Archive for the ‘Donald Trump’ Category

Emails show Trump lawyers mocked his wealth then tried to block the emails from Congress – Salon

Former President Donald Trump's attorneys joked about his wealth in private emails leading up to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

The emails between Trump lawyers Bruce Marks and Kenneth Chesebro in December 2020 were among the evidence that attorney John Eastman, who helped craft Trump's Jan. 6 strategy, concealed from the Jan. 6 select committee, claiming they were covered by attorney-client privilege or attorney work-product privilege.

"A shame you are not in DC and could contribute to violation of the emoluments clause," Marks wrote to Chesebro on Dec. 30 referencing the allegations that Trump was using his D.C. hotel to receive foreign payments.

In response, Chesebro wrote that he was staying at Trump's D.C. hotel and doing his "part to curry favor" with Trump by lining his "empty" pockets.

Kyle Cheney, the senior legal affairs reporter for Politico, posted the email thread on Twitter with further updates on the matter.

On Monday, the Jan. 6 select committee urged U.S. District Court Judge David Carter to evaluate 562 still-unproduced documents that they believe may contain material that should have been disclosed to them months ago.

Eastman handed over a small number of emails last week as the select committee planned to ask for additional correspondences that he made while working at Chapman University in California while helping Trump overthrow the election.

The emails also revealed an attempt by Eastman to shield a signed Trump photograph of a rally crowd. "TIMES 50 SUCH EVENTS NO WAY THIS LOSES," Trump wrote. Eastman tried to withhold the email that delivered the image to Trump's White House administrative assistant Molly Michael, claiming it was protected as an attorney-work product.

The committee asked Carter to look through the final batch of undisclosed emails to ensure the privilege claims are legitimate, or whether he is using it as an excuse to withhold significant evidence in the case.

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When asked about the emails, Marks said the exchange was simply "tongue-in-cheek" banter and defended himself by referencing outdated limits on Congress' power to "expose for the sake of exposure."

"The January 6 Committee deliberately attempting to embarrass and intimidate President Trump's attorneys is no less Un-American than the [Joseph] McCarthy inspired tactics of the House Un-American Activities Committee," Marks told Politico. "The mid-term elections cannot come soon enough to sweep the Democrats out of power in Congress."

"At the time of the emails on December 30 and 31, 2020, Professor Eastman, Ken Chesebro, and I were representing President Trump in litigating a U.S. Supreme Court petition filed on December 23," Marks said. "These emails were part of a privileged exchange. Regardless of whether specific tongue in cheek emails were protected by the attorney-client privilege, they were clearly protected by First Amendment rights of political association and free speech."

The emails from Chapman University and the University of Colorado Boulder have become important pieces of evidence surrounding Trump's efforts to remain in power at all costs. The select committee is working to obtain more of Eastman's emails before the end of the current congressional session.

Eastman's emails show communication with aides to then-Vice President Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani and other Trump lawyers. Carter previously said that Eastman and Trump likely conspired to commit felony and obstruction of Congress, and said that Eastman's claims of attorney-client privilege were invalid.

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Emails show Trump lawyers mocked his wealth then tried to block the emails from Congress - Salon

Letters: Donald Trump Jr. column twisted meaning of Tim Ryan’s words – The Columbus Dispatch

Letters to the Editor| The Columbus Dispatch

The Sept. 30 column, "Ryan's recent remarks brand Republicans as enemies of state," by Donald Trump Jr. turns my stomach.He touts a false equivalency between left and right extremists.

More:Donald Trump Jr: Tim Ryan's kill, confront movement remark makes MAGA 'enemy of the state'

The death of the 18-year-old in North Dakota is absolutely wrong and should not be used as cover for the rights far more extreme words and actions, i.e., the Jan. 6 seditious attack on the Capitol, packing the Supreme Court with religious extremists, Charlottesville, Kyle Rittenhouse, separating children from their parents, calling human beings at the border vermin, and on and on.

The column twisted Tim Ryans words into a lie and the Dispatch printed it.

Lawrence Roush, New Albany

Our president and vice president have represented us well the past couple of days.

First, our president, in a speech on Sept. 27, was asking for a deceased congresswoman to come on stage with him. Then, on Sept. 28, our vice president stated, "The United States shares a very important relationship, which is an alliance with the Republic of North Korea."

Think wisely as you consider your vote this Nov. 8.

