GOP candidate booed off stage for criticising Trump as ex-president slams DeSantis – news

Donald Trump asked a federal appeals court Friday to reverse a federal judge’s decision to keep his hush-money criminal case in a New York state court that the former president claims is “very unfair” to him.

Trump’s lawyers filed a notice of appeal with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan after U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein last week rejected his bid to move the case to federal court, where his lawyers were primed to argue he was immune from prosecution.

U.S. law allows criminal prosecutions to be moved from state to federal court if they involve actions taken by federal government officials as part of their official duties, but Hellerstein ruled that the hush-money case involved a personal matter, not presidential duties.

Trump’s appeal notice came at the end of another busy week of legal action for the twice-indicted Republican as he seeks a return to the White House in next year’s election. On Thursday, he was indicted on new criminal charges in a separate case in federal court in Florida involving allegations that he illegally hoarded classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is prosecuting the hush-money case and fought to keep it in state court, declined to comment on Trump’s appeal.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy avoided answering questions about the additional charges filed in the superseding indictment against former President Donald Trump and instead redirected the conversation to President Joe Biden.

“What concerns me is you have a sitting president that has a situation like this, but even worse, that had documents, but nothing’s happened,” Mr McCarthy told a CNN reporter.

He continued, turning to President Biden’s time in Congress: “The president, when he was a senator, he took a document. How many years is that and there’s been no prosecution?”

The House speaker was referring to the Biden classified documents, some of which were dated to the president’s time in the Senate, Mr Biden’s lawyer said in January.

According to CNN, the California Republican added, “This is why everybody sits back and says, ‘What are these two, two tiers of justice right?’ And then you look, anything when it comes to the Biden Inc. family, they get a whole different treatment.”

Leading up to the 2020 election, Facebook ads targeting Latino and Asian American voters described Joe Biden as a communist. A local station claimed a Black Lives Matter co-founder practiced witchcraft. Doctored images showed dogs urinating on Donald Trump campaign posters.

None of these claims was true, but they scorched through social media sites that advocates say have fueled election misinformation in communities of color.

As the 2024 election approaches, community organizations are preparing for what they expect to be a worsening onslaught of disinformation targeting communities of color and immigrant communities. They say the tailored campaigns challenge assumptions of what kinds of voters are susceptible to election conspiracies and distrust in voting systems.

“They’re getting more complex, more sophisticated and spreading like wildfire,” said Sarah Shah, director of policy and community engagement at the advocacy group Indian American Impact, which runs the fact-checking site Desifacts.org. “ What we saw in 2020, unfortunately, will probably be fairly mild in comparison to what we will see in the months leading up to 2024.”

It’s a stunning new allegation in an already serious case: Former President Donald Trump sought to delete Mar-a-Lago surveillance footage to obstruct the Justice Department’s investigation into his handling of classified documents.

The latest criminal charges unsealed Thursday deepen Trump’s legal jeopardy, alleging a more central role for the former president than previously known in a cover-up that prosecutors say was meant to prevent them from recovering top-secret documents he took with him after he left the White House. Coming as Trump braces for possible additional indictments related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the new allegations strengthen special counsel Jack Smith’s already powerful case against Trump while undercutting potential defenses floated by the former president, experts say.

“Before these new charges, you could maybe try some sort of defense that ‘this was all a mistake, it was my staff’ or confusion about what documents he actually had,” said former federal prosecutor Randall Eliason, a George Washington University law professor.

“But especially now, when you’re trying to destroy video footage,” he added, “that’s kind of the final nail in the coffin. I don’t see much in the way of a defense, not a real defense. All he can do is claim he’s being persecuted and hope for a holdout juror or something.”

According to the Progress Action Fund, which aims to defeat Republicans in red states, the platform “has censored” its account as well as the ad, called “Keep Republicans Out Of Your Bedroom.” In addition, the platform has “placed a ‘Search Ban’ and a ‘Search Suggestion Ban’ on the account.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, the account did not show up on the social media platform, yet the ad could still be seen on X through retweets from other accounts.

The Progress Action Fund said it contacted the platform’s legal department and “appealed the decision, which was denied.”

Joe Jacobson, Founder and Executive Director of Progress Action Fund, took a stab at X’s owner: “Elon Musk loves free speech, but only when it’s convenient for him and his far-right political agenda.”

He’s never spent a day in public office. He’s never even run for public office before, and he’s a 37-year-old practicing Hindu who is vying for presidential primary votes from a Republican electorate that is overwhelmingly old, white, and Christian.

So why does Vivek Ramaswamy’s unlikely presidential campaign seem to be catching on?

Over the last week, a succession of polls show the former biotech entrepreneur turned anti-woke author and asset manager turned political neophyte garnering support from as much as ten per cent of GOP primary voters.

On Thursday, Mr Trump’s lawyers were told that a third indictment related to Special Council Jack Smith’s investigation into the Capitol riot and the former president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election was likely imminent.

Mr Christie appeared on Thursday’s episode of Pod Save America to discuss the 2024 election and the implications of Mr Trump’s various criminal cases.

Host Jon Lovett asked Mr Christie if he had ever heard of someone “facing between four and six trials within a few months for different legal issues,” referring to Mr Trump.

“No. No. Usually, folks like this commit discrete crimes and wind up having one trial,” Mr Christie quipped. “This guy has been a one man crime wave. Look, he’s earned every one of them. If you look at it, every one of these is self-inflicted. And that’s why, you know, do I think that prosecutors exercise prosecutorial judgment in discretion in some respects that are questionable? Yeah – and they always have. But what I say to people all the time is whether you agree or disagree with the prosecutors, look at the underlying conduct.”

The unnamed “Trump employee 4” mentioned in the superseding federal indictment against former President Donald Trump has been identified as Yuscil Taveras, the director of information technology at Mar-a-Lago.

CNN and NBC News revealed the name on Friday. The reports said that Mr Taveras oversaw the surveillance camera footage at the property.

He had a conversation with the third co-defendant named in the superseding indictment – Carlos De Oliveira – who was a maintenance supervisor at Mar-a-Lago. He suggested their chat “remain between the two of them,” the indictment states. Mr De Oliveira asked to have a private discussion in an “audio closet.”

Mr De Oliveira then asked how long the server retained footage, to which Mr Taveras responded that he believed it was approximately 45 days. Mr De Oliveira then said “the boss” wanted the footage deleted.

The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg writes:

The new charges revealed in the superseding indictment show the extent of Mr Trump’s efforts to conceal what he was doing from the government he once led, but it also makes clear that Mr Smith’s team has taken the investigation into the ex-president and his co-defendants up a notch from what was previously known.