Trump skips fraud court as Rudy Giuliani trial begins: Live

An answer would mark the first time the nation’s highest court has weighed in on the criminal prosecutions of the former president, who was charged in a grand jury indictment for his alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Mr Trump has argued that he is protected from prosecution for crimes committed while in office, citing “presidential immunity” that the federal judge overseeing the case has rejected.

In a filing to the Supreme Court on Monday, Mr Smith’s team with the US Department of Justice asks for the justices to determine “whether a former President is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted before the criminal proceedings begin.”

“The United States recognizes that this is an extraordinary request,” according to the filing. “This is an extraordinary case.”

Unfortunately for Mr Biden, his 2024 campaign is flying into what looks to be hurricane-force headwinds, as detailed by an Emerson College poll released on Friday.

The survey found that voters under 30 years of age are turning away from the 81-year-old president, with 76 per cent of younger voters complaining that their parents had more or better economic opportunities than their generation does.

According to the survey, Mr Trump holds a four-point lead over the man who defeated him in 2020, with 47 per cent support to Mr Biden’s 43 per cent. Another nine per cent of voters surveyed said they are still undecided at this point.

The results get worse for the 46th president when GOP favourite and professed spoiler Robert F Kennedy Jr’s independent bid is included in the survey, along with third-party candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein.

Following her return as a moderator on 6 December, Megyn Kelly called into Glenn Beck’s show to talk about the fourth Republican debate and the current state of the GOP field.

After praising the performance of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for having “his best debate yet” and saying that Nikki Haley did not do well because “she shrunk away” and giving her take on the more divisive figures of Vivek Ramaswamy and Chris Christie, Kelly was then asked about Donald Trump.

Beck asked whether the former president and current frontrunner in the race to be the Republican Party’s nominee for 2024 “has faded from where he was in 2020”.

The gag order put in place by US District Judge Tanya Chutkan prohibited the former president from launching a “pretrial smear campaign” as he seeks the 2024 Republican nomination for president, the judge wrote in October.

Federal appellate court judges in Washington DC on Friday agreed that some of Mr Trump’s public statements “pose a significant and imminent threat to the fair and orderly adjudication of the ongoing criminal proceeding, warranting a speech-constraining protective order,” but said that the initial order “sweeps in more protected speech than is necessary.”

Mr Trump’s attorneys argued that the order unconstitutionally interferes with his “core political speech” as he runs for president while defending himself from several lawsuits and four criminal prosecutions, including two cases surrounding his alleged attempts to unlawfully overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Donald Trump and his associates allegedly repeatedly contacted a former Mar-a-Lago employee who knew of key conversations and moments in the federal classified documents case against the former president.

According to multiple human sources and other material accessed by CNN, Mr Trump took a rare step and reached out to the employee a few days after he quit working at the Florida estate to inquire why he was leaving.

Trump associates later allegedly offered the former employee free tickets to a golf tournament.

The employee, who later spoke about the contacts with the federal special counsel’s office investigating the documents case, even allegedly got an offer from Mr Trump’s lawyer for assistance in finding legal representation, with the lawyer mentioning in a voicemail he was aware the former employee had been subpoenaed to provide information to a grand jury.

More details in our full story.

The final defence expert witness for Donald Trump and his co-defendants in a trial stemming from a blockbuster fraud lawsuit was paid nearly $900,000 for his testimony.

On Thursday, he told the court that he went through New York Attorney General Letitia James’s complaint “allegation by allegation” to “try to find at least something, some proof, that would provide some basis” for them.

“Most of their claims were simply unsupported,” he said. “My main finding is that there is no evidence whatsoever of any accounting fraud.”

There are only two defence witnesses left in Donald Trump’s fraud trial, and the former president is one of them.

He returned to New York County Supreme Court on Thursday for the first time in more than a month, but not as a witness. He sat with his attorneys inside Judge Arthur Engoron’s courtroom in lower Manhattan to watch testimony intended to bolster his defence – his first courtroom appearance since leaving his own chaotic day on the witness stand on 6 November.

After a morning break, Mr Trump paused to chat with two courtroom sketch artists seated behind the team of lawyers for New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose fraud lawsuit against the former president, his two oldest sons and their chief business associates launched a trial that is now in its 10th week.

The artists, hired by news organisations to capture the inside of the no-photos-allowed courtroom, got his approval. “Nice,” he said.

He told them “it looks like I need to lose some weight” as he gestured to his neck, they told The Independent.

He smeared Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss as criminals whose workplaces and homes should be searched for evidence of voter fraud.

Donald Trump’s former attorney, who launched spurious lawsuits to overturn 2020 presidential election results, also appeared on podcasts and television shows to falsely claim those women wheeled a suitcase loaded with fraudulent ballots into a vote-counting centre and used a flash drive to manipulate the results to ensure Joe Biden’s victory.

Three years and one day after he introduced those bogus claims to Georgia lawmakers, Mr Giuliani sat with his attorneys for the first day of a civil trial in a federal courtroom in Washington DC, where an eight-member jury will determine how much he owes for defaming them.

Alex Woodward reports on today’s proceedings.

Donald Trump is well-known for a lot of things: his divisiveness, his career in real estate, The Apprentice, his lawsuits, for being the only president to be impeached twice. But perhaps nothing has infiltrated society more than Mr Trump’s unique linguistic style.

Whether he’s posting on Truth Social, speaking at a campaign rally, or testifying in court, Mr Trump never seems to be at a loss for words — and sometimes, he even makes up new ones.

From uttering gaffes to tweeting typos (like “covfefe”) to misreading words (like “Nambia”) to dismissing his opponent with a harsh nickname, his terminology quickly turns iconic.

Here, The Independent offers a dictionary guide to the Mr Trump’s most memorable phrases: