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Donald Trump just became his own hypeman in the trials he faces for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The ex-president promised yet again on Friday to produce irrefutable evidence in court that he got robbed of a victory after lying about his election loss for three years.

Massive information and 100% evidence will be made available during the Corrupt Trials started by our Political Opponent, he wrote on Truth Social. We will never let 2020 happen again. Look at the result, OUR COUNTRY IS BEING DESTROYED. MAGA!!!

Trump even threw in what many people identified as thinly veiled racism.

Does anyone notice that the Election Rigging Biden Administration never goes after the Riggers, but only after those that want to catch and expose the Rigging dogs, he said.

Following a similar statement about riggers in August, critics, including his former communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin, accused the ex-president of using a racist dogwhistle to appeal to bigots. Riggers, of course, is just a letter away from a heinous slur.

Weve been here before with Trump and his promises to verify his baseless claims of a stolen election. He recently announced a press conference to present a CONCLUSIVE report that would lead to a complete EXONERATION. But he canceled it.

Trump cant really cancel a trial, so maybe well see that purported evidence after all. Promises, promises.

In the meantime, potential legal jeopardy mounted for the autocratic ex-president and current Republican presidential front-runner. Trumps co-defendants Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro both pleaded guilty in the Georgia election conspiracy case and agreed to testify against their alleged accomplices, which would include Trump.

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Donald Trump Promises 100% Evidence Of 2020 Fraud With A ... - Yahoo News

Mr. Trumps adversaries often look to the courts for relief, but theres no remedy there for his tirades. The First Amendment protects all but the most explicit incitements to violence, so Mr. Trump has little reason to fear that prosecutors will bring charges against him for those remarks.

The most notorious moment of Mr. Trumps presidency also demonstrated the limits of relying on the courts as a meaningful check on his provocations. In his speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, he urged his supporters to fight like hell, and many did just that at the Capitol. But they paid a price, and he didnt. In yet another example of his life without consequences, more than 1,000 people have been charged for their conduct on Jan. 6, and many if not most of them broke the law because they thought thats what the president at the time wanted. Still, the special counsel Jack Smith refrained from charging Mr. Trump with inciting the violence, undoubtedly because of the Constitutions broad protection for freedom of speech. Incitements like Mr. Trumps, even if they are not crimes in themselves, can have dangerous consequences, as they did on Jan. 6.

Angry people, especially those predisposed to violence, can be set off by encouragement that falls well short of the legal standard for criminal incitement. To see the consequences of such constitutionally protected provocation, one need only look to the case of Timothy McVeigh, who set off the bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people on April 19, 1995. More than a decade before the attack, when Mr. McVeigh was still in high school, he first read The Turner Diaries, a novel about a right-wing rebellion against the federal government. Earl Turner, the hero and narrator of the novel, ignites a civil war by setting off a truck bomb next to the F.B.I. building in Washington which planted the idea for what Mr. McVeigh later did in Oklahoma City. After Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Mr. McVeighs revulsion at the new president prompted him to move the idea from the back of his mind to a definite plan of attack.

Mr. McVeigh was specifically outraged by the F.B.I.s raid on the Branch Davidian complex near Waco, Texas, which led to the death of 82 Branch Davidians and four federal agents and ended on April 19, 1993, and by Mr. Clintons signing of a ban on assault weapons, which took place the following year.

Mr. McVeighs anger was boiling at a time of incendiary political language in the mid-1990s, when, for example, Newt Gingrich, who would go on to become speaker of the House in 1995, said: People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz. I see evil all around me every day. In particular, on his long drives across the country, Mr. McVeigh became a dedicated listener to Rush Limbaugh, whose radio talk show was in its heyday. Mr. Limbaugh was saying things like, The second violent American revolution is just about I got my fingers about a quarter of an inch apart is just about that far away. Of course, all of this rhetoric, from the words of the novel to those of Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Limbaugh, was protected by the First Amendment.

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Opinion | Donald Trump Is Going to Get Someone Killed - The New York Times

Shortly after he left office, former President Donald J. Trump shared apparently classified information about American nuclear submarines with an Australian businessman during an evening of conversation at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The businessman, Anthony Pratt, a billionaire member of Mar-a-Lago who runs one of the worlds largest cardboard companies, went on to share the sensitive details about the submarines with several others, the people said. Mr. Trumps disclosures, they said, potentially endangered the U.S. nuclear fleet.

Federal prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, learned about Mr. Trumps disclosures of the secrets to Mr. Pratt, which were first revealed by ABC News, and interviewed him as part of their investigation into the former presidents handling of classified documents, the people said.

According to another person familiar with the matter, Mr. Pratt is now among more than 80 people whom prosecutors have identified as possible witnesses who could testify against Mr. Trump at the classified documents trial, which is scheduled to start in May in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla.

Mr. Pratts name does not appear in the indictment accusing Mr. Trump of illegally holding on to nearly three dozen classified documents after he left office and then conspiring with two of his aides at Mar-a-Lago to obstruct the governments attempts to get them back.

But the account that Mr. Trump discussed some of the countrys most sensitive nuclear secrets with him in a cavalier fashion could help prosecutors establish that the former president had a long habit of recklessly handling classified information.

And the existence of the testimony about the conversation underscores how much additional information the special prosecutors office may have amassed out of the publics view.

During his talk with Mr. Pratt, Mr. Trump revealed at least two pieces of critical information about the U.S. submarines tactical capacities, according to the people familiar with the matter. Those included how many nuclear warheads the vessels carried and how close they could get to their Russian counterparts without being detected.

It does not appear that Mr. Trump showed Mr. Pratt any of the classified documents that he had been keeping at Mar-a-Lago. In August last year, the F.B.I. carried out a court-approved search warrant at the property and hauled away more than 100 documents containing national security secrets, including some that bore the countrys most sensitive classification markings.

Mr. Trump had earlier returned hundreds of other documents he had taken with him from the White House, some in response to a subpoena.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Mr. Smith declined to comment. Representatives for Mr. Pratt did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Even though Mr. Pratt has been interviewed by prosecutors, the people familiar with the matter said, it remained unclear whether Mr. Trump was merely blustering or exaggerating in his conversation with him.

Joe Hockey, a former Australian ambassador to the United States, sought to play down Mr. Trumps disclosures to Mr. Pratt in a phone interview on Thursday.

If thats all that was discussed, we already know all that, Mr. Hockey said. We have had Australians serving with Americans on U.S. submarines for years, and we share the same technology and the same weapons as the U.S. Navy.

Still, Mr. Trump has been known to share classified information verbally on other occasions. During an Oval Office meeting in 2017 shortly after he fired the F.B.I. director James B. Comey, Mr. Trump revealed sensitive classified intelligence to two Russian officials, according to people briefed on the matter.

Well into his presidency, he also posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, a classified photo of an Iranian launch site.

The indictment in the documents case also accused Mr. Trump of showing a classified battle plan to attack Iran to a group of visitors to his club in Bedminster, N.J. Prosecutors claim that a recording of the meeting with the visitors depicts Mr. Trump as describing the document he brandished as secret.

Mr. Trump has not had access to more updated U.S. intelligence since leaving the presidency; President Biden cut off the briefings that former presidents traditionally get when Mr. Trump left office in the wake of Mr. Trumps efforts to overturn the election and the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021.

I just think that there is no need for him to have the intelligence briefings, Mr. Biden said at the time.

What value is giving him an intelligence briefing? he said. What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?

Mr. Trumps interactions with Mr. Pratt appear to fit a pattern of the former presidents collapsing his public office and its secrets into his private interests.

Mr. Pratt cultivated a relationship with Mr. Trump once he became president. He joined Mar-a-Lago in 2017, then was invited to a state dinner and had Mr. Trump join him at one of his companys plants in Ohio.

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Trump Said to Have Revealed Nuclear Submarine Secrets to Australian Businessman - The New York Times

Donald Trump is doing a brilliant job of promoting Letitia James. The former president had been punching at New York States attorney general sporadically for more than a year, calling James a racist and a disgrace as her office investigated whether Trump and his company had committed fraud by manipulating the value of his businesses. But now, as Trump is on trial, he has taken to attacking James on a daily basis, raging to reporters outside the lower Manhattan courtroom while calling her grossly incompetent, a monster, and even a deranged lunatic on social media.

The publicity offensive is certainly ugly and perverse, but it is elevating Jamess profile. The attorney general has already won one enormous victory against the former president: Last month, state judge Arthur Engoron ruled that James had proven that Trump and his companies committed long-running fraud in their financial statements. This case was brought simply because it was a case where individuals have engaged in a pattern and practice of fraud, James said on Wednesday. And I will not sit idly by and allow anyone to subvert the law. Upon the former presidents departure, James told reporters that the Donald Trump show is over and suggested his voluntary appearance in court was nothing more than a political stunt, a fundraising stop.

The current legal proceedings, which could last until December, are to determine what penalty Trump will pay, from a monetary fine to being barred from doing business in New York State. Perhaps Engoron will allow Trump to walk away with an anticlimactic slap on the wrist. But the odds that James will earn a large legal triumph and accumulate a sizable stockpile of political capital look far better.

Political capital that she will cash in to gowell, probably nowhere. The earnest, consensus view is that James will stay put because she loves her current job. Tish is not interested in publicity or what drives most elected officials, says Roberto Ramirez, a former New York Democratic state assemblyman who knows James well from his work as a strategist on several of her campaigns. She is the unicorn of New York politics. She is obsessed with the substantive nature of being a lawyer for the state.

