The ruling rebuffed a call by Trump’s legal team to exclude the pair’s testimony. Both Daniels and Cohen have claimed that Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, was paid ahead of the 2016 presidential election to keep quiet about a sexual encounter she had with Trump.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up his reimbursing Cohen for the $130,000 hush money payment. Trump repaid Cohen in 2017 through monthly checks that were disguised as payments for legal services and falsely documented at the Trump Organization, according to prosecutors.
Former President Donald Trump, disbarred attorney Michael Cohen and adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
Judge Juan Merchan’s ruling on the testimony maps out the potential contours of the trial, which was previously slated to begin March 25 but has been delayed until at least mid-April after Trump’s legal team asked for more time to review new documents.
Merchan will instead hold a hearing March 25 to deal with what happened with the new documents and potentially set a new trial date. The trial is expected to last several weeks.
Why Trump said Cohen should be kept out
“Michael Cohen is a liar,” Trump’s legal team wrote in their request to exclude Cohen’s testimony. They said Cohen has a history of lying that ranged from minimizing his own criminal conduct to distorting his background.
The Trump team pointed specifically to Cohen’s statement at Trump’s New York civil fraud trial that he had previously lied to a federal judge when he pleaded guilty to tax evasion. Cohen said at the civil fraud trial that he engaged in “tax omission,” not tax evasion.
“The People’s desire to rush ahead with these proceedings rather than look into the ongoing criminal conduct of their star witness is troubling and violates the People’s ethical and constitutional obligations,” Trump’s team argued, referring to the DA’s office.
However, Merchan said he wasn’t aware of any perjured testimony from Cohen in the hush money case.
“Defendant provides examples of situations where Cohen’s credibility has been called into question. However, he offers no proof of perjury in the case at bar,” Merchan wrote.
Merchan said he wasn’t able to find any applicable law or court holding that blocked a prosecution witness because the witness’s credibility was previously called into question.
The 2024 Republican presumptive nominee’s hush money case will mark the first-ever criminal trial of a former president.
Why Trump said Daniels should be kept out
In trying to get Daniels’ testimony blocked, Trump’s legal team described her stories as “contrived” and “inflammatory,” and quoted her as having said, in the context of testifying, she has “been asked to kind of behave.”
Prosecutors “appear to have recognized the risks of presenting this irrelevant and untrue testimony by warning their witness,” Trump’s team said in their request to exclude her testimony.
In allowing Daniels’ testimony, Merchan said its value is “evident.”
“Locating and purchasing the information from Daniels not only completes the narrative of events that precipitated the falsification of business records but is also probative of the Defendant’s intent,” he wrote.
Merchan did grant Trump’s request to block the jury from hearing about the results of any polygraph test Daniels took.
Testimony but not video on Access Hollywood tape allowed
In a separate ruling Monday, Merchan also made several determinations about the government’s requests around evidence, including about the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump stated that he kisses women without consent.
“You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful (women) — I just start kissing them,” Trump said. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” He added, “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab them by the p—-y. You can do anything.”
Merchan said the tape “is relevant to the critical issues in this case,” noting the government’s argument that Trump and his campaign team were worried after the tape was released that it would hurt his candidacy.
“Thus, the tape helps establish Defendant’s intent and motive for making the payment to Daniels and then” trying to hide it, Merchan wrote.
Merchan said, however, that there should be a compromise to avoid undue prejudice against Trump.
“This Court rules that the proper balance lies in allowing the People to elicit testimony about a videotaped interview which surfaced on October 7, 2016, that contained comments of a sexual nature which Defendant feared could hurt his presidential aspirations,” Merchan wrote.
“However, it is not necessary that the tape itself be introduced into evidence or that it be played for the jury,” Merchan added.
Merchan said he may reconsider his ruling on the tape if Trump opens the door to more evidence about it at trial.
Merchan also said Trump won’t be allowed to offer any evidence that the Justice Department chose not to prosecute him for potential campaign finance law violations. The department’s decision didn’t prove anything for purposes of the hush money case, Merchan said.
MAGA Reps Suddenly Face an Existential Threat: Themselves
Sam Brodey, Reese Gorman – March 18, 2024
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
It would be hard to argue that Rep. Mike Bost (R-IL) is guilty of the worst sin in today’s GOP—being a dreaded RINO, or “Republican In Name Only.”
The Illinois congressman endorsed Donald Trump for president and voted with him 93 percent of the time during his administration. Bost voted to throw out the electoral votes of states Joe Biden won in 2020. And Trump has even endorsed his 2024 re-election bid, saying Bost is doing a “fantastic job.”
None of it has been enough to stop a far-right challenger from casting Bost as the epitome of a RINO—forcing the incumbent into a brutal political dogfight ahead of Tuesday’s primary election.
Darren Bailey, a far-right state senator who was the GOP nominee for governor in 2022, is arguing that Illinois’ most conservative district needs the most MAGA possible representative.
On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast last week, Bailey told the former Trump strategist that Bost “will not stick his neck out like you, and like Mike Lindell, because obviously these people are career politicians, they’re concerned about the next election cycle.” Bannon, for his part, hyped up his guest’s opponent as “one of the worst, as bad as they come,” calling Bost a “mini-McCarthy” and fixating on reports that he had threatened to punch “our own” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL). (On top of regularly guest-hosting the War Room podcast, Gaetz has traveled to Bost’s district to campaign for Bailey.)
With his résumé, Bost would have been all but immune to a challenge from his right in years past. Since he was elected in 2014, in fact, he’s only faced one other primary challenge—in 2018, when he won by nearly 70 points.
But 2024 is poised to be a very different election year, one in which no House Republican is safe, no matter how MAGA they may be.
At least 21 House Republican incumbents are facing primary challenges from candidates who are seriously campaigning and raising at least some funds, according to a Daily Beast review of campaign filings and other materials.
