Former President Trump News/Discussion....

[Baxter49]

https://www.aol.com/news/us-judge-re...100816875.html
US judge receptive to Trump documents claims in warning sign for prosecutors

A federal judge overseeing the criminal case that accuses Donald Trump of mishandling classified documents has signaled an openness to the former U.S. president’s defense claims, in a sign that prosecutors might face a difficult road ahead.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, has asked Trump and prosecutors to propose jury instructions based on two legal scenarios that favor a claim from Trump that national security lawyers said have little relevance to the charges.

Trump and Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought the case, face a Tuesday deadline to respond to the judge’s order.

The dispute is another instance of Cannon lending credence to Trump's legal arguments about highly sensitive records taken to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida when he left the White House in 2021.

While Trump has clashed with judges in many of his legal cases, Cannon has been receptive to his defense in ways that could alter the course of the documents case.

“You have a court who is more favorable to the views of one party versus the other, and you’re seeing orders and decisions that are reflective of that,” said Brandon Van Grack, a former Justice Department national security official.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to charges accusing him of knowingly retaining secret records related to the U.S. national defense and obstructing efforts by the U.S. government to retrieve them.

The prosecution is one of four facing Trump as he seeks to unseat Democrat Joe Biden in the Nov. 5 presidential election. Trump has cast the cases as part of a politically motivated effort to damage his campaign.

At issue in Cannon’s recent order is Trump’s claim that he treated the documents as personal under a 1978 law that allows former presidents to keep records that have no connection to their official responsibilities.

Trump’s lawyers argue his decision to keep the records shows that he deemed them to be his personal property.

[Baxter49]

Apparently Hope Hicks flipped on Trump and will testify against him in the hush-money trial coming up.

The FL Supreme Court just announced that ballot initiatives on abortion and marijuana legalization will be on the ballot in Nov, providing a major boost to democratic candidates in the state.

And Trump's Truth Social lost 20 percent, who gave a money losing company which marginal numbers an eight billion dollar valuation? Pump and Dump is trending.

[DTravel]

Judge slaps expanded gag order on Trump after attacks on his daughter
Politico

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...cb877b50&ei=26

A New York judge has tightened restrictions on what Donald Trump can say in the lead-up to his criminal trial later this month — specifically by barring the former president from attacking the family members of prosecutors and the judge himself.

The move comes after Trump spent the weekend attacking the adult daughter of New York County Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who had issued a gag order last week barring Trump from attacking court staff and prosecutors. It shows Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s first criminal trial, isn’t shy about clamping down on rhetoric from Trump that he views as incendiary. Trump’s trial, over allegations he broke the law by paying hush money to a porn star to cover up an alleged sexual encounter with her, will start in two weeks.

In his order, Merchan lambasted Trump’s latest rhetoric.

“The average observer, must now, after hearing Defendant’s recent attacks, draw the conclusion that if they become involved in these proceedings, even tangentially, they should worry not only for themselves, but for their loved ones as well,” he wrote. “Such concerns will undoubtedly interfere with the fair administration of justice and constitutes a direct attack on the Rule of Law itself.”

Reached for comment on Monday evening, Steven Cheung, the communications director for Trump’s campaign, called the order “unconstitutional” and said it violates “the civil rights” of his social media followers, who “have a First Amendment right to receive and listen to his speech.”

Over the weekend, Trump dubbed Merchan’s daughter a “Rabid Trump Hater” for her work at a firm that has Democratic clients. He also accused her of using a picture of him in jail as her profile picture on a social media account, but a court official said another person had taken over the account when that picture was added.

Trump’s attacks on Merchan’s daughter are part of a pattern. In two other court cases over the past six months, judges have imposed gag orders barring Trump from going after witnesses and court employees. But Trump has instead attacked the judges and some of their family members — who were exempted from the other gag orders, which judges can deploy to protect the safety of people involved in the case.

[DTravel]

Trump's small-dollar donations plummeted as he hounded his base for cash: analysis
Raw Story

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...cb877b50&ei=72

Donald Trump's small-dollar donations have seen a big trend downwards as the former president hounded his base for cash, according to a new report.

Trump raised just just $51 million from small-dollar donors in 2023 in comparison to $626.6 million raised in 2020, according to an analysis by the Washington Post. Also in 2023, the Republican National Committee reportedly saw a drop in money from small-dollar donors in 2023.

“The biggest problem in GOP fundraising is that we don’t treat donors well,” Republican small-dollar fundraiser John Hall told The Post. “Sending eight emails and texts a day that promise an artificial match, threaten to take away your GOP membership, or call you a traitor if you don’t donate doesn’t build a long-term relationship with donors.”

After losing the 2020 election, Donald Trump flooded his mailing lists with requests for donations, prompting friends to complain they were be hounded, the Washington Post reports. Trump even heeded the warnings and asked his people to tone down the frequency of the requests.

Hall believes Trump's small donor boom slowed in 2023 because donors had been sent “too many messages that guilt them into donating,” according to Post. Hall added that people “being duped” into donating to candidates they didn’t know also played a role.

Zac Moffatt, CEO of the digital marketing company Targeted Victory, believes the reason for the donation slowdown was a little more complicated, he told the Post.

“It’s easy to blame texts and emails, but people don’t want to state the obvious: There’s far more competition in the space,” Moffatt said.

“As more races come on board, more people are competing. It used to be 50 people trying to talk to them; now it’s 150, even if the donors have grown 25 percent.”

According to people close to Trump, the fundraising is gaining steam again thanks to criminal cases leveled against him, which have reenergized his base.

[DTravel]

Donald Trump Has Increasingly 'Erratic Mind': Ex-Prosecutor
Newsweek

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...b877b50&ei=108

According to former prosecutor Dennis Aftergut, former president Donald Trump has an increasingly "erratic mind" following his recent posts on Truth Social.

Amid the 2024 election, in which former President Donald Trump and incumbent President Joe Biden will face off as both men each won a series of primary elections to become their party's presumptive presidential nominees, Trump has often been known to take to his social media account on Truth Social to speak on the political atmosphere, often criticizing his political opponents.

In addition, Trump, who faces various legal troubles at both the state and federal level, has also taken to Truth Social to voice his innocence and opposition to the allegations made against him. Most recently, Judge Juan Merchan imposed a gag order against Trump after the former president made a series of public comments about Merchan and his daughter, Loren Merchan. Trump attacked Merchan's daughter for her work in Democratic political circles and called for the judge to be recused from the case.

Trump is accused of falsifying business records over hush money payments to former adult film star Stormy Daniels to keep an alleged affair secret before the 2016 election. Prosecutors led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg allege the payments were part of a scheme to stop potentially damaging stories about the Republican from becoming public. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee for 2024, has denied any wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty to the 34 charges against him in the case.

On Monday, Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, published an opinion piece, "How Violence and Intimidation Are Key to Understanding Trump" on The Bulwark, a news site on Substack that provides analysis and reporting.

In the piece, Aftergut discusses Trump's continued social media posts as he states the former president's mind has become "increasingly erratic."

Newsweek has reached out to Trump's spokesperson via email for comment.

"You can see Trump's increasingly erratic mind in his calls for violence and acts of intimidation. Such calls led New York State Justice Juan Merchan to impose a limited gag order on Trump last week to protect jurors and prosecutors in Trump's upcoming criminal trial in Manhattan..Trump's mind seems ever more chaotic. You can see it in his hours-long ranting and rambling campaign speeches."

Aftergut continues to explain that Trump's posting is often aimed at "amping up his base" amid the 2024 election, but he adds that the general elections are all about appealing to voters in the middle.

"Violence-inciting social media posts are almost certain to do the opposite. Yet Trump can't help himself. There's madness to his method, politically and psychologically.And his madness is a call to all of us for method. We need to be methodical in responding to him if we wish to preserve our safety and our freedom from Trump and his thugs," Aftergut added.

Aftergut's comments come after LaDoris Cordell, a retired judge who worked at the California Superior Court said the former president risks imprisonment over his online behavior.

Speaking on CNN on Monday, Cordell said Trump is "tiptoeing very close" to breaking the gag order and that many people think there are "double standards" regarding how he is treated by the courts.

"When he steps across that gag order line—and I do hope it will be expanded—there should be only one response: bring your toothbrush Donald Trump because you're going to sit in a jail cell for a while," Cordell said. "There has to be an immediate consequence when he defies a court order. That is a normal response. You cannot have a court system that is subjected to these kinds of threats and intimidation. Nowhere else has this ever happened and gone without any consequences and that has to change and it has to change now."

