Archive by Author

Trump lawyer hopes surrender in Manhattan will be 'painless and classy'

Attorney Joe Tacopina, who represents former President Trump, said on Sunday that he hopes Trump’s expected surrender to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office for arraignment this week will be “painless and classy.”

“Hopefully this will be as painless and classy as possible for a situation like this, which I don’t even know really what brings us here, but that’s a different story,” Tacopina said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” 

A New York grand jury last week voted to indict the former president for his alleged role in organizing hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, becoming the first sitting or former U.S. president to face criminal charges.

Aides to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) said Thursday that they’d reached out to Trump to coordinate his surrender, and he’ll reportedly appear in court on Tuesday for the charges against him to be read aloud.

Tacopina on Sunday sidestepped questions about the logistics of what happens next, saying “nothing’s been nailed down.”

Asked whether there will be a perp walk, Tacopina said, “I anticipate them trying to get every ounce of publicity out of this that they can get, you know, I don’t know if that’s gonna happen. Again, Secret Service is involved.”

He also said he wasn’t sure whether Trump will have to take a mug shot.

“All the Tuesday stuff is still very much up in the air other than the fact that we will very loudly and proudly say ‘not guilty’,” Tacopina said.

Source: TEST FEED1

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson announces White House bid

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Sunday announced that he is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, officially joining Former President Trump and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the primary contest.

During an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” Hutchinson told host Jonathan Karl that he was going to run for the 2024 GOP nomination, saying he is “convinced that people want leaders that appeal to the best of America.”

“I am going to be running. And the reason, as I’ve traveled the country for six months, I hear people talk about the leadership of our country, and I’m convinced that people want leaders that appeal to the best of America, and not simply appeal to our worst instincts,” the former governor said. “I believe I can be that kind of leader for the people of America.”

Hutchinson said he will make a formal announcement later this month in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Hutchinson, who worked as a federal prosecutor, also reiterated calls for Trump to drop out of the race now that he has been indicted, saying that the office “is more important than any individual person.”

“For the sake of the office of the presidency, I do think that’s too much of a sideshow and distraction, and he needs to be able to concentrate on his due process, and there is a presumption of innocence.”

Hutchinson added that while he believes people don’t have to step aside from public office if they’re under investigation, however, he noted that “if it reaches the point of criminal charges that have to be answered, the office is always more important than a person.”

“I’m not supportive of Donald Trump. I want to provide an alternative, but I’m happy if the voters make that decision and choice,” Hutchinson said. “I don’t like the idea of the charges from what I’ve seen coming out of New York. But the process has got to work, and we’ve got to have respect for our criminal justice system, but also for the office of presidency.”

–Updated at 10:17 a.m.

Source: TEST FEED1

How schools can help combat the rise in teen overdose deaths

Schools are introducing new measures and drug prevention organizations are adding to their curricula to combat a disturbing rise in teen overdose deaths.

Drug use among high school students is in a historic decline, but the particular substances teenagers are consuming are becoming more dangerous, including some laced with fentanyl.

Fatal overdoses among teens have doubled over the last three years.

“I think that teachers — that all elementary, middle, high school and college professors — they have a responsibility to understand the environment now that we’re in,” Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America President and CEO Barrye L. Price said. 

Only a tiny amount of fentanyl is needed to kill a person, especially someone younger and inexperienced with drugs. Most teenagers who overdose on fentanyl likely did not know it was in the drug they were taking. 

Among those aged 15 to 19, drug and alcohol deaths went from 788 in 2018 to 1,755 in 2021, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tabulated by The Hill.

Teachers “need to understand that kids might be experimenting with drugs, that they may – I mean, you’ll find marijuana even, laced with fentanyl. That they may be experimenting or a kid may have taken a pill that somebody else bought for their mind,” said Price, a retired Army general.

“I know many parents who had children who died of somebody saying, ‘Hey, this is a study drug. This will help you to focus,’ you know, Adderall, and it was laced with fentanyl,” he added. 

In the fall of 2022, Los Angeles-area schools saw multiple teenagers overdose, with one 15-year-old girl dying at school. The police said the pills she took were likely laced with fentanyl. 

The Los Angeles Unified School District has taken several actions since the overdoses to combat the problem, including providing education and courses for students and families about fentanyl and substance abuse, increasing partnerships with community organizations and holding a press conference about the opioid crisis. 

However, the two most important steps it took, according to advocates, were making Narcan available in every K-12 school and allowing students to carry the medication. 

