Trump’s Thanksgiving message attacks fraud trial judge and clerk: Live

Days after a federal appeals court panel grilled Trump’s legal team over their opposition to a gag order in his election interference case in Washington DC, his attorneys struck back in a letter to the court clerk to blast both the gag order and the case itself.

They dismissed death threats in his New York fraud case as irrelevant, while accusing special counsel Jack Smith of bringing “an inflammatory, lawless indictment” against Trump, making “false and misleading statements” about him, and leading “confidential information in order to harm” him.

“Both the indictment and the Gag Order represent an unconstitutional attempt to silence President Trump; they are clearly election interference,” they wrote.

The words echo the former president’s campaign-trail remarks and rhetoric on social media, where he posts conspiracy theories accusing prosecutors and judges of working with Democratic officials to keep him away from the White House.

Dean Phillips, who is pursuing a long-shot challenge against President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2024, announced that he won’t be seeking his re-election to Congress.

He is currently a state representative for Minnesota.

Mr Phillips already was facing several interparty challenges for his seat in Congress after he began mulling plans to challenge Mr Biden.

Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis made her debut arguing before a judge and questioning witnesses in a case surrounding Donald Trump’s sprawling election interference case this week.

She ressed a judge to revoke a bond order for one of Trump’s co-defendants who repeatedly posted about several people involved the case despite the terms of his release prohibiting him from communication with witnesses or co-defendants “directly or indirectly”.

The appearance from Ms Willis previewed the arguments, evidence and list of witnesses expected to testify in the upcoming trial, among several criminal cases surrounding the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination for president.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee declined to send Harrison Floyd back to jail and directed the parties to draft an order that reels in his public statements.

Georgia’s Supreme Court rejected a commission’s authority to remove state prosecutors, which Republican officials had hoped to use against Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, whose sprawling racketeering case against Donald Trump and his co-defendants is steering towards a criminal trial in Atlanta.

A ruling from the court on Wednesday surrounding the Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission – which was established by Republican Governor Brian Kemp earlier this year – argued it does not have the constitutional authority to do so.

Mr Kemp said the committee was created to remove local prosecutors who did not fulfill their “constitutional and statutory duties” or were “driven by out-of-touch politics.”

Republican lawmakers in the state intended to wield that authority against Ms Willis and other Democratic elected prosecutors.

But the state’s highest court has “grave doubts that we have the constitutional power to take any action on the draft standards and rules,” according to the ruling.

DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston, among several Georgia prosecutors who sued to overturn the commission, said they are “pleased the justices have taken action to stop this unconstitutional attack on the state’s prosecutors.”

“While we celebrate this as a victory, we remain steadfast in our commitment to fight any future attempts to undermine the will of Georgia voters and the independence of the prosecutors who they choose to represent them,” she added.

Elise Stefanik is among congressional Republicans defending the former president in the court of public opinion as he faces a potentially crushing judgment in his civil fraud trial.

She filed an ethics complaint against the judge overseeing the trial, and then took credit for an appeals court ruling that temporarily paused a gag order in the case.

Ms Stefanik, the third-ranking House Republican, now appears to be using the gag order in her election messaging.

From her personal campaign account, she claimed that she “fought to lift President Trump’s gag order and won.” Her statements did not appear to have anything to do with the order.

“But the fight doesn’t end here. We must work to re-elect Trump on November 5, 2024,” she added. “Together, we can protect ALL Americans’ First Amendment and due process rights.”

Rudy Giuliani is facing yet another lawsuit.

A former associate is suing him for $10,000, adding to the mountain of debt the former New York City mayor and Trump attorney is facing.

BST & Co. CPAs, LLP, an accounting firm based in Latham, New York, claims he had the company conduct an appraisal of his business interests while he separated from his wife, Judith Nathan, without paying them.

Including interest, the firm now seeks to recover about $25,000.

Michelle Del Rey reports:

Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, who testified against him in the civil fraud trial in New York, said his former boss is “seeing himself lose every single day” he is in court.