There is also the hard political reality that James is boxed in. New York senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand arent departing anytime soon. Two years ago James mounted a brief, half-hearted run for governor (The people around her wanted it far more than she did, a state Democratic insider says), and the incumbent, Kathy Hochul, wont be on the ballot again until 2026. In the past, James has talked far more enthusiastically about running for mayor of New York Citybut it is very hard to see her giving up a powerful statewide office for a bloody 2025 primary challenge to fellow Democrat and fellow Brooklynite Eric Adams.

And then theres the more intriguing constraint on Jamess enhanced prestige: She would undermine a defeat of Trump by trying to capitalize on it. Joe Bidens reelection campaign is highly worried about turning out crucial Black voters, particularly women, in battleground states. James would be an energetic, effective surrogateexcept that making her a prominent part of the presidents campaign would hand Trump ammunition. This case adds a lot of value to her political future, and it inoculates her from what a lot of women in her position have to deal with, being more credentialed and validated in ways that men dont, says Cornell Belcher, a Democratic strategist who worked on both of Barack Obamas White House runs. But the Biden campaign couldnt and wouldnt use her, because it would feed into the narrative that Trump wants, that this case is about politics.

James certainly doesnt lack ambition. She maneuvered through the treacherous, corruption-prone ranks of the Brooklyn Democratic Party to be elected a city councilwoman, before winning one of New Yorks three citywide offices, as public advocate. James had entered politics as a candidate of the left-wing Working Families Partybut ditched the WFP to make a useful alliance with its mortal enemy, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, in her successful 2018 run for AG. In 2021, after conducting an investigation requested by Cuomo, James delivered a 165-page report detailing multiple sexual harassment allegations against him. One week later the governor announced his resignation.

One year into her second term as New Yorks top prosecutor James, 64, looks as if shes settling in for at least the medium haul. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, when too many pols are fixated on the next rung of the ladder. Yet unpredictable things have a way of happening in politics. Its natural for a person to feel maybe I should consider other options, Ramirez says. Her future is only limited by what she wishes to do. For the moment, though, James is the rare politician whose future is paradoxically restricted by the nature of her imminent triumph.

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Donald Trump Can Snarl All He Likes, But He's Making a Star Out of ... - Vanity Fair

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Editor's note: Nehls on Thursday evening said on social media that he spoke with former President Donald Trump about the speakership and learned he was supporting Rep. Jim Jordan. Nehls said he too would now support Jordan.

WASHINGTON U.S. Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Richmond, is recruiting his peers to support the exceedingly improbable push to make former President Donald Trump the next speaker of the House.

I nominate Donald J. Trump for Speaker of the House, U.S. Rep. Troy Nehls declared on social media shortly after Kevin McCarthy was ousted from the job.

Nehls said this week he has since reached out to a host of other Republicans, including Rep. Ronny Jackson of Amarillo, and said some of them would be open to making the case for Trump as the House votes on its next speaker Wednesday. Jackson, a staunch Trump supporter, used to be the presidents White House physician. Jacksons office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Jackson tweeted on Thursday afternoon he was throwing his support behind Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.

No one who is not a member of Congress has ever served as speaker, and the idea faces near impossible political odds. But Trump has shown some signs of humoring the idea. He is considering visiting the Capitol before the speaker election, Politico reported, and posted a picture of himself with the speakers gavel on social media.

Trump is also the Republican forerunner for the 2024 presidential election and has said that hes keeping his attention on that race. Speaking with reporters Wednesday outside a New York courthouse where he is the defendant in a civil suit, Trump said hell do whatevers best for the country and the Republican Party but we have some great people already running for speaker.

Ill do whatever it is to help, but my focus, my total focus, is being president, Trump continued.

The odds against Trump are enormous. He is mired in a web of legal challenges, including four criminal indictments related to hush money payments to cover up an alleged affair, retaining of classified documents after being instructed to return them and his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

There are few people whom House Democrats despise more than Trump, and the speaker is chosen by a simple majority in the whole House. Trump would need practically the entire Republican conference to back him, and there are some popular Republicans already in the race. Democrats voted as a bloc to remove McCarthy and are unlikely to support another Republican candidate. They repeatedly voted unanimously for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to be speaker in January.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Jordan have both thrown their names into the ring to become speaker. Republican Study Committee Chair Kevin Hern has also expressed interest and made a pitch during a Texas Republican delegation lunch Wednesday.

Scalise already has several vocal backers, including Reps. Tony Gonzales of San Antonio and Jake Ellzey of Waxahachie.

The choice appears to be from that pool for most rank and file Republicans. Several Texas members said they were impressed with Scalise, Jordan and Hern and would be happy to support whoever among them would be able to rally the support of the entire conference.

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, a close Trump ally, has also been calling for the former president to become speaker.

Disclosure: Politico has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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U.S. Rep. Troy Nehls leads push for Donald Trump to be next House ... - The Texas Tribune