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    How the National Enquirer boosted Trump and smeared his opponents: ‘The only choice for president’

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    A New York court has heard evidence of how Donald Trump’s long and tumultuous journey to secure the Republican nomination – and later the presidency – was aided by a US tabloid known for printing gory pictures of murder scenes and questionable journalistic ethics.Testimony from David Pecker revealed how the former publisher of the National Enquirer had pledged to be Trump’s “eyes and ears” during his 2016 presidential campaign.Prosecutors say an alleged “catch-and-kill” scheme saw the National Enquirer catching a potentially damaging story by buying the rights to it and then killing it through agreements that prevent the paid person from telling the story to anyone else. Trump has maintained his innocence.In court on Tuesday, Pecker recounted how he promised Trump that he would help suppress harmful stories while smearing his political opponents at the same time.The process was solidified during an August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower involving Trump and Michael Cohen, his lawyer and personal fixer, in which Pecker said he would publish positive stories about Trump and negative stories about his opponents.Soon after, the fruits of that pledge became apparent in the pages of the National Enquirer.View image in fullscreenThroughout 2015 and 2016, a months-long fight to secure the Republican nomination saw more than 12 candidates, made up of political veterans and business titans, cast aside by the momentum of Trump’s campaign.However, in the days and weeks after Trump announced his candidacy, he was still seen as a long shot. Jeb Bush led across most polls in June 2015 and was attracting millions of dollars in donations.That month, the Enquirer printed unfounded claims about Bush, claiming he had a cocaine habit in the 1980s.In late August Trump penned an article for the National Enquirer outlining why he was “the ONLY choice for President” and by autumn, Bush was lagging far behind in the polls.By then, Trump’s closest challenger was another political outsider, Ben Carson, a soft-spoken retired paediatric neurosurgeon who also had no background in politics. In October, Carson was polling near neck and neck with Trump, and pulling in large amounts in fundraising.That month, the Enquirer published a front-page story: “Ben Carson butchered my brain!” The article claimed that Carson had left a sponge in a person’s brain during a procedure. Carson responded at the time by saying his opponents had found “five or six disgruntled people … and many of those cases never went anywhere”.View image in fullscreenBy March 2016, Carson was out and Trump’s closest rival became Ted Cruz, the Texas senator.The Enquirer began to print unsubstantiated stories about Cruz having multiple affairs, labelling the devout Christian a hypocrite on its front pages.In one example – redolent of how the publications would twist headlines until they had only a passing connection to the facts – an Enquirer headline read “Ted Cruz Shamed by Porn Star”, above a picture of a woman wearing a bikini.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe actual story was about Cruz’s campaign having to pull an advertisement after learning one of the actors had worked in adult films.In May, with Cruz trailing Trump in the primaries and battling to keep his candidacy alive, the Enquirer printed a “World Exclusive Investigation”.Next to a grainy photo of the JFK assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, the magazine printed the headline “Ted Cruz father linked to JFK assassination!”. Trump picked up on the story, mentioning the claim in campaign speeches.Cruz labelled the unfounded claims “kooky” and tore into Trump, calling him an “amoral pathological liar”, and a “braggadocious, arrogant buffoon”. Within hours though, Cruz was out of the race and Trump’s path to the Republican nomination was clear.View image in fullscreenAs the Republican party broadly swung behind Trump’s candidacy, the Enquirer turned its attention to his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.Headlines ranged from the simple (“Corrupt!”), to the ridiculous (Hillary’s hitman tells all!”). The magazine attacked Clinton’s health, said she was “going to jail” and continually labelled her corrupt. It alleged, without any reliable evidence, that she used racist language and that she “blackmailed and intimated” prosecutors, claims that are entirely unsubstantiated.By election day, Clinton had appeared on the Enquirer’s front page at least 15 times in a five-month period.In its first edition published after Trump’s shock victory, the Enquirer plastered the incoming president on its front page and outlined a supposed checklist of his most important policy priorities.Above the headline “My first 100 days!”, the magazine apparently couldn’t resist a final insult to anyone who doubted the incoming president: “We told you so!” More

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      Trump speaks before historic criminal trial over ‘hush money’– video

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      Donald Trump was seen arriving in court on Monday in his criminal trial involving the adult film actor Stormy Daniels and the former Playboy model Karen McDougal. Trump, the first former US president to face a criminal trial, is accused of paying Daniels and McDougal to cover up alleged extramarital liaisons that could have damaged his candidacy in the 2016 election. The trial is scheduled to start this morning, with jury selection in Manhattan supreme court More

