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  • E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump rest their cases in civil rape trial, but Trump could still testify | CNN Politics

    E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump rest their cases in civil rape trial, but Trump could still testify | CNN Politics

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Attorneys for E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump rested their respective cases in the battery and defamation trial against the former president in Manhattan federal court on Thursday evening.

    Carroll, a former magazine columnist, alleges Trump raped her in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s and then defamed her when he denied her claim, said she wasn’t his type and suggested she made up the story to boost sales of her book. Trump has denied all wrongdoing.

    While resting his case means Trump legally waived his right to testify in his own defense, District Judge Lewis Kaplan left a window for Trump to change his mind over the weekend.

    Kaplan ruled that Trump’s legal team has until 5 p.m. Sunday to petition the court to reopen the defense case for the sole purpose of allowing Trump to testify. The judge said he ordered the precautionary measure in light of Trump’s public comments made earlier Thursday suggesting he would make an appearance in court before the trial ended.

    Trump, who has not appeared in the courtroom at any point during the trial, told reporters in Ireland on Thursday he’ll “probably attend” the trial.

    “I have to go back for a woman that made a false accusation about me, and I have a judge who is extremely hostile,” Trump said in Doonbeg, Ireland, according to Reuters.

    During a sidebar on Thursday afternoon, Trump’s attorney tried repeatedly to reassure Kaplan that his client would not take the stand and implied that the judge has an idea of what it’s like representing the former president.

    “I know you understand what I am dealing with,” Joe Tacopina told the judge, according to a court transcript.

    If Trump does not change his mind, the parties are set to give closing arguments to the jury at 10 a.m. on Monday.

    Carroll’s legal team put on 11 witnesses in her case including the writer herself over seven trial days.

    Republican panelist: Trump’s glorification of accused Jan 6 rioters is “disgusting.”

    Earlier Thursday the jury saw more clips of Trump’s video-recorded deposition taken last October for this case in which Trump vehemently denies Carroll’s rape allegations against him.

    “She’s accusing me of rape, a woman that I have no idea who she is. It came out of the blue. She’s accusing me of rape – of raping her, the worst thing you can do, the worst charge. And you know it’s not true too. You’re a political operative also. You’re a disgrace. But she’s accusing me and so are you of rape, and it never took place,” Trump said on video, addressing Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan.

    Trump stood by his social media posts published in 2019 and 2022 denying Carroll’s accusations and confirmed he personally wrote them.

    At one point during the deposition, Trump held a well-known black and white photo of himself, E Jean Carroll, her former husband news anchor John Johnson, and Trump’s then-wife Ivana.

    Trump recognized Johnson and recalled thinking he was good at his television job, but then mistook Carroll for his other ex-wife Marla Maples.

    “That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife,” he said.

    After the attorneys corrected him, Trump said the photo was blurry.

    He acknowledged the photo suggests he met Carroll at least once but said it must have been very brief at an event and he does not remember or know her.

    “I still don’t know this woman. I think she’s a whack job. I have no idea. I don’t know anything about this woman other than what I read in stories and what I hear. I know nothing about her,” the former president said.

    “She’s a liar and she’s a sick person in my opinion, Really sick. Something wrong with her,” Trump said during another point in the deposition.

    screengrab maggine haberman

    Haberman: Trump is personally bothered by the E. Jean Carroll case

    Carroll’s attorney asked Trump about his comments regarding Carroll, Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff all not being “his type.”

    He stood by the statements each time he was asked. At one point he said, “the only different between me and other people is I’m honest.”

    He also told Carroll’s attorney she’s not his type. “You wouldn’t be a choice of mine either to be honest,” Trump said.

    He also said he felt like he had a right to insult the women who’ve accused him falsely.

    “I don’t want to be insulting but when people accuse me of something I think I have a right to be insulting because they’re insulting me,” Trump said.

    The jury watched Trump view the “Access Hollywood” tape during his deposition. He didn’t appear to noticeably react as it was played.

    When asked about the tape he said it’s already been “fully litigated” and, “it’s locker room talk, I don’t know, it’s just the way people talk.”

    Former local news anchor Carol Martin testified Thursday that she remembers Carroll confiding in her soon after the alleged assault by Trump in the mid-1990s.

    Martin testified under direct examination that she didn’t remember when exactly it happened, but she knew it was some time while the two were working at the same cable network between 1994 and 1996.

    By Martin’s account the two friends had finished taping their respective shows and Carroll asked if she could come over Martin’s home near the studio. They talked in her kitchen for about an hour, Martin testified, and Carroll was “frenzied.”

    Carroll’s “effect was anxious and excitable, but she can be that way sometimes so that part wasn’t as different but what she was saying didn’t make any sense at first.” The conversation was not linear, Carroll started her account saying, “You won’t believe what happened to me the other night,” Martin recalled.

    “And I didn’t know what to expect,” Martin said she felt at the time. Carroll repeatedly said, “Trump attacked me,” according to Martin.

    “I think she said ‘he pinned me’ and I still didn’t know what she meant,” Martin testified.

    Martin testified that she told Carroll she shouldn’t tell anyone her story. “Because it was Donald Trump and he had a lot of attorneys and I thought he would bury her is what I told her,” Martin said.

    “I have questioned myself more times than not over the years. I am not proud that that’s what I told her in truth but she didn’t contest,” Martin added.

    During cross-examination, Tacopina read through a series of messages Martin has sent friends, many to Carroll, speaking negatively about Trump for years since he first ran for the presidency.

    Martin testified that as “very liberal feminist women,” they frequently discussed politics including their dislike for Trump. “We would often talk about ways to change the climate or work on issues of interest to us,” Martin testified.

    Tacopina also read the jury several messages Martin sent to friends and family about Carroll’s lawsuit against Trump that appeared to criticize Carroll. “She’s gonna sue when adult victims of rape law is passed in New York State or something. WTF that’s the defamation case and DOJ oversight or something. It’s gone to another level and not something I can relate to. For her, sadly, I think this quest has become a lifestyle,” Martin wrote in one text.

    Martin responded in court that at the time she sent the messages she was dealing with serious matters in her own personal life that affected her feelings toward Carroll’s situation. She testified that the texts do not reflect her current feelings.

    A marketing expert commissioned by Carroll testified it would take up to $2.7 million to run an effective marketing campaign to repair her reputation just from the damage of Trump’s October 12, 2022, comments denying her allegations.

    Northwestern University Professor Ashlee Humphreys said that Trump’s statement at issue in this trial reached somewhere between 13.7 and 18 million impressions.

    Humphreys and a team of researchers evaluated the post first published on Truth Social and how it spread across mediums like other social media platforms, websites and cable and network broadcast television.

    In a series of calculations Humphreys said about 21% of the people who viewed the statement in some capacity – about 3.7 to 5.6 million people – likely believed Trump. The analysis did not consider the effects of previous statements Trump made about Carroll.

    On cross examination Humphreys acknowledged that she did not consider damage done to Trump by Carroll’s statements against him.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Simmering tensions erupt between top Texas state Republicans | CNN Politics

    Simmering tensions erupt between top Texas state Republicans | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The day after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused the state House speaker of presiding over the chamber while drunk and called on him to resign, a House ethics panel on Wednesday heard explosive testimony from investigators detailing what they described as years of misconduct by the attorney general.

    The week’s events marked an eruption of simmering tensions between two of the top Republicans in the most populous red state.

    The remarkable outburst of public acrimony has been years in the making. Paxton, a more conservative figure who aligned himself with former President Donald Trump and used his office to challenge the 2020 presidential election results, has long cast House leadership as too liberal.

    His attacks on state House Speaker Dade Phelan are a vivid window into a political environment where Republicans control all levers of state government but are split into multiple factions battling for power and influence.

    Paxton on Tuesday posted on Twitter a letter to the state House General Investigating Committee, the chamber’s ethics panel, asking for an investigation into Phelan for performing his duties in what Paxton described as “an obviously intoxicated state.”

    Paxton’s call for Phelan’s resignation came after video circulated on social media over the weekend of Phelan appearing to slur his words as he presided over the House chamber at the end of Friday’s late-night session.

    Paxton did not present any evidence beyond the video clips to support his claim that Phelan was drunk.

    “It is with profound disappointment that I call on Speaker Dade Phelan to resign at the end of this legislative session,” Paxton said in a statement posted to his Twitter account. “Texans were dismayed to witness his performance presiding over the Texas House in a state of apparent debilitating intoxication.”

    Less than an hour later, the state House General Investigating Committee – a panel that investigates corruption in state government and has the power to initiate impeachment proceedings – revealed it had subpoenaed records from Paxton’s office as part of an investigation Phelan’s office said started in March.

