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  • Hunter Biden’s lawyers argue deal to resolve felony gun charge is still ‘valid and binding’ despite collapse of plea talks | CNN Politics

    Hunter Biden’s lawyers argue deal to resolve felony gun charge is still ‘valid and binding’ despite collapse of plea talks | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Hunter Biden’s lawyers said in a court filing Sunday that they believe their deal with the Justice Department to resolve a felony gun charge is still “valid and binding,” though it’s unclear if the newly appointed special counsel agrees with their interpretation.

    The filing comes two days after David Weiss, the Trump-appointed US attorney investigating the president’s son, was granted special counsel status following a breakdown in plea talks to resolve tax and gun charges. By naming Weiss as a special counsel, Attorney General Merrick Garland gave him more powers than a typical US attorney and further independence from the Justice Department as he embarks on an unprecedented potential trial against the son of the sitting president, and as Republicans claim the department is politicized.

    The parties had previously struck two deals amid a sprawling Justice Department investigation: A “plea agreement” where Biden would plead guilty to two federal tax misdemeanors, and a “diversion agreement” where prosecutors would drop a felony gun charge in two years if he passed drug tests and stayed out of legal trouble.

    The probe had appeared to reach its conclusion when a plea deal was announced in June. But the deal dramatically unraveled in court last month under scrutiny from the federal judge overseeing the case, and the resumed negotiations collapsed last week.

    Lawyers for Biden argued in the filing Sunday that Weiss decided “on Friday to renege on the previously agreed-upon Plea Agreement,” referring to the tax deal, after negotiations fell apart earlier in the week.

    But in their view, the gun deal was fully “executed” when it was signed by both parties and presented to a federal judge at a court hearing last month in Delaware. A copy of the deal that was previously posted to the docket was signed by Biden, his attorney Chris Clark and federal prosecutor Leo Wise – but the line for a signature from a probation officer is blank.

    “The parties have a valid and binding bilateral Diversion Agreement,” Hunter Biden’s lawyers wrote to the judge, referring to the gun deal, and adding that their client “intends to abide by the terms of the Diversion Agreement.”

    They also said that it was the prosecutors – not them – who crafted the two intertwining agreements that District Judge Maryellen Noreika balked at last month’s court hearing, which ended after she said she wasn’t ready to accept the deals.

    Earlier Sunday, a lawyer for Biden said a trial is “not inevitable,” days after the Trump-appointed US attorney investigating the president’s son was granted special counsel status following a breakdown in plea talks to resolve tax and gun charges.

    “We were trying to avoid one all along and so were the prosecutors who came forward to us and we’re the ones to say: ‘Can there be a resolution short of a prosecution?’ So they wanted it and maybe they still do want it,” Abbe Lowell, Biden’s attorney, told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

    Lowell defended Hunter Biden’s defense attorneys, placing the blame on federal prosecutors for the deal falling through. “What group of experienced defense lawyers would allow their client to plead guilty to a misdemeanor on a Monday, keeping in mind that they knew that there could be a felony charge on a Wednesday? That wouldn’t happen,” he said.

    Lowell described President Joe Biden as “nothing other than a loving father,” and said the evidence to indict the president in his son’s potential crimes “doesn’t exist.”

    The gun charge revolves around a firearm that Hunter Biden purchased in 2018 – he lied on a federal form when he swore that he was not using, and was not addicted to, illegal drugs. The tax offenses stem from Hunter Biden repeatedly missing IRS deadlines to pay his taxes on time, though he eventually paid roughly $2 million to settle his debts, along with penalties and interest.

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and top Republicans on Capitol Hill were swift to criticize Garland’s decision to grant Weiss special counsel status and vowed to continue their own investigations.

    New York Rep. Dan Goldman, a member of the Democratic Oversight Committee, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” Sunday that “if Hunter Biden has committed crimes, he should be charged with them. I’m a Democrat saying that.”

    “You don’t hear any currently elected Republican saying that, if Donald Trump committed crimes, he should be charged with them and held accountable. And that’s a critical distinction that the public needs to understand,” he added.

    “And this is just another reflection of the true independence of this Department of Justice. A Trump-appointed U.S. attorney is investigating the president’s son. That is pretty remarkable. And you don’t hear from the other side a respect for the fact that Joe Biden has stayed out of this investigation,” Goldman said.

    Republican presidential candidate Will Hurd, a former Texas congressman, told Tapper in a separate interview on “State of the Union” that “the immediate family of a president should not be allowed to be lobbyists or consultants when their father or their husband is the president of the United States.”