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      New book details Steve Bannon’s ‘Maga movement’ plan to rule for 100 years

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      Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chair and White House strategist, believed before the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on Congress that a “Maga movement” of Trump supporters “could rule for a hundred years”.“Outside the uniparty,” the Washington Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf writes in a new book, referring to Bannon’s term for the political establishment, “as Bannon saw it, there was the progressive wing of the Democratic party, which he considered a relatively small slice of the electorate. And the rest, the vast majority of the country, was Maga.“Bannon believed the Maga movement, if it could break out of being suppressed and marginalised by the establishment, represented a dominant coalition that could rule for a hundred years.”Arnsdorf’s book, Finish What We Started: The Maga Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, will be published next week. The Post published an excerpt on Thursday.A businessman who became a driver of far-right thought through his stewardship of Breitbart News, Bannon was Trump’s campaign chair in 2016 and his chief White House strategist in 2017, a post he lost after neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville that summer.He remained close to Trump, however, particularly as Trump attempted to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden.That attempt culminated in the attack on Congress of 6 January 2021, when supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” to block certification of Biden’s win attacked the US Capitol.Nine deaths have been linked to the attack, including law enforcement suicides. More than 1,200 arrests have been made and hundreds of convictions secured. Trump was impeached for inciting the insurrection but acquitted by Senate Republicans.Notwithstanding 88 criminal charges for election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments, and multimillion-dollar penalties in civil cases over fraud and defamation, the latter arising from a rape claim a judge called “substantially true”, Trump won the Republican nomination with ease this year.As a Trump-Biden rematch grinds into gear, Bannon remains an influential voice on the far right, particularly through his War Room podcast and despite his own legal problems over contempt of Congress and alleged fraud, both of which he denies.The “uniparty”, in Bannon’s view, as described by Arnsdorf, is “the establishment [Bannon] hungered to destroy. The neocons, neoliberals, big donors, globalists, Wall Street, corporatists, elites.”“Maga” stands for “Make America great again”, Trump’s political slogan.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionArnsdorf writes: “In his confidence that there were secretly millions of Democrats who were yearning to be Maga followers and just didn’t know it yet, Bannon was again taking inspiration from Hoffer, who observed that true believers were prone to conversion from one cause to another since they were driven more by their need to identify with a mass movement than by any particular ideology.”Eric Hoffer, Arnsdorf writes, was “the ‘longshoreman philosopher’, so called because he had worked as a stevedore on the San Francisco docks while writing his first book, The True Believer [which] caused a sensation when it was published in 1951, becoming a manual for comprehending the age of Hitler, Stalin and Mao”.Bannon, Arnsdorf writes, “was not, like a typical political strategist, trying to tinker around the edges of the existing party coalitions in the hope of eking out 50% plus one. Bannon already told you: he wanted to bring everything crashing down.“He wanted to completely dismantle and redefine the parties. He wanted a showdown between a globalist, elite party, called the Democrats, and a populist, Maga party, called the Republicans. In that match-up, he was sure, the Republicans would win every time.”Now, seven months out from election day and with Trump and Biden neck-and-neck in the polls, Bannon’s proposition stands to be tested again.
      Biden v Trump: What’s in store for the US and the world?On Thursday 2 May, 3pm EDT join Tania Branigan, David Smith, Mehdi Hasan and Tara Setmayer for the inside track on the people, the ideas and the events that might shape the US election campaign. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live More

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      Trump called Iowa evangelicals ‘so-called Christians’ and ‘pieces of shit’, book says