    “It is not surprising that a committee appointed by liberal Speaker Dade Phelan would seek to disenfranchise Texas voters and sabotage my work as Attorney General,” Paxton said in a statement he posted on Twitter. “The false testimony of the highly partisan Democrat lawyers with the goal of manipulating and misleading the public is reprehensible. Every allegation is easily disproved, and I look forward to continuing my fight for conservative Texas values.”

    Phelan’s office said Paxton’s allegation was merely retaliation for the House ethics panel’s probe.

    “Mr. Paxton’s statement today amounts to little more than a last ditch effort to save face,” Phelan communications director Cait Wittman said in a statement Tuesday.

    Democratic state Rep. Terry Canales said that the broader context of Friday’s all-day session made clear that Phelan “was not under the influence.”

    “At that point in the night the House had been in session over 13 hours and we had been doing so for multiple days in a row. We were all exhausted,” Canales said in a statement. “Nevertheless, I had multiple interactions with the speaker throughout the day and that night and I can say unequivocally he was not under the influence.”

    The acrimony between Phelan and Paxton underscores the personal and ideological tensions within the GOP as the party approaches its 2024 presidential primary.

    Phelan has also clashed in recent months with another more conservative Republican official, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, over property tax relief, school choice and other key issues.

    The state House hearing is the latest in a string of legal troubles for Paxton. CNN has previously reported that he was facing an FBI investigation for abuse of office and that Justice Department prosecutors in Washington, DC, took over the corruption investigation. He is also under indictment for securities fraud in a separate, unrelated case. Paxton has denied all charges and allegations.

    On Wednesday, a team of lawyers working with the House ethics panel spent three hours laying out details of allegations of misconduct against Paxton spanning years.

    The probe began in March after Paxton sought to use $3.3 million in state dollars to settle a whistleblower lawsuit after four former employees of the attorney general’s office accused him of using his authority to benefit political friend Nate Paul, a real estate investor who had donated tens of thousands of dollars to Paxton’s campaign. In the settlement, Paxton apologized but did not admit fault or accept liability. He denied wrongdoing and said in a statement he had agreed to the settlement “to put this issue to rest.”

    As the hearing took place on Wednesday, the Texas Tribune reported that Paxton called into Dallas radio host Mark Davis’ show and criticized the investigation.

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  • Microsoft to pay $20 million to settle Xbox Live privacy allegations | CNN Business

    Microsoft to pay $20 million to settle Xbox Live privacy allegations | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Microsoft will pay $20 million to settle US government allegations that the tech giant violated children’s privacy by illegally collecting their personal information through its Xbox Live gaming service.

    According to the Federal Trade Commission, Microsoft broke the law by failing to tell parents about the full breadth of information it gathered from kids under the age of 13.

    That information, the FTC said in a lawsuit filed Monday, included the fact that children may share images of themselves in their account profiles, as well as video and audio recordings of themselves, their real names and logs of their activity on the platform.

    Microsoft also allegedly kept for years the personal information of millions of people, including children, who started creating accounts with Xbox Live but who never completed the sign-up process.

    “Even when a user indicated that they were under 13, they were also asked, until late 2021, to provide additional personal information including a phone number and to agree to Microsoft’s service agreement and advertising policy, which until 2019 included a pre-checked box allowing Microsoft to send promotional messages and to share user data with advertisers,” the FTC said in a release.

    In a statement, Microsoft said: “We recently entered into a settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to update our account creation process and resolve a data retention glitch found in our system. We are committed to complying with the order.”

    Parental settings give adults some control over what their children’s accounts show to other users. For example, Xbox Live’s default settings restrict who children can interact with on the service, the FTC said. But other default settings, the agency alleged, allow kids to access third-party games and apps with minimal friction.

    Microsoft failed to sufficiently disclose to parents what information the company was collecting from kids and how it was being used, the FTC said, alleging violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

    In agreeing to settle the claims, Microsoft committed to several additional measures beyond the financial penalty.

    Microsoft agreed to delete any personal information it collects from kids if they don’t complete the account registration process. It also agreed to tell third-party game publishers when a user may be a child, effectively putting the third-party publishers on notice to comply with COPPA in handling the user’s information.

    The settlement comes as the FTC has challenged Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of video game giant Activision-Blizzard, a proposed deal that would turn Microsoft into the world’s third-largest game publisher and give it control over popular franchises such as “Call of Duty” and “World of Warcraft.”

    US and UK officials have alleged that Microsoft’s acquisition could give it anti-competitive control over the games industry by being able to withhold titles from rival platforms, particularly in the nascent cloud gaming sector. To address the concerns, Microsoft has struck licensing deals with other companies to ensure their customers continue to have access to Activision games following the deal’s close.

    Those concessions have convinced the European Union to approve the deal, but litigation to block the deal involving US and UK regulators remains ongoing.

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  • FTC to seek federal court order temporarily blocking Microsoft-Activision deal | CNN Business

    FTC to seek federal court order temporarily blocking Microsoft-Activision deal | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    The Federal Trade Commission on Monday sued to prevent Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard from closing their $69 billion merger.

    The filing asks the US District Court for the Northern District of California for a temporary restraining order that could keep the companies from consummating the acquisition while the FTC’s in-house court is deliberating on the deal.

    The FTC sued Microsoft in the agency’s administrative court in December, challenging the deal as anticompetitive.

    “Both a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction are necessary because Microsoft and Activision have represented that they may consummate the Proposed Acquisition at any time without any further notice to the Commission,” the FTC’s court filing said.

    “We welcome the opportunity to present our case in federal court,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, said in a statement. “We believe accelerating the legal process in the U.S. will ultimately bring more choice and competition to the market.”

    UK competition regulators have also challenged the deal, which promises to make Microsoft the world’s third-largest video game publisher after Tencent and Sony. The acquisition would give Microsoft control over popular franchises including “Call of Duty” and “World of Warcraft.”

    Officials from the FTC and the UK have claimed that the deal could harm the gaming industry by allowing Microsoft to withhold Activision titles from rival platforms, such as Sony’s Playstation. Microsoft has struck 10-year licensing agreements with some game platforms that will ensure those titles remain available.

    Antitrust officials from the European Union blessed the deal last month, saying that Microsoft’s concessions were enough to address its competition concerns.

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  • Republican 2024 hopefuls converge on DC under the shadow of Trump | CNN Politics

    Republican 2024 hopefuls converge on DC under the shadow of Trump | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Republican presidential candidates took turns Friday pitching themselves to a ballroom full of religious conservatives in Washington as the most viable alternative to front-runner Donald Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination.

    The specter of the former president loomed large over the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Policy Conference, a summit that marks the first time the biggest names in the GOP race are appearing on the same stage as the summer campaign season kicks into gear. Trump is slated to speak Saturday, which will mark his first in-person appearance at a large GOP gathering of presidential hopefuls since announcing his White House bid.

    The topic of abortion was a through-line at the conference Friday, which coincided with the eve of the first anniversary of the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Abortion has been a politically fraught issue for Republicans, and some GOP 2024 candidates are struggling to balance appealing to the hard-line GOP base without alienating more moderate voters needed to win a general election.

    Though several GOP candidates typically skate around the issue, including what kind of federal legislation they would support, one candidate has staked out a clear position on abortion and kicked off the conference with a call to action for his GOP 2024 rivals to do the same.

    “Every Republican candidate for president should support a ban on abortions before 15 weeks as a minimum nationwide standard,” former Vice President Mike Pence told the audience, largely made up of conservative evangelical voters.

    Pence appeared to take a shot at Trump, who, like other GOP hopefuls, has wrestled with how to navigate the politics of abortion.

    The former vice president told the audience that some speakers would say “that the Supreme Court returned to the issue of abortion only to the states and nothing should be done at the federal level.”

    “Others will say that continuing the fight to life could produce state legislation is too harsh. Some have even gone on to blame the overturning of Roe v. Wade for election losses,” Pence added.

    Trump’s campaign softened its stance that abortion should be decided at the state level after receiving backlash from the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. And after the GOP had a worse-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterm elections, Trump said the “abortion issue” had been poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those who insisted on no exceptions in the case or rape, incest or life of the mother, which, he said, “lost large numbers of voters.”

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, notably, did not make abortion a main focus of his remarks and only made a quick reference to his state’s six-week abortion ban he signed into law earlier this year. (The law has yet to go into effect.)

    He spent more time during his roughly 35-minute speech leaning into cultural fights and digging in on his ongoing fight with Disney, decrying transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, touting his opposition to the teaching of gender ideology in public schools and propping up Florida as what he described as a “citadel of freedom,” particularly during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

    With the GOP field somewhat solidified, Trump remains firmly the favorite for the nomination – a fact that is apparent not only in recent polls but in the conference’s programming itself. The former president will serve as the keynote speaker for the event’s closing gala on Saturday.