“That case is going to financially put Trump on his a**, not to mention it is going to unwind the Trump corporation, at least here in the state,” he said on his podcast on Thursday.

“It becomes what’s known as the death spiral where you’re no longer able to operate,” he added.

Judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the case, already found Trump liable for fraud, in a pretrial judgment that effectively dissolved his ability to do business in the state. That part of the order has been temporarily frozen on appeal.

Trump has called the judgment “the corporate death penalty” against him, as he continues to base his campaign a conspiracy theory that the multiple criminal and civil cases against him are intended to keep him away from the White House.

In his two-day testimony in the fraud trial, Cohen claimed he was “tasked by Mr Trump to increase the total assets based upon a number that he arbitrarily elected” for his statement of financial condition, the documents at the centre of the case.

Cohen and convicted former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg were instructed to “reverse engineer the various different asset classes – increase those assets – in order to achieve the number that Mr Trump had tasked us with,” Cohen said.

Asked by counsel for the attorney general’s office what that number was, Cohen replied: “Whatever number Mr Trump told us to.”

Under questioning from Trump’s attorneys, Cohen agreed that his former boss never explicitly asked him to “inflate” the figures at the centre of the case.

“Donald Trump speaks like a mob boss,” Cohen testified. “He tells you what he wants without specifically telling you … That’s what I was referring to.”

Trump reportedly told Argentina’s far-right president-elect Javier Milei that he plans to travel to meet him, Mr Milei’s office said on Thursday.

The office did not provide a date. Mr Milei is scheduled to be inaugurated on 10 December.

“The president-elect received a call last night from the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, who congratulated him and pointed out his triumph by a wide margin in last Sunday’s election had a great impact on a global scale,” according to a statement from Mr Milei’s office.

In a video on Tuesday, Trump said: “I am very proud of you. You will turn your country around and truly make Argentina great again.”

President Joe Biden, meanwhile, also has called Mr Milei following his election victory to discuss “the strong relationship between the United States and Argentina on economic issues, on regional and multilateral cooperation, and on shared priorities, including advocating for the protection of human rights, addressing food insecurity and investing in clean energy.”

Meet South America’s incoming new MAGA-like leader:

Hours after Jack Smith’s team directed a federal appeals court judge to the mountain of threats to court staff surrounding Trump’s fraud case, the former president’s attorneys dismissed it as “irrelevant”.

A federal appeals court is considering whether to keep a gag order in place in Trump’s federal election interference case.

On Wednesday, attorneys for the judge overseeing Trump’s fraud trial in New York told a separate appeals court – also considering a gag order – about the wave of threatening messages his staff has received after Trump’s comments.

Mr Smith’s team included that statement in a Thanksgiving Day filing to support its push for a gag order in the federal case, but on Friday, Trump’s attorney’s called it “an impermissible attempt to supplement the record on appeal with irrelevant information that could have been, but was not, submitted to the district court below.”

“To date, the prosecution has never submitted any evidence of alleged ‘threats’ or ‘harassment’ to any prosecutor, court staffer, or potential witness in this case,” the letter from Trump’s attorney states.

“This falls short of the ‘solidity of evidence’ required to justify a prior restraint,” they argue.

Good morning from New York.

Donald Trump’s supporters unleashed a wave of death threats and antisemitic and homophobic messages to the judge overseeing his fraud trial, as well as his chief clerk, according to a court filing this week.

A gag order prohibited all parties in the case from making disparaging remarks towards the judge’s staff, including his principal law clerk, but a state appeals court judge paused the order earlier this month.

A filing this week to support Justice Arthur Engoron’s opposition to the pause includes an affidavit from a court security official who has collected “hundreds of threats, disparaging and harassing comments and antisemitic messages” that followed the former president’s harassment.

Federal prosecutors referred the appeals court judge to reffered to the filing, as well as “harassing voicemail messages that have been transcribed into over 275 single spaced pages.”

Read more about the threats in The Independent: