Prefer Cannon Guarantees She’ll Take Her Sweet Time With This Trump Case

April 5, 2024

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Donald Trump received some good news and some bad news in his classified documents trial on Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon rejected Trump’s effort to dismiss the case outright. Trump had claimed in a motion that the trove of national security secrets found at Mar-a-Lago during an FBI raid had in fact been his under the Presidential Records Act. But that’s not sufficient, Cannon said, noting that the “Presidential Records Act does not provide a pre-trial basis to dismiss.”

But Cannon also used the ruling to push back on special counsel Jack Smith, who had effectively asked that she rule on a motion that was filed last month.

“Individually, to the extent the Special Counsel requests an anticipatory finalization of jury instructions before trial, before a status conference, and before the presentation of trial defenses and evidence, the Court declines that request as unprecedented and unjust,” Cannon wrote. “The Court’s request for preliminary draft instructions on certain counts must not be misconstrued as declaring a final definition on any essential element or asserted defense in this case. Nor should it be interpreted as anything other than what it was: an earnest effort, within the context of the upcoming trial, to better understand the parties’ competing positions and the questions to be submitted to the jury in this complex case of first impression.”

Lawful analysts be pleased anxious that a potential of steady delays might maybe well neatly be the Trump-appointed judge’s advance of surreptitiously pushing aside the trial altogether.

Last month, Trump tried twice to get the case dismissed, arguing in separate motions that it didn’t matter when he took the classified material if doing so was unlawful, and that the classified documents might be considered “personal records” rather than presidential under the Presidential Records Act. The latter argument was roundly rejected by Smith’s team, which pointed to a transcript of Trump’s own remarks in which the former president acknowledged the documents were definitely not personal.

“This completely vindicates me, you know. Except it’s, like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information,” Trump said in a 2021 recording.

Smith’s team also argued that Trump’s “personal records” claim suggests the GOP presidential nominee believes he is above reproach and beyond the law.

“Trump’s claims rest on three foremost errors, all of which mirror his be taught about that, as a ancient President, the Nation’s licensed pointers and tips of accountability that govern every other citizen carry out no longer notice to him,” federal prosecutors wrote in a filing closing month.

Trump appears to know this is the case. In a July 2021 recording, Trump confessed the shocking: that he in fact could not have declassified the “secret” documents as he claimed he did because he was no longer president. And in a June interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, Trump claimed he was too “busy” to return the boxes to the federal government.

Trump has also taken to outright admitting that he took the classified information. In a prerecorded interview on Newsmax, Trump claimed flat out that he in fact did take the classified documents, describing the process of shamelessly packing them away while leaving office.

“I took them very legally,” Trump said. “And I wasn’t hiding them.”

The jig is up for Senator Ted Cruz—and he knows it.

On Wednesday, the Texas Republican leveraged an interview with Fox News to beg for campaign donations after his opponent, NFL player and former Representative Colin Allredwon Texas’s Democratic Senate primary in a landslide.

“The Democrats are coming after me, they are gonna spend more than $100 million this year, George Soros is already spending millions of dollars in the state of Texas,” Cruz said, leaning on the favored Republican and antisemitic talking point, billionaire George Soros.

“My opponent, a liberal Democrat named Colin Allred, is out-raising Beto O’Rourke, my previous opponent, 3-to-1. They’re flooding hundreds of thousands of dollars into Texas—and the reason is simple. You recall my last reelection, it was a three-point race. I won by 2.6 percent.”

Cruz: Colin Allred is outraising my closest opponent 3-1. They’re flooding hundreds of thousands of dollars into Texas and the reason is straightforward. My last reelection was a 3-point race. I won by 2.6% pic.twitter.com/9RB0Hof7Wb

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 4, 2024

That’s a narrow margin for someone who has had a gradual rise in Texas politics over the past decade—even though he has been called “Lucifer in the flesh” by members of his own party and crowned the most “unpopular member of the U.S. Senate” by local papers.

Allred was initially predicted to be a long-shot candidate against Cruz. Finally, it’s been 33 years since a Democrat held a statewide office in the traditionally deep-red state. But Allred has quickly gained momentum in the race, trailing the incumbent by just 6 percent, according to a Marist College poll conducted in March. It may well seem that 10 years in the Texas sun have led to certain shortcomings in the Lone Star State, where Cruz has consistently portrayed himself as spineless as he is self-serving.

Recall that, in the face of a devastating winter storm that wrecked Texas’s infrastructure, Cruz decided to skip town, opting to vacation in Cancun instead of helping the state recover, leaving behind Texans and his dogs. And Cruz later endorsed Donald Trump for president even after the latter insulted his wife before the 2016 election.

