Archive for the ‘Donald Trump’ Category

Donald Trump will rally for Doug Mastriano and Mehmet Oz in Wilkes-Barre next week – The Philadelphia Inquirer

Former President Donald Trump will appear at a Sept. 3 rally in Wilkes-Barre to boost Republican candidates Mehmet Oz and state Sen. Doug Mastriano in their key midterm election campaigns.

The rally at Mohegan Sun Arena comes a little more than two months before Election Day in a race where both Oz, the GOPs Senate nominee, and Mastriano, the partys gubernatorial nominee, trail their Democratic rivals in polling and fund-raising.

Trumps Save America PAC announced the rally for the entire Pennsylvania Trump Ticket, on Friday. GOP congressional hopeful Jim Bognet, who is running in a rematch against U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, is also expected to attend.

Trump announced the rally in an email from his Save America PAC while Mastriano was at an event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in Pittsburgh.

While neither man has announced their candidacy, DeSantis is widely considered a potential 2024 GOP presidential rival to Trump.

READ MORE: 3 big takeaways from Ron DeSantis Pennsylvania rally for Doug Mastriano

The rally announcement comes amid reports of Republicans, including Trump, questioning the strength of some of the partys candidates running this year, and as some GOP candidates have struggled to match their Democratic opponents in fund-raising.

Oz, who trails Lt. Gov. John Fetterman by five to 10 points in the most recent polls, also lags Fetterman in fund-raising. Fetterman raised about $11 million last quarter, while Oz brought in just $3.8 million, including $2 million he gave his campaign.

Political action committees and national groups on both sides have said they will funnel millions into the Senate race in the state.

Fetterman has largely campaigned against Oz on social media, save for a large rally in Erie earlier this month. Oz has accused Fetterman of hiding from voters and has repeatedly pressured Fetterman to respond to his challenge of five debates, the earliest of which would be in early September.

Speeches at the Trump rally will begin at 4 p.m., with the former president slated to give remarks at 7 p.m.

Wilkes-Barre is in Luzerne County, which swung from voting for Democrat Barack Obama in 2012 to backing Trump in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton. Luzerne voted narrowly for Trump again in 2020. The Northeastern Pennsylvania region is considered one of the most critical parts of the swing state.

President Joe Biden, who has roots in Scranton not far from Wilkes-Barre, will visit Wilkes-Barre on Aug. 30, a rescheduled trip after he had to cancel a visit in July when he was diagnosed with COVID-19. The president is expected to give remarks at Wilkes University about reducing gun crime.

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Donald Trump will rally for Doug Mastriano and Mehmet Oz in Wilkes-Barre next week - The Philadelphia Inquirer

Donald Trumps turbulent White House years culminate in Fla. search – cleveland.com

NEW YORK (AP) Mounds of paper piled on his desk. Framed magazine covers and keepsakes lining the walls. One of Shaquille ONeals giant sneakersdisplayed alongsidefootball helmets, boxing belts and other sports memorabilia, crowding his Trump Tower office and limiting table space.

Well before he entered politics, former PresidentDonald Trumphad a penchant for collecting. And that lifelong habit combined with his flip disregard for the rules of government record keeping, his careless handling of classified information, and a chaotic transition born from his refusal to accept defeat in 2020 have all culminated in a federal investigation that poses extraordinary legal and political challenges.

Thesearch of Trumps Mar-a-Lago clubearlier this month to retrieve documents from his White House years was an unprecedented law enforcement action against a former president who is widely expected to run for office once again. Officials have not revealed exactly what was contained in the boxes, but the FBI has said itrecovered 11 sets of classified records, including some marked sensitive compartmented information, a special category meant to protect secrets that could cause exceptionally grave damage to U.S. interests if revealed publicly.

Why Trump refused to turn over the seized documents despite repeated requests remains unclear. But Trumps flouting of the Presidential Records Act, which outlines how materials should be preserved, was well documented throughout his time in office.

He routinely tore up official papers that later had to betaped back together. Official items that would traditionally be turned over to the National Archives became intermingled with his personal belongings in the White House residence. Classified information was tweeted, shared with reporters and adversaries even foundin a White House complex bathroom.