Stan Fulk, Dublin

More:Vice President Harris mistakenly touts US 'alliance with the Republic of North Korea'

Share your thoughts:How to submit a letter to the editor for The Columbus Dispatch

In the Sept. 22 column, "EPA must tackleLakeErietoxicalgaecrisis," Janean Weber presents many valid points we need to tackle immediately.

I want to add the reminder that as the water sources in the western U.S. are drying up at unprecedented and unpredictable rates, they will be looking for new water sources.

More:You can't fish through an 'algal bloom.' Threat about more than drinking water| Opinion

We need to have clear and strong laws in place to govern the use of the lakes and input into them, now, before we are also waging this battle with other states and possibly other countries.

Susan Klun, Columbus

We are writing to express our support for Justice Sharon L. Kennedy for chief justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio.

Justice Kennedys judicial philosophy is based on the Constitution, not personal feelings or political views. She says what the law says rather than what the law should be and decides only what is necessary to resolve the legal question before the court.

With our support, she will continue to honor the Constitution by upholding the law, not creating it or legislating from the bench.

More:Up for grabs: Poll shows close races for 3 Ohio Supreme Court seats

Justice Kennedy has over 37 years of service in the judicial system as a police officer, trial court judge, and justice. She has garnered the solid foundation needed to serve our great state.

She is trusted and fair and will work hard for Ohio. As small business owners in Allen County, we see a need for a chief justice we can count on to create and maintain a predictable environment for Ohio.

Please join us in voting for the Ohio Republican Partys endorsed candidate, Sharon Kennedy.

Ken and Linda Rumbaugh, Lima

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Letters: Donald Trump Jr. column twisted meaning of Tim Ryan's words - The Columbus Dispatch

Donald Trump rages that Ron DeSantiss Marthas Vineyard stunt was his …

Donald Trump is privately raging at fellow Republican Ron DeSantis over the governors decision to authorise flights carrying roughly 50 migrants last week from the southern border to Marthas Vineyard, Rolling Stone reported.

The Florida governor patted himself on the back over the weekend while delivering a speech in Wisconsin to stump for GOP candidates, announcing that he intended to tap every penny from the $12m Freedom First budget allocated to the Florida Department of Transportations efforts to transport unauthorised aliens.

And though both Mr DeSantis and anti-immigration sympathisers on Fox News and within the Republican party celebrated the firebrand politicians actions with Texas Senator Ted Cruz even calling for governors to increase their controversial relocation programs and send half a million undocumented migrants on to Washington DC not everyone in right-wing circles was happy with last weeks headlines.

Namely, former president Donald Trump found himself scowling at how his potential rival for the Republican ticket in the 2024 presidential election was dominating the headlines and drawing attention away from his own antics.

Rolling Stone reported that two inside sources close to the twice-impeached president had heard him vent about the Republican governor taking the limelight off Trump and accused him of using the migrant flights to prop up his national profile ahead of a potential bid for the White House.

Neither Mr DeSantis nor Mr Trump have made public commitments to run in 2024, though both men are considered to be frontrunners to challenge President Joe Biden for the Oval Office.

Mr Trump also reportedly raged at his aides in the wake of Mr DeSantiss highly publicised stunt, noting that the Florida governor had taken a page from his own playbook as he contended that flying migrants on planes from the southern border was his idea.

Rolling Stones report on Mr Trump privately seething at Mr DeSantiss rising star is just the latest slight in an ongoing Cold War between two of the most outspoken and divisive figures in US politics.

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When polls last summer began to point to the Florida governors potential to outpace the man who had once endorsed his campaign, Mr Trump seemed to begin to walk back his full-throated support for the Republican he credits himself as being responsible for landing in the governors office.

In June, the University of New Hampshire shared the results of a survey which showed a shocking change of fortune for the former president who for the first time began to trail the Florida governor among likely primary voters in the state.

On the same day those results were shared, the former president took to his own social media platform Truth Social to post the results of a separate poll from the right-leaning pollster Zogby. In those results, unlike the University of New Hampshires, it indicated that he was the clear favourite for winning the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, 42 points ahead of Mr DeSantis in a survey of GOP voters nationally.

The former president has even struck out at his once-avowed network of preference, Fox News, for airing what he viewed as inaccurate polling results during one of their morning news programs.

@foxandfriends just botched my poll numbers, no doubt on purpose, the one-term president wrote on Truth Social back in July, calling out a segment where hosts had presented the findings from both the University of New Hampshire survey and Blueprint in Florida that showed Mr DeSantis being the favourite of the two. That show has been terrible gone to the dark side, he added.