Three lawmakers have already survived, but by slim margins. In March 5 primaries, Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), Steve Womack (R-AR), and Jake Ellzey (R-TX) defeated underfunded MAGA challengers, but with less than 60 percent of the vote. Womack, a critic of hardline conservatives, won by just 7 points.
In a brief interview with The Daily Beast last week, Bost lamented what he saw as the driving factors behind many of these challenger campaigns: attention and purity tests.
“What that is is all about your own ego, and that’s the problem,” Bost said. “And they find like people that think like they do, and then try to drag them up against somebody that doesn’t think like they do.”
Some of the incumbents are familiar primary targets, like Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) and Don Bacon (R-NE), considered among the most centrist members of the GOP conference. Some are being challenged simply because they aren’t loud or combative enough—or even if they cast a vote in favor of funding the government, which is now a punishable offense in the MAGA base.
But many are as conservative and Trump-supporting as Bost, if not more so. Rep. William Timmons (R-SC), who has a 95 percent lifetime score from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, is facing an aggressive primary challenge.
Some archconservatives are being targeted because they backed Ron DeSantis for president, like Reps. Bob Good (R-VA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), while others are being challenged in part because they didn’t support Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) in his bid for the House speakership last fall.
1920481347House Freedom Caucus Chairman Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) speaks with reporters at the U.S. Capitol.Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
What nearly all of these incumbents have in common is that their opponents hail from the far-right fringes of the party. Where the incumbents are on Fox and Newsmax, the challengers are regulars on Bannon’s show, hoping to land endorsements from figures like Mike Lindell, Roger Stone and Michael Flynn.
One primary hopeful is a pro-gun YouTuber; another has based his campaign around having served prison time for participating in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Far-right troll Laura Loomer, who came within 7 points of defeating Rep. Daniel Webster (R-FL) in 2022, is running again. Often lost in the noise from these ultra-MAGA figures is that their beloved party leader has endorsed their opponent.
That’s what’s so different about this primary cycle, say Republicans and election analysts.
“The threshold of what it takes to offend Republican primary voters has fallen lower,” said Dave Wasserman, the election expert and senior editor for U.S. House races at the Cook Political Report.
At this point, GOP strategist Ken Spain said, “many of the Republicans in the House have taken on a Trump-like persona, where you either fight to the death, or you’re simply not committed to the cause—and that’s what we’re seeing play out.”
Like in every election year, at least one of these challenges will almost certainly be successful. It’s possible many could lose, or 2024 could be a better year for incumbents than 2022, when five lost primary challenges in non-redistricting related races.
But the more important upshot of any member having to worry about a primary threat, no matter how marginal, may not be who wins—it may be how members adjust their behavior to survive.
Pointing to weak incumbent performances on March 5, Wasserman said, “the combined impact of those three outcomes will be a chilling effect on other Republican members who have been willing to speak out against Trump or vote for things that Trump doesn’t like.”
While Trump often put Republicans in a difficult position when they had to defend his near-daily controversies, he offered many of them something they desperately desired: a cheat code to avoid primary challenges.
Republicans during the Trump era were largely measured by their support of Trump. Gone were the Heritage Action or Club for Growth scores to rank a Republican’s conservatism, or the need to collect endorsements from across the GOP spectrum, or even the need to spend considerable time in the district.
Republicans, by and large, only needed Trump’s endorsement to be considered sufficiently conservative and avoid a credible threat. That fealty of Republicans to Trump further reinforced his power in the party, and further exacerbated the transformation of the party into his image.
Even with Trump out of office for three years, his influence has been constant. What has changed, however, is just the number of anti-Trump—or, really, insufficiently pro-Trump—Republicans that are left in Congress.
With just about every Republican claiming the mantle of a ‘Trump Republican,’ being ‘pro-Trump’ might not be the same prophylactic that it once was against primary challengers. (If every Republican is pro-Trump, is anyone really pro-Trump?)
Combine it all with the dearth of successful challenges in recent years—which has just increased the internal tension in the party—and there’s a pressure cooker situation developing.
After a year that unleashed unprecedented internal animosity in the House GOP, members’ increased eagerness to campaign against their own colleagues is adding yet another layer of drama in a majority already ripped apart by it.
Gaetz, naturally, is a ringleader, having stumped for primary challengers to Bost and Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-TX). Timmons’ challenger, meanwhile, has been endorsed by a remarkable seven colleagues.
Many Republicans, of course, would rather see these members using their campaign time and resources working to protect and expand the House GOP’s increasingly slim majority instead of trying to replace conservative colleagues with even more conservative colleagues.
On the Democratic side of the aisle, the primary fever that helped put the left-wing “Squad” into office in 2018 and 2020 has abated. The most high-profile challenges to incumbents this cycle are from the center, not the left, targeting Squad-aligned Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Cori Bush (D-MO). Meanwhile, just two members of the party’s center and center-left wing are facing viable primaries from progressives.
Occasionally, this frustration has emanated from the top of the House GOP. During House Republicans’ annual retreat last week, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) privately—and showing real frustration—admonished members who were campaigning against each other, a source familiar with his remarks told The Daily Beast.
“I’ve asked them all to cool it,” Johnson told CNN on Sunday. “I am vehemently opposed to member-on-member action in primaries because it’s not productive… So I’m telling everyone who’s doing that to knock it off.”
In response to a question from The Daily Beast about primaries, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the fourth-ranking House Republican, declared her support for all GOP incumbents and urged members to work as a team.
“It’s a slim majority, and we need to make sure that everyone feels the support from their colleagues,” she said. “Even if you vote differently based upon your district, it’s important to know that we’ve all heard the support of our constituents to be here.”
Perhaps more than any other primary fight, the one in West Virginia’s 1st District illustrates the singular dynamics at this fraught moment within the Republican Party.
The incumbent, Rep. Carol Miller, has represented this district since 2019. Trump won it by over 40 points in 2020. Miller voted to throw out Biden’s Electoral College votes on Jan. 6 and has been a Trump ally. But in general, she has quietly gone about her business in Congress, and has cast votes to keep the government open and avoid defaults on the national debt.