John Bolton, who served as Trumps third national security adviser, said that, before he arrived, hed heard there was a concern in the air about how he handled information. And as my time went on, I could certainly see why.

Others in the Trump administration took more care with sensitive documents. Asked directly if he kept any classified information upon leaving office,former Vice President Mike Pencetold The Associated Press on Friday, No, not to my knowledge.

The investigation into Trumps handling of documents comes as hes facing mounting legal scrutiny on multiple fronts. A Georgia investigation into election interference has moved closer to the former president, with former New York City MayorRudy Giuliani, a top defender, informed earlier this month that he is a target of a criminal probe.

Meanwhile, Trump invoked hisFifth Amendment protectionagainst self-incrimination as he testified under oath in the New York attorney generals long-running civil investigation into his business dealings. A top executive at the businesspleaded guiltylast week in a tax fraud case brought by the Manhattan district attorney.

But few legal threats have galvanized Trump and his most loyal supporters like the Mar-a-Lago search. The former president and his allies have argued the move amounts to political persecution, noting the judge who approved the warrant has given money to Democrats. The judge, however, has also supported Republicans. And White House officials have repeatedly said they had no prior knowledge of plans to search the estate.

Trump allies have tried to claim the presidency granted him unlimited power to unilaterally declassify documents without formal declaration. But David Laufman, the former chief of the Justice Departments counterintelligence section, said thats not how it works.

It just strikes me as a post hoc public affairs strategy that has no relationship to how classified information is in fact declassified, said Laufman, who oversaw the investigation into Hillary Clintons personal email server during her tenure as secretary of state. While he said it is true that there is no statue or order that outlines procedures the president must abide by to declassify information, at the same time its ludicrous to posit that a decision to declassify documents would not have been contemporaneously memorialized in writing.

Its not self executing, he added. There has to be some objective, contemporaneous, evidence-based corroboration of the claims that theyre making. And of course there wont be because theyre making it all up.

The decision to keep classified documents at Mar-a-Lago a property frequented by paying members, their guests and anyone attending the weddings, political fundraisers, charity dinners and other events held on site was part of a long pattern of disregard for national security secrets. Former aides described a cavalier attitude toward classified information that played out in public view.

There was the dinner with then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Mar-a-Lagos patio, where fellow diners watched and snapped cellphone photos as the two menreviewed details of a North Korean missile test.

There was the time Trump revealedhighly classified informationallegedly from Israeli sources about Islamic State militants to Russian officials. And there was the time he tweeted a high-resolution satellite image of an apparent explosion at an Iranian space center, which intelligence officials had warned was highly sensitive. Trumpinsisted he hadthe absolute right to share it.

Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Trump was careless with sensitive and classified information and seemed never to bother with why that was bad.

Grisham recalled one incident involving Conan, a U.S. military dog hailed as a hero for his role in the raid that killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. She said that before the dogs arrival at the White House, staff had received a briefing in which they were told the dog could not be photographed because the images could put his handlers in danger. But when the dog arrived, Trump decided he wantedto show it off to the press.

Because he wanted the publicity, out went Conan, she said. Its an example of him not caring if he put lives in danger. ... It was like its his own shiny toy hes showing off to his friends to impress them.

Bolton said that, during his time working for Trump, he and others often tried to explain the stakes and the risks of exposing sources and methods.

I dont think any of it sank in. He didnt seem to appreciate just how sensitive it was, how dangerous it was for some of our people and the risks that they could be exposed to, he said. What looks like an innocuous picture to a private citizen can be a gold mine to a foreign intelligence entity.

I would say over and over again, This is really sensitive, really sensitive. And hed say, I know and then go and do it anyway.

Bolton said that top intelligence officials would gather before briefings to discuss how best to handle sensitive subjects, strategizing about how much needed to be shared. Briefers quickly learned that Trump often tried to hang onto sensitive documents, and would take steps to make sure documents didnt go missing, including using iPads to show them to him.

Sometimes he would ask to keep it and theyd say, Its really sensitive. Sometime he just wouldnt give it back.

Trumps refusal to accept his election loss also contributed to the chaos that engulfed his final days in office. The General Services Administration was slow to acknowledge President Joe Bidens win, delaying the transition process and leaving little time to pack.

