Category Archives: Donald Trump

Former aides warn of ‘running out of time’ to prevent Trump re-election

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Sarah Matthews, Cassidy Hutchinson and Alyssa Farah Griffin insist Trump’s behavior would be worse if he wins second term

The re-election of Donald Trump in 2024 could “end American democracy as we know it”, according to three women who worked for him in the White House during his chaotic term in office.

All three gave testimony to the US House committee investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat as well as the 6 January 6 Capitol attack staged by his supporters. And they warned in an unprecedented television interview on Sunday that time was short to prevent a second Trump administration in which they insist his behavior would be much worse.

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Clarence Thomas must recuse himself from ruling on Trump’s 2024 eligibility, Raskin says

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Democrat speaks on supreme court stepping in to adjudicate Maine and Colorado rulings that removed Trump from ballots

Supreme court justice Clarence Thomas must recuse himself from ruling on Donald Trump’s eligibility for the 2024 presidential election, a prominent Democrat said Sunday, warning that the leading Republican candidate is seeking to become a “political martyr” as he pursues a second presidency.

Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin was speaking ahead of the nation’s highest court stepping in to adjudicate recent state rulings in Maine and Colorado that struck the former president from the general election primaries under the US constitution’s 14th amendment insurrection clause.

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Maine secretary of state targeted in ‘swatting’ call after removing Trump from ballot

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Shenna Bellows is latest politician to be victim of fake emergency call to police with the intent they will show up at a residence

A fake emergency call to police resulted in officers responding Friday night to the home of Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, just a day after she removed Donald Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot under the US constitution’s insurrection clause.

She becomes the latest elected politician to become a target of swatting, which involves making a phone call to emergency services with the intent that a large first responder presence, including Swat teams, will show up at a residence.

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How 2023 became the year Congress forgot to ban TikTok

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Momentum seemed to be on their side of US lawmakers this year to stop 150 million Americans from using TikTok. What happened?

Banning TikTok in the US seemed almost inevitable at the start of 2023. The previous year saw a trickle of legislative actions against the short-form video app, after dozens of individual states barred TikTok from government devices in late 2022 over security concerns. At the top of the new year, the US House followed suit, and four universities blocked TikTok from campus wifi.

The movement to prohibit TikTok grew into a flash flood by spring. CEO Shou Zi Chew was called before Congress for brutal questioning in March. By April – with support from the White House (and Joe Biden’s predecessor) – it seemed a federal ban of the app was not just possible, but imminent.

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Trump 2024 trials in limbo as supreme court becomes entangled

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Potential trial delays mean the former president could spend less time in courtroom and more time on the campaign trail

When Donald Trump was indicted in multiple criminal cases this summer, the conventional wisdom was that the former US president could spend vast amounts of time during the height of the 2024 presidential campaign stuck in courtrooms for back-to-back trials in New York, Florida and Washington.

But the reality is that with the federal 2020 election interference case on hold pending appeals, and repeated delays pushing the classified documents case behind schedule by several months, for instance, Trump may find himself in courtrooms far less than expected.

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Prosecutors urge court to reject Trump’s immunity claims in election subversion case

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Special counsel Jack Smith says in filing that suggestion Trump cannot be held accountable for crimes ‘threatens the country’

Special counsel Jack Smith urged a federal appeals court Saturday to reject former president Donald Trump’s claims that he is immune from prosecution, saying the suggestion that he cannot be held to account for crimes committed in office “threatens the democratic and constitutional foundation” of the country.

The filing from Smith’s team was submitted before arguments next month on the legally untested question of whether a former president can be prosecuted for acts made while in the White House.

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Michael Cohen accidentally gave his lawyer fake citations, court filing says

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Former Trump lawyer says he used AI program Google Bard and blames his lawyer for not fact-checking him

Michael Cohen, the former attorney and fixer for ex-president Donald Trump, said in a newly unsealed court filing that he accidentally gave his lawyer fake legal citations that were made up by an artificial intelligence program.

In a sworn declaration made public on Friday, Cohen told a Manhattan judge that the sham citations had been generated by the AI program Google Bard, and had made their way into his lawyer’s filing because of a pair of misunderstandings – including his failure to realize that the information spat out by the program was not based in reality.

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US supreme court under pressure to rule swiftly on states’ Trump ballot bans

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Court faces pressure to rule on Maine and Colorado’s decisions preventing ex-president from appearing on presidential ballots

A decision by Maine’s secretary of state to prevent former president Donald Trump from appearing on the state’s presidential election ballot will now probably end up before the US supreme court. Maine’s move follows a similar decision in Colorado this month.

There is mounting pressure on the conservative-leaning judicial body to swiftly rule on Maine and Colorado’s application of section 3 of the 14th amendment prohibiting anyone who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office. But neither decision will be the last ballot eruption in an already convulsive election which is likely to see a rematch of Trump versus Joe Biden.

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Donald Trump: I didn’t bully my way into Home Alone 2 – they begged me for a cameo

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Former US president denies director’s claims that he insisted on appearing in 1992 film in exchange for filming in his hotel

Donald Trump has denied claims made by the director Chris Columbus that he “bullied his way into” appearing in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.

The former US president said on his social media platform Truth Social, that the film’s production team were “begging me to make a cameo appearance”.

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Biden mulls border crackdown in face of Trump’s migrant-bashing rhetoric

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President faces pressure from Republican critics and Democratic allies as he struggles to address what both sides agree is a crisis

Heading into the heat of the 2024 election season, Joe Biden is weighing major changes to US immigration policy that would toughen border enforcement and address an issue that has emerged as one of the president’s biggest political vulnerabilities ahead of a likely rematch against his anti-immigration rival Donald Trump.