[DTravel]

This Is the Key to Covering Trump
Esquire - Opinion

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opini...b877b50&ei=124

The Cleveland Plain Dealer was once one of those famous local newspapers at which people like me dreamed of working one day. Its history went back past the Civil War to the days of Jacksonian Democrats. It had a romantic name, resonant with echoes of The Front Page. It won a Pulitzer for editorial cartooning in 1953. It won another for the columns written by my friend Connie Schultz. Alas, in recent years, the paper fell into the dark mills of absentee owners. In 2020, its owners shuttered the print newsroom, leaving only Cleveland.com. From the Columbia Journalism Review:

This weekend, however, the Plain Dealer recaptured a piece of its noble past. It decided to call a lie a lie and a liar a liar. No fear, no favor. Its editor, Chris Quinn, has declared its independence.

Why don’t our opinion platforms treat Donald Trump and other politicians exactly the same way. Some phrase it differently, asking why we demean the former president’s supporters in describing his behavior as monstrous, insurrectionist and authoritarian. I feel for those who write. They believe in Trump and want their local news source to recognize what they see in him. The angry writers denounce me for ignoring what they call the Biden family crime syndicate and criminality far beyond that of Trump. They quote news sources of no credibility as proof the mainstream media ignores evidence that Biden, not Trump, is the criminal dictator.

But...

The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don’t deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.

Chris Quinn and his reporters have found the key to covering the former president*, and it was lying out there in the sun, in plain sight, all along.

The facts involving Trump are crystal clear, and as news people, we cannot pretend otherwise, as unpopular as that might be with a segment of our readers. There aren’t two sides to facts. People who say the earth is flat don’t get space on our platforms. If that offends them, so be it.

The “reality-based” community, as that loathsome ferret Karl Rove put it during a previous ghastly Republican perversion of political norms and institutions, has found a voice. The P-D ran a beta test on it during the last U.S. Senate campaign when it simply announced it was going to ignore what it saw as the lies spouted by Republican candidate Josh Mandel. At that time, Quinn was just as immovable.

We could have written a traditional “he said-she said” story, saying, “Senate candidate Josh Mandel is calling on Gov. Mike DeWine to end coronavirus restrictions, but health experts warn such steps will endanger more people.” But that’s not what this was about. Mandel knows he is calling on the governor to do something that would endanger countless people. No, what this was about was a naked bid for attention. So, we could have covered it with an analysis piece, saying, “Senate candidate Josh Mandel seeks attention by calling for coronavirus steps that would kill Ohioans.”

We ultimately decided not to write about Mandel’s call for DeWine to lift his coronavirus restrictions. Mandel is pretty much a nobody right now, a nobody begging for people to notice his tweets a year ahead of the Senate primary. Just because he makes outrageous, dangerous statements doesn’t mean it is news.... We are proud of our role as a center of discourse, with a diversity of viewpoints you can find nowhere else in the state. But we do not knowingly publish ridiculous and idiotic claims.

See how easy it is, NBC? See how simple, New York Times? See how freeing it must be, Politico? No desperate groping for “balance” before you say that, yes, there’s a guy walking down the street with a duck on his head, and no reason to seek out someone to say that they saw a duck walking down the street with some guy on his a**. No more being tied to the millstone of Both Sides, the one that’s sinking the profession (and the republic) into the abyss. Follow the Cleveland Plain Dealer into the clear air and the light. There’s plenty of room.

[Baxter49]

So when does the appeal happen, and the one after that? Months. Years. I get the impression the appeals court is going to lower the judgement on appeal, it's unheard of to lower a bond this much. I read Bernie Madoff's bond was ten million.

https://www.aol.com/news/donald-trum...002220359.html
Donald Trump has posted a $175 million bond to avert asset seizure as he appeals NY fraud penalty

Donald Trump posted a $175 million bond on Monday in his New York civil fraud case, halting collection of the more than $454 million he owes and preventing the state from seizing his assets to satisfy the debt while he appeals, according to a court filing.

The bond Trump is posting with the court now is essentially a placeholder, meant to guarantee payment if the judgment is upheld. If that happens, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee will have to pay the state the whole sum, which grows with daily interest.

The company that underwrote the bond is Knight Specialty Insurance, which is part of the Knight Insurance Group. The chairman of that company, billionaire Don Hankey, told The Associated Press that both cash and bonds were used as collateral for Trump’s appellate bond.

“This is what we do at Knight Insurance, and we’re happy to do this for anyone who needs a bond,” said Hankey, who is best known in the business world for making high-risk, high-interest loans to car buyers with flawed credit histories. Hankey told the AP he has never met or spoken with Trump.

[Baxter49]

NEW: The company that underwrote Trump's bond tonight in the NY Attorney General's civil fraud case, Knight Specialty Insurance Co., is owned by Don Hankey, the so-called "king of subprime car loans."