Narcan is used as a treatment for opioid overdoses that is easily administered and safe to use. Even if Narcan is given to someone falsely suspected to have overdosed, the medication will not hurt them. 

“We are very lucky to have, in general, to have a drug like Narcan,” National Institute on Drug Abuse Director Nora Volkow said. “No. 1, it is an extremely safe drug, and, No. 2, it is very effective in reversing an overdose from opioids.”

The push to get Narcan in schools is relatively new, as these types of overdoses weren’t as regularly seen among teenagers before. 

“The possibility of carrying fentanyl, easily accessible in schools, was not an issue because overall teenagers don’t seek out heroin, they don’t seek out fentanyl. This is a relatively new perspective that has been brought up by the fact that prescription pills, these discounted pills, are now, over the pandemic, just expanded the access to these pills with fentanyl,” Volkow said. 

“Making these Narcan drugs available — that is very good medication, very effective and very safe — makes a lot of sense. And so, which is why, to the extent that you make it available in schools, in various places, could be saving the life of someone,” she added. “So this is the message that we want to pass: Make Narcan as widely available as possible.”

That goal just got a big boost after the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the first over-the-counter version of the drug.

Organizations that have long worked with schools on drug prevention have recently had to update their programs to include the new fentanyl trends. 

Drug Abuse Resistance Education, more commonly known as D.A.R.E., has added a fentanyl “enhancement lesson” to its program in schools across the country.

“We’ve developed national lessons on vaping, social media safety, bullying, fentanyl, so that it can be addressed in the same fashion that all the other topics are getting addressed without the students knowing that we’ve transitioned to a new topic,” said Frank Pegueros, D.A.R.E. America President and CEO. 

Advocates raise concerns that conversations about drugs in schools are not done early enough or often enough, often treated as only an annual discussion. 

“I don’t think it can be a once-a-year assembly or a one time in a student’s kindergarten through 12th grade curriculum. It needs to be presented as an initial topic and the initial intervention and followed up,” Pegueros said.

Jon Sundt, founder of Natural High, a youth drug prevention program, said that already “there’s a ton that schools can do but they just don’t do it.”

Sundt, who says he lost two brothers to addiction, said schools need to show videos that relate to the youth and have other young people come in to talk to students about drugs instead of the subject taught by “a 60-year-old dude on a chalkboard.”

“I think it’s incumbent upon schools to apply the concepts all throughout the kid’s junior high and high school career. Should probably start in fifth grade, maybe even fourth grade and go all the way through their senior year,” Sundt said. “It doesn’t have to be a lot. It has to be consistent. It has to be engaging. It can’t be like an assembly once a year. OK, that’s pretty good. It’s better than nothing. You can do better than that.”

Source: TEST FEED1

The Memo: Trump’s political woes with women deepen as Stormy Daniels reclaims stage

Former President Trump has a problem with women.

Specifically, he faces new struggles with female voters who are about to be reminded — perhaps daily, for months on end — of his alleged extramarital dalliances.

That’s a perilous prospect for a politician whose quest to return to the White House requires him to get a bigger share of the female vote than he did when he fell to defeat to President Biden in 2020.

Regardless of whether Trump is ultimately found guilty of the offenses contained in the indictment that will be unsealed Tuesday in Manhattan, the case is sure to put the spotlight back on accusations of tawdry encounters.

Even some people in Trump’s circle worry about the impact on moderate, suburban female voters. 

The concerns encompass the same kinds of questions that enveloped then-President Clinton when his affair with Monica Lewinsky came to light in the late 1990s — specifically, what does it mean politically when voters are confronted with lurid details of infidelity?

The investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has, at its core, a $130,000 payment made in late 2016 to the adult actress Stormy Daniels by Trump’s then-attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen.

The money was intended to buy Daniels’s silence in the closing days of Trump’s first presidential run over her claim that she had sex with him at a 2006 celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, Nev.

Trump had married his current wife, Melania, the previous year.

Bragg is reported to have also been looking at a $150,000 payment from the National Enquirer magazine to a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal.

The payments, also in 2016, were intended to secure the rights to McDougal’s story without any sincere intent to publish it — an arrangement known in the publishing industry as “catch-and-kill.”

McDougal says she had an affair with Trump in 2006 and 2007. In a 2018 CNN interview, she told Anderson Cooper that Trump had tried to pay her after the first time they had sex. 

“I actually didn’t know how to take that,” she said.

To be sure, there’s no guarantee that fresh information about these alleged affairs — which Trump denies took place at all — will come to light. 

Moreover, Trump won the presidency in 2016 roughly a month after the so-called “Access Hollywood” tape emerged. In that tape, made 11 years previously, the then-candidate was heard boasting about grabbing women’s genitalia.

Case is ‘front and center’

Even so, a reminder of the alleged encounters with Daniels and McDougal hardly augurs well for the former president.

“This is now front and center just as we are going into a presidential cycle,” said Olivia Troye, a former aide to Vice President Pence, who resigned in the final summer of the Trump administration. 

Troye, a Trump critic, noted the broader context of the battle for women’s votes.

“You have the disparaging comments he has made about women, in the background you have Roe v. Wade, and now this is being brought to the forefront all over again,” she said. “I think women voters will be watching this closely, and it will be interesting to see how this voting bloc will be impacted.”

Trump has no leeway to do any worse with moderate women than he did in 2020.

In the most widely used exit poll that year, he lost women by 15 points to Biden.

A more detailed voter analysis from the Associated Press and Fox News, indicated he lost all women voters by 12 points, suburban women by 19 points and women who had graduated from college by a startling 31 points.

Those deficits were simply too large for Trump to make up via his higher support among men.

The next few months could deepen those problems and give GOP primary voters greater pause about nominating Trump one more time.

“Everyone is exhausted by Trump, and they don’t want to go through that again,” said another Republican Trump critic, strategist Susan Del Percio.

Still, not everyone is convinced that a renewed focus on allegations from Daniels or McDougal will do Trump serious political damage, especially given how he has weathered troubles in the past.

GOP strategist Liz Mair pushed back against the idea that women would “automatically think it’s bad” for Trump to have had the kind of encounters alleged.

“I suspect the women who do [disapprove] are actually more conservative, not independent or swing voters. It would be more the moralist category,” she said.

For Mair, any charges — or, even worse, convictions — for Trump of any kind of fraud offense would be more electorally toxic.

“I think everyone gets tax evasion. Most people may not really get wire fraud but it has the word ‘fraud’ in it, which is inherently bad,” she said.

Trump, of course, protests his innocence. And there are bound to be many twists in the tale yet.

But it hardly helps the former president that Daniels is back in the spotlight, regaling the public with mocking details about him.

In an interview with the London Times this week, Daniels was asked if she was worried about facing Trump in court.

“I’ve seen him naked. There’s no way he could be scarier with his clothes on,” she responded.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.

Source: TEST FEED1

Russian offensive falters as Ukraine eyes counterattack

The Russian offensive that began in the late winter has largely stalled after failing to make any significant gains in eastern Ukraine, including in the town of Bakhmut, which has become a symbolic battle of the war and a priority for Moscow.

Russian forces are still pounding away at Ukrainian lines across the eastern front, but the intensity of the assault, which just weeks ago had put immense pressure on Kyiv, appears to be dying out.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said Russian forces have not made any progress in the past 20 days from the southeast to the Luhansk region up north.

“The Russians are struggling in a big way,” Milley told a House Armed Services Hearing on Wednesday. “These forces are very undertrained, they are essentially doing frontal assaults into machine gun positions and they are getting slaughtered.”

“That’s also true across the entire frontline, from Kreminna all the way down to Kherson,” the top U.S. general continued. “The Ukrainians have fought a remarkable defensive fight and the Russians have not achieved their strategic objectives.”

With the Russian assault slowing down and more advanced western armor trickling in, including Germany’s Leopard 2 tanks and more Soviet-era fighter jets, Ukrainian forces have hinted they are poised to launch a long-anticipated counteroffensive.

Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrski, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, said in a Telegram post last week the Russians have lost “considerable strength” during the offensive.

“Very soon we will take advantage of this opportunity, as we once did near Kyiv, Kharkiv, Balaklia and Kupyansk,” Syrski said, referring to successful Ukrainian counteroffensives last year.

The Russian offensive has lost steam but Moscow still has far more manpower than Ukraine, the biggest and most enduring obstacle for Kyiv in the war. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a partial mobilization last year that called up some 300,000 reservists. He also signed a decree on Thursday authorizing a semiannual conscription of 147,000 new conscripts between April and mid-July, although the servicemembers are likely to undergo training and it’s unclear if and when they will be deployed to the frontline.

Meanwhile, the Russian tactic of grinding out the war on the eastern frontline is wearing down both sides. Kyiv has inflicted heavy losses on Moscow but has faced a high death toll as well, particularly Bakhmut, according to the U.K. Defence Ministry.

Ukraine needs to transition the battle out of a defensive position with a strategic maneuver, said George Beebe, the director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute for Statecraft. 

“If you’re looking at this as a war of attrition, where the Russians are not actually focusing on big arrow movements on the map, but on grinding down Ukraine’s ability to bring manpower and munitions to the battle,” Beebe said, “then I think you get a different picture and the Russians may have more reason for optimism.”

Beebe also questioned whether Ukrainian troops have the capability to break through fortified Russian defenses — even with western armor, saying Ukraine needs hundreds of those to make a difference.

“I think the Ukrainians have their hands full,” he said. “I think what we’re headed for is a pretty long-term stalemate and the lines may move here and there, but I don’t think either side is going to win this war outright.”

For more than half a year, Moscow has applied much of its strength on taking Bakhmut, a mining town in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine that has been devastated and reduced to rubble by shelling. 

Russia has come close to seizing the city after encircling it earlier this month but has failed to completely push Ukrainian defenders out.

Bakhmut sits at an important crossroads in Donetsk and serves as a regional supply hub. Russia has sought to capture the city in order to advance further west and fully capture the Donbas — the industrial heartland made up of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Russia has seized most of Luhansk.

While Russia has undeniably seen Bakhmut as a strategic capture point, western analysts say its value is more symbolic because Ukrainians are dug in further west. The Kremlin is looking for a major victory it can tout to the public and Ukraine does not want to cede anything to Russia in fear of galvanizing the Russian war machine.

Ukrainian President Voldoymyr Zelensky told the Associated Press this week that losing Bakhmut could mean more international support for Russia. Putin could then push for a settlement unfavorable to Kyiv, he said.

“If he will feel some blood — smell that we are weak — he will push, push, push,” Zelensky said. “We can’t lose the steps because the war is a pie — pieces of victories. Small victories, small steps.”

Western analysts say Russian casualties have run high in the battle. Ian Stubbs, a senior military advisor at the United Kingdom’s Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), estimated about 30,000 Russian troops and soldiers with the mercenary outfit Wagner Group have died or been wounded in Bakhmut.

Stubbs said the offensive has stalled and Russia needs to regroup and resupply, also claiming the losses revealed a systematic problem for the Kremlin.

“The astounding levels of incompetence in Russia’s military leadership that have eroded Russia’s military reputation are clear for all to see,” Stubbs said in a Wednesday speech.

Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin has claimed control of most of the town but has repeatedly criticized the Russian military for not supplying his troops with enough ammunition.

Prigozhin recently admitted the battle for Bakhmut had “badly damaged” his soldiers but also “practically destroyed” the Ukrainian army, according to an audio tape obtained by Reuters.

Other Russian offensive operations in eastern Ukraine have also floundered.

Russia has failed to capture Vuhledar, a town in Donetsk that serves as a gateway to the southern Zaporizhzhya region, which was taken by Moscow early in the war.

The battle for Vuhledar resulted in an enormous number of Russian armor casualties as Ukraine devastated battle tanks around the town.

Russia may be preparing to reconstitute a brigade to resume another offensive operation in Vuhledar, but they have already done that multiple times and are unlikely to be successful, according to the Institute for the Study of War.

Moscow appears to have refocused its efforts on the town of Avdiivka, located about 50 miles south of Bakhmut.

Rybar, a prominent Russian military blogger, claimed in a Telegram post this week that Russian forces were advancing from the north of Avdiivka and south of the town.

The U.K. Defence Ministry said in an intelligence update on Tuesday that Russia is pushing to encircle Avdiivka but has failed to gain significant ground after suffering heavy armor losses.

For Ukraine, a potential counteroffensive could come if Russian forces slow down further to reorganize.

The most talked about opportunity is a break into the southern Zaporizhzhya region around the occupied city of Melitopol to cut off a land bridge to Crimea, but Ukrainian troops will face stiff resistance from Russian-held lines.

Stephen Biddle, an adjunct senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Ukraine will take ground in the counteroffensive — but the dispute is over how fast and at what cost.

Last fall, Ukraine faked that it would attack the southern Kherson region but instead went for Kharkiv.

