Trump’s Thanksgiving message attacks fraud trial judge and clerk: Live

Good morning from New York.

Donald Trump’s supporters unleashed a wave of death threats and antisemitic and homophobic messages to the judge overseeing his fraud trial, as well as his chief clerk, according to a court filing this week.

A gag order prohibited all parties in the case from making disparaging remarks towards the judge’s staff, including his principal law clerk, but a state appeals court judge paused the order earlier this month.

A filing this week to support Justice Arthur Engoron’s opposition to the pause includes an affidavit from a court security official who has collected “hundreds of threats, disparaging and harassing comments and antisemitic messages” that followed the former president’s harassment.

Federal prosecutors referred the appeals court judge to reffered to the filing, as well as “harassing voicemail messages that have been transcribed into over 275 single spaced pages.”

Read more about the threats in The Independent:

When the attorney general handed the case to his team of lawyers on 13 November, their first witness was Donald Trump Jr, who spent several hours testifying to his father’s “artistry” and “sexy” properties.

Two days later, Mr Trump’s attorneys demanded a mistrial. They lost. His attorneys also sued the judge overseeing the case, hoping to strike down a gag order that has blocked the former president from attacking court staff. They won.

Meanwhile, other members of Mr Trump’s legal team – a stable of attorneys defending him in four criminal cases and lawsuits across the country – are preparing for a separate courtroom battle to revoke a different gag order that prevents him from attacking witnesses and others in case accusing him of a conspiracy to overturn 2020 presidential election results.

In a filing to a federal judge, Mr Trump’s attorneys argued that the gag order blocks his “core political speech” – including his abilities to spread false claims about the chief court clerk in his fraud trial, in a courthouse that has been inundated with threatening messages.

Left-leaning activists in Virginia and Ohio in particular appeared energised by their victories, a much-needed boost to their confidence and optimism after heartbreaking defeats for the party in 2022 and 2021. Ohioans saw the election of author and Trump convert JD Vance to the US Senate, while Virginians witnessed the downfall of Terry McAuliffe, their state’s former governor, as he sought to defeat Republican Glenn Youngkin. Both were considered blows to Joe Biden for different reasons — in Virginia, Mr McAuliffe ran aligned with Mr Biden and was beaten soundly just months into the latter’s presidency, and in Ohio the president lost a much-needed opportunity to pick up a vote for his agenda in the US Senate.

But 2024 is on the horizon, and Democrats are looking ahead to the future — though not without some considerable sense of unease.

John Bowden spoke with Mr Tim Ryan.

“If Donald Trump is elected president again in 2024, I do fear that it will be the last election where we’re voting for democracy because if he is elected again, I don’t think we’ll be voting under the same Constitution,” Ms Hutchinson told Jen Psaki onInside with Jen Psaki.

Now she’s warning voters to choose wisely next year, should the election be another matchup between President Joe Biden and Mr Trump.

In an angry Truth Social post on Wednesday night, Donald Trump hit out at the delay in the release of hostages being held captive by Hamas militants in Gaza – and unsurprisingly sought to blame President Joe Biden.

“Hostage deal substantially delayed. Too much talk, no action!!! Some hostages held by criminal syndicates of which Hamas has no control,” Mr Trump wrote.

“ZERO RESPECT FOR THE UNITED STATES, & OUR INCOMPETENT LEADERSHIP!”

On Wednesday, the Israeli government approved a truce agreement – brokered by the US, Qatar and Egypt – to secure the release of hostages kidnapped by Hamas in the 7 October attacks on Israel which left 1,400 Israelis dead.

Under the terms of the deal, 50 hostages – many of them women and children – would be freed by Hamas in exchange for a four-day pause in Israel’s air and ground campaign in Gaza. An unknown number of Palestinian women and children held in Israeli prisons will also be released as part of the agreement,The Independent learned.

The hostage release had been expected to begin on Thursday morning but is now expected to commence on Friday morning local time.

While Mr Trump seeks to blame Mr Biden for the delay, the Biden administration actually played a key role in getting the deal over the line.

The negotiations are said to have begun when the president travelled to Israel last month and met face to face with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

There are a significant number of former Trump administration officials, staffers, and aides who have become vocal critics of former president Donald Trump, his 2024 campaign, and the prospect of him returning to the White House.

They are running against him (Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence), are testifying against him (Cassidy Hutchinson, Bill Barr), or are more than willing to eviscerate him on cable news (John Bolton, Chris Christie, Bill Bar, Cassidy Hutchinson, Olivia Troya, Stephanie Grisham, etc…).

The Washington Post asked in an article earlier this week whether their declarations that he shouldn’t be president would make a difference, and tapped former White House counsel Ty Cobb, who defended Mr Trump during the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Once a loyal soldier for the former president, he gave this withering quote in the Post article saying it was imperative that people vote against him:

“He has never cared about America, its citizens, its future or anything but himself. In fact, as history well shows from his divisive lies, as well as from his unrestrained contempt for the rule of law and his related crimes, his conduct and mere existence have hastened the demise of democracy and of the nation,” Cobb wrote in an email. “Our adversaries and our allies both recognize that even his potential reelection diminishes America on the world stage and ensures continued acceleration of the domestic decline we are currently enduring. If that reelection actually happens, the consequences will extinguish what, if anything, remains of the American Dream.”

A federal court ruling is teeing up another major Supreme Court case that could radically weaken the Voting Rights Act by blocking private citizens and civil rights groups from filing lawsuits to protect what has become America’s bedrock voting protections.

On Monday, a three-judge panel with the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit upheld a lower court ruling that determined that citizens and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP cannot legally challenge discriminatory state and local election laws.

According to two of the judges on the panel, only the US Department of Justice can do so.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign was dealt a blow this week when the chief executive of the super PAC supporting him resigned, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Chris Jankowski sent a resignation note to the board of Never Back Down, a super PAC dedicated to electing Mr DeSantis as president.

“Never Back Down’s main goal and sole focus has been to elect Gov. Ron DeSantis as president,” Mr Jankowski said in a statement.

“Given the current environment it has become untenable for me to deliver on the shared goal and that goes well beyond a difference of strategic opinion. For the future of our country I support and pray Ron DeSantis is our 47th president.

Donald Trump appears to be struggling to get into the holiday spirit and is far from feeling thankful – that’s if his latest Truth Social rants are anything to go by.

In the early hours of Thanksgiving morning, the former president took to his social media platform to launch the latest in a growing number of attacks on the judge and court clerk in his New York civil fraud trial.

Bizarrely beginning with the phrase “Happy Thanksgiving”, Mr Trump unleashed on who he described as “the Racist & Incompetent” New York Attorney General Letitia James, “the Radical Left Trump Hating Judge, a “Psycho”” Justice Arthur Engoron and “his Politically Biased & Corrupt Campaign Finance Violator” court clerk Alison Greenfield.