    Trump allies, too, are among the conference’s speakers. Last year’s losing Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and conservative commentators Nick Adams and Judge Jeanine Pirro are scheduled to speak Saturday. Florida Rep. Byron Donalds and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham spoke Friday. The Trump-heavy lineup underscores the challenges for other candidates to break out in a party still dominated by the former president.

    “Donald Trump is arguably the strongest front-runner and in the strongest position overall of anyone in my career,” said Ralph Reed, the founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

    But Reed added that Trump’s competition has a strong case to make, too, and there are paths for many of them to secure the nomination. Reed singled out DeSantis as an especially well-funded candidate who appears to pose a serious threat to the former president.

    A new CNN poll conducted by SSRS in the wake of his indictment and arrest on federal charges showed Trump remained the front-runner – 47% of Republicans and Republican-leaning registered voters say Trump is their first choice for the party’s nomination. That’s down from 53% in May. His support appears to be softening amid his legal troubles, with a greater share of Republicans now saying they will not support him under any circumstances. DeSantis’ support has held steady at 26% and no other candidate in the growing field tops double digits.

    “For the candidates that are not as high in the polls, this is an opportunity and an important moment for them to make their case,” Reed said. “If you’re not Donald Trump, it’s a very short calendar where you have to win somewhere and you have to do it quickly. If someone can win one of those first three states, and especially Iowa or New Hampshire, this race will change overnight. I think that’s part of why they’re all here.”

    In addition to Pence and DeSantis, Friday’s speakers included entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Radio show host Larry Elder and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will address the conference on Saturday.

    Christie drew boos from the crowd when he criticized Trump on Friday.

    “I’m running because he’s let us down,” the former New Jersey governor said. “He has let us down because he’s unwilling, he’s unwilling to take responsibility for any of the mistakes that were made. Any of the faults that he has and any of the things that he’s done and that is not leadership everybody. That is a failure of leadership.”

    When several people in the crowd started loudly booing, Christie said, “You can boo all you want.”

    Christie told CNN’s Dana Bash after his speech that he would continue speaking out against Trump on the campaign trail, saying the former president was “not a man of character, and they know it.”

    “There were a lot of people in that audience who were standing and cheering when I left. And there were some that were booing. But no one left wondering what I think,” Christie said.

    Christie has been sharply critical of the former president, whom he endorsed in the 2016 primary after dropping out of the presidential race and continued to advise ahead of the 2020 election. As other GOP hopefuls shy away from attacking Trump directly, hoping to avoid potentially alienating his supporters, Christie has taken direct aim at the former president and kicked off his 2024 candidacy lambasting Trump.

    Instead of drawing direct contrasts with Trump, Scott spent much of his speech attacking the Biden administration, accusing it of “weaponizing” the Justice Department against the president’s political opponents. 

    “In this radical-left Biden administration, they weaponize the Department of Justice against their political enemies. That is wrong. We deserve better in the United States of America,” Scott said.

    Scott didn’t directly reference the federal charges against Trump, but the senator’s remarks came less than two weeks after Trump pleaded not guilty in a Miami courtroom to federal charges related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving office. Trump continues to claim the DOJ has been “weaponized” against him. 

    Republican voters are increasingly getting opportunities to size up the GOP field and evaluate them in the same setting. Next weekend, Trump, DeSantis, Haley, Ramaswamy and Hutchinson will address a summit in Philadelphia hosted by Moms For Liberty, a relatively new but increasingly influential group of conservative women focused largely on K-12 education issues.

    The Road to Majority conference is taking place just two months before the first scheduled Republican presidential debate on August 23 in Milwaukee. Trump on Tuesday repeated his suggestion that he may not participate.

    “Why would I let these people take shots at me?” he told Fox News.

    However, Trump’s appearance on Saturday in DC marks a change in approach from similar Republican gatherings. To date, when Trump has participated, it has been via video message, just as he did at Faith and Freedom’s Iowa event earlier this year. Trump also skipped Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst’s annual “Roast and Ride” earlier this month, which drew the rest of the field that had entered at the time.

    Reed encouraged Trump to spend more time talking to voters and less time harping on his legal troubles and past elections.

    “He has a tremendous story to tell, and it’s the reason he’s doing so well among these voters now,” Reed said. “But I think it’s important for him to talk about what a second term agenda looks like.”

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Trump once said a president under felony indictment would grind the government to a halt and create a constitutional crisis | CNN Politics

    Trump once said a president under felony indictment would grind the government to a halt and create a constitutional crisis | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump said in 2016 that a president under indictment would “cripple the operations of our government” and create an “unprecedented constitutional crisis” – years before he himself was indicted on federal charges while running for a second term as president.

    Trump made the comments nearly seven years ago about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.

    “We could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and ultimately a criminal trial,” Trump said during a November 5, 2016, campaign rally in Reno, Nevada, reviewed by CNN’s KFile. “It would grind government to a halt.”

    Just days earlier, on October 28, then-FBI director James Comey publicly announced they had reopened the investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified information related to her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.

    Now, Trump finds himself under the exact situation he repeatedly described after he was charged in early June with 37 federal counts related to retention of classified documents and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

    A tentative trial date had been set for mid-August by the case’s judge, but it is likely to be pushed back. The special counsel’s office asked for a December trial. The flexibility of when the trial will begin leaves uncertainty if the case will conclude before the 2024 election.

    But Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, will not be disqualified from the presidency even if convicted, and he told Politico in June that he won’t leave the presidential race if he is convicted of the charges.

    At another rally on November 3, 2016, in Concord, North Carolina, Trump made similar comments.

    “If she were to win, it would create an unprecedented Constitutional crisis that would cripple the operations of our government,” he said. “She is likely to be under investigation for many years, and also it will probably end up – in my opinion – in a criminal trial. I mean, you take a look. Who knows? But it certainly looks that way.”

    “She has no right to be running, you know that,” Trump said. “No right.”

    Trump added at a November 5, 2016, rally in Denver that as “the prime suspect in a far-reaching criminal investigation,” Clinton’s controversies would make it “virtually impossible for her to govern.”

    The comments aren’t the only ones from Trump’s past campaigns that could have aged poorly with his legal troubles. In another comment, made when running for reelection, Trump acknowledged only the sitting president could reveal classified information.

    CNN previously reported in an exclusively obtained audio recording that Trump said as president he could have declassified a document about plans to attack Iran that he was showing aides after leaving office, but recognized he could not do so now that he is no longer president.

    “And you know the newspapers and the press and the fake news they went and said he just gave away classified information,” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania in September 2020 when discussing his conversations with author Bob Woodward on nuclear weapons. “First of all, I’m allowed to do it, I’m the President so I’m allowed to. I’m the one – I’m the only one that’s allowed.”

    In September, CNN’s KFile reported that Trump previously called for lengthy jail sentences for those who mishandled classified information.

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  • US-Israeli citizen charged with arms trafficking, acting as Chinese agent | CNN Politics

    US-Israeli citizen charged with arms trafficking, acting as Chinese agent | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    US prosecutors unsealed an indictment Monday charging the co-director of a think tank with illicit arms trafficking, violating US sanctions laws, and other charges, five months after he was arrested in Cyprus and fled from authorities.

    The US-Israeli citizen, Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, is also someone House Oversight Chairman James Comer, a top Republican, has described as an informant claiming to have incriminating information on Hunter Biden.

    Luft has tweeted denials of the allegations, saying in February, “I’ve been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the US. The US, claiming I’m an arms dealer. It would be funny if it weren’t tragic. I’ve never been an arms dealer. DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim&Hunter Biden.”

    An attorney for Luft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. CNN has reached out to the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.

    Luft is a fugitive, prosecutors say.

    Luft was charged with failing to register as an agent for China in the US, including in 2016 acting through a former high-ranking US official who was then advising President-elect Donald Trump. He was also charged with acting as a middleman to aid Chinese companies buying weapons. The indictment also alleges Luft violated US sanctions by attempting to broker sales of Iranian oil.

    House Republicans are investigating the Biden family’s financial dealings and have requested information from the Justice Department about its investigation into Hunter Biden, who has agreed to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors. At least one Republican, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, has claimed that Luft is an important witness in that investigation.

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  • Illinois Supreme Court upholds law eliminating cash bail | CNN Politics

    Illinois Supreme Court upholds law eliminating cash bail | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Illinois Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the state’s historic move to ban cash bail is constitutional, overturning a lower court decision.

    In a 5-2 decision, the state’s highest court ruled that the measure, which eliminates the requirement that individuals post bail in order to be released before trial, can go into effect on September 18. Under the law, a person can still be detained if they pose a “specific, real and present threat to a person” or if there is a “high likelihood” that they will flee.