Biddle said this was effective because the Russians “didn’t have enough troops to defend normal densities everywhere” and lost territory when it repositioned, but he said a similar scenario is unlikely this time.

“The Russians have subsequently mobilized an additional 300,000 soldiers and they spent months and months and months digging in and preparing defenses really all on the frontier,” Biddle said.” It would not be safe to simply assume that the Russians will have vulnerabilities to the kinds they had in the fall.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Trump calls for removal of every top official investigating him

President Trump on Thursday called for the removal of every law enforcement official currently leading investigations into him.

A busy morning on social media for Trump was capped with a post suggesting the leads of four different investigations into his conduct be removed from their post.

Trump’s comments follow significant advances in each investigation.

“District Attorney Bragg is a danger to our Country, and should be removed immediately, along with Radical Lunatic Bombthrower Jack Smith, who is harassing and intimidating innocent people at levels not seen before, ‘Get Trump’ Letitia James, the worst Attorney General in the United States, and Atlanta D.A. Fani Willis, who is trying to make PERFECT phone calls into a plot to destroy America, but reigns over the most violent Crime Scene in America, and does nothing about it!” Trump wrote in a post on his social media site.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) is set to meet Monday with a grand jury assembled to hear evidence in a case reviewing whether Trump broke the law in organizing and concealing a $130,000 hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

Trump last weekend predicted he would be arrested Tuesday in connection with the probe — a date that has come and gone as the grand jury continues their closed-door meetings.

Special counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing an investigation into the mishandling of records at Mar-a-Lago as well as the effort to stop the transition of power after the 2020 election, also just scored a major court victory. An appeals court backed a lower court ruling ordering Trump’s attorney in the Mar-a-Lago probe, Evan Corcoran, to turn over documents and transcripts of calls to prosecutors. 

The ruling pierces the attorney-client privilege between Corcoran and Trump, with the lower court judge determining the communications are not privileged since they may have occurred in furtherance of a crime.

New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) has brought a civil fraud suit against Trump. Efforts by Trump’s team to delay the case for six months do not appear likely to succeed.

Court documents filed earlier this month indicate that Judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the case, told the parties during a recent proceeding that the trial would start as scheduled on Oct. 2 “come hell or high water.”

And Trump’s Georgia-based legal team on Monday sought to quash an investigation led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) into his efforts to influence the 2020 election.

It’s not clear if Trump will be charged in connection with the probe, but the move comes after jurors who served on the grand jury there said this month its final report suggested charges for numerous people connected with Trump’s scheme.

Willis also said in January that charging decisions for multiple defendants are “imminent.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Bragg says Trump created ‘false expectation’ on potential arrest

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) for the first time on Thursday addressed a claim by former President Trump that he would be arrested in connection to an investigation into a hush money payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels, calling it the creation of a “false expectation.”

Bragg, in response to demands by House Republicans to force his testimony and turn over all documents and communication on the case, wrote in a letter to Congress that such a move was an “unprecendent[ed] inquiry into a pending local prosecution.”

“The letter only came after Donald Trump created a false expectation that he would be arrested the next day and his lawyers reportedly urged you to intervene,” Bragg wrote.

Trump wrote in a Truth Social post over the weekend that he expected to be arrested on Tuesday in connection to the probe, but as of Thursday morning, no charges have been announced and the grand jury weighing the case is not expected to meet for the rest of the week.

In a Saturday post, Trump wrote that “illegal leaks” indicate that “the far & away leading Republican candidate & former president of the United States of America, will be arrested on Tuesday of next week.” 

“Protest, take our nation back!” Trump added.

Trump’s call was shortly followed by a demand from a trio of House Republican chairmen on Monday for testimony from Bragg ahead of his anticipated prosecution of Trump in connection to the hush money payment made just before Trump’s 2016 election. Monday was also the same day a last-minute witness, attorney and Trump ally Robert Costello, appeared before the grand jury.

In a lengthy response, Bragg addressed Trump’s fears of an imminent arrest and said he could not reveal details about the investigation, as such a move could violate the confidentiality of all involved, including potential defendants such as Trump.

On Thursday morning, Trump again professed innocence in the matter and accused Bragg’s inquiry as being politically motivated.

“Everybody knows I’m 100% innocent, including Bragg, but he doesn’t care,” Trump wrote.

Source: TEST FEED1

Bragg fights GOP effort to force his testimony on Trump probe

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) called demands from House GOP leaders to force his testimony an “unlawful incursion” on his ongoing probe into former President Trump’s role in a hush money scandal.

The Thursday response from Bragg comes as lawmakers, led by House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), demanded the DA turn over all documents and communications about the case.

The move “is an unprecedent[ed] inquiry into a pending local prosecution. The letter only came after Donald Trump created a false expectation that he would be arrested the next day and his lawyers reportedly urged you to intervene,” Bragg wrote.

“Neither fact is a legitimate basis for congressional inquiry.”

The letter does not rule out the possibility of meeting with GOP lawmakers, instead offering to “meet and confer to understand whether the Committee has any legitimate legislative purpose in the requested materials that could be accommodated.” 

The five-page letter from Bragg offers a point-by-point breakdown of the GOP’s Monday letter, saying it would interfere with ongoing law enforcement duties, violate state sovereignty and would be an inappropriate use of congressional power, dangling limited use of federal funds as a backing for intervention.

Bragg’s response comes as the Manhattan grand jury assembled in the case is no longer expected to hear evidence on the matter on Thursday, delaying their next meeting on the matter until Monday.

The confidentiality of such processes, Bragg said, is designed to protect all involved, including potential defendants such as Trump. It was Trump who forecast he expected to be arrested earlier this week in the probe, but the grand jury has yet to weigh in on the matter.

Bragg pushed back on arguments that such a prosecution would be a political matter.

“If charges are brought at the conclusion, it will be because the rule of law and faithful execution of the District Attorney’s duty require it,” he wrote.

“The Letter’s allegation that the DA’s Office is pursuing a prosecution for political purposes is unfounded, and regardless, the proper forum for such a challenge is the Courts of New York, which are equipped to consider and review such objections.” 

The letter cites a number of laws and more than a dozen cases in pushing back on the congressional request. 

Bragg’s investigation is a “quintessential police power,” and therefore a matter left to the states rather than Congress.

“Your letter treads into territory very clearly reserved to the states. It suggests that Congress’s investigation is being ‘conducted solely for the personal aggrandizement of the investigators or to “punish” those investigated,’ and is, therefore, ‘indefensible,’” he writes, pointing to a 1957 Supreme Court ruling limiting congressional investigations. 

The GOP’s letter called Bragg’s investigation political and warned prosecution would “erode confidence in the evenhanded application of justice and unalterably interfere in the course of the 2024 presidential election.”

House Judiciary’s response Thursday again raised that specter, while rehashing earlier claims that New York City is facing an increase in crime.

“Alvin Bragg should focus on prosecuting actual criminals in New York City rather than harassing a political opponent in another state,” the committee wrote on Twitter.

“Make Manhattan Safe Again!”

Bragg’s office fought that claim Monday, noting a decline in homicides and shootings both this year and last year while pointing to statistics in the home states of the three chairman that authored the letter.

“New York remains one of the safest big cities in the U.S. with a far lower murder rate than the most populous cities where the Committee Chairmen hail from – Ohio, Wisconsin, and Kentucky,” a spokeswoman for Bragg said.

Bragg is no longer the only official sought by the GOP in connection with the Trump probe.

In a late Wednesday letter, Jordan requested testimony from two prosecutors who resigned from the New York case over disagreements with Bragg.

The requests were made to Mark Pomerantz, former New York County Special Assistant District Attorney, and Carey Dunne, a former Manhattan Special Assistant District Attorney, both of whom resigned from Bragg’s Trump investigation in February 2022.

“Last year, you resigned from the office over Bragg’s initial reluctance to move forward with charges, shaming Bragg in your resignation letter — which was subsequently leaked — into bringing charges,” Jordan wrote to Pomerantz. 

“Based on your unique role in this matter, and your subsequent public statements prejudicing the impartiality of any prosecution, we request your cooperation with our oversight of this politically motivated prosecutorial decision.”

—Updated at 11:18 a.m.

Source: TEST FEED1

GOP questions DeSantis attacks on Trump ahead of possible indictment

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) salvo targeting former President Trump’s character this week has been met with questions from corners of the GOP over the effectiveness of his latest message as the world waits to see whether Trump will be indicted over a hush money payment to an adult film actress.

DeSantis has yet to announce his expected presidential bid and had been muted in his response to the flurry of barbs Trump has thrown his way. But this week he came out swinging against his onetime ally and Trump and his backers punched back.

Chief among their concerns about DeSantis’s latest attack lines: that character may not be a message that resonates with primary voters these days, and their view that DeSantis’s response to the possibility of Trump’s indictment has been ham-handed and botched.

