Appeals court judge denies Trump's third attempt this week to delay hush-money trial
The appeals court judge, just moments after the hearing wrapped up in New York this afternoon, has ruled against Donald Trump’s third attempt this week to delay his hush-money criminal trial
Trump was denied his attempt to push back his 15 April trial on charges stemming from hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, paving the way for the first-ever criminal trial of a former US president, Reuters reports.
During an earlier hearing, Trump lawyer Emil Bove said the trial should be delayed because justice Juan Merchan, who is overseeing the case, has not yet ruled on their request for him to recuse himself.
Bove also said Merchan was wrong to deny their request to bar prosecutors from presenting Trump’s tweets during his 2017-2021 presidential term as evidence. Bove said presidential immunity should prevent the prosecutors from presenting those posts as evidence. At the hearing before associate justice Ellen Gesmer at a mid-level state appeals court called the appellate division, Bove said:
We are scheduled to begin trial under circumstances that will violate President Trump’s rights.
Steven Wu, a lawyer for Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, said Trump’s lawyers had brought the requests too late, saying:
There is a powerful public interest in ensuring that this criminal trial go forward.
An appeals court judge in New York denied Donald Trump’s third attempt in three days to delay his hush-money criminal trial. Trump was denied his attempt to push back the 15 April trial on charges stemming from hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, paving the way for the first-ever criminal trial of a former US president.
Donald Trump said he believes the Arizona supreme court went too far with its ruling upholding a near-total abortion ban. Asked if he would sign a national abortion ban if elected president in 2024, Trump said: “No.”
In response, the Biden campaignsaid Trump “owns the suffering and chaos happening right now” and warned that he has banned abortion “every chance he gets”.
Asked what he would say to the people of Arizona, Joe Bidensaid: “Elect me. I’m in the … 21st century, not back then.” Biden also said he is “considering” a request from Australia to end the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Kamala Harris will visit Arizona on Friday as part of her nationwide reproductive freedoms tour. The White House said Harris would highlight “extremists” in the state who are pushing for abortion bans during her visit.
Democrats in Florida are teaming up withoperatives from Biden’s re-election campaign in an all-out assault on Republicans’ extremist positions on abortion, believing it will bring victory in presidential and Senate races in November.
The House voted to block the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a high-profile warrantless surveillance program that is now in limbo before a 19 April expiration date.
House speaker Mike Johnson will meet on Friday with Donald Trump for a press conference on “election integrity” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, a Trump campaign official said. Johnson met with Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on Wednesday, marking the first time the two have spoken since Greene filed a motion to vacate the speakership late last month. Greene described the meeting as “passionate”.
The independent presidential candidate Cornel Westannounced that Melina Abdullah would serve as his running mate, joining the former Harvard professor’s long-shot bid in the US presidential race.
The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, told donors and supporters last weekend that he would help raise money for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, according to multiple reports.
Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, is accused of covering up a $130,000 hush-money payment his former lawyer Michael Cohen made to porn star Stormy Daniels for her silence before the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she says she had with Trump in 2006, Reuters neatly recaps.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records and denies any such encounter with Daniels.
Judge Juan Merchan has not yet ruled on Trump’s motion for him to recuse himself. The defense has argued that the judge’s daughter’s work for a political consulting firm with Democratic clients poses a conflict of interest.
On Monday, a judge at the appellate division denied Trump’s request to delay the case while he pursues a challenge to the trial being held in heavily Democratic Manhattan.
On Tuesday, another judge rejected his bid to pause the trial while he appeals Merchan’s decision to impose a gag order restricting his public statements about potential witnesses, court staff, lawyers and family members of the judge and district attorney Alvin Bragg. Those appeals will still be heard by a full panel.
Appeals court judge denies Trump's third attempt this week to delay hush-money trial
The appeals court judge, just moments after the hearing wrapped up in New York this afternoon, has ruled against Donald Trump’s third attempt this week to delay his hush-money criminal trial
Trump was denied his attempt to push back his 15 April trial on charges stemming from hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, paving the way for the first-ever criminal trial of a former US president, Reuters reports.
During an earlier hearing, Trump lawyer Emil Bove said the trial should be delayed because justice Juan Merchan, who is overseeing the case, has not yet ruled on their request for him to recuse himself.