    Chief Justice Mary Jane Theis wrote in the opinion, “Our constitution creates a balance between the individual rights of defendants and the individual rights of crime victims. The Act’s pretrial release provisions set forth procedures commensurate with that balance.”

    The cash bail ban, part of a law passed in 2021 called the SAFE-T Act, had been overturned by a Kankakee County judge, who ruled that the bail provision could only be enacted with an amendment to the state’s constitution, not a new law.

    “In eliminating monetary bail, the discretion constitutionally vested to the courts to protect victims and their families by this method is gone,” Judge Thomas Cunningham wrote late last year.

    In a dissent Tuesday, Justice David Overstreet echoed this argument. “The legislature has not done so, but this is constitutionally required no matter how desirable it may be to abolish monetary bail,” he wrote.

    However, Theis said Cunningham “incorrectly assumed that abolishing monetary bail undermines the State’s interests,” adding that stating that monetary bail is required “ignored the plain language of the constitution.”

    Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who signed the SAFE-T Act into law, celebrated the decision: “I look forward to continuing to work with the General Assembly and our many other partners as we transition to a more equitable and just Illinois.”

    The Supreme Court ruling was also applauded by Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx.

    “Today’s ruling ends the cash bail system, replacing that system with a detention process based on community safety and not on the financial fitness of defendants. Congratulations to every stakeholder who helped make this happen,” Foxx said in a written statement.

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  • The US immigration story extends well beyond the border | CNN Politics

    The US immigration story extends well beyond the border | CNN Politics

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    A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    There is a tendency to view the different elements of the immigration landscape in isolation.

    • Texas is being sued by the US Department of Justice for acting on its own to put obstructions along the border.
    • New York and other cities complain they are overwhelmed by buses of migrants being sent from the border.
    • In the absence of action by Congress, court decisions are setting US border policy.

    But the elements are all interrelated.

    I talked to CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez to get her perspective as a White House reporter with a deep background in reporting on all aspects of the larger immigration story. Our conversation, conducted by email, is below. And don’t miss her story that published Tuesday: Federal judge blocks Biden’s controversial asylum policy in a major blow to administration.

    WOLF: The US government is suing Texas to remove floating barriers from the Rio Grande. But it’s just the latest in a series of escalating measures Texas has undertaken on its own to keep migrants out of the country. What is the state of play at the border?

    ALVAREZ: The handling of the US-Mexico border has long been a point of contention between President (Joe) Biden and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who’s argued that the administration hasn’t done enough to enforce the border.

    As an affront to Biden’s border policies, Abbott has transported migrants to Democratic-led cities without coordinating with city officials, deployed more personnel to the Texas-Mexico border, and earlier this month, installed buoys in the Rio Grande.

    Border agents have historically worked closely with the Texas National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety. But the latest steps taken by the state have made day-to-day operations more difficult.

    DPS made certain portions of the Texas-Mexico border more difficult to access, marking a departure from the coordination that previously existed between law enforcement. Agents on the ground have also sent regular reports to US Customs and Border Protection headquarters about what they’ve observed as Abbott’s operation has been underway, a Homeland Security official told me.

    But disturbing images of migrants with injuries and troubling reports of Texas troops pushing migrants back to Mexico forced the Biden’s administration hands.

    Last week, the Justice Department said it’s assessing the situation along the Texas-Mexico border and on Monday, the DOJ filed a lawsuit on a separate, though related matter: the installation of a floating barrier. The lawsuit says Texas didn’t seek authorization before placing the floating barrier in the Rio Grande and poses a threat to navigation.

    That court battle could take months to play out. But in the interim, it could fuel tensions between agents and troops on the ground and further escalate the feud between Biden and Abbott.

    WOLF: You’ve written about how an expected surge of migrants after the end of a Covid-era policy known as Title 42 never materialized. What happened?

    ALVAREZ: Let’s provide some context first. Migration often ebbs and flows.

    But the Biden administration has had to grapple with unprecedented mass movement of people in the Western hemisphere, which is in part the outcome of the coronavirus pandemic decimating conditions in the region.

    The administration relied on a public health authority, known as Title 42, to quickly expel migrants back to Mexico or their origin countries. That authority had been invoked under former President (Donald) Trump and used to turn away migrants, including asylum-seekers, at the US-Mexico border on public health grounds.

    In the days leading up to the expiration of Title 42, thousands of migrants tried to cross the US southern border, knowing that they could face tougher penalties after the end of the authority including bans on reentry to the United States.

    And that’s indeed been the case. Increased deportations and tougher policies, paired with other, new legal pathways to the United States, appear to have driven down the number of people attempting to unlawfully cross the US-Mexico border.

    In June, for example, US Border Patrol arrested nearly 100,000 migrants along the US southern border, marking a decrease from May and marking the lowest monthly border encounters since February 2021, according to US Customs and Border Protection data.

    WOLF: Far from the border in Texas, New York Mayor Eric Adams, after earlier welcoming migrants bused to his city, has said with increasing urgency that the city is full. Migrants are now also being bused to Los Angeles. What’s the latest on the busing angle?

    ALVAREZ: The busing is still happening. Since last year, Texas has bused more than 27,000 migrants to six cities, according to Abbott’s office. The cities include Washington, DC, New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver and Los Angeles.

    One of the main issues with the transport of migrants to these cities that officials often raise alarm about is the lack of coordination. The governor’s office doesn’t generally notify cities that migrants are being sent there, leaving border NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) to try to fill the information void.

    It’s important to note, though, that migrants who are released from government custody have been vetted and processed by federal authorities and are released as they go through their immigration court proceedings. An immigration judge ultimately decides whether a migrant has grounds to stay in the United States or be ordered removed.

    WOLF: All of these things are related – the efforts by Texas to create its own border policy, the difficulty New York and cities are facing as they deal with an influx of migrants … everything feeds from the lack of more comprehensive immigration reform. Is there any movement in Congress toward dealing with all of this in a comprehensive way?

    ALVAREZ: Bills addressing the immigration system have been introduced by both parties. Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas, for example, has introduced legislation that addresses work visa programs, among other parts of the system. But it’s such a divisive issue that legislation struggles to move forward.

    Both parties are so far apart on the issue that even though Democrats and Republicans acknowledge the US immigration system is broken, they can’t agree on how to fix it.

    Without comprehensive reform, the federal government is left to implementing a patchwork of policies and then playing defense when lawsuits are filed against them, often resulting in policy whiplash.

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  • Twitter sues hate-speech watchdog, following through on its litigation threat | CNN Business

    Twitter sues hate-speech watchdog, following through on its litigation threat | CNN Business

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    Washington, DC
    CNN
     — 

    Twitter has sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit group that has criticized the company’s handling of hate speech, following through on a litigation threat that had been publicly revealed just hours before.

    The lawsuit filed Monday in San Francisco federal court accuses CCDH of deliberately trying to drive advertisers away from Twitter — recently rebranded as “X” — by publishing reports critical of the platform’s response to hateful content.

    It specifically claims CCDH violated Twitter’s terms of service, and federal hacking laws, by scraping data from the company’s platform and by encouraging an unnamed individual to improperly collect information about Twitter that it had provided to a third-party brand monitoring provider.

    The complaint accuses CCDH of engaging in a wide-ranging campaign to silence users of Twitter’s platform by calling attention to the views they post on social media.

    Responding to the complaint’s allegations on Tuesday, CCDH’s CEO Imran Ahmed told CNN that much of the lawsuit, particularly its claim about the unnamed individual, “sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory to me.”

    “The truth is that he’s [Elon Musk] been casting around for a reason to blame us for his own failings as a CEO,” Ahmed said, “because we all know that when he took over, he put up the bat signal to racists and misogynists, to homophobes, to antisemites, saying ‘Twitter is now a free-speech platform.’ … And now he’s surprised when people are able to quantify that there has been a resulting increase in hate and disinformation.”

    “All we do is hold up a mirror to the platform and ask them to consider whether or not they like the reflection they see in it,” Ahmed added. “What Mr. Musk has done is said, ‘I’m going to sue the mirror because I don’t like what I see.’”

    In the past 24 hours, Ahmed said, thousands of people have visited CCDH’s website and many have made donations to the group.

    “That’s what we’re going to need if we’re going to survive this,” he said, adding: “The reason that organizations like CCDH have to rely on methodologies like we do is because there is no transparency on these platforms.”

    The lawsuit comes after CCDH on Monday disclosed Twitter’s original July 20 threat to sue, along with its response to Twitter’s threat calling the company’s claims “ridiculous.”

    “X’s legal threat is a brazen attempt to silence honest criticism and independent research, perhaps in a desperate hope that it can stem the tide of negative stories and rebuild the company’s relationship with advertisers,” Ahmed wrote in an op-ed Monday coinciding with the group’s publication of Twitter’s threat.

    In its own blog post Monday, Twitter said its lawsuit was intended to promote free expression and that it “rejects all claims made by the CCDH.”

    “X is a free public service funded largely by advertisers,” the company said. “Through the CCDH’s scare campaign and its ongoing pressure on brands to prevent the public’s access to free expression, the CCDH is actively working to prevent public dialogue.”

    The July 20 threat indicated Twitter was investigating whether CCDH could be sued for violations of federal laws against false advertising. But Monday’s complaint does not appear to include such an allegation.

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  • Welcome to the era of viral AI generated ‘news’ images | CNN Business

    Welcome to the era of viral AI generated ‘news’ images | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Pope Francis wearing a massive, white puffer coat. Elon Musk walking hand-in-hand with rival GM CEO Mary Barra. Former President Donald Trump being detained by police in dramatic fashion.

    None of these things actually happened, but AI-generated images depicting them did go viral online over the past week.

    The images ranged from obviously fake to, in some cases, compellingly real, and they fooled some social media users. Model and TV personality Chrissy Teigen, for example, tweeted that she thought the pope’s puffer coat was real, saying, “didn’t give it a second thought. no way am I surviving the future of technology.” The images also sparked a slew of headlines, as news organizations rushed to debunk the false images, especially those of Trump, who was ultimately indicted by a Manhattan grand jury on Thursday but has not been arrested.

    The situation demonstrates a new online reality: the rise of a new crop of buzzy artificial intelligence tools has made it cheaper and easier than ever to create realistic images, as well as audio and videos. And these images are likely to pop up with increasing frequency on social media.

    While these AI tools may enable new means of expressing creativity, the spread of computer-generated media also threatens to further pollute the information ecosystem. That risks adding to the challenges for users, news organizations and social media platforms to vet what’s real, after years of grappling with online misinformation featuring far less sophisticated visuals. There are also concerns that AI-generated images could be used for harassment, or to further drive divided internet users apart.

    “I worry that it will sort of get to a point where there will be so much fake, highly realistic content online that most people will just go with their tribal instincts as a guide to what they think is real, more than actually informed opinions based on verified evidence,” said Henry Ajder, a synthethic media expert who works as an advisor to companies and government agencies, including Meta Reality Labs’ European Advisory Council.

    Images, compared to the AI-generated text that has also recently proliferated thanks to tools like ChatGPT, can be especially powerful in provoking emotions when people view them, said Claire Leibowicz, head of AI and media integrity at the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit industry group. That can make it harder for people to slow down and evaluate whether what they’re looking at is real or fake.

    What’s more, coordinated bad actors could eventually attempt to create fake content in bulk — or suggest that real content is computer-generated — in order to confuse internet users and provoke certain behaviors.

    “The paranoia of an impending Trump … potential arrest created a really useful case study in understanding what the potential implications are, and I think we’re very lucky that things did not go south,” said Ben Decker, CEO of threat intelligence group Memetica. “Because if more people had had that idea en masse, in a coordinated fashion, I think there’s a universe where we could start to see the online to offline effects.”

    Computer-generated image technology has improved rapidly in recent years, from the photoshopped image of a shark swimming through a flooded highway that has been repeatedly shared during natural disasters to the websites that four years ago began churning out mostly unconvincing fake photos of non-existent people.

    Many of the recent viral AI-generated images were created by a tool called Midjourney, a less than year-old platform that allows users to create images based on short text prompts. On its website, Midjourney describes itself as “a small self-funded team,” with just 11 full-time staff members.

    A cursory glance at a Facebook page popular among Midjourney users reveals AI-generated images of a seemingly inebriated Pope Francis, elderly versions of Elvis and Kurt Cobain, Musk in a robotic Tesla bodysuit and many creepy animal creations. And that’s just from the past few days.

    Midjourney has emerged as a popular tool for users to create AI-generated images.

    The latest version of Midjourney is only available to a select number of paid users, Midjourney CEO David Holz told CNN in an email Friday. Midjourney this week paused access to the free trial of its earlier versions due to “extraordinary demand and trial abuse,” according to a Discord post from Holz, but he told CNN it was unrelated to the viral images. The creator of the Trump arrest images also claimed he was banned from the site.

    The rules page on the company’s Discord site asks users: “Don’t use our tools to make images that could inflame, upset, or cause drama. That includes gore and adult content.”

    “Moderation is hard and we’ll be shipping improved systems soon,” Holz told CNN. “We’re taking lots of feedback and ideas from experts and the community and are trying to be really thoughtful.”

    In most cases, the creators of the recent viral images don’t appear to have been acting malevolently. The Trump arrest images were created by the founder of the online investigative journalism outlet Bellingcat, who clearly labeled them as his fabrications, even if other social media users weren’t as discerning.

    There are efforts by platforms, AI technology companies and industry groups to improve the transparency around when a piece of content is generated by a computer.

    Platforms including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Twitter and YouTube have policies restricting or prohibiting the sharing of manipulated media that could mislead users. But as use of AI-generated technologies grows, even such policies could threaten to undermine user trust. If, for example, a fake image accidentally slipped through a platform’s detection system, “it could give people false confidence,” Ajder said. “They’ll say, ‘there’s a detection system that says it’s real, so it must be real.’”

    Work is also underway on technical solutions that would, for example, watermark an AI-generated image or include a transparent label in an image’s metadata, so anyone viewing it across the internet would know it was created by a computer. The Partnership on AI has developed a set of standard, responsible practices for synthetic media along with partners like ChatGPT-creator OpenAI, TikTok, Adobe, Bumble and the BBC, which includes recommendations such as how to disclose an image was AI-generated and how companies can share data around such images.

    “The idea is that these institutions are all committed to disclosure, consent and transparency,” Leibowicz said.

    A group of tech leaders, including Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, this week wrote an open letter calling for artificial intelligence labs to stop the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.” Still, it’s not clear whether any labs will take such a step. And as the technology rapidly improves and becomes accessible beyond a relatively small group of corporations committed to responsible practices, lawmakers may need to get involved, Ajder said.

    “This new age of AI can’t be held in the hands of a few massive companies getting rich off of these tools, we need to democratize this technology,” he said. “At the same time, there are also very real and legitimate concerns of having a radical open approach where you just open source a tool or have very minimal restrictions on its use is going to lead to a massive scaling of harm … and I think legislation will probably play a role in reigning in some of the more radically open models.”

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  • Elizabeth Holmes must report to prison this month while waiting out her appeal, judge rules | CNN Business

    Elizabeth Holmes must report to prison this month while waiting out her appeal, judge rules | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    A judge on Monday denied Elizabeth Holmes’ request to remain free while she appeals her conviction, setting the stage for the disgraced Theranos founder to report to prison later this month.

    In his order, Judge Edward Davila of the Northern District of California said Holmes does not pose a danger to the community or a flight risk, but he cast doubt on her appeal. Even if Homes won her appeal, he said, it is unlikely to result in a reversal, or an order for a new trial, for all of the counts on which she was found guilty.

    Davila previously ordered Holmes to turn herself into custody on April 27, 2023.

    Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison last November, after she was convicted months earlier on multiple charges of defrauding investors while running the failed blood testing startup Theranos. Attorneys for Holmes did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment on the ruling.

    Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, Holmes’ ex-boyfriend and the former chief operating officer at Theranos, was also found guilty on multiple counts of fraud in a separate trial. He was sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison last December. Balwani’s request to remain out of prison during his appeal was also denied, and he has been ordered by Davila to surrender to prison on April 20.

    Once valued at $9 billion, Theranos attracted top investors and retail partners with claims that it had developed technology to test for a wide range of conditions using just a few drops of blood. The company began to unravel after a Wall Street Journal investigation in 2015 reported that Theranos had only ever performed roughly a dozen of the hundreds of tests it offered using its proprietary technology, and with questionable accuracy.

    Holmes’ trial was initially delayed multiple times, due to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and then because of her pregnancy. Following her sentencing in November, Holmes sought to delay the start of her prison term after giving birth to her second child.

    While Davila denied Holmes represented a flight risk, he also addressed the fact that she had previously booked a one-way ticket to Mexico in January 2022.

    “Booking international travel plans for a criminal defendant in anticipation of a complete defense victory is a bold move, and the failure to promptly cancel those plans after a guilty verdict is a perilously careless oversight,” Davila wrote in the court filing.

    Holmes’ attorneys had previously claimed that Holmes had hoped the verdict would be different when booking the travel plans and that she wanted to make this trip to attend the wedding of friends in Mexico. Davila wrote in court documents that the court accepts Holmes’ “representation that the oneway flight ticket—while ill-advised—was not an attempt to flee the country.”

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  • Fox News’ defamation battle isn’t stopping Trump’s election lies | CNN Politics

    Fox News’ defamation battle isn’t stopping Trump’s election lies | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The defamation clash between Fox News and a small election services firm, due to go to trial this week, represents the most significant moment yet in which those who disseminated former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen must answer for conduct that is still poisoning American democracy.

    Dominion Voting Systems alleges the conservative network promulgated the ex-president’s conspiracy theories, including about its voting machines, to avoid alienating its viewers and for the good of its bottom line.

    The trial had been scheduled to open Monday but the judge announced Sunday evening it’d be delayed until Tuesday. The reason was not immediately clear. But The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Fox Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch, reported that Fox had made a late push to settle the dispute out of court, citing people familiar with the matter.

    The drama expected to play out in a Delaware courtroom represents an extraordinary moment in modern American history because it could show how truth has been tarnished as a political currency and highlight a right-wing business model that depends on spinning an alternative reality. And yet, it remains unclear whether Trump – the primary author of the corrosive conspiracies that the 2020 election was fraudulent – will end up paying a significant personal or political price.

    The idea that Trump’s claims – echoed by his aides and allies on Fox and sometimes by the channel’s personalities – had any merit will not even make it to first base in the trial. In one remarkable development during pre-trial hearings, presiding Superior Court Judge Eric Davis ruled that jurors did not even need to decide one key issue: whether Fox’s claims about Dominion were true.

    “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” Davis wrote, in a ruling last month that significantly narrowed the network’s avenues to mount a defense.

    The epic case now turns on an attempt by Dominion to prove the legal standard for defamation that Fox must have known (or strongly suspected) it was lying about the issues at hand at the time and that it acted with “actual malice.”

    Though he vigorously denies breaking any laws, the former president appears to face the possibility of indictment in probes into his attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s election victory by a district attorney in Georgia and by special counsel Jack Smith into his conduct in the lead-up to the US Capitol insurrection. And the many layers of Trump’s democracy-damaging behavior were catalogued in interviews and public testimony taken by a House select committee when Democrats controlled the chamber last year.

    But the falsehood of a corrupt election still forms the bedrock of Trump’s 2024 campaign to win back the White House. Millions of Trump’s supporters have bought into the idea that he was illegally ejected from office on the premise that he really won in 2020.

    It’s also questionable whether viewers of conservative media will hear much about the trial and get sufficient information that might convince them to change their minds about 2020.

    Trump’s insistence that the election was stained by fraud is giving some senior Republicans nightmares as they try to rebound from his loss in 2020 and work through their disappointment at the lack of a “red wave” in the last year’s midterms, despite winning the House.

    As Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp put it on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, the ex-president is forcing his party to keep looking in the rearview mirror and hampering its effort to look to the future.

    One core argument in court will likely be trying to show that Fox believed that telling the audience inconvenient truths was bad for business – a factor that drove right-wing media in 2020 and still holds true today. Proof of this can be seen in the way the Republican Party remains unwilling to anger its base voters two years on. While many top party leaders have signaled they want to move on from Trump, the only part of the GOP that has power in Washington – the House Republican majority – has made repeated efforts to shield Trump from accountability over the 2020 election and to distort what actually happened on January 6, 2021.

    But the court proceeding against Fox – like the constitutional process that assured a transfer of power between Trump and Biden, albeit one marred by violence – shows that the country’s instruments of accountability remain intact, despite Trump’s efforts.

    Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corporation, deny wrongdoing. They’ve argued that their conspiracy theory-filled broadcasts after the 2020 election were protected by the First Amendment and that a loss in the case would be a devastating blow to press freedoms.

    But the run-up to the trial has been a catalog of embarrassments and reversals for both the network and the broader premise that there is anything to Trump’s false claims.

    The judge, for instance, observed last week in pre-trial hearings that there were well established and accepted limits on First Amendment rights.

    “To go up there and say, ‘What Fox did was protected by the First Amendment,’ it’s half the story. It’s protected by the First Amendment if you can’t demonstrate actual malice,” he said.

    Texts and emails between Fox personalities and managers, and depositions released by Dominion, suggest that privately, some at the channel dismissed Trump’s claims but amplified them amid growing fears that telling the truth might force viewers to turn elsewhere.

    For example, Murdoch emailed Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott telling her that rival conservative network Newsmax needed to be “watched.” In another message, Fox anchor Tucker Carlson told his colleague Laura Ingraham, “Our viewers are good people and they believe [the election fraud claims].”

    Fox has accused Dominion of cherry picking damaging quotes and texts ahead of the trial. But the evidence that has emerged suggests that Fox’s desire to cater to the beliefs of its viewers, even with untrue information, is closely allied to Trump’s own approach and reflects the way in which the Republican Party has been loath to antagonize the ex-president’s supporters.

    From the opening hours of his presidency, Trump made clear he would create an alternative vision of reality that his supporters could embrace and that would help him subvert the rules and conventions of the presidency. The angry exhortations by Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, in January 2017 that his boss had attracted the biggest inauguration crowd in history seemed at the time bizarre and absurd. But in retrospect, they were the first sign of a daily effort to destroy truth for Trump’s political benefit, which eventually morphed into lies about a stolen election that convinced many of the ex-president’s supporters. The culmination of all this was the mob attack by his supporters on Congress on January 6, 2021, during the certification of Biden’s victory.

    The idea that the Fox defamation trial might actually play a role in purging lies about the 2020 election seems far-fetched because the power of his falsehoods has survived many previous collisions with the truth. Although multiple courts in multiple states threw out Trump’s cases alleging election fraud after the 2020 election, the idea that the election was stolen still undermined faith in American democracy among his supporters. Only 29% of Republicans in a CNN/SSRS poll published in July 2022 had confidence that US elections truly represent the will of the people.

    This is, perhaps, not surprising. Because when he was in office, Trump made no secret of his strategy, telling the world in a moment of candor how he operated.

    “Stick with us. Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” he said in a directive to his supporters at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City in 2018. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

    Five years on, Trump is still at it.

    “We won in 2016. We won by much more in 2020 but it was rigged,” Trump said in the first big rally of his campaign in Waco, Texas, at the end of March.

    The fact that Trump continues to spread such falsehoods – and that many in the Republican Party remain unwilling to challenge him – irks some party leaders who watched as Trump’s handpicked candidates, who touted his election lies as the price of his endorsement, flamed out in swing states in last year’s midterm elections.

    Georgia’s Kemp warned, for example, that constantly bringing up 2020 would create another political disaster for his party.

    “I think any candidate, to be able to win, is to talk about what we’re for, focus on the future, not look in the rearview mirror,” Kemp told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday.

    “If you look in the rearview mirror too long while you’re driving, you’re going to look up, and you’re going to be running into somebody, and that’s not going to be good.”

    Yet the fact that Trump, according to many polls, remains the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024 and is still wildly popular with conservative grassroots voters suggests that it will take far more than a courtroom display to restore the truth about 2020.

    And the GOP will likely be looking in the rearview mirror for some time to come.

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  • The viral new ‘Drake’ and ‘Weeknd’ song is not what it seems | CNN Business

    The viral new ‘Drake’ and ‘Weeknd’ song is not what it seems | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    One of the buzziest songs recently circulating on TikTok and climbing the Spotify charts featured the familiar voices of best-selling artists Drake and the Weeknd. But there’s a twist: Drake and the Weeknd appear to have had nothing to do with it.

    The viral track, “Heart on my Sleeve,” comes from an anonymous TikTok user named Ghostwriter977, who claims to have used artificial intelligence to generate the voices of Drake and the Weeknd for the track.

    “I was a ghostwriter for years and got paid close to nothing just for major labels to profit,” Ghostwriter977 wrote in the video comments. “The future is here.”

    “Heart on my Sleeve” racked up more than 11 million views across several videos in just a few days and was streamed on Spotify hundreds of thousands of times. The original TikTok video has seemingly been taken down, and the song has since been removed from streaming services including YouTube, Apple Music and Spotify. (TikTok, YouTube, Apple and Spotify did not respond to a request for comment.)

    The exact origin of the song remains unclear, and some have suggested it could be a publicity stunt. But the stunning traction for “Heart on my Sleeve” may only add to the anxiety inside the music industry as it goes on offense against the possible threat posed by a new crop of increasingly powerful AI tools on the market.

    Universal Music Group, the music label that represents Drake, The Weeknd and numerous other superstars, sent urgent letters in April to streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple Music, asking them to block AI platforms from training on the melodies and lyrics of their copywritten songs.

    “The training of generative AI using our artists’ music — which represents both a breach of our agreements and a violation of copyright law as well as the availability of infringing content created with generative AI on digital service providers – begs the question as to which side of history all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on: the side of artists, fans and human creative expression, or on the side of deep fakes, fraud and denying artists their due compensation,” the company said in a statement this week to CNN.

    The record label said platforms have “a fundamental legal and ethical responsibility to prevent the use of their services in ways that harm artists.”