Miller’s opponent is Derrick Evans, a former West Virginia state lawmaker who might be the purest expression of the MAGA id and political incentive structure on display anywhere in the country.
Now, the candidate’s feed on X is full of daily outrage bait. “White liberal women are the greatest threat to the future of our constitutional republic,” he posted recently. He has called for “arresting the people who stole the 2020 election.” He has been endorsed by QAnon favorite Michael Flynn and Trump acolyte Roger Stone. For some reason, he traveled to Delaware last Friday to give a speech about Joe Biden.
While he has dinged her for such offenses as appearing in a photo with Bill Gates, Evans has occasionally made a succinct case for his primary campaign. “My opponent,” Evans once tweeted, “is a total RINO representing an Ultra MAGA District.”
Evans has also raised real money: over $290,000 in 2023, according to his Federal Election Commission filings. (Miller has raised just over $560,000.)
In a brief interview with The Daily Beast at the House GOP retreat last week, which took place in her district, Miller demonstrated how starkly different she is from her opponent.
“My mama told me not to say anything if I can’t say anything nice,” Miller said. “I welcome people challenging me. His lack of experience is a little different to me. I’ve worked very hard the last six years. I represent my district well. I’ve listened to them, I’ve voted conservatively, and it’s been my honor to serve.” (Evans did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast.)
There is another potent GOP primary dynamic adding to the 2024 chaos: incumbents who may face challenges stemming from their votes to remove Kevin McCarthy as Speaker last year. The furious deposed leader has taken verbal potshots at the eight GOP lawmakers who ousted him, and he and his powerful allies are moving to hamper their re-election campaigns.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) is considered one of the top targets, along with Rep. Good in Virginia. One of the McCarthy Eight, Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT), is not even seeking re-election, citing a personal smear campaign against him.
In Good’s 5th Congressional District of Virginia, all the strains of GOP drama converge. The chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, it’s hard to get more conservative than Good. But he earned establishment enemies with his support for removing McCarthy—and earned enemies in the MAGA movement for his support of DeSantis for president.
His opponent is John McGuire, a Virginia state senator who has touted his support for Trump at every turn possible. Ahead of the June 18 primary, Good’s standing among primary voters is so poor that he was thrown out of a pro-Trump store in his district that had hosted an event for McGuire.
Massie, the Kentucky Republican, also was a prominent DeSantis backer, and his opponent has touted that as his No. 1 reason to dump the incumbent. But Massie has been here before; in 2020, Trump backed his primary challenger. He won easily anyway.
“This would be the third person who’s tried to run to the Trump of me, and that’s the only direction you can go where I might not be 100 percent in terms of the MAGA scorecard,” Massie told The Daily Beast.
But Massie acknowledged that not all of his colleagues have cultivated as strong a brand that lets them survive getting crosswise with Trump.
“If you’re not known in your district,” Massie said, a Trump endorsement could “cost you 10 points in your primary.”
“If somebody gets endorsed on the other side they can go up 10 points, and the other person could go down 10 points if they’re not very well defined in their district,” he said.
How Massie fares in his own state’s primary could show how acute the party’s MAGA angst really is. But he’s not sweating the challenge.
“People would rather I support the Constitution,” he said, “than any particular president.”
Supreme Court Puppetmaster Explains How Billionaires Can Push America Right
Andrew Perez – March 18, 2024
Conservative activist and Supreme Court puppetmaster Leonard Leo recently outlined his pitch for billionaires on how they can help move the United States government and society to the right.
“It’s really important that we flood the zone with cases that challenge misuse of the Constitution by the administrative state and by Congress,” Leo said in a new podcast interview, calling on the ultra-wealthy to support these litigation efforts.
“We have a great Overton window in the next couple of decades to really try to create a free society,” Leo said of the Supreme Court. “And I think we should take full advantage of it.”
The co-chair of the Federalist Society, the conservative lawyers network, Leo is best known as the man who helped build the Supreme Court’s conservative 6-3 supermajority, in his role as President Donald Trump’s judicial adviser. Leo’s dark money network, which received a historic $1.6 billion infusion in 2021, additionally helps bring cases before the high court, influence which cases the justices consider, and shape the court’s decisions. As Rolling Stone reported last month, Leo has been working to expand his network in recent months.
Leo has been at the center of the ethics questions swirling around the Supreme Court in the past year. ProPublica reported that Leo arranged Justice Samuel Alito’s seat on a private jet — paid for by a billionaire hedge-fund chief — as part of an undisclosed luxury fishing trip in Alaska in 2008. He also reportedly steered secret consulting payments to Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife.
Long averse to media attention, Leo recently taped a podcast interview with Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of surveillance company Palantir and the University of Austin, a conservative alternative college he started with journalist Bari Weiss. The discussion was first highlighted by the watchdog group Accountable.US.
In the interview, Leo spoke about his $1.6 billion dark money fund, called the Marble Freedom Trust, explaining: “We’re trying to really institute a lot of legal and social change through philanthropy.” He also offered his thoughts on how billionaires can help conservatives limit regulations, take over corporate C-suites, reshape America’s education system, and influence our culture. Leo, a devout Catholic, additionally discussed his interest in reforming religious institutions.
Leo outlined how conservatives can chip away at the administrative state by flooding the courts with legal challenges. Touting a Supreme Court ruling that limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate some carbon emissions, he said that “there needs to be constraints on agencies’ interpretations of their own power,” and that “courts have a role to play in interpreting agency power and constraining them when necessary.” He added, “There are many more of those cases that are going to be brought over the next three to five years.”
In the business realm, he argued, “We need to be building pipelines of talent — pipelines of people who understand that the Constitution matters, and that the private sector and civil society matter. And that means building talent pipelines of people who can be in the C-suite and in boardrooms, because corporate America plays an enormously important role in potentially constraining government.”