But it is also a risk for Biden, who entered the White House in 2021 promising to “restore humanity and American values to our immigration system” after Trump’s four-year crackdown on immigration.

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‘Sitting on a powder keg’: US braces for a year, and an election, like no other

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Amid fears of authoritarianism, oldest US president likely to face off against first president to be criminally charged

The 60th US presidential election, which will unfold in 2024, will be quite unlike any that has gone before as the US, and the rest of the world, braces for a contest amid fears of eroding democracy and the looming threat of authoritarianism.

It will be a fight marked by numerous unwanted firsts as the oldest president in the country’s history is likely to face the first former US president to stand trial on criminal charges. A once aspirational nation will continue its plunge into anxiety and divisions about crime, immigration, race, foreign wars and the cost of living.

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FBI investigating threats directed at Colorado supreme court justices after Trump ruling

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Court voted 4-3 last week that ex-president was ineligible to run for White House again under US constitution’s insurrection clause

Colorado police are working with the FBI to investigate threats directed at justices of the state’s supreme court after its decision to remove Donald Trump from the presidential primary ballot.

The court voted 4-3 last week that the former president was ineligible to run for the White House again, citing a rarely used clause in the US constitution and his role in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

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A split among Democrats may threaten ‘the Squad’ – and help Trump – in 2024

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Centrists are taking on progressives in upcoming House races, as some say they’re losing sight of the big picture

A looming clash between the centre and left of the Democratic party could unseat members of the “the Squad” of progressives and hand a gift to Donald Trump’s Republicans in the 2024 elections.

The war in Gaza has divided Democrats like no other issue and is likely to play a key role in party primaries that decide which candidates run for the House of Representatives.

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Trump asks appeals court to throw out 2020 election subversion charges

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Lawyers argue Trump cannot be prosecuted for actions taken while serving as president in latest battle with special counsel

Donald Trump has asked an appeals court in Washington DC to throw out charges that he sought to subvert the 2020 election, in the latest of a series of high-stakes legal maneuvers between the former president’s lawyers and the US department of justice.

In a filing late on Saturday lawyers for Trump argued to the DC circuit court of appeals that he is legally cloaked from liability for actions he took while serving as president.

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Nikki Haley surges in poll to within four points of Republican leader Trump

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Former South Carolina governor still trails the ex-president, but has made strides in polling ahead of the New Hampshire primary

The former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley has pulled within four percentage points of frontrunner Donald Trump in New Hampshire’s 2024 Republican presidential primary, a contest which could prove closer than expected for the ex-president, according to a new poll.

In an American Research Group Inc poll released on Thursday which had asked voters whom they preferred in the New Hampshire primary scheduled for 23 January, Haley earned 29% support to Trump’s 33%. That meant the gap between Haley and Trump was within the survey’s 4% margin of error after the former president had long held dominating polling leads in the race for the 2024 Republican White House nomination.

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Trump pressured Michigan election officers not to certify 2020 vote – report

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Recording shows Trump asked canvassers not to sign official document confirming Biden had won, Detroit News says

Donald Trump made a phone call in November 2020 in which he put pressure on two Republican election officers in Michigan not to sign the official document from the state confirming that Joe Biden had won the presidential election there, according to an exclusive report by The Detroit News late on Thursday.

The Detroit News outlet has obtained recordings of the call, made on 17 November 2020, where Trump, who was refusing to accept that he had just lost the White House to Joe Biden, and Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel talked to Wayne county election officials Monica Palmer and William Hartmann and told them they would look “terrible” if they signed to endorse Trump’s defeat in the crucial swing state, according to the report.

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How Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is taking over the Republican party

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Rhetoric that was widely seen as echoing Hitler was not enough for some senior Republicans to break ranks with the former president

Donald Trump has the tacit blessing of senior Republican figures as he seeks to put border security front and center of the 2024 election by deploying fascistic language to fire up his support base, political analysts warn.

The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 has called for a sharp crackdown on immigration and asserted at a weekend rally that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

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Colorado supreme court justices face death threats after Trump ruling

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Report finds ‘significant violent rhetoric’ against justices and Democrats online after ruling to exclude Trump from ballot

Justices on the Colorado supreme court are receiving a barrage of death threats after it ruled to exclude Donald Trump from the state’s presidential ballot next year because of his attempts to cause insurrection.

A report compiled by Advance Democracy, a non-partisan non-profit organization, said there was “significant violent rhetoric” against the justices and Democrats on social media, according to NBC News.

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Trump lawyers urge supreme court to reject fast-tracking immunity decision

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Federal 2020 election interference trial is currently set for 4 March, the day before Super Tuesday

Lawyers for Donald Trump on Wednesday urged the US supreme court to reject a request from the special counsel to expeditiously decide whether he was immune from prosecution over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, contending prosecutors lacked standing to bring the petition.

The argument from the ex-president was that prosecutors had no basis to appeal a lower court ruling that was favorable to them, and should instead defer intervening in the case until a federal appeals court issued its own judgment first.

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‘He’s dog-whistling’: Trump denounced over anti-immigrant comment

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Former president said undocumented immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’ at political rally on Saturday

Donald Trump is facing a backlash for repeating a remark at a political rally on Saturday where he said undocumented immigrants to the United States are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

The former US president’s comments were the latest example of his campaign rhetoric that seemed to go beyond the lies and exaggerations that are a trademark of his stump speeches and instead go into territory of outright extremism or racism. In November he was widely condemned for calling his opponents “vermin”, language that echoed that used historically by dictators and authoritarians.

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