As California experiences a heat wave residents are being pressured to make unreasonable sacrifices that prove Governor Gavin Newsom’s green energy plan is destined to fail.
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On Tuesday the Supreme Court rejected an emergency appeal from former President Donald Trump that sought to shield his tax records from Congress.
The order, which had no noted dissents, concludes a multi-year legal battle by Democrats to obtain the records.
Last month, the former President filed the emergency appeal after a lower court declined to reverse its ruling mandating that he turn over the records to the House Ways and Means Committee. The Committee has argued the records are critical to its probe of how the IRS conducts its presidential audits but Trump and his attorneys have asserted the effort is merely a political stunt meant to jeopardize Trump and his businesses.
Chief Justice John Roberts had temporarily blocked their release in a Nov. 1 order while the court considered the matter, according to The Hill.
“The Committee’s purpose in requesting President Trump’s tax returns has nothing to do with funding or staffing issues at the IRS and everything to do with releasing the President’s tax information to the public,” Trump’s attorneys wrote to the court in October.
Federal law mandates that tax returns are generally confidential unless an exception applies, one of which includes a written request by the House Ways and Means Committee. The issue in Trump’s litigation in large part turns on whether this exception is constitutional.
“Why would anybody be surprised that the Supreme Court has ruled against me, they always do!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “It is unprecedented to be handing over Tax Returns, & it creates terrible precedent for future Presidents. Has Joe Biden paid taxes on all of the money he made illegally from Hunter & beyond.”
“The Supreme Court has lost its honor, prestige, and standing, & has become nothing more than a political body, with our Country paying the price,” Trump wrote on Wednesday. “They refused to even look at the Election Hoax of 2020. Shame on them!”
This story is developing. Stay with Great America News Desk for updates.
Donald Trump is known for his bombastic personality and his no-nonsense approach to politics but while that attracted voters and donors in 2016 it seems to be having the opposite effect now.
Major Republican donors seem to be turned off by Trump’s recent attacks on GOP challengers, especially Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Donald Tapia, a prominent businessman from Arizona and Trump’s former ambassador to Jamaica from 2019 to 2021, was a strong financial backer of Trump in 2016 and 2020, contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the former president over his two elections.
“The name-calling has turned a lot of people off,” Tapia said to Politico. “Let me tell you, we don’t like that.”
Tapia is now amongst a growing group of Republicans choosing to throw their support behind DeSantis, despite the fact he hasn’t even launched a presidential campaign yet.
Recently, DeSantis has been the target of a number of Trump’s Truth Social tirades, even earning the nickname “Ron DeSanctimonious.”
However, despite Trump’s barrage of attacks the Florida governor has opted to play coy, a tactic that seems to be drawing in more and more supporters.
Popular podcast star Joe Rogan recently defended the Sunshine State governor from Trump’s criticsms.
“All of the Fake News is reporting that I spend large amounts of my time coming up with a good ‘nickname’ for Ron DeSanctimonious, who is obviously going to give the presidential ‘thing’ a shot,” Trump claimed. “They are all 100% wrong; I don’t even think about it — A very unimportant subject to me!!!”
When Rogan’s guest noted that Trump was losing “losing his touch” in coming up with nicknames, Rogan responded that the task would be even harder for Trump to do with the Florida governor.
“Well, there’s not a good one that you can come up with for Ron,” Rogan said. “Because Ron, he’s too good with that base and his success in Florida is pretty unparalleled.”
“I think Ron DeSantis would work as a good president. I think, I mean, what he’s done for Florida has been admirable,” Rogan said last summer. “I feel like what he did for Florida, a lot of people gave him a lot of grief, but ultimately, he was correct. He was correct when it comes to like deaths. He was correct when it comes to protecting our vulnerable populations. He was correct in terms of distribution of monoclonal antibodies, and he was furious when the government tried to pull those, they were trying to pull very effective treatments.”
Earlier this week, DeSantis finally shed some light as to when Americans can expect his decision on a White House run.
During an appearance with “Fox & Friends” DeSantis charted out the next few months saying that he will embark on a tour to promote his new book, “The Courage to be Free,” and work through the Florida legislature’s regular session, which begins in early March.
“We’re going to sell some books, we’re going to spread the message of Florida. And then on March 8, I have our Legislative Session that’s kicking off,” DeSantis said.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” he added. “This is going to be the most productive Legislative Session we have had across the board and I think people are going to be really excited … So those are what we’re going to be doing over these next few months as we get beyond that, then we can decide from there.”
On Thursday, a London judge tossed out Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Orbis Business Intelligence, a company co-founded by Christopher Steele, the former British spy who created the debunked Steele Dossier in 2016.
The infamous dossier was paid for by Democrats and published during Trump’s first presidential bid against Hillary Clinton. It contained uncorroborated allegations and rumors designed through mainstream media outlets and among critics in an effort to sway the 2016 election. Trump denied the legitimacy of the dossier’s contents from the beginning however the claims sparked an investigation into alleged ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
“There are no compelling reasons to allow the claim to proceed to trial,” Judge Karen Steyn said of the lawsuit.
In the lawsuit, Trump alleged Orbis violated British data protection laws and sought damages. He also wanted a judge to definitively rule the claims were false.
Fox News has more:
Trump’s legal team argued the former president “suffered personal and reputational damage and distress” because his data protection rights were violated. Trump’s lawyer Hugh Tomlinson argued the dossier “contained shocking and scandalous claims about the personal conduct of President Trump.” Trump’s case “is that this personal data is egregiously inaccurate.”
Conversely, Orbis said the lawsuit should be thrown out because the dossier, which was published by BuzzFeed, was never meant to be made public. It was done so without the permission of Steele or Orbis, they claim. They also said Trump’s lawsuit was filed too late.
The judge seemed to agree, saying Trump had “chosen to allow many years to elapse – without any attempt to vindicate his reputation in this jurisdiction – since he was first made aware of the dossier.”
On Wednesday, a former congressional candidate and WWE wrestler turned himself into authorities after an arrest warrant for open murder was issued for him.
Dan Rodimer, 45, was identified Wednesday as the suspect in an alleged altercation that turned deadly inside a Las Vegas resort room in October, according to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.
Fox News reported that the man inside the room, later identified as 47-year-old Christopher Tapp, was taken to the hospital with “injuries as a result of a purported accident,” police said at the time.
Tapp died at Sunrise Hospital on Nov. 5, FOX 5 Las Vegas reported, and on Nov. 22, police began investigating his death as suspicious after learning he had been involved in an altercation.
David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, Rodimer’s lawyers, gave the following statement to FOX 5 on Wednesday evening:
“Mr. Rodimer is voluntarily surrendering to authorities and will post a court ordered bail,” it read. “He intends on vigorously contesting the allegations and asks that the presumption of innocence guaranteed all Americans be respected.”
He posted his $200,000 bail Wednesday night and has a hearing set for Thursday morning, local outlets reported.
Former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg has been sentenced to five months in prison for perjury stemming from former President Trump’s civil fraud case.
Weisselberg pleaded guilty to two counts of felony perjury last month as part of a plea deal with the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
The charges stemmed from a 2020 deposition with the New York attorney general’s office as it built its civil fraud case against the Trump Organization.
The Hill has more:
In his July 17, 2020, deposition with the attorney general’s office, state lawyers questioned Weisselberg over the size of Trump’s Manhattan triplex apartment in Trump Tower. The property was listed on the former president’s financial statements as 30,000 square feet in size but is actually less than 11,000 square feet.
Weisselberg told state lawyers he “didn’t find out about the error” in the triplex’s listed size until Forbes reported it and that he was never present when Trump described the size of the property. He has now admitted that both remarks were untrue.
The inquiry into Weisselberg’s perjury was spurred by his October testimony in the civil fraud trial, in which he was also a defendant. Without pleading guilty to a specific charge, he admitted as part of his plea deal that he falsely testified he “never focused” on the triplex throughout the course of his work for the Trump Organization.
Prosecutors with the district attorney’s office said in charging documents that the Trump Tower triplex’s size was “material” to the attorney general’s investigation.
The civil fraud trial ended earlier this year with a New York judge ruling that Trump and top executives, including Weisselberg, conspired to alter the former president’s net worth for tax and insurance benefits.
Weisselberg was ordered to pay more than $1.1 million, plus interest, and barred for three years from serving in top leadership positions in any New York corporation or business entity. He was also barred for life from serving “in the financial control function” of any New York business.
Trump was ordered to pay $454 million, plus interest, and faced similar business-related penalties.
Weisselberg’s 5-month sentence marks his second stint in prison after the former CFO pleaded guilty in 2022 to evading nearly $2 million in taxes. He was sentenced to five months at the Rikers Island jail for tax evasion.
This is a breaking news story. Please check back for updates.
The Justice Department is reportedly seriously contemplating offering former Trump adviser Kash Patel an immunity deal in exchange for his testimony about claims that highly sensitive government documents the FBI seized from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort were declassified.
According to sources close to the matter, the DOJ is considering the special deal because Patel was one of Trump’s appointed representatives with the National Archives and therefore could have knowledge of how Trump handled the records seized from Mar-a-Lago.