    But attempting to crack down on AI-generated music may pose a unique challenge. The legal landscape for AI work remains unclear, the tools to create it are widely accessible and social media makes it easier than ever to distribute it.

    AI-generated music is not new. Taryn Southern’s debut song “Break Free,” which was composed and produced with AI, hit the Top 100 radio charts back in 2018, and VAVA, an AI music artist (i.e. not a human), currently has a single out in Thailand.

    But a new crop of AI tools have made it easier than ever to quickly generate convincing images, audio, video and written work. Some services such as Boomy specifically leverage generative AI to make music creation more accessible.

    There’s little known about who is behind the Ghostwriter977 account, or which tools the creator used to make the track. The user did not respond to a CNN request for comment.

    In the bio section of the user’s TikTok account, a link directs users to a page on Laylo, a website where fans can sign up to get notifications from artists when new songs are dropped or merchandise and tickets become available. The company told CNN the account likely registered to build up its fan base and brought in “tens of thousands” of signups in the past few days.

    Laylo CEO Alec Ellin denied that the company was behind the viral track as some have speculated, but Ellin told CNN whoever did make it was “clearly a really savvy creator” and called it “a perfect example of the power of using Laylo to own your audience.”

    Michael Inouye, an analyst at ABI Research, said “Heart on my Sleeve” could have been made in several ways depending on the sophistication of the AI and level of musical talent.

    “If music artists were involved, they could create the background music and the lyrics, and then the AI model could be trained with content from Drake and The Weekend to replicate their voices and singing styles,” he said. “AI could also have generated most of the song, lyrics and replicated the artists again based on the training data set and any prompts given to direct the AI model.”

    He added that part of this fascination and virality of the song comes from “just how good AI has gotten at creating content, which includes replicating famous people.”

    Roberto Nickson, who is building an AI platform to help boost productivity and work flow, recently posted a video on Twitter showing how easy it is to record a verse and train an AI model to replace his vocals. He used the artist formerly known as Kanye West as an example.

    “The results will blow your mind,” he said. “You’re going to be listening to songs by your favorite artist that are completely indistinguishable and you’re not going to know if it’s them or not.”

    Although the entertainment industry has seen these issues coming, regulations are lagging behind the rapid pace of AI development.

    Audrey Benoualid, an entertainment lawyer based in Los Angeles, said one could argue “Heart On My Sleeve” does not infringe copyright as it appears to be an “original” composition.

    “Ghostwriter also publicized that Drake and The Weeknd were not involved in the making of the song, which could protect them from a ‘passing off’ claim, where profits are generated as consumers are misled into believing the song is actually a Drake-Weeknd collaboration,” she said in an email to CNN.

    However, Benoualid added, machine learning and generative AI programs may also be found to infringe copyright in existing works, either by making copies of those works to train the AI or by generating outputs that are substantially similar to those existing works. “Major labels would undoubtedly, and have already begun to, argue that their copyrights (and their artists’ intellectual property rights) are being infringed,” she said.

    Michael Nash, an executive VP at Universal Music Group, recently wrote in an op-ed that AI music is “diluting the market, making original creations harder to find, and violating artists’ legal rights to compensation from their work.”

    No regulations exist that dictate on what AI can and cannot train. But last month, in response to individuals looking to seek copyright for AI-generated works, the US Copyright Office released new guidance around how to register literary, musical, and artistic works made with AI.

    The copyright will be determined on a case-by-case basis, the guidance continued, based on how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final piece or work. The US Copyright Office announced it will also be seeking public input on how the law should apply to copywritten works the AI trains on, and how the office should treat those works.

    “AI and copyright law and the rights of musicians and labels have crashed into one another (once again), and it will take time for the dust to settle,” Benoualid said. “The landscape is anything but clear at the moment.”

    Inouye said if AI generated content becomes associated with famous individuals in a negative way that could be grounds for a lawsuit to not only take content down but to cease and desist their operations and potentially seek damage.

    “On the flip side, if the content were to be popular and the creator were to make revenue off of the artists’ image or likeness then again the artists could similarly request the content to be taken down and potentially sue for any monetary gains,” he said.

    But for now, concerned parties may be forced to play whack-a-mole. While services like Spotify pulled “Heart on my Sleeve,” versions of it appeared to continue circulating as of Tuesday on other online platforms.

    Even a song made with artificial intelligence may find real staying power online.

    – CNN’s Vanessa Yurkevich contributed to this report.

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  • Elizabeth Holmes reports to prison | CNN Business

    Elizabeth Holmes reports to prison | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Elizabeth Holmes reported to prison on Tuesday, capping off a stunning downfall for the disgraced founder of failed blood testing startup Theranos.

    Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison last November, after she was convicted months earlier on multiple charges of defrauding investors while running the now-defunct startup.

    Her request to remain free on bail while she fights to overturn her conviction was denied by an appellate court earlier this month. Judge Edward Davila, who presided over her trial, ordered Holmes to turn herself in to the Bureau of Prisons by May 30 to begin serving her sentence.

    Holmes arrived Tuesday at Federal Prison Camp Bryan in southern Texas, a minimum security federal prison camp that is approximately 100 miles from Houston, where she grew up before moving to California to attend Stanford.

    “We can confirm Elizabeth Holmes has arrived at the Federal Prison Camp (FPC) Bryan in Bryan, Texas, and is in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons,” a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons said in a statement provided to CNN.

    Her ex-boyfriend and former Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani was also convicted of fraud, and reported to prison in California last month to begin serving out his sentence.

    Holmes was once an icon in the tech world, serving as a posterchild for the limitless ambitions and potential of Silicon Valley. Now, she and Balwani are the rare tech executives tried for, and convicted on, fraud charges.

    Holmes dropped out of Stanford at the age of 19 to focus full-time on Theranos, a startup that claimed to have invented technology that could accurately test for a range of conditions using just a few drops of blood. Theranos raised $945 million from an impressive list of investors and was valued at some $9 billion at its peak – making Holmes a paper billionaire. She graced magazine covers and engaged in public speaking events wearing a black turtleneck that invited comparisons to the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

    Her company began to unravel after a Wall Street Journal investigation in 2015 reported that Theranos had only ever performed roughly a dozen of the hundreds of tests it offered using its proprietary technology, and with questionable accuracy. It also came to light that Theranos was relying on third-party manufactured devices from traditional blood testing companies rather than its own technology.

    Theranos ultimately dissolved in September 2018.

    Dawn breaks at the Federal Prison Camp where Elizabeth Holmes, the former founder and CEO of Theranos, is expected to arrive to begin her 11 year sentence for fraud relating to the defunct company Tuesday, May 30, 2023, in Bryan, Texas.

    Holmes and Balwani were first indicted together nearly five years ago on the same 12 criminal charges. Their trials were severed after Holmes indicated she intended to accuse Balwani of sexually, emotionally and psychologically abusing her throughout their decade-long relationship, which coincided with her time running the company. (Balwani’s attorneys have denied her claims.)

    This month, Davila ordered Holmes and Balwani to pay restitution of roughly $452 million to victims of their crimes.

    Before her sentencing was announced in November, a tearful Holmes spoke to the court in San Jose, California.

    “I loved Theranos. It was my life’s work,” she said. “The people I tried to get involved with Theranos were the people I loved and respected the most. I am devastated by my failings.”

    She went on to apologize to the employees, investors and patients of Theranos.

    “I’m so, so sorry. I gave everything I had to build our company and to save our company,” she said. “I regret my failings with every cell in my body.”

    – CNN’s Brad Parks contributed to this report.

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  • Elizabeth Holmes objects to government requesting she pay $250 a month to victims after prison | CNN Business

    Elizabeth Holmes objects to government requesting she pay $250 a month to victims after prison | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced former Theranos CEO, has “limited financial means” and should not be forced to pay $250 a month to victims of her crimes after she is released from prison, her lawyers argued in a court filing on Monday.

    The move from Holmes’ attorneys comes after federal prosecutors said in a separate filing last week that “clerical errors” had resulted in no payment schedule being set for Holmes’ restitution after she is released from prison. Holmes and former Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were previously ordered to pay $452 million in restitution to victims of their crimes.

    Holmes reported to prison late last month in Texas to serve out her more than 11-year sentence. She was convicted early last year on multiple charges of defrauding investors while running the failed blood-testing startup Theranos.

    Federal prosecutors asked that once Holmes is on supervised released, criminal monetary penalties should be paid monthly in the amount of $250, or at least 10% of her wages, whichever is greater.

    In the latest filing, Holmes’ attorneys argued “there is no basis in the record for the payment structure in the government’s request,” but did not object to her being asked to start paying $25 per quarter as part of her restitution while she is in prison.

