TV News LIES

The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s prosecution on charges of retaining classified documents denied his effort to have the case dismissed on the contention that the Presidential Records Act allowed him to transform them as personal property and possess them at his Mar-a-Lago club.

The ruling by US district judge Aileen Cannon was significant as it struck one of Trump’s main defenses and suggested the case is headed to trial.

Cannon’s three-page order rejecting Trump’s motion to dismiss rested on the fact that Trump’s argument about the Presidential Records Act did not directly address the applicability of the Espionage Act, which he has been charged with violating, meaning it did not give her a basis to toss the case.

More...

In the waning days before Jan. 6, 2021, Clark, then serving as acting assistant attorney general for the civil division at DOJ, sought to be appointed as acting attorney general in order to carry out former President Donald Trump’s orders to open investigations into false claims of voter fraud.

Sadow said in a statement Thursday that he respectfully disagreed with McAfee’s order but could potentially raise the issue again later.

The Georgia case is one of four criminal trials pending against Trump and he has pleaded not guilty in each of them. He previously tried to have Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis removed from the case because of her relationship with another prosecutor, but only special prosecutor Nathan Wade had to resign.

Trump and 18 co-defendants were charged with a racketeering conspiracy that tried to steal the 2020 election by urging state officials to overturn the results. Four of the co-defendants have pleaded guilty and the rest await trial.

Donald Trump’s social media company Trump Media managed to go public last week only after it had been kept afloat in 2022 by emergency loans provided in part by a Russian-American businessman under scrutiny in a federal insider-trading and money-laundering investigation.

The former US president stands to gain billions of dollars – his stake is currently valued at about $4bn – from the merger between Trump Media and Technology Group and the blank-check company Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which took the parent company of Truth Social public.

But Trump Media almost did not make it to the merger after regulators opened a securities investigation into the merger in 2021 and caused the company to burn through cash at an extraordinary rate as it waited to get the green light for its stock market debut.

More...

Remember when U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon floated a fringe legal theory that could help throw Donald Trump’s classified documents case in favor of the former president?

Well, special counsel Jack Smith just filed a devastating response, telling Cannon that he might have to challenge the Trump appointee on appeal if she doesn’t get it together.

As a refresher, Cannon asked the parties to file proposed jury instructions, regarding the federal charges alleging that Trump illegally retained national defense information. In doing so, she told them to consider two “scenarios,” both of which lend credence to the notion that the Presidential Records Act applies in this case. The problem is that the PRA is irrelevant to these criminal charges. So injecting the issue into the trial could lead the jury to think that Trump could do whatever he wanted with classified documents, which would obviously go against the criminal law that says otherwise.

More...

An Iowa woman found guilty on 52 counts of voter fraud, carried out in support of her Republican husband, was given an eight-month custodial sentence.

Kim Taylor, of Woodbury county, will serve four months in prison and four in home confinement, KTIV, a Sioux City TV station, reported. Subject to two years’ supervised release, Taylor will also pay $5,200.

Each count carried a maximum penalty of five years in prison – or 260 years in all.