He continued: “Corporate America, [the] finance world, banks — they have an enormous amount of influence over our culture and our social life. And we need to be finding ways of getting folks in the C-suites and in the boardrooms who are just tired of our woke culture.”
Leo has financed the right-wing campaign against so-called “woke capitalism,” targeting the use of ESG — environmental, social, and governance — criteria in investment decisions.
Twice in the interview, Leo talked about the need for conservatives to “build talent pipelines in the media and entertainment industry,” adding: “There are a lot of people in the entertainment world who really understand limited government and free society. And they’re not happy with the entertainment world, and they’re looking for opportunities to band together, and to be a part of new enterprises.”
Leo’s network has funded the conservative National Review Institute as well as the RealClearFoundation, a nonprofit affiliated with the political news aggregator RealClearPolitics.
Another key element in Leo’s pitch to prospective donors centered around education — both K-12 and higher education. “We need to create talent pipelines for K-12 education and for higher ed, something like you’re doing with the University of Austin,” he told Lonsdale, “so that we remind people that the purpose of higher ed, for example, is to basically build a citizenry that’s committed to the Constitution as it was originally written.”
Leo explained this means recruiting teachers and working to influence education board races, “so that we can begin to have some sanity and local education.”
He added, “The idea behind education, as [Thomas] Jefferson put it, was to create good engaged citizens. So if we teach them civics, in a way that’s understandable, and comprehensible, and appealing, the idea that limited government advances human dignity, and I really believe that, if we can, if we can have educational institutions that instill that, we’ll create a better electorate. And if we create a better electorate, I think ultimately, we’ll have a government, including an administrative state, that’s much more reflective of a free and just society.”
One group in Leo’s network, Free to Learn, has been involved in local school board elections. His network recently created a new group called the American Parents Coalition.
Lastly, Leo talked about the need to reform the clergy. “This is one that I just started thinking about, there’s the whole issue of clergy, and this is a tough one to crack,” he said, adding: “This may not be for everybody, but my own perspective is: God made us to know him, to love him, and to serve him. And I think our religious leaders need to center more on that, and less on knowing, loving, and serving ourselves, and whatever personal desires or affections we may have.”
Leo leads a separate nonprofit entity, called the Sacred Spaces Foundation, which he used to purchase a Catholic church near his summer home in Northeast Harbor, Maine, last year.
Trump’s ‘blood bath’ threat wasn’t even the most dangerous thing he said all weekend
Rex Huppke, USA TODAY – March 18, 2024
You might have heard some controversy over former President Donald Trump’s use of “blood bath” this weekend.
Here’s a quick summary: At an Ohio rally on Saturday, Trump was talking about the auto industry and said if he doesn’t get elected in November “it’s going to be a blood bath for the country,” prompting a number of news outlets to report things along the lines of “Trump predicts ‘blood bath’ if not elected,” which seemed pretty on point, but then a bunch of MAGA types got bent out of shape and said, “No, he was talking about it being a blood bath for the auto industry,” which still seems kind of bad and unnecessarily apocalyptic but … you know … whatever, and so a bunch of news outlets started writing about the possibility that the “blood bath” comment was taken out of context and all sorts of hand-wringing ensued and it was, to borrow a phrase, a bit of a blood bath.
Here’s the full quote, which came on the heels of his comments about the auto industry: “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath for the whole – that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a blood bath for the country.”
Here’s what matters: A number of media outlets and President Joe Biden’s campaign pounced on one unhinged Trump comment that had questionable context when there were SO MANY OTHER absolutely despicable comments to choose from.
Trump’s ‘blood bath’ line overshadowed more dangerous comments
If the media erred, it was in focusing on the “blood bath” comment rather than – (please imagine me waving my hands in all directions) – everything else.
Of greater importance, I’d argue, was the fact that Trump’s Saturday rally in Dayton began with an announcer saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated Jan. 6 hostages.”
The presumptive GOP presidential nominee has taken to calling the charged, tried, convicted and imprisoned insurrectionist-lunkheads who attacked the U.S. Capitol in 2021 “hostages.” He referred to them as “unbelievable patriots.”
The fact that a former president of the United States is treating domestic terrorists as heroes – they are so horribly and unfairly treated! – is certainly as newsworthy as any “blood bath” comment.
Trump calling migrants ‘animals’ should alarm everyone
Trump also continued his dehumanizing anti-immigrant rhetoric, painting a wildly inaccurate picture of “hardened criminals” by the “hundred of thousands” crossing the border and “destroying our country.”
“I don’t know if you call them people, in some cases they’re not people, in my opinion,” Trump said. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left say it’s a terrible thing to say.”
Former President Donald Trump campaigns at the Dayton International Airport on March 16, 2024, in Ohio. The state holds its Republican Senate primary on the following Tuesday.
On Saturday, Trump called them “animals.” That is vile rhetoric, though not at all surprising since he has previously echoed Adolf Hitler’s language by claiming immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
When you sound like Hitler, that’s a very bad thing
Asked about similarities between his words and Hitler’s on Fox News on Sunday, Trump said: “That’s what they say; I didn’t know that.”
Sure, buddy. He apparently missed the classes on World War II in high school history. And it seems worth noting that even “accidentally” saying something that sounds like Hitler is neither good nor normal.
Unfazed by his Fox News interviewer, Trump continued to repeat the same horrendous crap: “Our country is being poisoned.”
He mocked Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker: “You have this guy Pritzker … he’s too busy eating. He wants to eat all the time. Would you like a hamburger? How many do you want? Five. … Who the hell orders five burgers?”
Of Georgia district attorney Fani Willis, who’s prosecuting one of the many criminal cases against the former president, Trump said of her name: “It’s spelled ‘fanny,’ like your a–.”
Speaking of his former competitors in the GOP primary, Trump said advisers told him to to go easy on them: “They said, ‘Sir, please don’t talk about these people that way, they’re Republicans.’ … I don’t give a sh–, they’re terrible.”
To sum things up, the “blood bath” comment, whatever the context, was bad.
But beyond that, the man a majority of Republicans believe should be the next president spent the weekend: calling the sitting president a “numbskull”; calling former Republican primary candidates “terrible”; continuing to deny the results of a free-and-fair election; calling immigrants “animals” while continuing to embrace Hitlerian rhetoric, even after being reminded it’s Hitlerian rhetoric; swearing; crudely making fun of someone’s weight and another person’s name; and calling the people who quite literally attacked the U.S. Capitol and assaulted more than 100 police officers “unbelievable patriots.”
I’d say the real controversy is the media failed to point out that Trump’s “blood bath” comment, disturbing as it is, might have been the least-bad thing he said all weekend.
With the election behind him, Putin says Russia aims to set up a buffer zone inside Ukraine
The Associated Press – March 18, 2024
Ukrainian and Russian soldiers are depicted in a tug-of-war game on a memorial in Izium, Kharkiv region, Ukraine, Sunday, March 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)Family members of Vitaliy Alimov, his mother Maria and his wife Natalia, mourn over his body before his funeral in Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, Ukraine, Monday March 18, 2024. Alimov, a firefighter, was killed in the Russian attack on Odesa on Friday March 15. (AP Photo/Victor Sajenko)Men in unmarked uniforms stand guard during the seizure of the Ukrainian corvette Khmelnitsky in Sevastopol, Crimea, Thursday, March 20, 2014. When Ukraine’s Kremlin-friendly president was ousted in 2014 by mass protests that Moscow called a U.S.-instigated coup, Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by sending troops to overrun Crimea and staging a plebiscite on joining Russia, which the West dismissed as illegal. (AP Photo, File)Emergency services workers look on as Military chaplain Archpriest Ioann shovels earth into the grave of Vitaliy Alimov during his funeral in Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, Ukraine, Monday March 18, 2024. Alimov, a firefighter, was killed in the Russian attack on Odesa on Friday March 15. (AP Photo/Victor Sajenko)
Russian President Vladimir Putin said after extending his rule in an election that stifled opposition that Moscow will not relent in its invasion of Ukraine and plans to create a buffer zone to help protect against long-range Ukrainian strikes and cross-border raids.
The Kremlin’s forces have made battlefield progress as Kyiv’s troops struggle with a severe shortage of artillery shells and exhausted front-line units after more than two years of war. The front line stretches over 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) across eastern and southern Ukraine.
Advances have been slow and costly, and Ukraine has increasingly used its long-range firepower to hit oil refineries and depots deep inside Russia. Also, groups claiming to be Ukraine-based Russian opponents of the Kremlin have launched cross-border incursions.
“We will be forced at some point, when we consider it necessary, to create a certain ‘sanitary zone’ on the territories controlled by the (Ukrainian government),” Putin said late Sunday.
This “security zone,” Putin said, “would be quite difficult to penetrate using the foreign-made strike assets at the enemy’s disposal.”
He spoke after the release of election returns that showed him securing a fifth six-year term in a landslide in an election devoid of any real opposition following his relentless crackdown on dissent.
Monday marks the 10th anniversary of Russia’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula, which set the stage for Russia to invade its neighbor in February 2022. However, Putin has been vague about his goals in Ukraine since that full-scale invasion floundered.
Putin again warned the West against deploying troops to Ukraine. A possible conflict between Russia and NATO would put the world “a step away” from World War III, he said.
French President Emmanuel Macron recently said that sending Western troops into Ukraine should not be ruled out, though he said the current situation does not require it.
Commenting on the prospects for peace talks with Kyiv, Putin reaffirmed that Russia remains open to negotiations but won’t be lured into a truce that will allow Ukraine to rearm.
However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has apparently shut the door on such talks, saying Putin should be brought to trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which last year issued an arrest warrant for Putin on war crime charges.
With crucial U.S. aid being held up in Washington, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham arrived in Kyiv on Monday, the U.S. Embassy said. Ukraine desperately needs the around $48 billion that the package of support would provide, especially artillery shells and air defense systems.
Ukraine’s air force said it intercepted 17 out of 22 Shahed drones launched by Russia over various regions of the country overnight. Russia also fired five S-300/S-400 missiles at the Kharkiv region and two Kh-59 at the Sumy region, both in northeastern Ukraine, it said.
Authorities say the intensity of ground attacks and airstrikes has increased recently in the Sumy region, prompting the evacuation of 56 people, including 26 children, from one border village over the past week.
In the past two and a half months the region has been struck more than 3,000 times, after some 8,000 strikes over all of last year, the Ukrainian regional government says. The number of aerial bomb attacks has tripled, and Russian saboteurs are highly active, according to officials.
This story corrects the name of the court to the International Criminal Court.
Trump has failed to get appeal bond for $454 million civil fraud judgment, lawyers say
Luc Cohen – March 18, 2024
FILE PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump holds rally in Richmond
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Donald Trump – has so far been unable to obtain a bond that would allow him to appeal a $454 million judgment against the former U.S. president in a New York civil fraud case without posting the full amount himself, his lawyers said on Monday.
Trump must either find the cash or post a bond to prevent the state’s authorities from seizing his properties while he appeals Justice Arthur Engoron’s Feb. 16 decision ordering him and co-defendants to pay $464 million in penalties and interest for misstating property values to dupe lenders and insurers.
In a court filing on Monday, the Republican presidential candidate’s lawyers urged a mid-level state appeals court to delay enforcement of the judgment, arguing the amount was excessive.
They said the defendants had so far approached 30 surety companies through four separate brokers to obtain a bond.
“Enforcing an impossible bond requirement as a condition of appeal would inflict manifest irreparable injury on Defendants,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
The lawyers asked that he instead be allowed to post a $100 million bond while he appeals the judgment. A bonding company would be on the hook for any payout if Trump loses his appeal and proves unable to pay.