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Judge Chutkan temporarily freezes Trump gag order in 2020 election subversion case | CNN Politics

    Judge Chutkan temporarily freezes Trump gag order in 2020 election subversion case | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    US District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Friday temporarily froze the gag order she issued on Donald Trump in the former president’s federal 2020 election subversion criminal case.

    In a brief order, Chutkan, who is overseeing the case against Trump in Washington, DC, said she was issuing the administrative stay of the gag order entered earlier this week to give the parties more time to brief her on the former president’s request to pause the order while his appeal of it plays out.

    Chutkan also said that the Justice Department has until Wednesday to respond to Trump’s request for a longer pause on the gag order and that Trump would have until the following Saturday to reply to the government’s filing.

    Trump has already appealed the gag order to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and in a 33-page filing on Friday, his attorneys urged Chutkan to pause the order while that appeal plays out.

    The pause comes days after Chutkan presided over a contentious hearing where Trump’s attorneys and federal prosecutors clashed over how Trump would be able to discuss special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution against him on the campaign trail.

    “I understand that you have a message you want to get out,” Chutkan said at the time. “I do not need to hear any campaign rhetoric in my court.”

    The gag order, which was limited in scope, had prohibited Trump from making certain types of statements about the special counsel’s team or potential witnesses, including any comments that directly targeted court personnel, potential witnesses or the special counsel and his staff.

    However, the gag order did not prevent Trump from making disparaging comments about Washington, DC, where the trial is slated to take place next year. Trump was allowed to make certain comments about the Justice Department at large. Chutkan had specified that Trump “can certainly state that he is being unfairly prosecuted.”

    Meanwhile on Friday, the former president was fined $5,000 by a New York judge presiding over his civil fraud trial for violating another gag order that bars him from speaking about any members of the court staff.

    Judge Arthur Engoron had issued the order in that case earlier this month after Trump posted about the judge’s clerk on Truth Social.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Special counsel says Hunter Biden’s gun deal is ‘withdrawn’ and invalid | CNN Politics

    Special counsel says Hunter Biden’s gun deal is ‘withdrawn’ and invalid | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Special counsel David Weiss said the deal his team previously reached with Hunter Biden to resolve a felony gun possession charge was never approved by a probation officer and is not binding.

    The Justice Department prosecutors said in a court filing on Tuesday that for the “diversion agreement” to be legally binding, it would have had to be signed by a probation officer after last month’s court hearing in Delaware.

    They said the official who needed to sign it was Margaret Bray, the chief United States probation officer for the District of Delaware.

    “In sum, because Ms. Bray, acting in her capacity as the Chief United States Probation Officer, did not approve the now-withdrawn diversion agreement, it never went into effect and, therefore, none of its terms are binding on either party,” prosecutors wrote.

    Biden’s lawyers on Sunday said they believed an agreement to resolve a felony gun possession charge was “valid and binding.”

    The filing states that negotiations to amend the plea deal continued after the court hearing on July 26 when a federal judge declined to accept a plea agreement on two tax charges.

    Biden’s team proposed changes, which prosecutors “did not believe they were in the best interests of the United States” and counter proposed. Biden’s team rejected those changes leading to prosecutors informing the judge they had reached an impasse.

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  • Four takeaways from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk | CNN Business

    Four takeaways from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    “You’ll never be successful,” Errol Musk in 1989 told his 17-year-old son Elon, who was then preparing to fly from South Africa to Canada to find relatives and a college education.

    That’s one of the scenes Walter Isaacson paints in his 670-page biography of Elon Musk, who is now the richest person who ever lived. The biography allows readers new glimpses into the private life of the entrepreneur who popularized electric vehicles for the masses and landed rocket boosters hurtling back to Earth so they could be reused.

    But Musk’s public statements and actions have become increasingly unhinged, filing and threatening lawsuits against nonprofits that fight hate speech and allowing some of the internet’s worst actors to regain their platforms.

    Isaacson portrays Musk as a restless genius with a turbulent upbringing on the cusp of launching a new AI company along with his five other companies.

    Musk allowed Isaacson to shadow him for two years but exercised no control over the biography’s contents, the author said.

    Here are four key takeaways.

    Musk’s upbringing and father haunt him

    Isaacson’s book attributes much of Musk’s drive to his upbringing. He recounts the emotional scars inflicted on Musk by his father, which, Isaacson writes, caused Musk to become “a tough yet vulnerable man-child with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.”

    Musk decided to live with his father from age 10 to 17, enduring what Musk and others describe as occasional but regular verbal taunts and abuse. Musk’s sister, Tosca, said Errol would sometimes lecture his children for hours, “calling you worthless, pathetic, making scarring and evil comments, not allowing you to leave.”

