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      Georgia takes on Trump and his allies | podcast

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      Until five months ago, no former US president had ever faced criminal charges. As of Monday evening, Donald Trump is facing 91 felony counts. The 97-page indictment handed down by a Fulton county grand jury in Georgia includes 41 criminal counts, 13 of them against Trump. This case may represent the biggest legal peril for Trump to date and it could see him behind bars, no matter who wins the presidential election next year.
      Joan E Greve and Sam Levine discuss every possible outcome

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      A Black prosecutor was elected in Georgia – so white Republicans made their own district

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      Since 1870, the Augusta judicial circuit has been home to the criminal justice system of a three-county area on Georgia’s border with South Carolina. In that time, no African American has been elected district attorney of the circuit – until 2020, when a Black lawyer named Jared Williams upset a conservative, pro-police candidate with just more than 50% of the vote.But that historic win was short-lived. The day after his election, a lawyer and state lawmaker in the area proposed something unusual: that the circuit’s whitest county separate itself from the Augusta circuit, creating a new judicial circuit in Georgia for the first time in nearly 40 years.“Does the board of commissioners want to be there [sic] own judicial circuit,” Barry Fleming, a Republican state legislator from nearby Harlem, asked the Columbia county commission chair, Doug Duncan, in a text message.Duncan supported the plan, and in December 2020 issued a resolution asking the area’s lawmakers, including Fleming, to introduce legislation that would separate Columbia county from the judicial circuit it had been a part of for 150 years. Fleming’s bill passed with bipartisan support.The split caused the disenfranchisement of the old circuit’s Black voters, voting advocacy organization Black Voters Matter Fund contended in a lawsuit that was eventually dismissed by the state supreme court. Those voters had chosen Williams, who ran on a pledge to uphold criminal justice reforms such as not prosecuting low-level marijuana possession, a crime which disproportionately affects Black and minority communities.Instead of Williams, Black voters in Columbia county got as their prosecutor Bobby Christine, a Trump-appointed US attorney who was appointed by the Republican governor, Brian Kemp. Christine then chose Williams’s opponent as his chief deputy.Voting advocates say the circuit split is an example of the type of minority rule that Republicans are accused of engaging in across the US.“There was a time when as we started to win these elections, white people would leave,” said Cliff Albright, executive director of Black Voters Matter Fund. “But now they’ve figured out, we don’t actually have to leave, we can just change the jurisdiction. It is a way, even when the political minority is losing, to hold on to the mechanism of coercion through the courts and law enforcement.”Despite voting advocates’ opposition, the circuit split had bipartisan support and was welcomed by some Black Democrats in the legislature, who argued that a backlog of felony cases in Richmond county could be reduced if the circuit were smaller and didn’t include Columbia county.Fleming and Duncan did not respond to requests for comment. In response to a public records request, Duncan’s office said it had no communications with Fleming related to the Augusta split.The splitting of the Augusta judicial circuit and the resulting creation of the new Columbia judicial circuit is not the only split to have been proposed in recent years. Nor is it the only split to have involved Fleming, a hardline conservative lawyer who was the architect of Georgia’s 2021 sweeping voter suppression law.Following the Augusta split, two Republican lawmakers in Georgia proposed a circuit split in Oconee county after the election of a progressive