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      In the heat of the Republican primary of 2016, Donald Trump called evangelical supporters of his rival Ted Cruz “so-called Christians” and “real pieces of shit”, a new book says.The news lands as the 2024 Republican primary heats up, two months out from the Iowa caucus and a day after Trump’s closest rival this time, the hard-right Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, was endorsed by Bob Vander Plaats, an influential evangelical leader in Iowa.The new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, by Tim Alberta, an influential reporter and staff writer for the Atlantic, will be published on 5 December. The Guardian obtained a copy.Early in the book, Alberta describes fallout from an event at Liberty University, the evangelical college in Virginia, shortly before the Iowa vote in January 2016.As candidates jockeyed for support from evangelicals, a powerful bloc in any Republican election, Trump was asked to name his favourite Bible verse.Attempting to follow the advice of Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, the thrice-married, not noticeably church-going New York billionaire and reality TV star introduced it as “Two Corinthians”, rather than “Second Corinthians”, as would have been correct.“The laughter and ridicule were embarrassing enough for Trump,” Alberta writes. “But the news of Perkins endorsing Ted Cruz, just a few days later, sent him into a spiral. He began to speculate that there was a conspiracy among powerful evangelicals to deny him the GOP nomination.“When Cruz’s allies began using the ‘Two Corinthians’ line to attack him in the final days before the Iowa caucuses, Trump told one Iowa Republican official, ‘You know, these so-called Christians hanging around with Ted are some real pieces of shit.’”Alberta adds that “in private over the coming years”, Trump “would use even more colourful language to describe the evangelical community”.Cruz won Iowa but Trump took the second primary contest, in New Hampshire, and won the nomination with ease. After beating Hillary Clinton and spending four chaotic years in the White House, he was beaten by Joe Biden in 2020.Pursuing the lie that his defeat was the result of electoral fraud, Trump refused to concede defeat. He has continued to dominate Republican politics, now as the clear frontrunner to be the nominee again.Trump has maintained that status despite having been impeached twice (the second for inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress) and despite facing 91 criminal charges (34 for hush-money payments to a porn star) and civil threats including a case arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.Evangelicals remain the dominant bloc in Iowa, 55% of respondents to an NBC News/Des Moines Register poll in August identifying as “devoutly religious”. But despite his lengthy rap sheet, Trump’s hold on such voters appears to remain strong.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn October, the Register put him at 43% support overall in Iowa, with DeSantis and the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley 27 points behind. The same poll said 44% of evangelicals planned to make Trump their first choice, with DeSantis at 22% and Haley seven points back.Evangelicals have also stayed with Trump nationwide. According to exit polls, in the 2020 presidential election he was supported by 76% of white evangelical voters.DeSantis and Haley must attempt to catch Trump in Iowa. Vander Plaats’ endorsement was thus a sought-after prize, if one Trump did not pursue, declining to attend a Thanksgiving Family Forum Vander Plaats hosted in Des Moines last week.On Monday, announcing his decision to endorse DeSantis, the president of the Family Leader, which seeks to “inspire the church to engage government for the advance of God’s kingdom and the strengthening of family”, pointed to the conclusion he hoped his followers would reach.Speaking to Fox News, Vander Plaats said: “I don’t think America is going to elect [Trump] president again. I think America would be well served to have a choice, and I really believe Ron DeSantis should be that guy. And I think Iowa is tailor-made for him to win this.”Trump’s rivals may yet take encouragement from Register polling, should evangelicals begin to doubt Trump. In the October poll, 76% of Iowa evangelicals said they had a positive view of DeSantis, while 62% said they liked Haley. More

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      Mitt Romney mulled unity ticket with ‘scary’ Cruz to stop Trump, book says

