Tag: donald trump

Rep. Eric Swalwell Testifies in Case to Keep Trump Off the Ballot

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) testified on Oct. 30 in a trial in Colorado in a case that seeks to keep former President Donald Trump from appearing on the Colorado primary ballot.

Mr. Swalwell testified via video conference, describing the events of Jan. 6, 2021, from his perspective. He was in the Capitol when the Electoral College votes were being certified and had “gaveled” the Congress in that day, leading the pledge of allegiance.

“We connected the president’s tweets to our own safety in the chambers,” he said, “and the integrity of the proceedings taking place.”

Attorneys showed him a post on Twitter, now known as X, in which President Trump wrote that Vice President Mike Pence didn’t have the “courage” to give states “a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify.”

“USA demands the truth!” the president wrote.

“We interpreted it as a target had been painted on the Capitol,” Mr. Swalwell said.

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ACLU: Trump’s gag order in federal case is unconstitutional

For four years during former President Donald Trump’s presidency, the American Civil Liberties Union was one of his biggest courtroom adversaries. Now, the group is taking his side in a high-profile fight over what Trump can say as a criminal defendant.

The ACLU on Wednesday stepped into the battle over Trump’s federal gag order, arguing that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan violated Trump’s First Amendment rights as well as the public’s right to hear him when she issued the order earlier this month. Chutkan is presiding over the criminal case special counsel Jack Smith is pursuing against Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

“The obvious and unprecedented public interest in this prosecution, as well as the widespread political speech that it has generated and will continue to generate, only underscores the need to apply the most stringent First Amendment standard to a restraint on Defendant’s speech rights,” ACLU attorneys wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief.

The group urged Chutkan to reevaluate her order, calling it both vague and overbroad, with aspects of its meaning “unknown and perhaps unknowable.” One particular uncertainty the ACLU seized on was the meaning of Chutkan’s prohibition on statements that “target” Smith, his prosecutors, court personnel, defense attorneys or witnesses.

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President Trump Freed Drug Offenders. Candidate Trump Wants To Kill Them.

Donald Trump can’t seem to decide whether he wants to execute drug dealers or free them from prison. The former president’s debate with himself reflects a broader clash between Republicans who think harsher criminal penalties are always better and Republicans who understand that justice requires proportionality.

Trump has long admired brutal drug warriors like Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines. Consistent with that affinity, he has repeatedly floated the idea of imposing the death penalty on drug traffickers.

Trump returned to that theme in November 2022, when he officially launched his 2024 presidential campaign. “We’re going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs, to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts,” he said.

Trump reiterated that position during a June 2023 interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier, saying, “That’s the only way you’re going to stop it.” But as Baier pointed out, a policy of executing “everyone who sells drugs” is inconsistent with Trump’s record as president, which included sentencing reforms and acts of clemency aimed at reducing drug penalties that Trump described as “very unfair.”

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Conservatives are increasingly knives out for the nation’s top cyber agency

An agency set up under Donald Trump to protect elections and key U.S. infrastructure from foreign hackers is now fighting off increasingly intense threats from hard-right Republicans who argue it’s gone too far and are looking for ways to rein it in.

These lawmakers insist work by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to combat online disinformation during elections singles out conservative voices and infringes upon free speech rights — an allegation the agency vehemently denies and the Biden administration is contesting in court. The accusations started in the wake of the 2020 election and are ramping up ahead of 2024, with lawmakers now calling for crippling cuts at the agency.

“CISA has blatantly violated the First Amendment and colluded with Big Tech to censor the speech of ordinary Americans,” Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which oversees CISA, said in a statement to POLITICO.

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Former Trump Drug Czar Says Top Federal Officials Stopped FDA From Scheduling Kratom Amid Concern About Agency’s ‘Bias’

As the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the Trump administration prepared to propose federal restrictions on kratom, a number of top officials intervened, criticizing the agency’s “bias” and stopping it “on the spot” from moving ahead with scheduling, a former White House drug czar said in a new interview.

“They did not give—did not have—the entire facts. They didn’t have the science,” said Jim Carroll, who served as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, or drug czar, under President Donald Trump from 2018 to 2021. “FDA did not paint the entire picture. Maybe they didn’t have the entire picture, but everyone else did.”

Carroll, who now works as a private lawyer and consultant, made the comments during a discussion with Mac Haddow, senior fellow at the American Kratom Association (AKA), during the National Conference of State Legislatures summit in Indianapolis earlier this month.

The former White House official said that as the Trump administration was considering whether to schedule kratom under the Controlled Substances Act, around 2018, FDA gave a presentation to his office that misstated the drug’s risk profile and potential benefits.

The agency was “talking about kratom being an opioid. We know that’s wrong, it’s flat-out wrong,” Carroll said. “They said that it’s highly addictive. Johns Hopkins [and] other medical, independent researchers have said it’s no more addictive than a cup of coffee in the morning, which I had before this interview.”

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Truth Social Tipped FBI to *Armed* Utah Man Killed in Pre-Dawn Raid

Truth Social, the social media company owned by Trump, reportedly contacted the FBI back in March to tip them off about threats against Joe Biden made by a Utah man killed in a pre-dawn raid.

Craig Robertson, 75, was shot and killed by Salt Lake City FBI agents early Wednesday morning.

According to reports, Robertson was facing 3 counts after posting threats to Joe Biden: Interstate threats, threats against the president, and influencing, impeding and retaliating against federal law enforcement officers by threat.

Robertson allegedly threatened to kill Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and other officials prosecuting Trump in a series of social media posts.

“I hear Biden is coming to Utah. Digging out my old ghillie suit and cleaning the dust off the M24 sniper rifle,” Robertson allegedly said in a social media post according to the complaint.

According to CNBC, Truth Social contacted the FBI after Robertson threatened to kill Alvin Bragg.

Robertson was reportedly armed when FBI agents attempted to arrest him Wednesday morning and had his weapon pointed at the agents.

Agents fatally shot Robertson after he reportedly refused to obey their commands.

A neighbor captured the raid.

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‘Fake Melania’ conspiracy reemerges after Fox News misidentifies Trump aide for wife

In 2017, a new conspiracy theory emerged on the far right when MAGA Republicans started claiming that then-First Lady Melania Trump had a body double. And the “fake Melania” conspiracy theory was reignited on June 13 — the day of former Donald Trump’s arraignment in Miami on 37 federal criminal counts — after Fox News reporter John Roberts (not to be confused with the U.S. Supreme Court chief justice) mistook Margo Martin, the former president’s director of communications, for Melania Trump.

According to The Sun’s Caitlin Hornik, the woman in Miami could not have been Melania Trump because the former first lady was in New York City on June 13 and didn’t go to Miami with her husband. Martin, however, was with Donald Trump in the courthouse.

Reporting live in Miami, Roberts saw Martin and said, “There she is.” But around 15 minutes later, Roberts told Fox News viewers, “Apparently, it was not Melania. A day like today with so many comings and goings, it’s easy from a distance to mistake two people.”

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NIH restarts bat virus grant suspended 3 years ago by Trump

Three years after then-President Donald Trump pressured the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to suspend a research grant to a U.S. group studying bat coronaviruses with partners in China, the agency has restarted the award.

The new 4-year grant is a stripped-down version of the original grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization in New York City, providing $576,000 per year. That 2014 award included funding for controversial experiments that mixed parts of different bat viruses related to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the coronavirus that sparked a global outbreak in 2002–04, and included a subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The new award omits those studies, and also imposes extensive new accounting rules on EcoHealth, which drew criticism from government auditors for its bookkeeping practices.

But EcoHealth’s embattled director, Peter Daszak, says his group is pleased: “Now we have the ability to finally get back to work,” he says.

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Trump Accuser E. Jean Carroll Keeps Calling Rape ‘Sexy’, As Social Media Notices Her Story Matches a 2012 Law & Order Episode.

Trump accuser E. Jean Carroll has how claimed that simulated rapes in the Game of Thrones television series were “sexy” and used to excite viewers and draw an audience, in a bid to contextualize comments made to CNN host Anderson Cooper.

In doing so, some contend Carroll herself comes across as a rape fantasist. The notion is perhaps underscored by the fact that her story about Donald Trump raping her appears in a 2012 episode of Law and Order, featuring rape fantasists and the very same Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing rooms she claims the former President used in an attack on her.

Carroll – a Law and Order fan – first made her allegations against Trump in a 2019 book.

The former Elle advice columnist, 79, made her most remarks in reference to an interview she gave to Anderson Cooper on CNN, in which she bizarrely suggested that “most people think of rape as sexy”. She had also previously told Britain’s leftist Guardian newspaper that rape is “a fantasy” and “very sexual” and that this is why she previously refused to describe her alleged attack as “rape”.

The live, televised interview was so strange that even Cooper, scarcely an example of traditional values, balked and cut to commercial.

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Trump Advocates Mass Incarceration, ‘Tent Cities’ To Address Homelessness

On April 18, former President Donald Trump posted a video on his Truth Social account titled “Homelessness Plan.” In it, Trump alleged that “the homeless, the drug-addicted, and the violent and dangerously deranged” had ruined America’s cities, “turn[ing] every park and sidewalk into a place for them to squat and do drugs.” He promised, “When I’m back in the White House, we will use every tool, lever, and authority” to “end the scourge of homelessness and make our cities clean and safe and beautiful once again.”

How would he accomplish this? “Working with states, we will ban urban camping wherever possible…. We will then open up large parcels of inexpensive land; bring in doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, and drug rehab specialists; and create tent cities where the homeless can be relocated and their problems identified.”

Treatment would be catered to individual need: “For those who have addictions, substance abuse, and common mental health problems, we will get them into treatment. And for those who are severely mentally ill and deeply disturbed, we will bring them back to mental institutions where they belong, with the goal of reintegrating them back into society once they are well enough to manage.”

Trump’s plan may sound magnanimous, but it’s anything but. First off, there’s no telling what such a plan, or for that matter any plan, would cost. Advocates often say that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimates $20 billion as the cost of ending homelessness in America. But that number was an informal, unverified estimate of the annual cost in 2012. And as Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, told VERIFY in 2021, “It’s not so difficult to figure out what it would cost to end homelessness for everyone who is homeless tonight…. The problem is that more people BECOME homeless every day because they don’t earn enough to pay for housing – we’re 7 million housing units short to meet the needs of low-income people.”

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