prosecutor who ran on a platform of addressing systemic racism. Since then, Republican legislators statewide created a prosecutor oversight commission that holds the power to remove prosecutors for misconduct. The commission has been heavily criticized by Democratic prosecutors such as Fani Willis, who is investigating the Trump campaign’s meddling in the 2020 election in Georgia. Willis and others told lawmakers the commission was created so white Republicans could target minority prosecutors.The splits come at a time when criticism of prosecutors like Williams – who refuse to toe the line of tough-on-crime conservative policies – abounds on the right. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has made punishment of so-called progressive prosecutors part of his presidential campaign, firing a prosecutor who signed a pledge criticizing the criminalization of transgender people. In Mississippi, white Republican leaders have created a judicial district with hand-picked judges and law enforcement to oversee a majority-Black city.The Florida prosecutor who was removed by DeSantis has sued the governor, saying that by “challenging this illegal abuse of power, we make sure that no governor can toss out the results of an election because he doesn’t like the outcome”.Tossing out the outcome of an election is exactly what happened in Georgia when Republicans pushed for the creation of the new Columbia judicial circuit, Williams and others said.Before Fleming spearheaded the Augusta split, others had proposed breaking up the circuit. In 2018, state senator Harold Jones, who is Black, requested that the judicial council of Georgia conduct a workload study for courts in the three counties that comprise the old circuit – Columbia, Richmond and Burke. The study found that workloads were high for local judges, especially in the majority-Black county of Richmond, Jones said, so he argued that the 200,000 people there should have their own circuit. But he couldn’t make any headway.“As a Democrat, to do something that monumental, it’s next to impossible,” Jones said.It wasn’t until December 2020 that the study was used as rationale for a circuit split. Then, the Columbia county board of commissioners issued a resolution requesting that its local legislative delegation – which includes Fleming – introduce a law that would formalize the split. The resolution cited Jones’s 2018 study, but that was only part of the story.Behind the scenes, Columbia county leaders were coordinating to separate the county in response to Williams’s historic election win. Among those working to institute the split was Fleming himself.Fleming, an attorney who works on behalf of nearly 40 state and county governments throughout Georgia, is a full-throated Trump supporter. He has been heavily involved in election matters through his former role as chair of the special committee on election integrity. Fleming and Duncan were vocal opponents of Williams and supported his opponent, Natalie Paine.Held in the midst of widespread protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd, the 2020 race between Williams and Paine, who was appointed by Kemp in 2017 and ran unopposed in 2018, reflected national themes of conflict between so-called law-and-order conservatives and progressive reformers. Williams prevailed despite attacks calling him “soft on crime”.His win set in motion the series of events to split Columbia county. After Fleming’s House bill, state senator Lee Anderson, who has ties to Fleming through their failed effort to annex land in Fleming’s home town away from Columbia county, introduced a senate bill officially calling for the creation of the Columbia judicial circuit.Co-sponsoring the bill were a handful of conservative and well-connected legislators including Jeff Mullis, a Confederate monument defender; Butch Miller, a far-right election denier; and state senator Bill Cowsert, who is Kemp’s brother-in-law. The bill eventually passed the senate unanimously, with many Democrats including Jones voting in favor due to their desire for a smaller circuit that could better serve Richmond’s high Black population, Jones said.Seven of the eight judges in the old Augusta circuit objected to the split, saying it would not address workload issues.The Augusta split provided a roadmap for Republicans throughout Georgia to fight back against progressive prosecutors. In 2020, Deborah Gonzalez became the state’s first Latina district attorney for the Western judicial circuit, winning on a platform of ending prosecution of low-level marijuana possession. Two Republican state lawmakers quickly asked the judicial council of Georgia to perform a study that would justify the separation of Oconee County from the Western circuit. Oconee is 87% white while the other county in the circuit, Athens-Clark, has a much higher Black population of 27%.One of the lawmakers, state representative Houston Gaines, was clear about the rationale behind the proposed split.“Our district attorney is choosing which laws to prosecute and which laws not to, and that is not the role of the district attorney,” Gaines told the local press.Then on 12 April, Meriwether county commissioners issued a resolution asking for itself and two other counties – Troup and Coweta – to have their own circuit, citing increasing populations and felony caseloads.The public reason for the proposed split, according to the Coweta circuit district attorney, Herb Cranford, is the circuit’s per-judge caseload. But recommendations for splits traditionally come from the judicial council of Georgia, and Cranford has said that a council study isn’t necessary.The Carroll county sheriff, Terry Langley – whose law enforcement agency oversees one of the five counties in Coweta’s judicial circuit – spoke in support of the split, saying the growing population of the area made it necessary.Much of that population growth has come in the form of people moving from the Atlanta metro area, Langley noted in a recent interview. The Atlanta area is far more Black than Carroll county.“I’m not big into growth … I like some of our small-town stuff that we have, much of it’s gone,” Langley said. “It’s managed growth. We’re gonna grow, but you gotta manage it to a way that you don’t lose the quality of life that we have.”Officials in Coweta, Heard, Meriwether and Troup counties did not respond to requests for comment.Fleming is also co-sponsor of a bill proposing to split Banks county from the Piedmont judicial circuit. All of the circuit’s judges, its public defender and its district attorney have spoken in opposition to the split.The Piedmont circuit does not have an abnormally high caseload for judges, according to the two most recent judicial council of Georgia workload assessments, although the circuit has seen a steady increase in population in recent years.The real reason for the desired split probably comes down to a disagreement over prosecutorial ideology. During testimony before lawmakers, Judge Joseph Booth said that the bill was a result of disagreements between Sheriff Carlton Speed, whose office has been accused of racially discriminating against a defendant in a prominent case involving a Black former Atlanta Hawks basketball player, and the district attorney, Brad Smith.Another judge in the circuit, Currie Mingeldorff, also noted that the split was proposed after he engaged in a failed effort to institute a drug court in Banks county. Drug or specialty courts have been around for decades to prevent mass incarceration of non-violent drug offenders. But Speed opposed the program.“I never considered it to be tough on crime or not tough on crime, I considered it to be a way to keep the community safe, rehabilitate a person and reduce recidivism,” Mingeldorff said.The bill stalled in Georgia’s house of representatives but was replaced by a Senate bill that remains pending. Erwin, Speed, Smith and Booth did not respond to requests for comment.James Woodall, a public policy associate with the Southern Center for Human Rights, which advocates on behalf of indigent defense, said circuit splitting allows lawmakers to hand-pick conservative prosecutors in a swing state.“They’re trying to find ways to maintain power,” Woodall said. “And who’s going to choose those people? Not the voters.” More

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      Progressives denounce FBI attacks by right wing but push for agency reforms

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      Christopher Wray appeared stupefied. As the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation testified on Wednesday before the House judiciary committee, Republicans on the panel painted him as a liberal stooge abusing his power to punish Joe Biden’s political enemies.The accusations stunned Wray, a registered Republican who was appointed by Donald Trump and previously served in George W Bush’s administration.“The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background,” Wray told the committee.Some progressives share Wray’s disbelief. The two indictments of Donald Trump, as well as Hunter Biden’s plea deal with federal prosecutors and conspiracy theories about the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, have fueled Republicans’ accusations that the FBI and the justice department are unjustly targeting rightwing groups.Those allegations have somewhat complicated progressives’ longstanding criticism of the FBI over the bureau’s documented surveillance of liberal activists. Even as progressives denounce rightwing conspiracy theories about the FBI, they continue to push for an overhaul of the bureau’s surveillance and data collection methods.“If Republicans really care about FBI overreach of civil liberties, then they will get serious about the real reforms,” Representative Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, said. “But that’s not really what they’re pushing right now. Instead, they’re still amplifying those conspiracy theories and trying to distract the public, to gaslight the country and distract us from Trump’s criminality.”Progressives’ skepticism of the FBI long predates Trump’s presidency. In 1956, the FBI launched its domestic counterintelligence program (Cointelpro) to infiltrate and discredit political organizations that the bureau considered suspicious. The program, which shuttered in 1971, resulted in the surveillance of many leaders in the anti-Vietnam war and civil rights movements, including Dr Martin Luther King Jr.Progressive activists’ concerns about FBI surveillance stretch into the present day. According to a 2022 memo declassified by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in May, the FBI violated its own guidelines in running so-called “batch queries” related to 133 people “arrested in connection with civil unrest and protests” after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. The memo found that the FBI conducted similarly inappropriate inquiries of more than a dozen people suspected of participating in the January 6 Capitol attack.“The FBI for many decades – almost a century – has been sort of the chief secret police entity against the left and progressives,” said Vince Warren, executive director of the progressive Center for Constitutional Rights. “During that time, the right wing and Republicans have been the biggest cheerleaders of this illegal activity when aimed at communists, civil rights advocates, anti-war advocates, all the way up to [Black Lives Matter] protesters. That seemed to change in 2016, when they backed a lawless president who didn’t like that his illegal activities were being investigated.”Republicans’ sentiments toward the FBI have indeed shifted as Trump has come under increasing legal scrutiny, marking a notable sea change for a party that long claimed the mantle of law and order. When Trump was indicted on 37 federal charges last month for his alleged mishandling of classified documents, the former president’s congressional allies jumped to his defense, accusing the FBI and the justice department of exploiting its powers to target Republicans.Opening the hearing with Wray on Wednesday, Representative Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the judiciary committee, bemoaned the “weaponization of the government against the American people” and “this double standard that exists now in our justice system”.Jordan repeatedly suggested that Republicans and Democrats could work together on reforming the FBI’s data collection methods, specifically in the form of overhauling the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa). That law, which is currently set to expire at the end of the year, has long been a source of outrage on the left. One particularly controversial provision of Fisa, section 702, allows the FBI to carry out warrantless surveillance of targeted foreigners overseas, and the personal data of many Americans – including Black Lives Matter protesters – have been swept up in the expansive searches made possible by the law.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen Representative Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, questioned Wray on Wednesday, she focused her queries on the FBI’s data collection methods and warned that Fisa would face “a very difficult reauthorization process”.During a press call on Wednesday, Jayapal expressed dissatisfaction with “the vagueness of the director’s answers” and suggested Democrats and Republicans could indeed work together to ensure a significant overhaul of Fisa.“I think that this is actually a bipartisan area of concern,” Jayapal said. “We have an opportunity here to ensure that any [Fisa] reauthorization that we pass contains some significant reforms that protect the privacy and the personal information of people across the country.”On the possibility of bipartisan Fisa reform efforts, Bush said she was “open to working with anyone who cares about real people and bringing about real change”, although she remained skeptical of Republicans’ commitment to the cause.“If that’s what they actually want to see, then yes, I’m open to working with them,” she said.Warren was even more dubious about bipartisan efforts to overhaul the FBI’s surveillance methods. Given Republicans’ decades-long history of endorsing the FBI despite its controversial tactics, he considered it unlikely that the party’s leaders would now embrace reform.“While the right and left may both see a problem with the FBI, I don’t see them agreeing on a reform solution,” Warren said. “The foundational challenge with federal law enforcement is that it broadly criminalizes communities of color and activists, and I think that, so long as those activists are environmental or [Black Lives Matter] ones, the right wing will be perfectly happy with the way things are going.” More

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      Can Biden solve his supreme court problem? – podcast

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      In recent weeks the US supreme court ended affirmative action, ruled in favour of a web designer who does not want to serve gay clients and blocked Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan.
      Michael Safi speaks with Sam Levine, a voting rights reporter with Guardian US, to learn the stories behind these decisions, and what president Biden can do about them

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      The right believes the FBI is obsessed with jailing Trump. The opposite is true | Andrew Gawthorpe