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      Mitt Romney considered a desperate, third presidential bid in 2016, aiming to stop Donald Trump as part of an unlikely unity ticket with Ted Cruz – a hard-right Texas senator who Romney privately considered “scary” and “a demagogue”, a new book reports.“Romney was willing to wage a quixotic and humiliating presidential bid if that’s what it took,” McKay Coppins writes in Romney: A Reckoning, a biography of the 2012 Republican nominee written in close cooperation with its subject.“He might even be able to swallow sharing a ticket with Cruz, a man he’d described as ‘scary’ and ‘a demagogue’ in his journal. But Romney didn’t think the gambit would actually succeed in taking down Trump. The problem was that no one else in the party seemed to know what to do about Trump, either.”Widely trailed, Coppins’ book will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy. A spokesperson for Cruz did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Trump stormed to the nomination. Beating Hillary Clinton, he had four chaotic years in power before losing to Joe Biden. Trump refused to go quietly, however, inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress and now dominating polling for the next Republican nomination despite facing 91 criminal charges and an array of civil cases.Romney, now 76, is a former venture capitalist, Massachusetts governor and Winter Olympics chief executive who ran for the Republican nomination in 2008 then won it in 2012. Beaten by Barack Obama, he entered the next election as a party grandee.Describing backstage machinations by power players seeking to stop Trump, Coppins says Romney was approached five days before the New Hampshire primary by Robert O’Brien, a friend and adviser, and Jim Talent, a former senator from Missouri.“The party was in crisis,” Coppins writes. “An interloping frontrunner was on the verge of hijacking the GOP, and the rest of the field had shown they couldn’t beat him. If no one else stepped up by 1 March, they argued, Romney should enter the race and tap Cruz as his running mate to unite Republican opposition to Trump.“O’Brien and Talent called this the ‘Robert Kennedy’ strategy – get in late to build momentum, win enough delegates to keep the frontrunner from clinching the nomination, then march into the convention girded for a floor fight.”Robert F Kennedy entered the 1968 Democratic primary late, tapping a surge of support before being assassinated in California.Coppins says Romney entertained the Cruz idea, telling Talent and O’Brien his “number one priority is to stop Trump”.Formally, Romney broke with Trump after Trump refused to disavow support from David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader. Quoting Romney’s journal, Coppins says he reached for the words of Winston Churchill, writing: “It is nearly certain that he will be the nominee. I am not tempted in the slightest to retreat. I will fight him on the beaches. I will fight him in the air …” In public, Romney denounced Trump in a speech, calling him a “phony” and a “fraud”. That didn’t move the needle, so Romney reportedly sought to form another anti-Trump ticket, with Cruz as nominee for president and Marco Rubio, the Florida senator also in the race, as the Texan’s running mate. That didn’t work either. The two men were “just too self-interested”, Coppins writes, adding: “With each passing day of inaction, Trump gained more votes, more delegates and more momentum.”Coppins’ reporting lands amid a 2024 primary in which a huge Republican field has again refused to coalesce round one alternative to Trump.In 2016, Romney also tried to “usher John Kasich out of the race”, Coppins writes. The former Ohio governor refused, prompting Romney to write in his journal: “Delusion runs deep in politicians’ veins.” Romney sent Kasich “a series of increasingly gruff emails”, telling him to drop out, back Cruz then fight for the nomination at the convention. Kasich, Coppins writes, responded with “more stump speech pablum”.“Refusing to believe that Kasich was so obtuse that he couldn’t grasp basic math, Romney began to entertain the theory that Kasich was somehow back-channeling with Trump. How else to explain his bullheaded commitment to a nonsensical strategy that only helped the frontrunner?”Nothing worked. Trump became president.In a move symbolic of how many top Republicans soon resigned themselves to Trump, O’Brien, the man with the Romney-Cruz plan, ultimately became Trump’s last national security adviser.Romney became a Utah senator in 2018, going on to twice vote to impeach Trump and then call him a demagogue in a stinging retirement announcement last month. But even Romney was not immune to temptation. Coppins describes a famously humiliating flirtation with becoming secretary of state after Trump won power in 2016.“Finally, Trump cut to the chase. ‘You really need to say that you’ve come to the conclusion that I’m terrific and that I’ll be a great president. We need to clear this up.’“But Romney couldn’t bring himself to do it.” More

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      ‘They will bend the knee’: Lincoln project cofounder cautions against dismissing Trump

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      ‘They will bend the knee’: Lincoln project cofounder cautions against dismissing TrumpRick Wilson, a veteran Republican strategist, suggests the ex-president still holds sway despite multiple crises Donald Trump, the former US president, is all washed up. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is poised to dethrone him. This is the view currently in vogue among many in Washington.Not so fast, argues Rick Wilson, a veteran Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group that shot to prominence with go-for-the-jugular advertisements before becoming mired in scandals of its own.Who’s next? Republicans who might go up against Trump in 2024Read more“The greatest danger in American politics is not recognising that there are great dangers,” Wilson, who lives in Florida, says in a phone interview. “The same people in 2015 and 2016 were confidently asserting Donald Trump could never, ever under any circumstances win the Republican nomination, and there were never any circumstances where Donald Trump could beat Hillary Clinton, and then he could never have almost a million people die because of his mishandling of Covid and on and on and on and on.“I know that the Republicans who right now are acting very bold and the donors who are acting very frisky – as Trump starts winning primaries, they will bend the knee, they will break, they will fall, they will all come back into line.”When Trump scheduled his announcement of a third run for the White House this month, he had hoped to ride a “red wave” of midterm election successes and sweep aside potential rivals within the Republican party. But the red wave ebbed and his anticlimactic campaign launch had the opposite effect.With Trump at arguably his weakest point since last year’s January 6 insurrection, senior Republicans are criticising his losing habit, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is ridiculing him and big money donors such as Ken Griffin and Stephen Schwarzman are deserting what they perceive as a sinking ship.The new conventional wisdom – or wishful thinking – among numerous pundits is that, after surviving crisis after crisis, Trump has finally met his Waterloo. A slew of federal, state and congressional investigations and opinion polls showing DeSantis ahead or level lend credence to this view.Some have noted, however, that Trump maintains an iron grip on his base and, just as in 2016, that might be enough to win a Republican primary race in which the anti-Trump vote is split among several candidates.Wilson, 59, author of the books Everything Trump Touches Dies and Running Against The Devil: A Plot To Save America from Trump and Democrats From Themselves, says: “He controls a quarter, at the minimum, of the Republican base. Even if it’s 15% and he goes into Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and he wins primaries because he has 15% going in, that’s the ballgame. It’s over. It’s done. Everybody else, it’s all over bar the crying.”He adds: “Right now they’re all talking so much shit: ‘I’m not going to get with Trump. I’m going to be with the hot new number, DeSantis.’ When DeSantis gets his ass handed to him, when he gets his clock cleaned in a debate or forum or just by Trump grinding away at him, eating him alive mentally for weeks on end, and suddenly Donald Trump’s numbers start posting up again, all the conservative thinkers who are right now like, ‘We will never vote for Trump again, we have integrity!’ will find themselves some excuse. ‘Well, you know, we don’t like Trump’s tweets, but otherwise it’s pure communism!’“It’s all bullshit, it’s all a fucking game, and that game is going to play out in a way that does not result in the outcome that the donor class thinks they’re going to get.”Wilson, who began his career on the 1988 presidential campaign of George HW Bush, worked as a consultant and political ad maker for numerous candidates and state parties. In December 2019 he and other Republican operatives founded the Lincoln Project, a political action committee that assailed Trump with a punch-in-the-mouth brio eschewed by “when they go low, we go high” Democrats.Some of the co-founders have acknowledged their part in the Republican party’s descent into bloodsport, hypocrisy and extremism. Wilson told an audience at the group’s launch event: “We have, as the great political philosopher Liam Neeson once said, a particular set of skills. Skills that make us a nightmare for people like Donald Trump.”He produced slick advertisements that got under the president’s skin and helped make the Lincoln Project the best known of the so-called Never Trump groups, raising tens of millions of dollars.But its meteoric rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall. The group’s co-founder John Weaver was revealed to have sent sexually charged messages to multiple men, sometimes with offers of employment or advancement. There were allegations of opaque accounting and financial impropriety that Wilson and others adamantly deny. A glut of high-profile figures resigned.But the Lincoln Project has survived in slimmed down form and continued to wage war on Trump and Trumpism in the midterms. Paradoxically, its continued relevance partly depends on Trump’s own; without him, it loses the principal reason for its creation. It has already launched attacks on DeSantis as a “new ultra-Maga megastar” who poses his own threat to American democracy.Living in the Florida state capital, Tallahassee, Wilson is ideally placed to take stock of the governor, a former US navy lawyer and congressman whose own brand of conservative populism and “anti-wokeness” helped him win re-election by nearly 20 percentage points over the Democrat Charlie Crist.He says: “Ron DeSantis won an election in Florida against a three-time loser, a campaign that was run by the best Republican party in the country, and I mean that because I’m a guy who helped over many years elect many people in the great state of Florida. The quality of our operation here made it look easy.“Has Ron DeSantis been to the rodeo? Has he been out there in the fight? Has he actually faced up against a full campaign of the brutality and the cruelty that Donald Trump will level against him? He has not. It’s like he’s walked on to the field on to third base and thought he hit a grand slam home run. It’s easy for Republicans to win in Florida. It’s how it’s supposed to be: we built it that way. In a Republican primary against Trump, even Trump in a weakened state still has an innate feral sense of cruelty and cunning that Ron DeSantis does not have. How does Trump know that? He watched the debate.”Wilson is referring to a gubernatorial debate in which Crist asked his opponent to commit to another full four-year term in the governor’s mansion; like a rabbit caught in headlights, DeSantis, 44, struggled to answer directly.“It was nine seconds of the gears moving in his head and you could see the agony on his face, like ‘I don’t know what to say.’ Trump never has a doubt. He may be an asshole but he never has a doubt. Ron is over-intellectualising it and I’m telling you: this guy has a glass jaw.”This, Wilson predicts, will become apparent on the debate stage, a setting where Florida Republicans such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio struggled against Trump in 2016. “All of a sudden, all that donor money is going to go, ‘Oh, fuck,’ and then they’re going to call Ron’s people and go, ‘Hey, listen, we love Ron but we’re worried. We’re gonna have to sit this one out for a little while. Let’s see what it looks like in a month.’“And then a month will pass and all of a sudden Donald Trump is the nominee. That’s how it’s going to go and I don’t say this out of any joy; I say this because I’ve just been to this fucking party too many times now.”Wilson also suggests that DeSantis may lack the personal touch and knack for retail politics that is crucial in a Republican primary. A recent New Yorker magazine profile noted several people describing “his lack of curiosity about others, his indifferent table manners, his aversion to the political rituals of dispensing handshakes and questions about the kids”.Wilson opines: “You’re telling me you’re going to send Ron DeSantis to New Hampshire where he has to go and sit in a diner with the Merrimack county GOP chairman and that 79-year-old codger is going to want to talk to Ron DeSantis about the gold standard or whatever and Ron DeSantis is going to sit there and get bored and restless and leave or be angry? I’m sorry. Sell me another fantasy of Ron DeSantis the perfect candidate.”TopicsRepublicansRon DeSantisDonald TrumpFloridaUS politicsHillary ClintonUS elections 2016featuresReuse this content More