While other White House staff and even the former first lady started making arrangements, Trump largely refused. At the same time, White House staff were departing in droves as part of the regular offboarding process, while morale among others had cratered in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Bolton said he doubted that Trump had taken documents for nefarious reasons, and instead thought Trump likely considered them souvenirs like the many hed collected through his life.

I think he just thought some things were cool and he wanted them, Bolton said. Some days he liked to collect french fries. Some days he liked to collect documents. He just collected things.

The Washington Post first reported in February that the National Archives had retrieved 15 boxes of documents and other items from Mar-a-Lago that should have been turned over to the agency when Trump left the White House. An initial review of that material concluded that Trump had brought presidential records and several other documents that were marked classified to Mar-a-Lago.

The investigation into the handling of classified material intensified in the spring as prosecutors and federal agents interviewed several people who worked in the Trump White House about how records and particularly classified documents were handled during the chaotic end of the Trump presidency, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press. Around the same time, prosecutors also issued a subpoena for records Trump was keeping at Mar-a-Lago and subpoenaed for surveillance video from Mar-a-Lago showing the area where the records were being stored, the person said.

A top Justice Department official traveled to Mar-a-Lago in early June and looked through some of the material that was stored in boxes. After that meeting, prosecutors interviewed another witness who told them that there were likely additional classified documents still stored at Mar-a-Lago, the person said. The person was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Justice Department later sought a search warrant and retrieved the additional tranches of classified records.

___

Balsamo reported from Washington.

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Donald Trumps turbulent White House years culminate in Fla. search - cleveland.com

NFL World Reacts To What Donald Trump Said About Cowboys – The Spun

CLEVELAND, OHIO - SEPTEMBER 29: U.S. President Donald Trump participates in the first presidential debate against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden at the Health Education Campus of Case Western Reserve University on September 29, 2020 in Cleveland, Ohio. This is the first of three planned debates between the two candidates in the lead up to the election on November 3. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Since Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys for$140 million in 1989, he's overseen the team grow into the most valuable franchise in the NFL, valued at over $8 billion.

But there was a time when former U.S. President Donald Trump could have added the Cowboys to his portfolio. According to Front Office Sports, Trump had the opportunity to buy the team for $50 million back in 1983. Trump declined.

Instead, Trump invested his money into the United States Football League, taking the New Jersey Generals as his team and helping to oversee the league before it folded in 1985. At the time though, Trump had harsh words for anyone interested in taking the deal he turned down:

"I feel sorry for the poor guy who is going to buy the Cowboys... he'll be known to the world as a loser," Trump said.

Naturally, fans are having a good laugh at the irony of those words:

When Jerry Jones took over the Cowboys in 1989, he was taking over a team that had long-since lost its way as a winning franchise. One of his first orders of business was the still-controversial decision to fire head coach Tom Landry and install Jimmy Johnson instead.

There were growing pains at first, namely the 1-15 season that remains one of the worst seasons in NFL history. But within three years of Jones taking over they were back in the playoffs and within seven years they were three time Super Bowl champions.

Jerry Jones might not have taken as many trips to the White House as Donald Trump did, but his legacy as one of the NFL's all-time greats is already secured.

As for Trump, his legacy in pro football is the failure of the USFL and being repeatedly snubbed by Super Bowl championship winners as President of the United States.

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NFL World Reacts To What Donald Trump Said About Cowboys - The Spun

Trump’s throw-everything-against-the-wall response to the Mar-a-Lago search – POLITICO

Rare is the case that a Trump emissary is an addendum to, and not the focus of, a high-profile proceeding. And Bobbs decision to observe rather than partake ended up earning her a grilling from typically friendly Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who wondered whether she had forfeited Trumps right to help shape the process behind the potential release of the FBIs affidavit.

We really just chose to see how it would play out, Bobb replied.

The moment underscored an increasingly apparent truth about Donald Trumps legal strategy in the week since the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago home: He and his team havent settled on a singular approach and appear in the dark about what may come next. Trump has often used litigation to delay but has been loath to go on offense, particularly when hes likely to lose. His vow Friday to make a major motion appeared in keeping with that approach.

While its unclear whether the former president or any of his top allies are at imminent risk of criminal charges, they have sketched out competing and sometimes conflicting positions that may come into play as the investigation now in its early stages accelerates.

