Donald Trump trial

Trump rails against ‘rigged’ trial

Former president Donald Trump railed against the “rigged” trial that saw him convicted on thirty-four felony charges during a forty-minute press conference at Trump Tower in New York on Friday. In addition to speaking about the case and the individuals he believed to be responsible for corrupting it — DA Alvin Bragg, Judge Juan Merchan and his former lawyer Michael Cohen, among others — Trump went on offense against the Biden campaign and administration and tied this latest trial to the years-long investigation into alleged Russian collusion and the three other cases pending against him. He claimed the United States is now officially a “fascist” country, flipping the term that Democrats have long used to describe him and and his plans for a second term.

The fallout from the astonishing Trump verdict

The morning after the night before The week in Washington was overshadowed somewhat by the antics up the Acela corridor in New York, where a Manhattan jury found Donald Trump guilty of thirty-four counts of falsifying business records. For Trump haters, Thursday’s decision adds to a long list of “firsts”: he’s the first president to be impeached twice, the first president to be found liable for sexual abuse... and now, the first president to be convicted of a felony. But as with his previous court fights — over E. Jean Carroll’s accusations of sexual impropriety against him and Letitia James’s real-estate fraud case — it’s not yet clear how the guilty verdict will harm him in the polls as he attempts to be reelected as president.

The Trump trial tedium

Donald Trump was falling asleep. The former president of the United States was, as we have all been at one point or another, stuck in an interminably long and boring meeting. This one happened to be in a courtroom, one that he protested was being kept too cold — the presiding judge agreed but said that the choice with their limited thermostat was between too cold and too hot, and it was better not to swelter. So the room was cold, the talk was boring, and the former president was falling asleep.

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Trump on trial

It’s been a banner week for armchair lawyers. Here’s what you need to know about Donald Trump’s trials in New York City and before the Supreme Court.In the Big Apple, where Trump has scored rave reviews in bodegas and from construction workers. This week, David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, confirmed what Ted Cruz long suspected during the 2016 campaign — that the tabloid was deeply plugged-in with the Trump orbit, even to the point of manufacturing conspiracies that Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.“We mashed the photos and the different picture with Lee Harvey Oswald and mashed the two together,” Pecker said. “And that’s how that story was prepared — created, I would say.

The ayatollah’s birthday surprise

Did Iran’s ayatollah have the worst birthday ever? His eighty-fifth kicked off with a bang, as Israel retaliated after Iran’s unprecedented strike across the Jewish state that featured a failed barrage of lethal drones over the weekend. What comes next from Iran remains anyone’s guess — but the Israeli response, which struck an Iranian military but not nuclear site, served as an undoubted shot across the bow to the largest state sponsor of terrorism. The message was that it can’t attempt to directly attack Israel’s homeland without consequences and that Israel has the capability to attack Iran’s nukes if they so please. Iranian proxies, like Hamas, not only invaded Israel on October 7, but have been plaguing global shipping routes for months.

A president on trial

A week after the death of O.J. Simpson, America has a new Trial of the Century — perhaps the first of many. Jury selection is currently underway in a Manhattan courtroom as presidential candidate Donald Trump faces charges from New York County district attorney Alvin Bragg of faking business records to conceal payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Daniels says that she was paid $130,000 by Michael Cohen in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election in order to not talk publicly about having sex with Trump a decade previously, shortly after his third marriage to Melania and the birth of their son Barron. This is the first trial of a former US president.