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      Jury acquits Russian analyst of lying to FBI in Trump dossier case

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      Jury acquits Russian analyst of lying to FBI in Trump dossier caseThis was the third case brought by special counsel John Durham in FBI’s own investigation into Russian collusion claims A jury on Tuesday acquitted a thinktank analyst accused of lying to the FBI about his role in the creation of a discredited dossier about Donald Trump.The case against Igor Danchenko was the third and possibly final case brought by the special counsel John Durham as part of his investigation into how the FBI conducted its own inquiry into allegations of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Kremlin.Sources in Russian analyst’s Trump dossier fabricated, prosecutors argueRead moreThe first two cases ended in an acquittal and a guilty plea with a sentence of probation.Danchenko betrayed no emotion as the verdict was read. His wife wiped away tears after the clerk read the final “not guilty” to the four counts he faced.The jury reached its verdict after roughly nine hours of deliberations over two days.The acquittal marked a significant setback for Durham. Despite hopes among Trump supporters that the prosecutor would uncover a sweeping conspiracy within the FBI and other agencies to derail his candidacy, the three-year investigation failed to produce evidence that met those expectations.The Danchenko case was the first of the three to delve deeply into the origins of the “Steele dossier”, a compendium of allegations that Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was colluding with the Kremlin.Most famously, it alleged that the Russians could have blackmail material on Trump for his supposed interactions with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. Trump derided the dossier as fake news and a political witch-hunt when it became public in 2017.Danchenko, by his own admission, was responsible for 80% of the raw intelligence in the dossier and half of the accompanying analysis, though trial testimony indicated that Danchenko was shocked and dismayed about how Steele presented the material and portrayed it as factual when Danchenko considered it more to be rumor and speculation.Prosecutors said that if Danchenko had been more honest about his sources, the FBI might not have treated the dossier so credulously. As it turned out, the FBI used material from the dossier to support applications for warrantless surveillance of a Trump campaign official, Carter Page, even though the FBI never was able to corroborate a single allegation in the dossier.Prosecutors said Danchenko lied about the identity of his own sources for the material he gave to Steele.The jury began deliberations Monday afternoon after hearing closing arguments on four counts. On Friday, the US district judge Anthony Trenga threw out a fifth count, saying prosecutors had failed to prove it as a matter of law.Trenga nearly threw out all of the charges before the trial began, citing the legal strength of Danchenko’s defense, but allowed the case to proceed in what he described as “an extremely close call”.TopicsFBIDonald TrumpUS elections 2016US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Sources in Russian analyst’s Trump dossier fabricated, prosecutors argue