Then, in January, Cruz endorsed Trump all over again, despite tolerating months of ruthless mockery from the Trump campaign over his alleged need to wear heels to reach the podium. (On a side note, Cruz moreover made fun of then–Vice President Joe Biden on the eve of his son Beau’s funeral in 2015.)

Cruz’s rhetoric has also shifted the state toward political extremes that do not necessarily align with what the majority of Texans want: He backed Trump’s claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, supported a strict abortion ban, and has done little to improve IVF access in the state.

He has also vehemently opposed gun control measures in the state even after lone shooters killed 21 people at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, 23 people in an El Paso Walmart, and 27 people at a church in Sutherland Springs, in separate shootings. The Sutherland Springs attack is the state’s deadliest mass shooting ever.

Cruz’s bid to retain his seat also flies in the face of laws he proposed last year, proposing two-term limits in order to rid Congress of “completely entrenched politicians.” Obviously, Cruz admitted later he did not actually believe the restrictions would apply to him.

Allred, meanwhile, has a completely different approach.

“My temperament is very different. I strive to remain even-keeled. I work in a bipartisan manner. I don’t lash out at people. I prefer to represent Texas in a way that’s consistent with what I believe a senator’s job should be, which is to introduce legislation that helps Texans—not to be a kind of media personality,” the 40-year-old told The New Republic in September.

That might maybe well well neatly be glorious what Texas is buying for.

Donald Trump’s social media firm has seen its payment plummet after a chain of atrocious news this week, and the ancient president is throwing a tantrum about it online.

In two lengthy posts on Truth Social, part of the project, Trump ranted about how great he thinks the platform is, attacking Democrats and other social media platforms that have banned him.

“I THINK TRUTH IS AMAZING! To start with, it is extremely steady, having over $200,000,000 in CASH and ZERO DEBT,” Trump posted Thursday morning. “More importantly, it is the first time I get the word out and, for better or worse, people must listen to what I actually want to say, perhaps, according to experts, more than anyone else in the World.”

He went on to brag about his TV scores, about how other social media platforms desire him to wait on, and the design in which the “FAKE NEWS” shouldn’t be believed because, “They’re all on TRUTH because they will doubtless be pleased to be[[[[sic].”

The rant comes after two of Trump Media and Technology Corp.’s high investors pleaded guilty to insider buying and selling on Wednesday, after they traded securities using nonpublic information of a shell company that later merged with Trump’s firm ahead of its initial public offering. That revelation came just days after Trump Media’s SEC filings were released, showing staggering losses of $58 million, with only $4.1 million in earnings, sending investors bailing.

As of this writing, TMTG’s inventory is buying and selling at $46.49, below its high of $Seventy 9.38 per portion on March 26, the day of its IPO. Trump has to wait six months forward of he can profit and begin selling a couple of of his 72 million shares, or procure approval from the firm’s board. He might maybe well resolve to carry out that sooner as his factual funds pile up.

There’s no less than one ghost that won’t stop haunting Congress, and his name is George Santos.

Despite being ousted by the legislative body from his seat representing New York’s Third congressional district back in November, the notorious con man is back, ready to sow chaos—as he promised—for the lawmakers who gave him the boot. For the time being on the docket: fellow Long Island Republican Representative Garret LaLota.

Despite there being 26 other New York lawmakers to run against—including some from counties with overwhelming Republican majorities that could well give him a better shot at returning to the lower chamber—Santos has decided to resurrect his political career by running against LaLota, whom he might hate more than anyone else.

“He’s not well liked. He’s an arrogant individual. He’s not a great man. He’s cocky,” Santos said of LaLota the day before his expulsion. “He’s a meathead, somebody who’s not good to you for no reason.”

LaLota represents New York’s 1st congressional district, encompassing the eastern part of Suffolk County, and on the opposite side of the peninsula from where Santos obtained his election. He was also one of the first members of Congress from either political party to call for Santos to resign after the latter’s lies had been uncovered. But in an interview with The Daily Beast Santos rejected the idea that he was running against LaLota merely because he didn’t like him. His explanation was, in fact, a bit weirder.

“We’re going to have a chicken coop and stuff like that, and in Suffolk County it’s much easier to get that,” Santos told the newsletter, comparing the suburban sprawl to his situation in Queens. “In Nassau County, it’s full of restrictions on where and how much, and can you get chickens and can you get roosters because of neighbors and noise and that stuff.”

LaLota isn’t the only New York Republican to face threats from the indicted former congressman. Santos kicked off his revenge tour back in December with a dig against Representative Nicole Malliotakis, accusing her of using information from classified briefings to make some money on the stock market.