Bove also said Merchan was wrong to deny their request to bar prosecutors from presenting Trump’s tweets during his 2017-2021 presidential term as evidence. Bove said presidential immunity should prevent the prosecutors from presenting those posts as evidence. At the hearing before associate justice Ellen Gesmer at a mid-level state appeals court called the appellate division, Bove said:
We are scheduled to begin trial under circumstances that will violate President Trump’s rights.
Steven Wu, a lawyer for Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, said Trump’s lawyers had brought the requests too late, saying:
There is a powerful public interest in ensuring that this criminal trial go forward.
The hearing is over at the appeals court in New York where lawyers for Donald Trump are making the argument for the third time in three days that his hush-money criminal trial should be delayed.
Jury selection will begin on Monday, so time is running out for Trump. We await the court’s decision.
As colleague Cameron Joseph wrote earlier today, this follows a longstanding pattern of Trump freaking out as major threats approach, and his team responding with frenetic energy.
Trump’s team throws everything it can at the wall, while Trump continues his tirade against presiding judge Juan Merchan – while pushing the bounds of the judge’s gag order.
To get the latest court developments delivered to your inbox, in the Guardian US’s free Trump on Trial newsletter put together by Cameron, sign up here.
Lawyers for Donald Trump have been back in court for almost the last hour trying to stave off the first-ever criminal trial of a former US president, which begins on Monday.
In a more technical legal take from NBC, the TV network explains the following:
The court docket for the state Appellate Division shows Trump’s attorneys filed the challenge as a lawsuit invoking a provision of New York law known as Article 78. Article 78 challenges allow litigants, whether in ongoing litigation or otherwise, to seek relief from allegedly unlawful state or local government action.
The documents were filed under seal. The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is prosecuting the case, said it involved Judge Juan Merchan’s refusal to step aside from presiding over the case.
Lawyers for former President Trump head back to a New York appeals court with their third legal challenge involving his impending criminal trial in three days. https://t.co/kBDIs74KWC
Trump is a defendant in four criminal cases, two federal and two state. The hush-money case in New York is first up. The Georgia election interference case, the federal election interference case and the federal classified documents case do not have trial dates yet. The presidential election is on 5 November and Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee, prior to his expected anointment at the Republican National Convention this summer.
Trump tries to delay hush-money trial for third time this week
Donald Trump’s lawyers told a New York appeals court judge on Wednesday that the former US president’s 15 April trial should be delayed because the judge has not yet ruled on their motion for him to recuse himself, in his third last-ditch attempt so far this week to delay the case, Reuters reports.
The Republican presidential candidate is accused of covering up a $130,000 hush-money payment his former lawyer Michael Cohen made to porn star Stormy Daniels for her silence ahead of the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she says she had with Trump in 2006.
Stormy Daniels speaks as she departs federal court in the Manhattan borough of New York City in April 2018. Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records and denies any such encounter with Daniels.
On Monday, a judge at a mid-level state appeals court known as the appellate division denied Trump’s request to delay the case while he pursues a challenge to the trial being held in heavily Democratic Manhattan.
And on Tuesday, another judge rejected his bid to pause the trial while he appeals Judge Juan Merchan’s decision to impose a gag order restricting his public statements about potential witnesses, court staff, lawyers, and family members of the judge and the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg.
Those appeals will still be heard by a full panel. Jury selection is scheduled to begin in the trial on Monday.
The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, speaks during a news conference at his office in New York City in February. Photograph: Brendan McDermid/Reuters
The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, told donors and supporters last weekend that he would help raise money for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, according to multiple reports.
DeSantis, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race in January, told his allies about his plans to help his former rival during a private gathering at the Hard Rock Hotel in south Florida, a DeSantis adviser told NBC News.
Ron DeSantis in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on 20 January 2024. Photograph: Randall Hill/Reuters
DeSantis is “committed to helping Trump in any and every way”, said Texas businessman Roy Bailey, who attended the retreat. He said:
I will follow the governor’s lead and I will do anything that he or President Trump ask me to do to help him win this election.