    Holmes, once a paper billionaire, could hold a job at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, with hourly wages ranging from $0.12 to $1.15, according to the prison’s handbook.

    Theranos once claimed to have invented technology that could test for a range of conditions using a few drops of blood. It was valued at some $9 billion at its peak and raised money from a long list of prominent investors. Then it all began to unravel after a damning Wall Street Journal report cast doubt on the company’s claims.

    As part of the original restitution order, some $125 million is owed to media mogul Rupert Murdoch, as well as millions in payments to other Theranos investors.

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  • New US Army regulation could result in more soldiers failing body fat assessments | CNN Politics

    New US Army regulation could result in more soldiers failing body fat assessments | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    As the US Army moves to a new way to measure soldiers’ body fat, officials acknowledged Wednesday that some soldiers who had previously passed under the old regulations may now fail under the new.

    The Army is changing its tape test – a method to measure soldiers’ body fat by taking the circumference of various parts of a soldier’s body with a measuring tape. The tape test, an often-dreaded practice among soldiers, is used when soldiers’ weights do not fall within the mandated body mass index screening table.

    Previously, men were taped around their neck and abdomen, while women were taped around their neck, waist, and hips. Now, all soldiers regardless of gender will be taped in one area – around the navel – to calculate their body fat.

    Many soldiers had cheered the Army’s efforts to update its Body Composition Program when the study started in 2021.

    But Holly McClung, a lead researcher on the Army’s Body Composition Study that resulted in the change, told reporters Wednesday that more soldiers will fail the new test.

    Army data provided to CNN showed that 34% of people were passing the previous version of the tape test when they should have failed. The new test is expected to align with the regulations and lead to more failures, the data said.

    The change is a potential concern considering that soldiers who fail to meet the weight standards can be separated from the service, after several months of attempting to get within their weight standard.

    Asked about concerns over more soldiers potentially failing because of the updated body composition study, Sgt. Maj. Christopher Stevens, the senior enlisted leader of the Army’s personnel office, told reporters on Wednesday that the Army is “putting everything on the table to really look at how we can ensure that we continue to assess and retain quality.”

    The tape test practice has long been criticized as outdated and inaccurate, particularly as the Army shifted to a new fitness test that introduced more weightlifting than the old test, sparking concerns that the body assessment wouldn’t account for gaining muscle mass.

    The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that the measurement of waist circumference can help predict who may be at higher risk of developing obesity-related health problems like diabetes and heart disease, but it is not a diagnostic tool to determine body fatness or health.

    Indeed, the Army said in March that soldiers “with a high volume of lean muscle mass were still at risk of failing the body fat assessment.” So the Army made an exemption for soldiers who scored a 540 out of 600 total points on the Army Combat Fitness Test, saying that those soldiers would not need to be taped. The exemption requires a minimum of 80 out of 100 points earned in each of the six fitness tests.

    “As soldiers leverage all domains of Holistic Health and Fitness and strive to reach their maximum potential, our policies should encourage their progress, not constrain It,” Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Grinston said at the time.

    McClung said Wednesday that efforts by the Army to link data of body composition to soldiers’ performance is “kind of groundbreaking.”

    “And what we hope is that over years to come, maybe the bar will get heightened and that it won’t be a 540 it’ll be a 550, it’ll be a continuous moving benchmark because the soldiers will become more fit,” she said.

    For the next year, soldiers will have the option of using the previous measuring methods if they fail the tape test under the new regulations. If a soldier fails both, they have the option of requesting another assessment using specific machines that use X-ray or other methods to measure body fat.

    Soldiers who still weigh outside the required standard for their gender and height are enrolled in the Army Body Composition Program, which is meant to help them lose weight and get back within standards. Army regulations say they will be provided “exercise guidance” by a fitness trainer in the unit and meet with a registered dietitian.

    Soldiers who fail to get within standards after six months can be separated from the service.

    McClung said Wednesday that those who had been inaccurately passing would not be “necessarily separated from the Army.”

    “We want to help them,” she said, “we want to put them on a health promotion track, work with some dietitians and some trainers, and bring them up to standards.”

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  • Biden to allow US to share evidence of Russian war crimes with International Criminal Court | CNN Politics

    Biden to allow US to share evidence of Russian war crimes with International Criminal Court | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden has decided to allow the US to cooperate with the International Criminal Court’s investigation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, two US officials and a source familiar with the matter told CNN.

    The decision comes after months of internal debate and marks a historic shift, as it would be the first time the US has agreed to share evidence with the court as part of a criminal probe into a country that is not a member of the ICC. Neither the US nor Russia are members of the court.

    “It could be deeply consequential,” one of the sources said, adding that the US government now has “a clear green light” to share information and evidence with the ICC.

    What information the US shares will ultimately depend on what the ICC prosecutor requests for the investigations, the source explained.

    A National Security Council spokesperson would not comment directly on the decision, but said in a statement that Biden “has been clear: there needs to be accountability for the perpetrators and enablers of war crimes and other atrocities in Ukraine.”

    “We have been clear that we support a range of international mechanisms to identify and hold accountable those responsible, including through the Office of the Ukraine Prosecutor General, the Joint Investigative Team through Eurojust, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission, the Expert Missions established under the OSCE’s ‘Moscow Mechanism,’ and the International Criminal Court among others,” the spokesperson added.

    The New York Times first reported on Biden’s order.

    Over the course of the war, Biden administration officials have obtained evidence of alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine, through intelligence gathering mechanisms among other channels, officials told CNN. But the administration debated for months internally over whether to share that evidence with the court, as officials grappled with the possibility that doing so could set a precedent that could one day be used against the United States, officials explained.

    The Pentagon was the most concerned about cooperating with the court, officials said, and worried that doing so might set a precedent for the ICC to investigate alleged war crimes carried out by Americans in Iraq. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin raised his concerns with the president earlier this year, but told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer earlier this month that the Defense Department would cooperate with whatever policy decision was made by the president.

    The NSC spokesperson noted that the US has already “deployed teams of international investigators and prosecutors to assist Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General in documenting, preserving, and preparing war crimes cases for prosecution, and the Department of Justice has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding to cooperate with Ukraine on investigations and prosecutions of war crimes committed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

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  • Trump legal team will look to challenge ‘every potential issue’ once indictment is unsealed | CNN Politics

    Trump legal team will look to challenge ‘every potential issue’ once indictment is unsealed | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Donald Trump’s legal team will look to challenge “every potential issue” in his indictment once the charges are unsealed, an attorney for the former president said Sunday.

    “We’re not doing anything at the arraignment because that would be showmanship and nothing more because we haven’t even seen the indictment yet. We will take the indictment, we will dissect it, the team will look at every – every – potential issue that we will be able to challenge and we will challenge it,” Joe Tacopina told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

    Tacopina and other Trump lawyers have done several TV interviews in anticipation of the former President’s first appearance in court Tuesday, when he will learn the charges that the Manhattan grand jury has approved against him.

    At times, the lawyers have vowed to ask for the charges to be dismissed. But the full slate of charges still aren’t known. And crucially, a judge will ultimately determine if the law is sound enough for the case to move forward to trial.

    Former Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance said in an interview with NBC News on Sunday, “We can speculate on what evidence we think they may or may not have, but even with the indictment published, we really will not know what the district attorney’s evidence is and what they would present at trial.”

    Vance’s team investigated the case but did not charge it, leaving it under the purview of his successor, Alvin Bragg.

    Trump faces more than 30 counts related to business fraud in the indictment. The investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office began when Trump was still in the White House and relates to a $130,000 payment made by his then-personal attorney Michael Cohen to adult film star Stormy Daniels in late October 2016, days before the presidential election, to silence her from going public about an alleged affair with Trump a decade earlier.

    Trump has denied the affair.

    The Trump team’s court strategy could center around challenging the case because it may rely on business record entries that prosecutors tie to hush money payments to Daniels seven years ago, beyond the statute of limitations for a criminal case.

    Tacopina suggested in TV interviews Sunday that the statute of limitations may be passed, and said the Trump businesses didn’t make false entries.

    “They’re not false entries. But assuming they were, they’re misdemeanors way beyond the statute of limitations, so they had to cobble them together to try and get a felony,” he said.

    Tacopina on Sunday also said a request to move the case to a different New York City borough isn’t on the table yet for Trump’s legal team.

    “There’s been no discussion of that whatsoever,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in another interview. “It’s way too premature to start worrying about venue changes until we really see the indictment and grapple with the legal issues.”

    CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct Cy Vance’s comments to NBC.

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  • READ: Trump indictment and statement of facts related to hush money payment | CNN Politics

    READ: Trump indictment and statement of facts related to hush money payment | CNN Politics

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    Former President Donald Trump has been charged with 34 criminal counts in an indictment unsealed Tuesday.
    Read the indictment here.

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