Trump’s lawyers included a statement by Gary Giulietti, an executive with insurance brokerage the Lockton Companies, which Trump has hired to help get a bond.
Giulietti wrote that a bond for the full $464 million “is not possible under the circumstances presented,” noting that many sureties would not issue bonds above $100 million and were willing to accept only cash or securities – not real estate – as collateral.
Trump denied wrongdoing in the case, which was brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James in New York state court in Manhattan.
Trump earlier this month posted a $91.6 million bond to cover an $83.3 million defamation verdict for the writer E. Jean Carroll while he appeals, in a case that arose from his branding her a liar after she accused him of raping her decades ago.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York – Editing by Nick Zieminski)
7 battlegrounds that will decide who wins the presidency
Niall Stanage – March 18, 2024
7 battlegrounds that will decide who wins the presidency
It’s a rematch.
President Biden and former President Trump each hit a key marker last week, clinching enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee of their respective party.
The outcome of the general election will come down to a handful of states, as usual.
The map maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ lists seven contests as toss-ups.
Those key states are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In 2020, Biden won six of the seven — the exception being North Carolina — on his way to a 306-232 victory over Trump in the Electoral College.
The seven battlegrounds in aggregate count for 93 Electoral College votes this year.
Trump leads in all seven in current polls.
Here’s the state-by-state breakdown.
Arizona
Arizona was second to Georgia as the tightest race in the nation in 2020. Biden prevailed by about one-third of a percentage point.
The president will struggle to replicate that performance this year, if the current polls are anything to go by.
An Emerson College poll for The Hill and Nexstar last month put Trump up by 3 points in a head-to-head match-up. Trump’s lead grew to 6 points when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was added as a choice.
A pro-Kennedy super PAC, American Values, claims it has already secured more than enough signatures to get him on the ballot in Arizona.
There are two other factors to consider.
First, Latinos make up a larger share of Arizona’s population than they do in any other battleground state — 33 percent, according to the Census Bureau.
Trump allies contend the former president is making big inroads with this demographic nationally. But in 2020, Biden bested Trump by 28 points among Latino voters, according to the VoteCast survey commissioned by The Associated Press and Fox News.
Second, Arizona could see one of the most dramatic — and polarizing — Senate races in the nation, with left-leaning Rep. Ruben Gallego (D) and fervent Trump backer Kari Lake (R) widely expected to become the major-party nominees.
Such a dramatic Senate battle could nudge up presidential turnout to even higher than expected levels. But it’s not clear who would get an advantage from such a scenario.
Georgia
Georgia has made plenty of political headlines recently, relating to the effort by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 result in the state.
Trump faces 10 charges over that push, even after a judge threw out three additional charges against him Wednesday.
Back in 2020, Biden won by about one-quarter of 1 percent in the state.
A CBS News/YouGov poll released this week gave Trump a 3-point edge in a head-to-head match-up.
One-third of Georgians are Black — a significantly higher proportion than in any other battleground state. Obviously, that makes Black voter enthusiasm for Biden critical if he is to have any real shot at holding on.
There is some pessimism in Democratic circles about Georgia, with some strategists arguing that North Carolina presents a more inviting target for Biden this time around.
Four years ago, Biden was the first Democrat to carry Georgia in a presidential election since 1992.
Michigan
Biden carried Michigan with a smidgen of comfort in 2020, defeating Trump by almost 3 percentage points.
In current polling, it is one of the tightest of the battleground states.
The Emerson College/The Hill/Nexstar poll in February found Trump leading by 2 points with just him and Biden on the ballot.
Trump’s edge doubled to 4 points with Kennedy on the ballot. As with Arizona, the pro-Kennedy super PAC contends it has enough signatures to make that happen.
A big warning sign for Biden came in the Democratic primary, when more than 100,000 people voted “uncommitted.”
Michigan is home to more than 200,000 Arab Americans, representing about 2 percent of the state’s population.
If the conflict in Gaza rages on to November, or even close to it, Biden is facing very serious trouble here.
Nevada
No Republican seeking the White House has carried the Silver State since then-President George W. Bush in 2004.
But Trump clearly has a fighting chance.
A Morning Consult/Bloomberg poll last month gave the former president a lead of either 6 points or 7 points — the slightly bigger margin coming if Kennedy is in the race.
Thirty percent of Nevadans are Latino, making the battle within that demographic critical.
Among the seven battlegrounds, Nevada also has the lowest share of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher — 27 percent, according to the Census Bureau.
That could be good news for Trump, who is markedly stronger among voters without a college education.
North Carolina
This is Biden’s one semirealistic chance to flip a battleground state this year.
Trump won North Carolina by roughly 1 point in 2020. The state’s major cities, notably Charlotte and Raleigh, have seen their populations swell with new arrivals from more Democratic-leaning states in the north.
Black voters will be critical here too, representing 22 percent of the overall population.
The headwinds Biden faces right now make a North Carolina victory look like an uphill climb, however.
A poll this month from Raleigh TV station WRAL and SurveyUSA found Trump leading by 5 points among likely voters.
The wild card could be the gubernatorial race.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D), ending his second term, cannot run again because of term limits.
Attorney General Josh Stein last week secured the Democratic nomination to try to succeed Cooper.
But the bigger story came with the choice by North Carolina’s Republicans to nominate Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.
Robinson’s history includes a series of controversial remarks about the Holocaust, describing “homosexuality” as “filth,” and suggesting that God has ordained that Christians should be “led by men.”
Could moderate suburbanites come out to thwart Robinson and, in the process, nudge up Biden’s chances? It’s at least possible.
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania is the biggest prize of the seven battlegrounds, with 19 Electoral College votes up for grabs.
Trump leads by 4 points in the latest Emerson poll for The Hill and Nexstar. A poll a few days prior for Fox News put the margins tighter, including a dead heat between Biden and Trump if Kennedy is on the ballot.
Pennsylvania was one of three Democratic ‘blue wall’ states Trump demolished in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, becoming the first Republican presidential nominee to win there since 1988.