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      Donald Trump’s indictment earlier this month on 37 counts related to mishandling classified information set off a firestorm on the political right. Conservatives accused Joe Biden of using the justice system to prosecute his main political rival and attempting to “steal” the 2024 election. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, promised to “hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable”. In short, the right wants us to believe that Biden and his administration will stop at nothing to put Trump in jail as quickly as possible.In fact, the exact opposite is true. Worried about just this type of accusation, the justice department under Merrick Garland and the FBI have approached their investigations of Trump much too cautiously. Far from being persecuted because of who he is, Trump’s status as a former president and as the unofficial leader of the Republican party have led to him being handled with vastly more deference than anyone else would be. The result has been a series of delays and missteps which may allow Trump to escape accountability once again.It is now nearly 18 months since the government first recovered classified material from Mar-a-Lago in early 2022. Although the justice department concluded shortly afterwards that Trump likely possessed further sensitive material, it took seven months for Mar-a-Lago to be searched, in part because the FBI feared that the move would open the agency to accusations of partisanship. Trump was then only indicted nearly a year later. After his initial arraignment he remains a free man, released without having to post bail – despite credible concerns he may still have additional classified material in his possession.Compare that timeline to the events surrounding the arrest of intelligence contractor Reality Winner, who in 2017 received a five-year prison sentence for leaking one document to the news website the Intercept. The document Winner leaked was written on 5 May 2017 and she was arrested on 3 June, days before the Intercept even had a chance to publish its article about her leak. She was indicted on 8 June and jailed pending her trial. Winner later pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act – precisely the law that it seemed clear Trump had flouted for over a year before he was indicted.Trump has likewise been slow to face consequences in the federal investigation into his actions leading up to the insurrection at the US Capitol. According to a new report by the Washington Post, the justice department and FBI delayed launching a probe into Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election for 15 months, again because of fears that they would be criticized for partisanship. The agencies instead pursued cases against rank-and-file insurrectionists, ignoring the existence of evidence implicating Trump and his inner circle until media and political pressure forced them to begin taking it seriously.These delays matter because they make it possible – even likely – that Trump will never truly face accountability for his actions. Trump’s trial in the documents case is unlikely to be held before the 2024 presidential election and the same is true for any possible charges in the January 6 case. If Trump wins the election and becomes president again – as current polls suggest he will – then he will have multiple tools at his disposal to derail the trials or even pardon himself. Justice delayed will be justice denied.Efforts by the justice department and other agencies to appear non-partisan have been well-intended but outdated. The modern conservative movement will give the Biden administration and the law enforcement agencies little credit for proceeding so slowly and deliberately. Instead, the justice system’s extreme deference to conservative complaints will only encourage the Maga movement to double down. If federal law enforcement can be so easily scared away from enforcing the law without fear or favor, we can expect more hysteria and finger-pointing – even threats of violence – to follow in the future.These events also set a catastrophic precedent. The sitting president’s immunity from prosecution and the political barriers to impeachment leave criminal proceedings after a president leaves office as the last available means of imposing accountability. If law enforcement agencies are too scared to investigate prominent politicians promptly and effectively, even that opportunity will vanish and presidents will be left with virtually no checks on their behavior.But worst of all is the fact that if Trump gets off the hook and re-enters office, the independence and integrity of the justice department and FBI are likely to be destroyed anyway. He has made it clear that he would seek to weaponize law enforcement agencies against his political opponents, including by forcing the justice department to follow his personal and political vendettas.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump himself represents a unique threat to the rule of law and the independence of American law enforcement, one which must be confronted with appropriate but aggressive tools. Sadly, thanks to years of misplaced appeasement, it might already be too late.
      Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University. He hosts a podcast called America Explained and writes a newsletter of the same name More

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      Media organizations push for release of sealed records of US priest accused of abusing children

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      Two national US media organizations and Louisiana state prosecutors have joined efforts to secure the public release of sealed information that would provide a more complete account of a retired Roman Catholic priest in New Orleans who has been previously accused of molesting several children.In papers filed late Wednesday at New Orleans’s federal courthouse, the Guardian and the Associated Press contend that there is a legitimate public interest in the contents of the documents dealing with Lawrence Hecker despite archdiocesan claims that the information could be disparaging to the organization.The Guardian and AP argue that the records were improperly labeled as confidential after the church filed its pending, three-year-old bankruptcy case and are seeking to remove that designation, supporting arguments first advanced by Aaron Hebert, who in 2019 filed a lawsuit accusing Hecker of molesting him decades earlier, when the plaintiff was a child.The archdiocese is the only entity which has opposed efforts by Hebert and his lawyers to unseal the Hecker-related records. Church attorneys have argued that neither the Guardian nor the AP have a right to become involved because the archdiocese’s 2020 bankruptcy filing for the most part indefinitely halted litigation against it.“The archdiocese has consistently hid behind its bankruptcy case to keep the public from learning facts about abuse perpetrated at the hands of its priests,” said attorney Lori Mince, who is representing the Guardian and the AP. “We do not believe the law allows this.”Wednesday’s filings by Mince and her associates note how similar arguments by the archdiocese failed last year when the church argued that an audit detailing possible financial crimes by a priest accused of abuse in a separate lawsuit should be shielded from public view.The abuse lawsuit against the priest named in the audit was later voluntarily dismissed, as was a defamation case that the cleric had filed.The church’s opposition to unsealing records related to Hecker comes even as New Orleans’s district attorney, Jason Williams, filed a legal brief Tuesday which urged federal judge Jane Triche Milazzo to publicly release the documents in question.Hebert, who on Wednesday agreed to reveal his identity for the first time, and his lawyers have long maintained that the retired cleric committed crimes for which he can still be punished because they were severe enough that there is no deadline by which he needs to be charged. Williams’s brief said unsealing documents involving Hecker would allow “the appropriate authorities to investigate any criminal activity”.“The continued sealing of the documents in this case serves as a major impediment to a proper investigation,” said Williams’s brief, which was filed within hours of the Guardian asking a DA’s spokesperson whether his office intended to take a position on the Hecker records-related dispute.Williams separately provided the Guardian with a statement on Wednesday which mentioned how the records being sought included a sworn civil deposition Hecker made while facing questioning “concerning the commission of a crime”.That, Williams said, “should not be withheld from a prosecutorial authority merely because reputations may be harmed”.As New Orleans television station WWL reported, Williams’s filing was the first move from local law enforcement aimed at exposing records that the archdiocese has long fought to keep hidden, though some facts about the accusations against Hecker and the church’s reactions to them have been previously publicized by the media and archdiocesan officials themselves.The lawsuit at the heart of the battle over access to Hecker’s records not only accuses him of abuse. But it also accuses his supervisors of not immediately reporting him to law enforcement despite knowing he was an abuser.Hebert’s legal team asserts Hecker was treated in a similar manner to how Boston’s Catholic archdiocese handled its abusive clerics before a 2002 scandal engulfed it and prompted the worldwide church to implement transparency policies, among other reforms.Court filings from Hecker have denied Hebert’s claims. Yet an attorney for New Orleans’s archdiocese at one point disclosed in open court that church officials had known as far back as the 1980s that Hecker was accused of child molestation, and they have paid out multiple civil financial settlements in cases involving claims against him.Despite that history, the church allowed Hecker to work in the archdiocese until he retired in 2002. And despite transparency reforms that the church implemented the year he retired, it wasn’t until 2018 that the archdiocese publicly acknowledged that it believed Hecker to be a child molester.The archdiocese provided Hecker with retirement benefits until after it filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2020, when it was faced with a mound of clerical abuse lawsuits. The bankruptcy indefinitely paused lawsuits against Hecker and other accused clergy abusers, though attorneys for the 2019 plaintiff gained permission to depose Hecker.Motions from Hebert, Williams, the Guardian and the AP now in front of Milazzo seek the release of the contents of that potentially explosive deposition – taken in late December 2020 – along with documents referenced during it to provide a fuller understanding of the case.Milazzo is scheduled to hear arguments on 15 June at a courthouse where several other judges have recused themselves from handling litigation involving abuse and the archdiocese because of links shared by the region’s legal establishment and the Catholic church.Hecker acknowledged last year that FBI agents had met with him amid a broader investigation into alleged sex abuse by Catholic church personnel in New Orleans. But he hasn’t been charged.Hebert on Wednesday said the public deserves to know everything Hecker, who is in his 90s, has done. “I want justice to be done,” Hebert said. “When everything comes out, it will be a better day for all of us.” More

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      Trump hush money trial set for March 2024 during Republican primaries