A Trump campaign adviser said they were not aware that the Florida governor was going to start raising money for them but added that “everyone should be working towards defeating Joe Biden and electing President Trump”, NBC reported.
Joe Biden, during a joint press conference with the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, at the White House, said Japan’s attempts to set up a leader-to-leader summit with North Korea is “a good thing” as he reiterated his administration’s willingness for its own talks without preconditions.
Biden said:
We welcome the opportunity of our allies to initiate dialogue with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. As I’ve said many times, we’re open to dialogue ourselves without preconditions with the DPRK.
The Biden administration has repeatedly expressed openness to talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, but has never received a response.
House speaker Mike Johnson will meet on Friday with Donald Trump for a press conference on “election integrity”, a Trump campaign official said.
The press conference is scheduled to take place at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, AP reported, citing a source as saying that Johnson and Trump will have a “joint announcement” on Friday.
NEWS w/ @KristenhCNN: Speaker Mike Johnson is making plans to deliver a joint press conference with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, focused on "election integrity," per sources.
Plans still fluid, but comes as Johnson is facing a threat to his speakership from MTG.
When the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, Republicans across the country cheered. Freed from Roe’s regulations, GOP lawmakers promptly blanketed the US south and midwest in near-total abortion bans.
But today, after a string of electoral losses, stories of women being denied abortions andpolls that confirm abortion bans remain wildly unpopular, the political calculus has changed. Republicans are now trying to slow down the car whose brakes they cut – and to convince voters that, if the car crashes, they had nothing to do with it anyway.
Nowhere encapsulates the GOP’s backpedal on abortion better than Arizona, whose state supreme court on Tuesday ruled to let an 1864 near-total abortion ban go into effect. That ban, which outlaws abortion in all cases except to save the life of a woman, was passed before Arizona became a state, before the end of the civil war and before women gained the right to vote.
The House has voted to block the reauthorization of section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a high-profile warrantless surveillance program that is now in limbo ahead of a 19 April expiration date.
House Republicans have been fiercely divided over how to handle the issue, and Wednesday’s vote comes months after a similar process to reform and reauthorize the program fell apart before it even reached the House floor.
The law allows the US government to collect the communications of targeted foreigners abroad by compelling service providers to produce copies of messages and internet data, or networks to intercept and turn over phone call and message data.
It is controversial because it allows the government to incidentally collect messages and phone data of Americans without a court order if they interacted with the foreign target, even though the law prohibits section 702 from being used by the National Security Agency to specifically target US citizens.
Joe Biden was asked what he would say to the people of Arizona following the state supreme court’s ruling to let a law banning almost all abortions in the state go into effect.
The president, referring to the 1864 abortion ban which passed when Arizona was still a territory, replied:
Elect me. I’m in the 20th century … 21st century … not back then. They weren’t even a state.
From the Washington Post’s JM Rieger:
REPORTER: On the issue of abortion, what do you say to the people of Arizona right now...?
BIDEN: Elect me. I'm in the 20th century — 21st century, not back then. They weren't even a state. pic.twitter.com/0T2ASk1E0w
Cornel West’s announcement that Melina Abdullah would serve as his running mate comes as West, an author and leftwing activist, continues his efforts to get on the ballot in every US state.
West’s campaign said he had already secured ballot access in Alaska, Oregon, South Carolina and Utah, but some states require a running mate for independent candidates to get on the ballot. As part of his 50-state campaign, West announced in January that he would launch a new political party, called the Justice for All party, to help ease his path to ballot access in some states.
West has no path to victory, as national polls show his support languishing in the low single digits. A survey conducted last month by the Marquette Law School found that just 4% of likely US voters named West as their preferred candidate.
But West’s presence on the ballot in key battleground states could draw support away from Joe Biden, raising concerns among Democrats that the independent candidate might serve as a spoiler for the incumbent president.
According to a Quinnipiac University poll of US voters conducted last month, Biden leads Donald Trump by three points, 48% to 45%, in a head-to-head match-up, but the president’s support dipped down to 38% (compared with Trump’s 39%) when third-party candidates such as West, Robert F Kennedy Jr and Jill Stein of the Green party were listed as options.