Hankey, who is #128 on Forbes’s 2023 list and #317 on the 2023 Forbes billionaires list, made his money in auto services. But he is also believed to be the largest shareholder in Axos Bank.

If Axos sounds familiar, it's because it's the financial institution that refinanced Trump’s loans on Trump Tower and Doral in 2022. Specifically, Axos has loaned Trump $100 million in his refinancing of Trump Tower and another $125 million for Doral.

Both loans are not due until 2032, according to the Office of Government Ethics disclosure Trump made in August 2023.

[Baxter49]

Trump is trying to get judge Merchand removed (same as other judges not named Cannon)

Cannon is expected to make a ruling as the slow walk continues in Florida late Tuesday with the burden on Jack Smith.

Primaries on Tuesday.

And apparently Trump is suing his Truth Social co-founder over shares:
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litiga...ny-over-shares

Trump Sues Truth Social Company Co-Founders to Zero Them Out (1)

In the latest legal skirmish over who gets how much of the hot but flailing meme stock, Trump alleges that Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss violated an agreement about the setup and don’t deserve their 8.6% stake, currently valued at $606 million.

The lawsuit, which was filed on March 24 in Florida state court and hasn’t previously been reported, comes after the pair brought their own suit against the former president in Delaware Chancery Court over their promised stake in the the social media company.

The legal fight is playing out amid wild swings in shares of Trump Media, which began trading last week after it merged with a special purpose acquisition company, known as a SPAC. The stock dropped 21% Monday after Trump Media disclosed in a securities filing a $58 million loss and a relative trickle of revenue for 2023, and reiterated a warning that it needed the money from the SPAC deal to keep operating.

[DTravel]

The full Bloomberg article:

Trump Sues Truth Social Company Co-Founders to Zero Them Out
Bloomberg

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/othe...4c1adcbe&ei=62

(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump has sued two co-founders of his newly public Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., claiming they set the company up improperly and shouldn’t get any stock in it.

In the latest legal skirmish over who gets how much of the hot but flailing meme stock, Trump alleges that Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss violated an agreement about the setup and don’t deserve their 8.6% stake, currently valued at $606 million.

The lawsuit, which was filed on March 24 in Florida state court and hasn’t previously been reported, comes after the pair brought their own suit against the former president in Delaware Chancery Court over their promised stake in the social media company.

The legal fight is playing out amid wild swings in shares of Trump Media, which began trading last week after it merged with a special purpose acquisition company, known as a SPAC. The stock dropped 21% Monday after Trump Media disclosed in a securities filing a $58 million loss and a relative trickle of revenue for 2023, and reiterated a warning that it needed the money from the SPAC deal to keep operating.

The stock was up 6.1% at $51.63 at 3:53 p.m. in New York on Tuesday.

Trump claims Litinsky and Moss failed to properly set up the corporate governance structure of Trump Media, launch his Truth Social platform and find an appropriate merger partner. That failure hurt the company, he argues. He says they then “began ceaseless attempts to thwart” the blank check deal in the struggle for their respective stakes. In their own suit, the two say Trump was planning to seek millions of extra shares, diluting their stake.

Lawyers for Litinsky and Moss didn’t return emails seeking comment on Trump’s suit.

Trump, the presumed Republican nominee in November’s presidential election, has seen his net worth soar due to his Trump Media stake, which he could ultimately use to pay off hundreds of millions of dollars in legal judgments against him — though he is currently unable to sell those shares for six months due to a lockup. Even with its slump, Trump Media currently has a market capitalization of $7.05 billion, and the larger his piece of it, the more money he could get. If the shares spiral, his payout would shrink.

Trump owns 57% of the company, according to the filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, with his stake now worth $4.02 billion on paper.

The Delaware judge, Sam Glasscock III, declined to fast-track Litinsky and Moss’s suit after Trump’s lawyers agreed to avoid lessening the value of their shares. But at a hearing Monday the pair told the judge they plan to seek an order barring the Florida suit from going forward while they litigate claims that Trump planned to target their stake all along.

The judge said he was “gobsmacked” to learn of Trump’s Florida suit — which he filed instead of bringing counterclaims against the two in Glasscock’s own courtroom — and would consider possible sanctions against the former president in the Delaware case.

The Florida case is Trump Media & Technology Group v. United Atlantic Ventures, Florida Circuit Court, 12th Judicial Circuit (Sarasota).