According to The Guardian, Patel started the Trump administration by railing against the Russia investigation when he served on the House intelligence committee’s Republican staff and ended it as chief of staff to the defense secretary.
During its August raid, the FBI seized thousands of pages of documents from the former President’s Florida residence. Throughout its investigation into whether Trump violated the Espionage Act, the DOJ has honed in on roughly 100 documents and whether they were-as Trump has claimed- declassified before leaving office.
Trump, Patel, and other confidantes have made claims about the declassification of the documents but the former president’s legal team has yet to make the assertion in court.
Justice Department officials are examining whether to allow federal prosecutors to seek an order from the chief US district court judge in Washington Beryl Howell granting Patel limited use immunity to compel his testimony on the declassification issue and other matters, the sources said.
The justice department had sought testimony from Patel when he was summoned to testify before a grand jury in Washington hearing evidence about Trump’s potential mishandling of national security materials and obstruction when he appeared resisted requests for their return, one source said.
But Patel asserted his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination to an array of questions at the 13 October appearance, the source said, though the basis for some was not clear; even if the documents were not declassified, making false public statements would probably not be a crime.
The Justice Department is not prone to offering immunity deals because it can potentially make bringing charges against the person in the future more difficult. The approval must also come from the top echelons of the DOJ according to guidelines, and the preference for prosecutors to obtain testimony is to have defendants plead guilty and then have them offer cooperation for a reduced sentence.
Republican Senate candidate and former Governor Larry Hogan will not vote for Donald Trump in the 2024 election despite accepting his endorsement earlier this summer.
“Look, I’ve said neither one of the two candidates has earned my vote, and the voters in the country are going to be able to make that decision,” the former Maryland governor said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Host Robert Costa pressed Hogan, asking if there is “no chance” he would cast his ballot for Trump.
“I’m not going to. I didn’t vote for him in 2016 or 2020 and I’ve made that pretty clear,” Hogan responded in a clip highlighted by Mediaite. “But look, I’m not running just for a Republican Party … it’s not just about red versus blue, which is what my opponent wants it to be about. I’m concerned about the red, white and blue, and I’m willing to put country over party and I’m hoping that the voters will be willing to do the same thing.”
Watch:
According to The Hill/Decision Desk HQ, Democrat Angela Alsobrooks leads Hogan in the Maryland Senate race by 9.4 percentage points.
On Thursday, a federal judge rejected the latest attempt to keep Donald Trump off the 2024 primary ballot in West Virginia.
Obama-appointed district judge Irene Berger ruled that John Anthony Castro, the little-known presidential candidate who brought the lawsuit to remove Trump, lacked standing to sue.
“The evidence establishes that [Castro] has no campaign offices, staff, or advertising in West Virginia, does not appear in polling, has little name recognition among West Virginia Republican primary voters, and has extremely minimal campaign funds, vastly insufficient to run an actual campaign,” Berger wrote. “If there were any question as to whether the allegations in the complaint are sufficient to overcome a facial challenge, the evidentiary submissions remove any doubt that Mr. Castro’s purported ‘campaign’ exists as a vehicle for pursuing litigation, not votes.”
Federal judges in Arizona and Rhode Island likewise found Castro lacked standing because he is not seriously running for office.
The decision comes days after Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled Trump was ineligible to appear on the state’s ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, likely teeing up a Supreme Court battle.
“This is a big win for the integrity of our elections,” said Republican West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey in a statement, according to News and Sentinel. “This lawsuit was frivolous to begin with and without merit – it had no basis in either law or fact. Any eligible candidate has the right to be on the ballot unless legally disqualified, and we will defend the laws of West Virginia and the right of voters and candidates to the fullest.”
The GOP is inching closer to securing a majority in the House of Representatives as former Trump Administration official Ryan Zinke declares victory in Montana’s newly created 1st Congressional District.
Zinke, the former interior secretary during the Trump administration, beat Democrat opponent Monica Tranel the Associated Press reported on Thursday.
According to The Washington Examiner:
Prior to Tuesday’s election, Zinke’s and Tranel’s campaigns both focused on affordability, though Zinke also focused on inflation and spending, while Tranel focused on growth. To combat inflation, Zinke has suggested slowing federal spending and has advocated more action to lower energy costs, according to KTVH.
“The things that are hurting are inflation — energy costs too much, fertilizer’s too much,” he said during a debate in Bozeman last month.
Ahead of the election, Tranel highlighted her four-point affordability plan, which calls for investing in the American workforce and domestic manufacturing, as well as standing up against corporate consolidation. To fix the housing situation, Tranel said during last month’s debate that she wants to expand tax credits for affordable developments and put restrictions on corporations that have been purchasing homes for investment purposes.