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      Donald Trump’s trial in New York on criminal charges over hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels will begin on 25 March 2024, amid the Republican presidential primary and less than than eight months before the general election the former president hopes to contest.The trial date was announced in a hearing in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday, Trump attending by video link from his Florida home.The judge, Juan Merchan, advised the former president to cancel all other obligations for the duration of the trial, which could last for several weeks.Trump was muted for most of the hearing, which lasted around 15 minutes. The video feed showed the former president sitting and conferring with his lawyer, Todd Blanche, in front of a backdrop of American flags.No other former president has been criminally indicted. Spokespeople for Trump did not immediately comment on news of his trial date.Trump used his Truth Social platform to lash out, claiming his “first amendment rights, ‘freedom of speech’” had been “violated” by the scheduling of the trial “right in the middle of primary season”.“This is exactly what the Radical Left Democrats wanted,” Trump wrote, also claiming “election interference”, a loaded term given widespread agreement that Russia interfered to boost his candidacy in the election he won in 2016.In April, Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 charges of falsification of business records, arising from his $130,000 payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels, during the 2016 election, to keep quiet about an alleged sexual encounter.The Tuesday hearing was also held to explain an order forbidding the disclosing of material presented by prosecutors not already publicly known.Merchan’s order bars Trump and his lawyers from disseminating evidence to third parties or posting it to social media, and requires that some sensitive material be kept only by Trump’s lawyers.Prosecutors sought the order soon after Trump was arrested, citing his history of “harassing, embarrassing, and threatening statements” about people with whom he has entered legal disputes.Trump claims to be the victim of political witch-hunts meant to silence him as he runs for the Republican nomination to face Joe Biden next year.Judge Merchan has stressed he is not seeking to gag Trump, but “bending over backwards and straining to ensure that he is given every opportunity possible to advance his candidacy”.Trump’s court appearance came after news that E Jean Carroll, the writer who accused him of rape and won $5m in a civil suit earlier this month, is seeking additional damages over his comments in a controversial CNN town hall.Just a day after he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, Trump called Carroll a “wack job” who “made-up” her story. He also claimed the trial was “rigged”.In a new filing in New York on Monday, lawyers for Carroll said such conduct “supports a very substantial punitive damages award in Carroll’s favor”.Carroll, a magazine columnist, says Trump raped her at a New York department store in the mid-1990s. Her new damages claim comes in a defamation suit filed in federal court in 2019, over Trump’s initial responses to her allegation and separate from the New York case, which was brought under a state law allowing victims of historic sexual crimes to sue their alleged attackers.The federal case had been on hold over the issue of whether Trump was protected because he made the comments in question while president. He does not enjoy that protection relating to comments during the CNN event.According to the New York Times, the new filing says Trump’s statements “show the depth of his malice toward Carroll, since it is hard to imagine defamatory conduct that could possibly be more motivated by hatred, ill will or spite”.Trump renewed his abuse of Carroll on social media on Monday. As he did so, George Conway, a conservative lawyer and Trump critic, told MSNBC: “The complaint that she’s been amending this time was actually the original complaint from the first lawsuit that she brought in 2019, when … Trump … from the bully pulpit of the Oval Office … basically accused her of being a liar.“And she got $3m for the second libel, in 2022, when he was dumb enough to repeat the first libel. And that time, he wasn’t president, so he didn’t have this legal argument. That’s why the first case went off on a wild goose chase in the appellate court, and now it’s come back.”The 2019 case, Conway said, “already had more damage potential [for Trump] than the case that [Carroll] already won … because he was president at the time.“It was the very, very first libel that he made on E Jean Carroll. And now the fact that he has repeated the libel after being found to have sexually abused her is really, really outrageous. And it is supportive of punitive damages.“This verdict could be greater than the $5m that she got in the first place. Frankly, I hope it is, because I think, at some point he’s got to stop lying about this and stop lying about her. How many times [are we] gonna have to go through this?”Trump’s legal problems extend beyond New York, where he also faces a multimillion-dollar civil suit over his business affairs, lodged by the state attorney general.In Georgia, indictments arising from Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat are expected this summer.In Washington DC, the US justice department continues to investigate Trump’s election subversion, including his incitement of the January 6 attack on Congress.Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed by attorney general Merrick Garland, is also investigating Trump’s retention of classified documents.Nonetheless, Trump enjoys huge leads over all other Republican presidential candidates. More

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      E Jean Carroll says she sued for rape on advice of Trump adviser’s husband

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      The advice columnist E Jean Carroll sued Donald Trump for rape after she was encouraged to take legal action by George Conway, the husband of a top aide to the then president.On her third day on the witness stand, Carroll told the jury hearing her lawsuit for battery and defamation over the alleged sexual assault in a New York department store changing room in 1996 that she did not intend to sue Trump until he called her a liar when she went public with her accusations more than two decades later.Shortly afterwards she met Conway, a lawyer who was at the time married to Kellyanne Conway, one of the Trump White House’s most visible officials. George Conway was a vocal critic of the then president, to the embarrassment of his wife.Carroll said that they spoke at a party where Conway laid out the difference between criminal case and civil cases.“George said: you should seriously think about this,” she told the jury of six men and three women.Two days later, Carroll filed her first lawsuit against Trump, for defamation, after he called her a liar in denying the alleged rape at the luxury Bergdorf Goodman store.Trump’s lawyer, Joe Tacopina, sought to characterise the lawsuit as politically motivated, in part through the association with Conway who went on to recommend a lawyer to Carroll.Tacopina contrasted that move – and a second more recent civil lawsuit for rape after a change in the law allowed for it – with Carroll’s decision not to take legal action against the former head of CBS, Les Moonves, who she also accused of sexual assault in an elevator.Carroll said that Moonves had not called her a liar.“He simply denied it,” she said. “He didn’t call me names. He didn’t grind my face into the mud like Donald Trump did.”Carroll said Moonves was accused of sexual abuse by a dozen women and that his denial of her allegation was one among many.Under cross-examination, Carroll defended her decision not to call the police after the alleged rape, as the typical response of women of her generation who are “ashamed” to have been sexually assaulted.She acknowledged that she frequently advised people to go to the police in her Elle column, Ask E Jean.“I was born in 1943. I’m a member of the silent generation. Women like me were taught to keep our chins up and to not complain,” she said. “I would never call the police about something I am ashamed of.”Carroll acknowledged she did call the police on one occasion, when she saw “loutish behaviour by some kids”.Tacopina responded: “So your testimony is you’ll call the police if a mailbox is attacked but not if you are attacked?”Carroll said it was.“I will never, ever go to the police,” she said.Asked why, then, more than two decades after the alleged rape she decided to go public, Carroll said that times had changed.“I reached a point in my life at 76 where I was no longer going to stay silent,” she testified.Tacopina pressed Carroll about her continued shopping trips to Bergdorf Goodman where she spent thousands of dollars in the following years.“Bergdorf’s is not a place I’m afraid to enter,” she responded.Tacopina also highlighted Carroll’s complimentary comments about Trump’s television show The Apprentice. Carroll said she was praising the construct of the programme as “witty”.On Monday afternoon, in re-cross-examination, Tacopina asked Carroll if she was happy now and she responded that she was “with undertones of unhappiness”.Then after three days of intense testimony, Carroll’s stint on the witness stand ended.Later this week, Carroll’s legal team is expected to call her friend, Lisa Birnbach and another woman, Carol Martin, to testify that Carroll told them about the alleged assault shortly after it occurred. Both have since corroborated the account.Carroll testified that Birnbach told her the alleged attack was rape and to call the police. But Martin advised her to keep quiet because Trump was a powerful businessman who would “bury” her.Carroll kept her silence for more than two decades but changed her mind as other women came forward to recount their experiences of sexual assault and harassment as the #MeToo movement swept the US. She wrote a book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, detailing abuse of one kind or other by a number of men, including Trump. Excerpts were published in New York magazine in 2019.Trump called Carroll’s allegations “a complete con job” and said her book “should be sold in the fiction section”.“She completely made up a story that I met her at the doors of this crowded New York City department store and, within minutes, ‘swooned’ her. It is a hoax and a lie,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.Carroll’s legal team is also expected to call two other women. Natasha Stoynoff, a writer for People magazine, is expected to testify that in 2005 Trump led her into an empty room and forcibly kissed her until he was interrupted. Jessica Leeds accuses Trump of assaulting her on a plane in 1979 by grabbing her breasts and trying to put his hand up her skirt. More