“You look at college football, basketball [or] anything in this country — winning matters first,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), an early Trump supporter, told reporters. “Unfortunately, sometimes, character should be more involved. But people look for success, they look for people to get things done. … That’s the way it is.”

In the Monday press conference, DeSantis attacked Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) as a “Soros-funded prosecutor” who is trying to create a “political spectacle,” a common attack line across the GOP. 

DeSantis has largely not responded to Trump’s attacks on him prior to his criticism of the former president this week. (AP Photo/Phil Sears)

However, flares went up in Trump’s universe when DeSantis declared that he doesn’t “know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair.”

His sit-down with British journalist Piers Morgan, who has also been a target of Trump’s venom, emerged a day later, showing him questioning Trump’s chaotic management style and criticizing him for hiring people who did not align with his policy positions and leaked information to reporters. 

“I also think just in terms of my approach to leadership, I get personnel in the government who have the agenda of the people and share our agenda,” DeSantis said. “You bring your own agenda in, you’re gone. We’re just not going to have that. So, the way we run the government, I think, is no daily drama, focus on the big picture and put points on the board, and I think that’s something that’s very important.”

The comments from DeSantis, who is running second to Trump in the majority of primary polls, have broken with most other current or likely Republican presidential candidates. Former Vice President Mike Pence and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) are among those who have issued words of support for Trump in the face of the looming indictment. 

“It’s gutsy,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who has not endorsed in the 2024 race but has previously been critical of Trump, told reporters of the governor’s attacks against Trump. “He’s stepping into a big arena. It’s a big arena. He’s probably calculating that if he’s going to be in that arena, you can’t just take all the blows. You have to land a couple yourself.” 

According to a pair of GOP operatives, however, DeSantis was both too late to respond and too weak in how he did it to be effective.

“The attacks from this week are too cute by half and come off as childish,” one GOP operative told The Hill. “What’s happening this week, the party thinks it’s wildly unfair and the way President Trump is being treated is a total joke, and they’re rallying around him — and that’s from a lot of people who love him, people who hate him who think he’s being treated unfairly.”

“These attacks are being perceived as cheap shots. Kicking someone while they’re down,” the operative continued. “So I don’t think they’ve helped [DeSantis]. If anything, they’ve helped Trump.” 

A second GOP strategist also questioned whether DeSantis is the right messenger for the pair of attacks over the ex-president’s character. The operative argued Pence and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who are viewed as top candidates for the evangelical, morality-based lane in an eventual 2024 field, would be more effective.

Both have supported Trump in the face of the possible indictment. 

Some GOP insiders have argued that DeSantis’s comments this week were too late and too weak to land any real impact. (AP Photo/Chris O’Meara)

“Donald Trump creates the playing field on which everyone’s playing on. He has the ability to create and shape what everyone’s talking about,” the second GOP operative said. “Your success in today’s Republican Party is dependent on your ability to play on his game board.”

“[DeSantis’s staff] could have had a camera on him in Tallahassee in 5 minutes on Saturday. He could have said it in an off-the-cuff line and it would have been fine instead of it coming days later and it feeling like it was a calculated line,” the operative continued. “When the two guys who can claim the moral high ground in their own response don’t criticize the moral failings, that means you’re probably wrong as well.” 

Adding to the issues for DeSantis, he has lost steam in recent months polling-wise after deciding to completely sidestep the various criticisms from Trump. Some Republicans believe that DeSantis may be in a period of transition from his reelection romp in November to a likely national campaign after the Florida legislative session wraps up in May. 

Trump’s latest missive toward DeSantis also arrived Wednesday, dismissing his work in office and laying the success of his in Tallahassee with his “great Public Relations” team. 

A week ago, GOP lawmakers were cringing at Trump’s attacks on DeSantis, concerned they were an early sign of a bitter and drawn-out primary.

But notably, a number of senators — spanning the spectrum of Trump backers to critics — on Wednesday either claimed they hadn’t seen the latest back-and-forth or just declined to comment. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who usually doesn’t hesitate to talk national politics, notably demurred when asked about the bitterness between the two GOP figures.

“Can we talk about like the AUMF [authorization for use of military force] repeal or —” Cornyn, who has not endorsed in 2024 but has criticized Trump, said with a laugh. He added it doesn’t do him much good to get involved.  

Source: TEST FEED1