One of the pillars of Trumps 2016 platform zeroed in on the countrys southern border policies, with his build the wall tagline becoming nearly as synonymous with his campaign as the make America great again slogan.

Though he pledged on the campaign trail that he would build a great, great wall on our southern border that the Mexican government would pay for, by the end of his presidency his administration had constructed 452 miles in total, according to the latest US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Most of those 452 miles, however, were reinforcing walls that had been built during previous US administrations as only 80 miles of new structures were erected where there had previously been nothing.

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Donald Trump Is More Deranged Than Ever – The New Republic

But even this was just part of the buildup to what ended up being a full QAnon passion play, as the rally culminated with Trump fulminatingreciting a series of grievances over swelling strings. His followers, commanded to raise their fingers in salute, did soresulting in a scene that looked like it was freshly plucked from Leni Riefenstahls back catalog. The swelling music over which he ranted was eerily similar to the QAnon anthem Wwg1wgaa reference to the conspiracy theorys slogan, Where we go one, we go all. The one-finger salute was also a nod to the title of that song. Two other speakers at the rally, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, have promoted QAnon over the last several years. Trump himself has recently posted or reposted several QAnon-linked images on his Truth Social platform.

Now we are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation, Trump said, riffing on what has become a familiar theme in his speechesreferencing high inflation and energy costs and the need for more domestic energy production. It was very much akin to traditional fascist mythmaking: Only one man can restore the glory and wealth and prestige of the motherland, and that person is a real estate developercon man turned insurrectionist.

Though Trumps eventual embrace of QAnon was pretty much foreordained, its still disturbing. The conspiracy theory is propped up by his most devoted followers, who believe, among other things, that he will be reinstated as president of the United States and that the Democratic Party is run by a cabal of child sex traffickers. That combination of extreme loyalty to himself and an extraordinary antipathy to his rivals is what he has always promoted among his supporters. As Trump has become more and more obsessed with the investigations engulfing himinto the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, into his apparent theft of hundreds of classified documents, into his corrupt businessesit only grows more necessary to play more directly to those most willing to believe his claims of victimhood.

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Donald Trump Is More Deranged Than Ever - The New Republic

Hope Hicks told Donald Trump he lost the 2020 election and that ‘nobody’s convinced me otherwise," book says – Yahoo News

Former President Donald Trump and Hope Hicks on March 29, 2018.MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

Longtime Trump aide Hope Hicks didn't buy into his false claims that he won the 2020 election.

She told him to move on, according to the book "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021."

"Trump responded bitterly. "Well, Hope doesn't believe in me," he'd say in meetings," they wrote.

After the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump's longtime aide Hope Hicks told him what he didn't want to hear: He lost.

The close aide was preparing to leave the White House and stayed away from Trump's 2020 election challenges, even as he brooded and "talked of little else" in the aftermath of the race being called for President Joe Biden, wrote New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and New Yorker staff writer and CNN global affairs analyst Susan Glasser in their new book "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021."

Hicks told Trump it was time to move on, according to the book set to publish Tuesday.

"Trump responded bitterly. 'Well, Hope doesn't believe in me,' he would say in meetings," they wrote. "'No, I don't,' she would reply. 'Nobody's convinced me otherwise.' She concluded any further efforts to try to steer Trump would simply be, as she told an associate, 'a waste of time.'"

Hicks worked for the Trump Organization and campaign before serving on the White House communications team and then, after some time at Fox Corporation, as counselor to Trump. But she was "marginalized" after telling Trump his election challenge was wrong and "did not even bother to go into the office" on January 6, 2021, the day of the Capitol insurrection, according to the authors.

Some advisors thought Trump "wavered" on the big lie in the first few days after his loss and that he understood he had come up short. Once, the authors wrote, when seeing Biden on television, he said, "'Can you believe I lost to this fucking guy?'"

"But the kind of advisers who might have steered him toward acceptance were no longer around the brooding president, who remained cloistered for days after the election and talked of little else," the authors wrote.

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Alyssa Farah, Trump's strategic communications director, soon resigned "out of disgust."

Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner "surrendered the field" when they saw the outgoing president was empowering his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who they blamed for his first impeachment, the authors wrote.

"'Obviously, I support you, but I can't help you on that,'" Kushner told Trump, as he related the story to another Republican at the time," the authors wrote.

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Hope Hicks told Donald Trump he lost the 2020 election and that 'nobody's convinced me otherwise," book says - Yahoo News