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      Sources in Russian analyst’s Trump dossier fabricated, prosecutors argueIgor Danchenko, who played a vital role in creating the Steele dossier, has been indicted on five counts of lying to the FBI A Russian analyst who played a major role in the creation of a flawed dossier about Donald Trump fabricated one of his own sources and concealed the identity of another when interviewed by the FBI, prosecutors said Tuesday.The allegations were aired during opening statements in the trial of Igor Danchenko, who is indicted on five counts of making false statements to the FBI.US justice department says Trump didn’t turn over all documents – reportRead moreThe FBI interviewed Danchenko on multiple occasions in 2017 as it tried to corroborate allegations in what became known as the “Steele dossier”.That dossier, by the British spy Christopher Steele – commissioned by Democrats during the 2016 presidential campaign – included allegations of contact between the Trump campaign and Russian government officials, as well as allegations that the Russians may have held compromising information over Trump in the form of videos showing him engaged in salacious sexual activity in a Moscow hotel.Specifically, prosecutors say, Danchenko lied when he said he obtained some information in an anonymous phone call from a man he believed to be Sergei Millian, a former head of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce.The prosecutor Michael Keilty told jurors in US district court in Alexandria that Danchenko had never spoken with Millian and that phone records showed he had never received an anonymous phone call at the time Danchenko claimed it occurred.Prosecutors also say Danchenko lied when he said he never “talked” with a man named Charles Dolan about the allegations contained in the dossier. Prosecutors say there is evidence that Danchenko “spoke with Mr Dolan over email” about very specific items that showed up in the dossier.The FBI needed to know that Dolan was an important source for Danchenko, Keilty said, because Dolan is a Democratic operative who has worked on the presidential campaign of every Democratic candidate since Jimmy Carter, and thus would have had motivation to fabricate or embellish allegations against Trump.“Those lies mattered,” Keilty said.But Danchenko’s attorney, Danny Onorato, told jurors that his client had been completely truthful with the FBI.He pointed out that Danchenko had never said he was certain that Millian was the source of the anonymous call but that he had good reason to believe it. The government’s case required jurors to become “mind readers” to assess Danchenko’s subjective belief about the source of the phone call, Onorato said.And while phone records might not show a call, Onorato said, the government had no idea whether a call could have been placed with a mobile app rather than a traditional telephone provider. Indeed, Onorato said, it made more sense that such a call would have occurred using an internet app because so many of them conceal the source of the call, and the caller wanted to be anonymous.As for the allegations about his discussions with Dolan, Onorato said, Danchenko had answered the question truthfully because the two had not “talked” – but rather had conducted a written exchange. If the FBI had wanted to know about email exchanges, it should have asked a different question, Onorato said.“The law doesn’t let you rewrite the dictionary,” Onorato said.Keilty, in his opening, acknowledged to jurors that evidence would show the FBI made errors in conducting its investigations, but he said that shouldn’t exonerate Danchenko.“A bank robber doesn’t get a pass just because the security guard was asleep,” Keilty said.The first prosecution witness was the FBI analyst Brian Auten, who testified that information from the Steele dossier had been used to support a surveillance warrant against a Trump campaign official, Carter Page.Under questioning from Durham, Auten testified that the dossier had been used to bolster the surveillance application even though the FBI couldn’t corroborate its allegations.Auten said the FBI had checked with other government agencies to see if they had corroboration but nothing had come back. Auten and other FBI agents had even met with Steele in the United Kingdom in 2016 and offered him as much as $1m if he could supply corroboration for the allegations in the dossier, but none had been provided.Danchenko is the third person to be prosecuted by the special counsel John Durham, who was appointed to investigate the origins of “Crossfire Hurricane” – the designation given to the FBI’s 2016 investigation into Trump’s Russia connections. It is also the first of Durham’s cases that delves deeply into the origins of the dossier, which Trump derided as fake news and a political witch-hunt.TopicsFBIDonald TrumpDemocratsRussiaUS elections 2016US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down Trump

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      Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down Trump The New York Times reporter presents a forensic account of the damage he has done to AmericaMaggie Haberman, the New York Times’ Trump whisperer, delivers. Her latest book is much more than 600 pages of context, scoop and drama. It is a political epic, tracing Donald Trump’s journey from the streets of Queens to Manhattan’s Upper East Side, from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, his Elba. There, the 45th president holds court – and broods and plots his return.Kushner camping tale one of many bizarre scenes in latest Trump bookRead moreHaberman gives Trump and those close to him plenty of voice – and rope. The result is a cacophonous symphony. Confidence Man informs and entertains but is simultaneously absolutely not funny. Trumpworld presents a reptilian tableau – reality TV does Lord of the Flies.For just one example, Mark Meadows, Trump’s last White House chief of staff, is depicted as erratic and detestable. Then there’s the family. Haberman reports how, after the 2016 election, Melania Trump won a renegotiated pre-nuptial agreement. Haberman also describes Trump repeatedly dumping on his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. If only he looked like Tom Brady and spoke in a deeper register. If only Ivanka had not converted to Judaism.The abuse gets absurd – even a kind of baroque. According to Haberman, at one 2020 campaign strategy meeting Trump implied Kushner might be brutally attacked, even raped, if he ever went camping: “Can you imagine Jared and his skinny ass camping? It’d be like something out of Deliverance.”The reader, however, should not weep for Jared. In Haberman’s telling, he is the kid who was born on third base and mistakes his good fortune with hitting a triple. For his part, Kushner is shown trashing Steve Bannon, the far-right ideologue who was campaign chair and chief White House strategist but was forced out within months.Haberman catches Kushner gleefully asking a White House visitor: “Did you see I cut Bannon’s balls off?”To quote Peter Navarro, like Bannon now a former Trump official under indictment, “nepotism and excrement roll downhill”.As it happens, Bannon’s testicles grew back. Like Charlie Kushner, Jared’s father, he received a Trump pardon. Bannon also helped propagate the big lie that Trump won the election, stoking the Capitol attack.These days, Bannon awaits sentencing, convicted of contempt of Congress. He also faces felony fraud charges arising from an alleged border-wall charity scam. In Trump’s universe, there is always a grift.For Confidence Man, Haberman interviewed Trump three times. He confesses that he is drawn to her, like a moth to a flame.“I love being with her,” he says. “She’s like my psychiatrist”.The daughter of Clyde Haberman, a legendary New York Times reporter, is not flattered or amused. She sees through her subject.“The reality is that he treats everyone like they are his psychiatrists,” Haberman writes. “All present a chance for him to vent or test reactions or gauge how his statements are playing or discover how he is feeling.”Also, Trump and Haberman have not always had a rapport. When he was president, she would interview him and he would attack her. In April 2018, Trump tweeted that Haberman was a Clinton “flunkie” he didn’t know or speak with, a “third-rate reporter” at that. He called her “Maggot Haberman” and even contemplated obtaining her phone records to identify her sources.Trump is 76 but he remains the envious boy from a New York outer borough, face pressed against the Midtown glass. Haberman is not the only Manhattan reporter he has courted and attacked. In 2018, he threatened Michael Wolff for writing Fire and Fury, the Trump book that started it all. Later, he welcomed Wolff to Mar-a-Lago.Haberman vividly captures Trump’s lack of couth. For just one example, according to Haberman the president chose to enrich his first meeting with a foreign leader, Theresa May, by asking the British prime minister to “imagine if some animals with tattoos raped your daughter and she got pregnant”.Each of Trump’s three supreme court justices voted to overturn Roe v Wade. One might wonder how the young woman in Trump’s hypothetical would feel about that.Haberman also pierces Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns. All that talk about an “audit” was a simple dodge, birthed on a campaign plane.In the run-up to Super Tuesday, the crucial day of primaries in March 2016, aides confronted Trump about his taxes. The candidate, Haberman writes, “thought for a second about how to ‘get myself out of this’, as he said. He leaned back, before snapping up to a sudden thought.01:13“‘Well, you know my taxes are under audit. I always get audited … So what I mean is, well I could just say, ‘I’ll release them when I’m no longer under audit. ‘Cause I’ll never not be under audit.’”These days, the Trump Organization faces criminal tax fraud charges. Together with Ivanka, Don Jr and Eric, his children from his first marriage, Trump is also being sued for fraud by Letitia James, the New York attorney general.As a younger reporter, Haberman did two stints at the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch’s flagship US tabloid. Murdoch’s succession plans – it’s Lachlan, he told Trump – appear in Confidence Man. So does Tucker Carlson, the headline-making Fox News host and kindred spirit to Vladimir Putin.Trump made up audit excuse for not releasing tax returns on the fly, new book saysRead moreAccording to Haberman, Carlson met Kushner and demanded Trump commute Roger Stone’s conviction for perjury.“What happened to Roger Stone should never happen to anyone in this country of any political party,” Carlson reportedly thundered, threatening to go public.Stone has since emerged as a central figure in the January 6 insurrection. Apparently, he has a thing for violence. For some Republicans, a commitment to “law and order” is elastic.When it comes to the attempt to overturn the election and the Capitol attack it fueled, Trump’s fate rests with prosecutors in Washington DC and Fulton county, Georgia.That old campaign chant from 2016, “Lock her up”? It carries its own irony.
      Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America is published in the US by Penguin Random House
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