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Rolling coverage of the former president’s latest legal woes
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Trump phones mother of shot Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt
A hardcore Trump supporter looks to have won the Republican Senate primary in New Hampshire. Don Bolduc appears to have beaten his mainstream competitor, leaving the GOP leadership worried he could cost them a winnable seat because of his extreme views.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump has come out furiously in support of Mike Lindell, the 2020 election conspiracy theorist and CEO of MyPillow, who claimed Tuesday that the FBI seized his cell phone at a fast food restaurant in Minnesota.
The CEO said that he was returning from a hunting trip in Iowa when his car was surrounded at a Hardee’s drive-thru in his hometown of Mankato in southern Minnesota.
“Breaking News: Mike Lindell, ‘THE Pillow Guy,’ was just raided by the FBI. We are now officially living in a Weaponized Police State, Rigged Elections, and all. Our Country is a laughing stock all over the World,” the former president wrote on Truth Social.
Numerous people in the former president’s orbit have recently been subpoenaed by the Justice Department as part of its probe into the effort to overturn his election defeat, and several have reportedly had their devices confiscated.
Speaking to a right-wing fellow traveller earlier this morning on The Lindell Report, an ersatz TV show on his own outlet, MyPillow CEO, conspiracy theorist and Trump fanatic Mike Lindell described the incident that saw FBI agents seize his phone – and described the officers who did so as “pretty nice guys”.
Mr Lindell has released details from the FBI search warrant for the phone that indicates the seizure relation to the investigation of Colorado county clerk and 2020 denier Tina Peters, who is accused of tampering with election equipment.
Read more on her case below.
A new arrest warrant has been issued for Colorado’s election-denying clerk Tina Peters
Former Biden White House Secretary Jen Psaki made her first appearance as an MSNBC commentator, arguing that Democrats are becoming increasingly engaged in the midterms the more former President Donald Trump inserts himself into the race.
Ms Psaki appeared on Alex Wagner Tonight on Tuesday, with Ms Wagner saying that abortion is an “animating factor” ahead of the midterms, following the overturning of Roe v Wade in late June and the 15-week national abortion ban proposed by South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.
“In these ways, these midterms may end up being a referendum on Republican power more so than Democratic power. Do you see it that way?” Ms Wagner asked Ms Psaki.
“Absolutely. And that is remarkable if you think about it. If you look back on the NBC poll in January, Democrats were not that into the midterms. They just weren’t that into it,” she said.
Gustaf Kilander has more:
‘The anger is among the members of the Democratic Party, which is the party in power, which is so rare for that to be the case’
Don Bolduc, a retired US Army general and a proponent of the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, appears to have won New Hampshire’s Republican primary election.
His chief opponent, state senate president Chuck Morse, who was endorsed by Governor Chris Sununu and backed by more than $4.5m from Republican campaigns, conceded to Mr Bolduc on Wednesday.
Mr Bolduc is set to face incumbent Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan in November’s general election. Mr Trump has congratulated him on his victory:
The far-right candidate has amplified baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was marred by fraud, among a field of Republican candidates in state, local and federal elections who have stood by spurious legal arguments and conspiracy theories to reject the former president’s loss.
Alex Woodward reports:
Don Bolduc, a retired US Army general and a proponent of the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, appears to have won New Hampshire’s Republican primary election.
Former president Donald Trump spoke to the mother of Ashli Babbitt on speakerphone on Tuesday as she rallied for Jan 6 defendants outside DC jail.
A video posted on Twitter by News2Share editor-in-chief Ford Fischer showed Mr Trump phoned in to speak with Micki Witthoeft on speakerphone.
“Its a terrible thing that has happened with a lot of people that have been treated very, very unfairly. We love Ashli and so horrible what happened to her… We are with you. We are working with a lot of different people on this. We can’t let this happen,” he can be heard saying in the video.
“You look at all of the riots that took place – for a long period of time, not just 2020, the last long period of time, and almost nothing has happened to those people,” he continued.
Maroosha Muzaffar reports.
‘We are working with a lot of different people on this. We can’t let this happen’
When Florida judge Aileen Cannon issued her highly controversial decision appointing a special master to vet the papers seized at Mar-a-Lago, in the process stopping the Department of Justice from sifting through the papers to establish which of them are classified, secret and important for national security, it put investigators in the awkward position of deciding which elements of her order to appeal.
The department’s strategy now appears to be to agree to the appointment of a special master – and even to agree with the Trump team on a particular candidate, Raymond Dearie – but to also ask the court to allow it to review “a discrete set of just over 100 records marked as classified”.
Its justification for this is based in large part on the weakness of the Trump team’s arguments about the documents’ status. Here’s what the department says in its latest filing asking for a stay so it can continue reviewing the papers:
Plaintiff principally seeks to raise questions about the classification status of the records and their categorization under the Presidential Records Act (“PRA”). But Plaintiff does not actually assert—much less provide any evidence—that any of the seized records bearing classification markings have been declassified. More importantly, the issues Plaintiff attempts to raise are ultimately irrelevant. Even if Plaintiff had declassified these records, and even if he somehow had categorized them as his “personal” records for purposes of the PRA—neither of which has been shown—nothing in the PRA or any other source of law establishes a plausible claim of privilege or any other justification for an injunction restricting the government’s review and use of records at the center of an ongoing criminal and national security investigation. And nothing in Plaintiff’s Response rebuts the compelling public interest in granting the limited stay the government seeks. DISCUSSIO
The Republican primary for one of New Hampshire’s congressional seats turned particularly weird in the home stretch when an outside group launched an ad attacking the now-nominee Karoline Leavitt – because of her age.
At 24, the Maga-inflected Ms Leavitt would be the youngest member of Congress if she wins the tossup seat in November. But if she does, she won’t be the only Gen Z-er joining the House of Representatives. Eric Garcia recently talked to 25-year-old Democrat Maxwell Frost, who’s running in a safe seat in Florida left vacant by Senate nominee Val Demings.
The soon-to-be youngest member of Congress talks to Eric Garcia about being the first Afro-Cuban member of Congress and how he plans to shake up Washington
The death of Ken Starr, whose stint as a special counsel in the mid-1990s led to the Clinton impeachment, has left Donald Trump mournful. Mr Starr served on Mr Trump’s impeachment team in his first Senate trial in 2020.
Here’s what the former president had to say:
Read more on Mr Starr’s passing from Andrew Feinberg.
Mr Starr later served as Jeffrey Epstein’s defence lawyer
It is becoming clear that the likeliest Senate nominee in New Hampshire is Don Bolduc, a strikingly extreme pro-Trump candidate whom the Democrats consider a particularly weak opponent to their incumbent Senator Maggie Hassan.
As news of his apparent victory beds in, people are sharing various examples of his more hardline comments in various past interviews – including this answer from a Q&A with the New Yorker:
I hear a lot of Republicans in Washington talking about voter fraud or a rigged election, but they don’t really mean it. They’re just trying to go along with President Trump, because they think that they need to do that to survive, but it seems like you are much more sincere about it, that you really feel that this stuff happened.
I do. I very much believe it and I think it exists, and I think it happens and it’s been happening for a long time in this country. When you try to steal the Presidency, a lot of people are going to go, “O.K., wait a minute. What the hell’s going on here?”
Waterville Valley, in the state of New Hampshire, had a-hundred-and-ninety-four-per-cent voter turnout. How can that be? How can you have over a hundred per cent of people in Waterville Valley voting? [Bolduc told The New Yorker that he was citing preliminary statistics from a Facebook group of amateur canvassers.] You can’t. It’s impossible. That’s just one, and there are a number of places across New Hampshire that have overages in the number of people in their town, the number of people registered, compared to the number of people that voted. That doesn’t make sense.
The Waterville turnout conspiracy is one of a number of provably false claims circulated by pro-Trump Republicans in the state. The area did not in fact have close to 200 per cent turnout; the figures used by election deniers draw on census data gathered before a local population boom.
Federal judge has unsealed additional sections of the heavily redacted Mar-a-Lago affidavit, agreeing with the Department of Justice that because lawyers for Mr Trump had revealed that a grand jury had subpoenaed footage from security cameras near the Mar-a-Lago storage room, “there is no longer any reason to keep them sealed (i.e. redacted) in the filings in this matter”.
The footage itself appears to have been a crucial part of the impetus to search Mr Trump’s property with a warrant, apparently showing that storage boxes and/or documents in the former president’s residence and office were handled after his team assured investigators they had been handed over.
The video was apparently provided to the department on a hard drive on 6 July – a month after a crucial visit that the Trump team claim proves they co-operated with investigators at every turn. The Justice Department says that the team’s account of that visit is misleading, and that the former president’s team prevented its agents from assessing what documents were being stored.
Read more:
A federal judge has unsealed additional portions of an FBI affidavit laying out the basis for a search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida home
Among the list of guest speakers at the Trump rally this Saturday in Youngstown, Ohio is congressional candidate J.R. Majewski, who is challenging veteran Democratic incumbent Marcy Kaptur in the state’s ninth district.
Mr Majewski has not only publicly alluded to the QAnon conspiracy theory and called for Republican states to secede from the US, but has also admitted to attending the 6 January rally and attack on the Capitol – raising about $25,000 to transport “60-70” fellow protesters there – and has since then not only said he still thinks the 2020 election was stolen, but that the violence at the Capitol may have been incited by federal agents.
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