Heres a look at the Trump teams early, shifting strategies and how they may fare:

Bobbs quiet approach to Thursdays hearing in Florida differed conspicuously from the tack taken by Trump, who has loudly insisted that DOJ release the unredacted affidavit underlying the search warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago. Several media organizations and conservative Judicial Watch filed motions with a federal magistrate judge to do just that.

But Trump never authorized his legal team to make that formal request.

His demand for the release of the affidavit was itself a shift. He and his team initially resisted public release of the search warrant itself, which they had access to on Aug. 8. Only after Attorney General Merrick Garland took the unusual step of moving to release the warrant did Trump start calling for transparency.

The public clamor that avoids an actual legal battle suggests Trump is treading cautiously lest his legal team commit to a course of action he cant take back later.

When Trump got his publicly stated wish to release the search warrant, Americans learned about dozens of boxes containing classified material he had squirreled away at his estate, and that DOJ was probing potential felonies, including mishandling of classified material and obstruction of justice.

Trumps team, via media ally John Solomon one of the former presidents authorized representatives to the National Archives floated a new defense on Thursday: Trump told people he considered the materials he stashed at his house to be personal items that belonged to him.

Its unclear whether and how Trump actually made such a designation, and his team has yet to produce evidence of it. But its not a trivial issue. A mishmash of past court rulings have suggested presidents wield enormous sway over their own materials, including the ability to designate some as personal, which removes them from the strict requirements of the Presidential Records Act.

Though the laws governing these designations have made clear that documents deemed personal should also have no inherent value to the operations of government, theres no mechanism to question a presidents decision on this score unless the Archives chooses to challenge it.

Police stand outside an entrance to former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate, Aug. 8, 2022, in Palm Beach, Fla.|Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo

But theres one problem for Trump in this defense: The power to deem records personal ended the moment his presidency did. So, if he hadnt designated the records taken to Mar-a-Lago by that point, then the determination was no longer his to make.

Given that several of Trumps allies and aides have suggested he didnt know what was packed in the boxes that were shipped to his estate, it would be hard to argue he had designated them as personal items.

Since the FBI went into Mar-a-Lago, Trump and his attorneys have argued that the search warrant itself was deficient overly broad and approved by a biased magistrate judge.

Their evidence of Judge Bruce Reinharts bias? He donated to Barack Obama. Some Trump supporters have pointed as well to his work more than a decade ago for employees and associates of Jeffrey Epstein. But its unclear how that creates a conflict with issues related to Trump. And Reinhart also gave contributions to Jeb Bush.

Trumps team has also suggested that Reinharts recusal from a sprawling lawsuit by Trump against Hillary Clinton and dozens of current and former DOJ officials is proof of bias. But Reinhart, one of six magistrates to recuse from that case, never indicated the reason for his decision. In fact, its far likelier that he recused for a more mundane reason: a prior working relationship with one of the dozens of defendants in the case or their attorneys.

But the approach to Reinhart has also been mixed. After a week of pounding the judge as biased, Trumps team embraced his resistance to keeping the affidavit fully sealed.

An important side note: While Trump asked that Reinhart recuse from this case, there really isnt a case to step aside from at the moment, simply a search warrant that was requested and granted, followed by a dispute over how much of those records should be public. If Trump or someone else is charged criminally in connection with the missing records, a judge would be randomly assigned.

Even if the search warrant passes legal muster, Trumps allies say, the FBI blew past its constraints, seizing boxes at random and just hoarding as much as possible. While theres significant evidence to the contrary, Trump hammered on this point days after the search, focusing on alleged passports that were taken from his estate.

What Trump didnt mention at the time was what the DOJ officials had told him: the passports were flagged by a team of investigators specifically appointed to screen out any improper or privileged information that might be scooped up in an FBI search. The involvement of a so-called filter team signals that DOJ had taken care to ensure investigators didnt lay eyes on evidence they werent meant to see.

Even so, Trumps legal team indicated late Friday it was prepared to make a more concerted push on this front. Attorney Jim Trusty joined pro-Trump radio host Mark Levin to outline Trumps intention to seek a special master to review the materials seized by the FBI and ensure any privileged information isnt seen by the bureau.