Biden carried the Keystone State by roughly 1 point four years ago.
People older than 65 make up a slightly larger share of the population in Pennsylvania than any other battleground. The state is also 75 percent white. Both factors should make it fertile ground for Trump.
But it’s also a state Biden has a real affinity for, given that it’s adjacent to his home state of Delaware.
This could be the decisive battle in November.
Wisconsin
Wisconsin was the narrowest Midwest win for Biden in 2020, where he scraped home by about half a percentage point.
It has fewer nonwhite voters than any other battleground, with Latinos representing roughly 8 percent of the population and African-Americans 7 percent.
The most recent Hill/Nexstar poll puts Trump up by 3 or 4 points, depending on the Kennedy ballot access question.
The state has a relatively strong history for Democrats in the recent past. Gov. Tony Evers (D) won reelection in 2022, and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D) is seeking a third term in November.
Still, Trump should not be underestimated. He beat Clinton in Wisconsin in 2016, becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to carry the state since 1984.
Trump faces ‘insurmountable difficulties’ in securing $464M bond in civil fraud case, his attorneys say
Aaron Katersky and Peter Charalambous – March 18, 2024
Former President Donald Trump is facing “insurmountable difficulties” in obtaining a bond to satisfy the $464 million civil fraud judgment, his attorneys said Monday in a new appellate court filing, and the magnitude of which would require him to use real estate as collateral.
Judge Arthur Engoron in February ordered Trump to pay $464 million in disgorgement and interest after holding him liable for doing a decade’s worth of business with fraudulent financial statements that overvalued his real estate holdings and hyped his wealth. Trump was also barred from leading any New York company for three years. His sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump were also fined $4 million apiece and barred for two years.
“Defendants have faced what have proven to be insurmountable difficulties in obtaining an appeal bond for the full $464 million,” according to an affirmation by Trump Organization general counsel Alan Garten.
While Garten said Trump is “financially stable” and maintains “substantial assets,” the magnitude of the judgment would require him to use his real estate as collateral for the bond. So far, according to Garten’s affirmation, no surety bond provider approached by Trump is willing to accept real estate as collateral, including Chubb, the insurance giant underwriting Trump’s $91.6 million bond to cover the $83 million judgment in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, plus interest.
“For Defendants, this presents a major obstacle,” Garten wrote.
Trump’s attorneys, who have called the judgment “unconstitutionally excessive,” asked an appellate court again on Monday to allow Trump to secure a bond in a lesser amount.
“Obtaining such cash through a ‘fire sale’ of real estate holdings would inevitably result in massive, irrecoverable losses — textbook irreparable injury,” defense lawyers Alina Habba and Clifford Robert wrote.
According to the filing, Gary Guilietti — the president of insurance surety Lockton Companies who testified in Trump’s defense at trial — has helped coordinate the Trump Organization’s outreach to bond companies. Guilietti said in an affidavit that surety companies have not allowed the Trump Organization to use its properties as collateral, leaving the company with the only option of posting 120% of the bond in the form of cash and cash equivalents, totaling $557,491,716.
“While it is my understanding that the Trump Organization is in a strong liquidity position, it does not have $1 billion in cash or cash equivalents,” Guilietti wrote.
PHOTO: Trump family judgments in civil fraud case (ABC News)
The New York Attorney General’s Office has objected to a lesser bond, arguing Trump and his co-defendants “will attempt to evade enforcement of the judgment or to make enforcement more difficult.”
The former president has denied all wrongdoing and has said he will appeal.
Engoron ordered Trump to pay pre-judgment interest on each ill-gotten gain — with interest accruing based on the date of each transaction — as well as a 9% post-judgment interest rate once the court enters the judgment in the case.
University of Michigan business law professor Will Thomas previously told ABC News the interest not only adds to Trump’s mounting legal bills but will likely also guide the former president’s approach to his appeal.
Trump will continue to accrue interest on the fine during his lengthy appeal of Engoron’s ruling, unless he deposits the full amount of the fine into an escrow account, according to Thomas.
While Trump’s appeal will prompt an automatic stay of the enforcement of Engoron’s ruling, Trump needs to first put money into an escrow account or post a bond in order to appeal.
If Trump decides to post a bond to cover the fine during his appeal, the interest will continue to accrue during his appeal, adding potentially tens of millions of dollars in the process.
Justice Breyer, Off the Bench, Sounds an Alarm Over the Supreme Court’s Direction
Adam Liptak – March 18, 2024
Justice Stephen Breyer in Washington, on Aug. 26, 2021. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — Justice Stephen Breyer’s Supreme Court chambers are not quite as grand as those he occupied before he retired in 2022, but they are still pretty nice. As before, they include a working fireplace, which was crackling when I went to visit him on a temperate afternoon in late February to talk about his new book.
In earlier interviews, Breyer could be rambling and opaque. This time he was direct. He said he meant to sound an alarm about the direction of the Supreme Court.
“Something important is going on,” he said. The court has taken a wrong turn, he said, and it is not too late to turn back.
The book, “Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism,” will be published March 26, the day the Supreme Court hears its next major abortion case, on access to pills used to terminate pregnancies.
The book devotes considerable attention to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 decision that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion. Breyer, who had dissented, wrote that the decision was stunningly naive in saying it was returning the question of abortion to the political process.
“The Dobbs majority’s hope that legislatures and not courts will decide the abortion question will not be realized,” he wrote.
He was more forceful during the interview. “There are too many questions,” he said. “Are they really going to allow women to die on the table because they won’t allow an abortion which would save her life? I mean, really, no one would do that. And they wouldn’t do that. And there’ll be dozens of questions like that.”
The book is a sustained critique of the current court’s approach to the law, one that he said fetishizes the texts of statutes and the Constitution, reading them woodenly, without a common-sense appreciation of their purpose and consequences.
Without naming names, he seemed to call on the three members of the court appointed by President Donald Trump — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — to reconsider how they approach the role.
“Recently,” he wrote, “major cases have come before the court while several new justices have spent only two or three years at the court. Major changes take time, and there are many years left for the newly appointed justices to decide whether they want to build the law using only textualism and originalism.”
He added that “they may well be concerned about the decline in trust in the court — as shown by public opinion polls.”
Textualism is a way of interpreting statutes that focuses on their words, leading to decisions that turn on grammar and punctuation. Originalism seeks to interpret the Constitution as it was understood at the time it was adopted, even though, Breyer said in the interview, “half the country wasn’t represented in the political process that led to the document.”
There are three large problems with originalism, he wrote in the book.
“First, it requires judges to be historians — a role for which they may not be qualified — constantly searching historical sources for the ‘answer’ where there often isn’t one there,” he wrote. “Second, it leaves no room for judges to consider the practical consequences of the constitutional rules they propound. And third, it does not take into account the ways in which our values as a society evolve over time as we learn from the mistakes of our past.”
Breyer did not accuse the justices who use those methods of being political in the partisan sense or of acting in bad faith. But he said their approach represented an abdication of the judicial role, one in which they ought to consider a problem from every angle.
In his chambers, he recalled another era, when three different Republican appointees — Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter and Anthony Kennedy — largely shared his basic approach to the law.
“Sandra, David — I mean, the two of them, I would see eye to eye not necessarily in the result in every case, but just the way you approach it.” Breyer said. “And Tony, too, to a considerable degree.”
Breyer retired a little reluctantly, under pressure from liberals who wanted to make sure that President Joe Biden could appoint his successor and that the conservative supermajority on the court, currently at 6-3, would not get any more lopsided. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former law clerk to Breyer, now occupies his seat.
Breyer, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, has returned to Harvard Law School, where he taught before becoming a judge. But he said he missed his old job.
“When you’re a professor, you’re mostly involved in what people decided already in the past,” he said. “When you’re a judge, you’re also interested in that, but what you’re deciding is going to affect present and future. And that’s hard. Because you don’t really know how it will work out. You have to do your best there. I like that kind of job.”
He shrugged, seeming to contemplate the passage of time. “What can you do?” he asked. “It’s the human condition.”
Breyer’s critics say his approach allows judges too much freedom to turn their preferences into law. I asked him for an example of a case in which the law required him to reach a conclusion at odds with his personal views.
“What about all the capital punishment cases?” he asked. Although he urged the court in a 2015 dissent to reconsider the constitutionality of the death penalty, he did not adopt the practice of some earlier justices of dissenting in every capital case. “That doesn’t mean I approved,” he said.
He added, more generally, that he hoped his book would reach both a broad audience and a narrow one.
“I’d love people to read it,” he said. “I’d like for you to agree with me. So would every author. I’d like even to get the members of this court to read it and to say, ‘Oh, not a bad point. Not a bad point.’ And that’s all.”
US abortions reach highest level in over a decade, sparked by surge in medication abortion
Deidre McPhillips, CNN – March 18, 2024
Abortions are on the rise in the United States, despite bans that have taken effect in more than a dozen states since the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that revoked the federal right to abortion in June 2022.
There were more than 1 million abortions in the US in 2023, the highest rate in more than a decade and a 10% jump from 2020, according to a report released Tuesday by the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization focused on sexual and reproductive health that supports abortion rights. The latest trends also suggest that medication abortion is a more common option than ever.
Although abortions all but stopped in the 14 states with total bans, nearly every other state had an increase in the number of abortions provided from 2020 to 2023. As the geography of abortion care shifted amid a fractured policy landscape, the 10% increase in abortions nationwide meant that states without total bans saw a 25% increase in those years.
The “drastic loss of access in states with bans has been counterbalanced by monumental efforts on the part of clinics, abortion funds and logistical support organizations to help people in ban states access care through financial and practical support,” the authors of the report wrote.
States bordering those with bans had particularly large increases, but abortions also increased in other states where they remained legal.
“It is very possible that, while access was dramatically curtailed for people living in ban states, access substantially improved for residents of states without bans,” the authors wrote.
In addition to states policies enacted to protect patients and access to care and increased financial support from abortion funds, researchers from the Guttmacher Institute suggest that improved access to telehealth in recent years may have made medication abortion more broadly available.
Medication abortion has become more common than ever post-Roe, according to another new Guttmacher report. Nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the US in 2023 – an estimated 642,700 – were medication abortions, the report says.
Medication abortion, also known as medical abortion, is a method by which someone ends their pregnancy by taking two pills – mifepristone and misoprostol – rather than having a surgical procedure.
This option has become steadily more common over the two decades it’s been available, rising from less than 10% of all abortions in the US in 2001 to 53% in 2020 and 63% in 2023.
But mifepristone, the drug that was approved for abortion use by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2000, faces an unprecedented legal challenge. On March 26, the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that puts access to the medication at stake – even in states where abortion remains legal – and raises questions about the authority that courts have to overrule determinations by FDA experts about a drug’s safety.
Misoprostol can be used on its own for a medication abortion and is a safe alternative, but research suggests that using both pills together is the gold standard.
Research has long found that medication abortion is safe and effective, but another recent study found that to be true even when the patient gets the medicine through a telehealth appointment.
“Any return to restrictions on medication abortion provision via telemedicine would be detrimental for people who either prefer or only have access to abortion using telemedicine,” the Guttmacher researchers wrote in the new report. “While the current court case only affects use of mifepristone — and a misoprostol-only regimen is also a safe and effective method of medication abortion — everyone seeking an abortion should have access to the full range of safe, effective options.”
The new reports from Guttmacher estimate abortion trends based on responses from a sample of abortion providers in the US. They probably undercount the number of abortions in the US, as the data does not include abortions that happen outside of the formal health care system or medication abortions that were sent to people in states where abortion is banned.
CNN’s Jen Christensen and Tierney Sneed contributed to this report.
