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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
Additional portions of an FBI affidavit laying out the basis for a search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida home have been unsealed by a federal judge. They show that agents earlier obtained a hard drive after issuing a subpoena for surveillance footage recorded inside Mar-a-Lago.
Elsewhere, a hardcore Trump supporter looks to have won the Republican Senate primary in New Hampshire. Don Bolduc, who is a well-known 2020 election denier, beat back a mainstream competitor leaving the GOP leadership worried he could cost them a winnable seat because of his extreme views.
A report has revealed that there are now election deniers on the ballot in 27 states that could subvert the outcome of the 2024 race for the White House should they get into office.
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.
Federal agents investigating former president Donald Trump’s hoarding of classified documents subpoenaed more than six months of surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach, Florida mansion turned private club where the ex-president maintains his primary residence and office.
The CCTV footage from the storage room could play a significant role in any decision to charge Mr Trump or anyone in his employ with crimes stemming from his decision to keep documents with classification markings long after his time as president had come to a close.
Andrew Feinberg reports.
The CCTV footage from the storage room could play a significant role in any decision to charge Mr Trump or anyone in his employ with crimes stemming from his decision to keep documents with classification markings long after his time as president had come to a close
Donald Trump has reason to celebrate after last night’s primaries in New Hampshire, which saw his preferred candidates secure the nominations they were seeking in primaries high up the ballot.
Whether this will serve Mr Trump or his party well in November is another matter. Many Republicans are worried that right-wing candidates’ extremism will play badly with an electorate that mostly does not endorse 2020 election conspiracies or other hardcore political views – and in one of the swingiest states in the country, the wrong nominee could make all the difference.
Donald Trump and the right-wing commentariat have made much of special counsel John Durham’s probe into the origins of the investigation into Mr Trump’s Russian connections. But three years after Mr Durham was appointed and with no charges brought against a single major figure in the various conspiracy theories involved, the New York Times reports that the investigation is winding down:
When John H. Durham was assigned by the Justice Department in 2019 to examine the origins of the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, President Donald J. Trump and his supporters expressed a belief that the inquiry would prove that a “deep state” conspiracy including top Obama-era officials had worked to sabotage him.
Now Mr. Durham appears to be winding down his three-year inquiry without anything close to the results Mr. Trump was seeking. The grand jury that Mr. Durham has recently used to hear evidence has expired, and while he could convene another, there are currently no plans to do so, three people familiar with the matter said.
Mr. Durham and his team are working to complete a final report by the end of the year, they said, and one of the lead prosecutors on his team is leaving for a job with a prominent law firm.
Read the full piece below.
A January 6 rioter could spend decades behind bars after being convicted of seven felonies.
During a bench trial on Tuesday, Patrick McCaughey III, 25, was found guilty of nine charges including assaulting and impeding officers from using a dangerous weapon, disorderly conduct in a Capitol building and engaging in physical violence with a deadly weapon.
McCaughey, of Ridgefield, Connecticut, was also charged with obstruction of an official proceeding, a felony that carries a maximum sentence of up to 20 years in prison, NBC reported.
If that sentencing is ultimately handed down, it would be twice as long as the strictest prison sentence given so far to any convicted rioter.
Andrea Blanco reports.
McCaughey was convicted of obstruction of an official proceeding, a felony that carries a maximum sentence of up to 20 years in prison
Writing for The Independent’s Inside Washington newsletter, Eric Garcia takes a look at how Lindsey Graham’s baffling decision to introduce a 15-week abortion ban into the Senate has scrambled his party’s midterm messaging:
As far as the news cycle was concerned, Tuesday should have been a layup for Republicans. The latest Consumer Price Index report showed that while inflation remained relatively stable in the last month, it still increased 8.3 per cent in the past year, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average had its worst single day since June 2020 – this just as President Joe Biden held a public event meant to celebrate the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.
But none of that dominated headlines in Washington. Instead, Republicans were put on the defensive by one of their own…
Prior to the Dobbs ruling, a Wall Street Journal poll showed that 48 per cent of Americans favored measures like Graham’s – but that same poll also found that a majority of voters believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And that was before the overturn of Roe turned these hypothetical questions into potential matters of nationwide policy.
The legislation could not have come at a worse time. With Labor Day behind them, voters are now paying attention, and now Graham’s words are on the lips of every reporter talking to Republicans.
Read the full analysis below.
The Senator’s introduction of legislation to ban abortion after 15 weeks has left GOP members unable to capitalize on what should’ve been good news for their party
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
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