Trump awaits fate of business empire in New York civil fraud trial: Live updates

In a year in which he was indicted four times on criminal charges, Donald Trump used approximately $50m of donor money on investigation and legal expenses, The New York Times reports.

Citing two people briefed on the figure, the Times notes that the exact figure for 2023 will be reported on Wednesday in new filings submitted to the Federal Election Commission.

The spending on legal fees is roughly equal to the amount Nikki Haley, his only rival for the Republican nomination, raised across all of her campaign committees in 2023.

The Trump campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment, the Times says.

“The whole point of this, this enormous damages, unprecedented damages now, is to tell Donald Trump to shut up,” Mr Yoo said.

Martha McHardy has the story:

A report in the New York Post over the weekend stated that the Trump team had tapped Mr Kennedy in April 2023 to be on the presidential ticket, and that despite the approach going nowhere “anything” was still possible, citing anonymous sources.

Donald Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba this week attempted to get the verdict in the E Jean Carroll defamation case dismissed over a baseless attack on the plaintiff’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan. In a letter to Judge Lewis Kaplan (no relation), Ms Habba claimed there had been a mentor-like relationship between the two in the past.

Ms Kaplan has now fired back a response in a letter to the judge, saying in part:

We write in response to the letter submitted yesterday by Alina Habba on behalf of her client Defendant Donald J. Trump, which contains false allegations of a “mentor-mentee relationship” between Your Honor and myself dating back to the brief period in which we overlapped at Paul, Weiss more than thirty years ago. As Ms. Habba well knows, these allegations are utterly baseless.

Attacking the motives for pursuing the allegations, Ms Kaplan further wrote:

From the very start of the recently concluded trial, Donald Trump and Ms. Habba have pushed a false narrative of judicial bias so that they could characterize any jury verdict against Trump as the product of a corrupt system. While that strategy has now moved into its post-verdict phase, it is now time for Defendant’s false and vexatious claims of bias or impropriety to stop.

She concluded with a threat to take further action against Ms Habba:

Here’s Ms Carroll and her lawyers on speaking to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC about Ms Habba:

His plea agreement states that he stole Mr Trump’s tax returns as well as the tax information of “thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people”. At the time, he was working for a consulting firm with IRS contracts.

Mr Littlejohn shared the tax information with two news outlets and subsequently deleted the documents from his laptop, which had been issued by the IRS, before handing it back. He also removed the places where he had previously stored the information to remove any traces, CNN noted.

Donald Trump will remain on Illinois’ 2024 presidential primary ballot, the state’s Board of Elections determined in a unanimous vote to dismiss a complaint that attempted to remove the former president under the 14th Amendment.

However, the Illinois Board of Election said that they did not believe they had the authority to determine Mr Trump’s eligibility because it raises a constitutional question and would require them to look outside their scope.

Ariana Baio watched the meeting for The Independent:

American and Chinese officials met Tuesday to discuss joint efforts to stem the flow of fentanyl into the U.S., a sign of cooperation as the two global powers try to manage their contentious ties.

The two-day meeting was the first for a new counternarcotics working group. One focus of the talks was fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that is ravaging America, and in particular ingredients for the drug that are made in China.

Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to restart cooperation in a handful of areas, including drug trafficking, when he and U.S. President Joe Biden met outside San Francisco in November. The agreements were a small step forward in a relationship strained by major differences on issues ranging from trade and technology to Taiwan and human rights.

The U.S. wants China to do more to curb the export of chemicals that it says are processed into fentanyl, largely in Mexico, before the final product is smuggled into the United States.

Chinese Public Security Minister Wang Xiaohong said the two sides had in-depth and pragmatic talks.

While we await the decision of the Illinois Board of Elections as to whether Donald Trump should be allowed on the Republican primary ballot in the state given Section Three of the 14th Amendment banning insurrectionists from holding public office, President Joe Biden told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House that he was fine with the former president ending up as his potential opponent again in November.

Former president Donald Trump is falsely claiming to have stopped all movement between the US and Mexico in a bid to push lawmakers to scuttle a bipartisan proposal to increase President Joe Biden’s power to curb illegal crossings.

Mr Trump took to his Truth Social platform on Monday to claim that he had not needed what he described as a “big, complex Democrat-oriented Border Bill” to stop crossings between the US and Mexico during his administration.

Andrew Feinberg reports from Washington, DC:

Rep Barry Loudermilk, Republican chairman of the House Administration Committee’s Oversight Subcommittee, has accepted an officer from the White House to review unredacted January 6 committee transcripts of four Trump White House aides that provided key testimony about the former president’s conduct on that day.

The transcripts do not include certain key transcripts — such as Bobby Engel or Tony Ornato’s interviews — which are being held by the Department of Homeland Security. However, they do include four White House employees who were identified anonymously in the January 6 report.

Rep Loudermilk said in a statement: “While the White House granting access to these transcripts is a step in the right direction, I maintain these are House records and they should be returned in full.”