“She receives classified briefings as a member of the Ways and Means Committee,” Santos said at the time. “Can someone explain to me how she miraculously becomes a member of the committee and then starts trading NYCB stock with the Signature Bank collapse just a day before an 80 percent stock increase?”

But it may not be up to voters to decide if Santos returns to office. The alleged fraudster—who was caught fabricating his entire résumé and lying about his relation to Holocaust survivors, being “Jewish,” his connection to the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, and the kidnapping of his niece, among other things—is currently facing 23 counts related to illegally receiving unemployment benefits, aggravated identity theft, and credit card fraud. His next court appearance is scheduled for August 13, with a trial expected in September.

In a notable shift, one of President Joe Biden’s closest allies in the Senate, Chris Coons, has come out in favor of conditions on U.S. weapons sales to Israel.

Coons made the statement on CNN, just days after Israel bombed a marked World Central Kitchen aid convoy on Monday night and killed seven aid workers, including Australian, British, and American citizens. The organization, founded by celebrity chef José Andrés, had coordinated the convoy’s movements with the Israeli military, and its vehicles were clearly marked.

If Israel conducts an invasion of Rafah “at scale, if they were to drop thousand-pound bombs, and send in a battalion to go after Hamas and make no provisions for civilians or for humanitarian aid, then I would vote to condition aid to Israel,” Coons told anchor Sarah Sidner.

“I’ve never said that before, I’ve never been here before,” Coons said, stressing his steady support for Israel and pointing out that Congress included an additional $3.3 billion of aid for the country in its final appropriations bill.

Despite Coons’s remarks, he did make similar comments on CNN in Februarywhen he told Wolf Blitzer that he’d support restricting military aid if Israel conducted a full-scale campaign in Rafah without regard to civilians or aid.

Coons’s remarks echo statements by several Democrats suggesting that conditions be placed on aid to Israel. Senator Bernie Sanders said so in November in Novemberand, in March, was joined by six other senators in a letter to Biden urging a suspension of military aid to Israel if humanitarian aid was blocked. Last month, Politico reported that even Biden himself was frustrated about any such measure.

It’s clear that Israel’s war in Gaza and the U.S.’s continued support for the country is a political minefield for Biden. It has sharply eroded his approval, in particular among Muslims and Arab American citizens in key swing states. A policy shift might be the best solution.

Biden’s struggles on Gaza:

Donald Trump has remade his name and image several times over, morphing from real estate magnate to New York socialite to reality-TV host to the far-right demagogue of a vitriolic national movement. But few people know Trump for his musical inclination. In his downtime at Mar-a-Lago, Trump is the one man with the aux cord—and he’s got some interesting hits on rotation.

According to an Axios analysis of Trump’s musical routine at the Florida club, Trump prefers to play the same playlist. That includes “Hello,” by Lionel Richie; “Suspicious Minds,” by Elvis; “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” by James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti; “November Rain,” by Guns N’ Roses; and, ironically“You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” by the Rolling Stones.

He moreover, surprisingly, throws in numbers from two big and wildly dramatic Broadway musicals: Phantom of the Opera and Jesus Christ Superstar.

But sadly for Trump, not all of his favorite artists esteem him wait on. One other standby for the GOP presidential decide is Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”—a single he loved lots that he tried to squeeze it into one among his campaign rallies, easiest to be roundly slapped down by the Irish singer’s estate for pondering of her at all.

“It is no exaggeration to claim that Sinéad would had been disgusted, difficulty and insulted to be pleased her work misrepresented on this advance by somebody who she herself incessantly known as a ‘biblical devil,’” O’Connor’s estate wrote in a missive, ordering him to discontinuance the utilization of her art work.

Autonomous presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a reputation for promoting pseudoscience. But in a recently surfaced interview, Kennedy makes one among his wildest claims but: that the upward thrust in mass shootings over the last twenty years is due to the antidepressants and video games.

Throughout a January interview with Turkish state-owned TRT World, Kennedy said that within the previous twenty years in the US, “there’s been no per capita increase higher in the number of weapons we have now in this country.

He argued that other causes worth studying, such as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), commonly used as antidepressants, and video games. Kennedy also claimed that the National Institutes of Health hasn’t been allowed to study the cause of gun violence in the US since 1996.

Wow.@RobertKennedyJr urged that the mass shooting problem in the US is not from guns, but from antidepressants and video games pic.twitter.com/CjHAF3Hf87

— Keith Edwards (@keithedwards) April 3, 2024

Kennedy’s claim about the number of guns in the US is not accurate. Over the past twenty years, gun production and imports have sharply increased, matching the rise in gun deaths. As for the NIH being allowed to study the cause of gun violence, it appears that Kennedy’s information is outdated.