Trusty didnt address why it took the legal team 11 days to settle on that strategy, following a year or more of dialogue with archivists and government lawyers. But he said a special master could review large swaths of material that Trumps team believes is subject to privilege claims, arguing that a DOJ-led filter team couldnt be trusted.

Trump promised in a social media post Friday that a legal filing would be forthcoming on this point, but by Sunday morning it still hadnt arrived.

Trump took a similarly lax approach when his former attorney, John Eastman, was fending off efforts by the Jan. 6 select committee to obtain thousands of emails that Eastman had claimed were protected by attorney client privilege with Trump being the client.

For months, a federal judge asked probing questions about Eastmans legal relationship with Trump and demanded that the former law professor produce paperwork proving when he became Trumps lawyer. But the ex-president never engaged in the suit, leaving Eastman wielding only an unsigned retainer agreement. The result? Eastman lost at nearly every turn and the judge issued a damaging ruling that he and Trump likely joined in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

Trumps attorneys have also contended that the FBI resorted to its most aggressive tactic an unannounced search and seizure of a former presidents home before exhausting less intrusive means. Bobb and other Trump allies noted that DOJ officials made a cordial visit to Mar-a-Lago on June 3. A few days later, DOJ called up Trumps attorneys and asked them to install a padlock on a basement storage room where some of the targeted records were being housed. Then there was radio silence for two months, Trump allies say, until the FBI executed the warrant.

Whats missing from that timeline has seeped out in subsequent reporting: DOJs interactions with Trumps team began only after the Archives had sought for more than a year to obtain the full slate of records held at Mar-a-Lago. The Archives asked DOJ to get involved after it discovered tranches of classified records on site.

In the spring, DOJ used a grand jury subpoena to try to obtain files housed at Mar-a-Lago. Then, soon after officials visited Trumps estate in June, the department issued a new subpoena for surveillance footage that might show important files being moved. Bobb told Ingraham that she believed the Trump team was open to releasing some of that surveillance footage. But they have not released that, or the subpoenas.

The best thing that Trump can probably hope for at the moment is that the search warrant was primarily a mechanism to recover records the government thought it was entitled to and isnt much of an indication of whether he or anyone else will face criminal charges.

Several former top DOJ officials have offered a similar take. But a lot remains unknown.

DOJ counterintelligence official Jay Bratt told Reinhart during Thursdays hearing that the investigation was in its early stages, suggesting that the matter isnt settled but also that charging decisions are a long way off.

Most cases about intentional or unintentional mishandling of classified information dont end in criminal charges. The governments primary goal is typically to end the so-called spill of material as quickly and completely as possible, with consequences for those responsible attended to later.

That means theres a remote likelihood of imminent developments as dramatic as the Aug. 8 Mar-a-Lago search.

But Trumps lawyers will stay busy. The other legal threats he faces include DOJ investigations into the attempted overturning of the 2020 presidential election; civil suits over the violence that unfolded at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; a criminal election-fraud probe in Georgia; and a pair of New York investigations into the tax and accounting practices of his real estate empire and marketing of the Trump brand.

Meridith McGraw contributed.

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Trump's throw-everything-against-the-wall response to the Mar-a-Lago search - POLITICO

Donald Trump Jr.: "If Donald Trump actually still had the nuclear codes, it’d probably be good." – Yahoo News

Donald Trump Junior decided to take to Twitter with a rant of posts and express his views on how he feels if daddy Trump still obtained the nuclear codes. This comes after the James Comeys Senate hearing and his brother Eric Trump said that Democrats arent even people. This seems as a usual Trump stunt and a way to protect the Trump reputation at all costs. Donald Trump Junior: "If Donald Trump actually still had the nuclear codes, it'd probably be good." Donald Trump has the nuclear codes. In the linen closet at Mar-A-Lago. By the way, for the record I would say that if Donald Trump actually still had the nuclear codes, it'd probably be good. See our enemies, our enemies might actually be like, okay, maybe let's not mess with them. I'm like, when they look at Joe Biden, they say you know what? We should attack now?

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Donald Trump Jr.: "If Donald Trump actually still had the nuclear codes, it'd probably be good." - Yahoo News