Cornel West announces running mate for independent presidential bid
Joan E Greve
The independent presidential candidate Cornel West announced on Wednesday that Melina Abdullah would serve as his running mate, joining the former Harvard professor’s long-shot bid in the US presidential race.
Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, helped to form the LA chapter of the group Black Lives Matter, and West praised her as “one of the great freedom fighters of her generation”. West told the talkshow host Tavis Smiley on Wednesday":
I wanted somebody whose heart, mind and soul is committed to the empowerment of poor and working peoples of all colors. And Melina has a history of longevity, of putting her heart, mind, soul and body in the struggle.
Melina Abdullah in Los Angeles, on 2 March 2020. Photograph: David Crane/AP
Abdullah told Smiley that West’s offer took her by surprise, but she quickly accepted because of her belief in his “platform of truth, love and justice”. “How can you not get behind that platform?” Abdullah said.
So I’ve been following him and had been really enthusiastic about his candidacy and just was excited to be able to share space with him.
Democrats in Florida are teaming up with operatives from Joe Biden’s re-election campaign in an all-out assault on Republicans’ extremist positions on abortion, believing it will bring victory in presidential and Senate races in November.
They fired an opening salvo on Tuesday, tearing into Donald Trump’s “boasting” about overturning federal abortion protections a day earlier, and assailing the incumbent Republican senator Rick Scottfor supporting Florida’s six-week ban that takes effect next month.
Ron DeSantis, the Republican Florida governor and former candidate for the party’s presidential nomination who signed the ban into law, also found himself under fire.
Faith Halstead with other protesters and activists near the Florida state capitol, in Tallahassee, on 3 April 2023, where state senators voted to pass a proposed six-week abortion ban. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images
The Florida supreme court ruled last week that the six-week ban will take effect on 1 May, as well as allowing a ballot measure for November that could see voters enshrine the right to the procedure into law.
The moves instantly propelled the state to the forefront of the national abortion debate, and allowed Democrats, all but wiped out in Florida in successive national elections, to seize on the issue as vote-winner.
Trump 'owns suffering and chaos happening right now', says Biden campaign on Trump abortion comments
Biden’s campaign has released a statement following Trump’s criticism of the Arizona abortion ban, warning that he has previously “[banned] abortion every chance he gets”.
A spokesperson for the Biden campaign said that Trump will enact a national abortion ban given his track record, adding that the former president “proudly overturned Roe”.
Donald Trump owns the suffering and chaos happening right now, including in Arizona, because he proudly overturned Roe – something he called ‘“an incredible thing’” and ‘“pretty amazing’” just today.
Trump lies constantly – about everything – but has one track record: banning abortion every chance he gets. The guy who wants to be a dictator on day one will use every tool at his disposal to ban abortion nationwide, with or without Congress, and running away from reporters to his private jet like a coward doesn’t change that reality.
Greene said he discussed having a kitchen cabinet group that would be a group of advisers for him and asked her if she “was interested.”
“I said, ‘I'll wait and see what his proposal is on that.’ Right now. he does not have my support, and I'm watching what happens with FISA… https://t.co/V7LMlxGCTt
The House speaker, Mike Johnson, and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene have concluded their meeting, with varying descriptions on how it went.
The meeting, which lasted over an hour, came after Greene filed a motion to vacate the speakership.
Greene described the meeting as “passionate”, NBC News reported. When asked if the meeting was “productive”, Greene said:
He’d have to completely change everything he’s done to be productive.
Meanwhile, Johnson gave a more diplomatic answer, calling Greene a “friend” even as the two Republicans have differed on “strategy”.
She’s a colleague. I’ve always considered her a friend … Marjorie and I don’t disagree on philosophy. We’re both conservatives. Sometimes we disagree on strategy.
From Punchbowl News’ Mica Soellner:
MTG on if she would describe the Johnson meeting as productive: "He'd have to completely change everything he's done to be productive."
JOHNSON on MTG meeting today: "She's a colleague. I've always considered her a friend... Marjorie and I don't disagree on philosophy. We're both conservatives. Sometimes we disagree on strategy."
The latest remarks from Trump come as Democrats have warned that he would authorize an extreme ban if elected, noting how federal abortion rights were overturned due to supreme court judges secured during Trump’s administration.