In 1996, Congress did pass the Dickey Amendment, which prohibited the use of any federal funding to “advocate or promote gun control.” The law effectively banned research on gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and in 2011, Congress amended the law to also include the NIH. But in 2019, Congress approved $25 million in funding specifically for the NIH and the CDC to study gun violence, and clarified that the Dickey Amendment did not specifically ban gun research.

Results from newer, federally funded research are starting to come in. Last year, Stanford researchers reviewed medical research for connections between video games and gun violence and found “that video games do not cause violence, can substantially reduce stigma and barriers to access, and hold the potential to inject wellness into our daily lives.”

Kennedy’s views on vaccines and drugs are alarming beyond his stances on vaccines. He’s claimed that polluted water is making kids transgenderthat China and the U.S. are developing ethnic bioweapons designed to target specific races, and that WiFi causes cancerand he has compared mask mandates to Nazi experiments. His running mate, Nicole Shanahan, has similarly problematic views.

A stalwart of the Republican Party went scorched earth on Donald Trump’s promise to pardon January 6 rioters, suggesting to his fellow conservatives that Trump’s staunch defense of the “sons of bitches” must disqualify him from the presidency.

In an interview on MSNBC’s The Beat on Wednesday, Karl Rove, a senior adviser to President George W. Bush, tore into Trump’s resolve to fight for people charged and convicted for committing acts of violence on the U.S. Capitol. Trump warmly refers to others who attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results as “hostages.”

“And what these people did after they violently attacked the Capitol, in an attempt to disrupt a constitutionally mandated meeting of Congress to certify the results of the Electoral College, is a stain on our history,” Rove said. “And every one of these sons of bitches who did that, we ought to apprehend them, try them, and send them to detention center.”

“And one of the serious errors made in this campaign is that Donald Trump has now said, ‘I’m going to pardon these people because they’re hostages.’ No, they’re not. They’re thugs. There were people—a couple of them had automatic weapons at a hotel in Virginia hoping to be called up,” Rove continued, describing the ensuing chaos as the rioters ransacked Congress, hunted Nancy Pelosi, and chanted “hang them all.”

“And so, why Trump has done this is beyond me. If he had said, ‘What? I believe our jury system, I believe law enforcement—anyone who assaulted the Capitol ought to be’—I mean, he said it a couple of times, but now he’s appearing in a video with people who assaulted police officers with the intent to storm the Capitol by force.”

But Rove says there’s a lesson in all this for Democrats too. The Republican Party’s failure to hold their demagogic leader accountable for January 6 should not stop the liberal party from making it a centerpiece of their campaigns against him.

“If they were smart, they’d seize on January 6 and push hard on it,” Rove told MSNBC’s Ari Melber. “They would normally say, ‘He should pardon these people who attacked our Capitol.’ I worked in that building as a young man. To me, the U.S. Congress is one of the great examples of the power of our democracy and a jewel of the Constitution.”

The Alabama Supreme Court ruling in February that declared frozen embryos are children, effectively ending in vitro fertilization procedures in the state, is still wreaking havoc, despite reopener”>recent state laws that were intended to protect access.

Infirmary Health, a health care system in the city of Mobile, will discontinue IVF procedures at the end of 2024 due to litigation linked to the ruling, the Alabama Reflector reported Wednesday. The hospital, which was one of the health care systems sued in the initial case, faced many more lawsuits after the court ruling.

“In order to support families in Alabama and along the Gulf Coast who have begun the process of IVF treatment in the hopes of starting a family, Mobile Infirmary has temporarily resumed IVF treatments at the clinic,” Infirmary Health said in a statement. “However, in light of litigation concerns surrounding IVF treatment, Mobile Infirmary will no longer be able to provide this service to families after December 31, 2024.”

In March, Alabama’s legislature passed a law that extended legal and civil immunity to IVF clinics for their work. But the law does not address when life begins, a sticking point that Infirmary Health noted at the time. Since not all embryos survive the IVF process, that could still leave room for lawsuits against the health care providers.

The Alabama court ruling has had a significant ripple effect. Donald Trump criticized the court ruling, Representative Nancy Mace put forward an inconsequential, nonbinding bill claiming to support the cause, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been positioned on the issuewith regards to why Republicans haven’t decisively acted to support IVF.

Last week, a Democrat, Marilyn Lands, won a special election for the Alabama state House in a deep-red seat. Lands ran on protecting access to abortion and IVF.

The ruling and ensuing events are a warning to other states regarding both healthcare and political upheaval. Democrats seek to capitalize on the pro-IVF momentum, ensuring that the treatment will remain an issue in November.