ms. Willis and her entire office should be removed from the case.But on March 15, Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court ruled that Ms. Willis could keep the case if Mr. Wade stepped away from it. Mr. Wade resigned a few hours after judge issued his ruling.Steven H. Sadow, the lead counsel for Mr. Trump in Georgia, said in a statement Wednesday that his client “looks forward to presenting interlocutory arguments to the Georgia Court of Appeals as to why the case should be dismissed and Fulton County D.A. Willis should be disqualified for her misconduct in this unjustified, unwarranted political persecution.”A spokesman for Ms. Willis’s office declined to comment on the appeals court’s action. More

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      Kristi Noem’s Book: Four Takeaways

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      After a rough start to the rollout of her memoir, the South Dakota governor has continued to defend shooting her dog and to deflect on a false story about meeting Kim Jong-un.In one sense, Kristi Noem has had a wildly successful rollout of her new book: America can’t stop talking about it.But all the chatter is not for the reasons Ms. Noem, the conservative governor of South Dakota, might have expected when she finished “No Going Back,” a memoir that recounts her political career. The book appears aimed at raising her profile as a MAGA loyalist while former President Donald J. Trump weighs his choices for running mate. Just a month ago, Ms. Noem had been widely seen as a contender.Instead of talking up her conservative bona fides, however, Ms. Noem has spent the last week on national television defending a grisly account in the book in which she shoots her dog in a gravel pit. The killing of the dog, a 14-month-old wire-haired pointer named Cricket, has drawn bipartisan criticism and scrutiny.The book, published on Tuesday, includes a number of other noteworthy details, some of which Ms. Noem has discussed in recent interviews. Here are four takeaways.At one point in Ms. Noem’s book, she describes a phone conversation she had with Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential candidate. Ms. Noem claims the exchange was threatening, which Ms. Haley’s spokeswoman denied.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesNoem has a lot of criticism for other Republicans.Ms. Noem’s account of her time in office — first as South Dakota’s sole House representative and then as governor — includes many stories that broadly criticize Republicans for their electoral failures, while also targeting figures who have drawn the ire of Mr. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Prosecutors Mine ‘How To Get Rich’ and Other Trump Books For Quotes

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      Prosecutors cannot force Donald J. Trump to testify at his criminal trial in Manhattan, but that does not mean they can’t use his words against him.On Tuesday, the prosecutors unearthed a series of damaging excerpts from books that the former president wrote, plucking out passages to help make their case against Mr. Trump. In essence, they called a past version of Mr. Trump to testify against his future self.In his own words, Mr. Trump described how he kept a focus on minute details and watched every penny that left his accounts, corroborating a core component of the prosecution’s case as they argue that he knew that his company falsified business records to cover up a hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, a porn star.On cross-examination, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, suggested that a ghost writer had been responsible for these words.Mr. Trump’s written words also described how he sees sexual potential in women that he encounters, a salient point in a trial tethered to encounters with women that he is accused of covering up. “All the women on ‘The Apprentice’ flirted with me,” he wrote.Prosecutors introduced the damning excerpts by questioning Sally Franklin, a witness who is an executive and editor, to read excerpts from “Trump: How to Get Rich” and “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire,” both of which were published by Ballantine, a Penguin Random House imprint.The jury heard Trump’s written words: “Every dollar counts in business, and for that matter, every dime.” The text continued, “Even in high end shops, I bargain,” adding, “I hate paying retail.”This was not the first time jurors heard Trump in his own words. Last week, prosecutors played video clips of him talking, and they have questioned witnesses about Mr. Trump’s infamous statement on the set of “Access Hollywood” that he would grab women by the genitals.But the judge would not allow prosecutors to play the tape for jurors, a decision that elevated the importance of the book passages, or any other opportunity to use Mr. Trump as a witness against himself.It might not be the only opportunity for jurors to hear from the former president. Although the prosecution cannot legally call him to testify, Mr. Trump could take the witness stand in his own defense, though it is unclear whether he will do so.For now, jurors heard his words via Ms. Franklin, who read ominous passages in which Mr. Trump spoke of how he treated his perceived enemies.“For many years I’ve said that if someone screws you, screw them back,” she read from a book by Mr. Trump. It continued: “When somebody hurts you, just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can. Like it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye.”As jurors listened, Mr. Trump’s smiling image on a book cover was plastered on screens across the courtroom, a sharp contrast from the scowl he sported throughout the testimony. More

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      Stormy Daniels Testifies at Trump’s Hush-Money Trial

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      For three weeks, witness after witness in Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial has spoken the name of Stormy Daniels, the porn star whose claim of a sexual encounter with the former president is at the center of the case. Today, jurors will hear from her.Ms. Daniels was called by prosecutors to take the witness stand in the Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday to testify against Mr. Trump. It will be her first time relaying her account while in the same room as Mr. Trump since her story of the encounter and a subsequent $130,000 payment to buy her silence became public six years ago.Much about that hush-money payment just before the 2016 election has been laid out in court from people who had key roles in the payment, as well as those on the periphery. They have described the mad scramble by Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer, to buy her silence before the election and Mr. Trump’s reimbursement of him while in the White House. Now, Ms. Daniels gets to tell her side of the story.Ms. Daniels, 45, was born Stephanie Clifford and raised in Baton Rouge, La. She said her encounter with Mr. Trump happened in July 2006, after be came a televisision star with his reality show, “The Apprentice.”They met at the booth for a porn label, Wicked Pictures, at a golf tournament in Nevada, and there is a picture of them together there. Afterward, she said, he invited her to his hotel suite, and they had sex. He also invited her to appear on “The Apprentice,” she said, but she never did.Ms. Daniels has said they kept in contact over the following years. Mr. Trump even had a nickname for her, she said: “Honeybunch.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jeffrey McConney, Trump Trial Witness, Helped Reimburse Michael Cohen

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      Jeffrey S. McConney worked as the corporate controller at the Trump Organization and, prosecutors say, helped arrange the reimbursement for a $130,000 hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, who has long claimed to have had an affair with Donald J. Trump.That reimbursement is at the center of the criminal case against Mr. Trump. Prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney’s office have accused Mr. Trump of falsifying business records by mislabeling the reimbursements in 2017 to Michael D. Cohen, his former personal lawyer and fixer, as “legal expenses.” Mr. Cohen made the payment to Ms. Daniels in the last days of the 2016 campaign.Mr. McConney, who took the witness stand on Monday, testified that he had a close relationship with his boss, Allen H. Weisselberg, then the company’s chief financial officer, who told him in 2017 that Mr. Cohen was owed money.He said that Mr. Weisselberg instructed him to send the money to Essential Consultants, the company Mr. Cohen had set up for the $130,000 hush-money payment to Ms. Daniels. The checks that Mr. Cohen received throughout 2017 exceeded that amount because he was also paid a bonus and money to cover the taxes on the income.Mr. McConney also spoke about Mr. Trump’s constant focus on the outflow of cash at the Trump Organization. Mr. McConney joined the company in 1987 and about a year later, Mr. Trump noticed that its cash balances had decreased from the week before. He called Mr. McConney and said, “Jeff, you’re fired.”He was not actually fired, Mr. McConney said on Monday, but the incident served as a lesson about Mr. Trump’s attention to cash and bills.Mr. McConney got involved the following February, according to a statement of facts filed by prosecutors that identified him only as the “TO Controller,” using the abbreviation for Mr. Trump’s company. That month, prosecutors say, Mr. Cohen emailed an invoice to Mr. McConney for $35,000 worth of legal expenses in January 2017 and the same for February 2017.Prosecutors say that Mr. Weisselberg approved the payments, and then Mr. McConney asked another accounting division employee to issue them and to register them as “legal expenses.” The payments continued through 2017.Mr. McConney testified for several days last November in a civil fraud case against Mr. Trump that was brought by the New York State attorney general’s office. Mr. McConney was also a defendant in the case.After 35 years at the Trump Organization, he said on the stand that he could no longer handle working there amid its legal challenges.“I just wanted to relax and stop being accused of misrepresenting assets for the company that I loved working for,” he said in November.The judge who ruled in the civil fraud case, Arthur F. Engoron, barred Mr. McConney from serving as an officer or director of a New York company for three years and issued a lifetime ban on serving in a financial management role at a New York company. More