    Elon Musk became estranged from his father, though he has occasionally supported his father financially. In a 2022 email sent to Elon Musk on Father’s Day, Errol Musk said he was freezing and lacking electricity, asking his son for money.

    In the letter, Errol made racist comments about Black leaders in South Africa. “With no Whites here, the Blacks will go back to the trees,” he wrote.

    Elon Musk has said that he opposes racism and discrimination, but hate speech has flourished on X, formerly known as Twitter, since he purchased it 11 months ago, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Musk threatened to sue the ADL for defamation last week, arguing that the nonprofit’s statements have caused his company to lose significant advertising revenue.

    Isaacson reported that Errol, in other emails, denounced Covid as “a lie” and attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United States’ former top infectious disease expert who played a prominent role in the government’s fight against the pandemic.

    Elon Musk, similarly, has criticized Fauci and raised many questions about public health policy during the pandemic. But he has said he supports vaccination, even if he doesn’t believe the shots should be mandated.

    Musk’s fluid family and obsession with population

    Musk has a fluid mix of girlfriends, ex-wives, ex-girlfriends and significant others, and he has many children with multiple women. Isaacson’s book revealed Musk had a third child (Techno Mechanicus) with the musician Grimes in 2022, and Musk confirmed the revelation Sunday.

    Musk has frequently stated that humans must be a multiplanetary species, warning space exploration will ensure the future of humanity. He similarly has spoken numerous times that people need to have more children.

    “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” Musk said last year.

    Musk has referred to his desire to increase the global population as an explanation for his unique family situation.

    The book reports that Musk encouraged employees such as Shivon Zilis, a top operations officer at his Neuralink company, to have many children. “He feared that declining birthrates were a threat to the long-term survival of human consciousness,” Isaacson writes.

    Although the book presents their relationship as a platonic work friendship, Musk volunteered to donate sperm to Zilis. She agreed and had twins in 2021 via in vitro fertilization; she did not tell people who the biological father was.

    Zilis and Grimes were friendly, but Musk did not tell Grimes about the twins, according to the book.

    Musk asked Zilis if her twins might like to take his last name. Isaacson reports that Grimes was upset in 2022 when she learned the news that Musk had fathered children with Zilis.

    “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” Musk tweeted at the time, trying to defuse the tension. “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”

    One of Musk’s children, Jenna, often criticized her father’s wealth specifically and capitalism broadly. In 2022, she disowned her father, which Isaacson reports saddened Musk.

    Isaacson reports that Musk’s fractured relationship with Jenna, who is trans, partly led to Musk’s rightward turn toward libertarianism and questioning what he considers the “woke-mind-virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman.”

    Musk has called into question the use of alternate gender pronouns and made numerous statements some critics consider to be anti-trans.

    “I absolutely support trans, but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare,” Musk posted in 2020.

    But in December 2020 he also posted a tweet, since deleted, that said “when you put he/him in your bio” alongside a drawing of an 18th century soldier rubbing blood on his face in front of a pile of dead bodies and wearing a cap that read “I love to oppress.”

    Late last year, he tweeted: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”

    The purchase of his favorite social media platform, gutting the staff and tinkering with policies and branding have taken time and resources away from Musk’s other companies and projects, Isaacson reports.

    “I’ve got a bad habit of biting off more than I can chew,” Musk told Isaacson at one point.

    After a protracted legal battle over his decision to purchase Twitter, Musk said he regained his enthusiasm for taking over the company when he realized that he wanted to prevent a world where people silo off into their own echo chambers and would prefer a world of civil discourse.

    But Isaacson notes “he would end up undermining that important mission with statements and tweets that ended up chasing off progressives and mainstream media types to other social networks.”

    Musk team members, such as his business manager Jared Birchall, his lawyer Alex Spiro and his brother Kimbal, sometimes try to restrain Musk from sending text messages or tweets that could create legal or economic peril, according to the book. Some friends convinced him to place his phone in a hotel safe overnight on one occasion, before Musk summoned hotel security to open the safe for him.

    During Christmas in 2022 with his brother, Kimbal warned Elon about how fast he was making enemies. “It’s like the days of high school, when you kept getting beaten up,” he said. Kimbal stopped following Elon on Twitter after his brother’s tweets about Fauci and other conspiracies. “Stop falling for weird s—.”

    Are robocars, an AI company and a robot called Optimus on tap?

    Musk continues moving forward on new engineering projects. Since 2021, Musk has been working on a “humanoid” robot called Optimus that walks on two legs instead of like four-legged robots coming from other labs. He unveiled an early version of the Optimus robot in September of 2022. Musk told engineers that humanoid robots will “uncork the economy to quasi-infinite levels,” according to Isaacson, by doing jobs humans find dangerous or repetitive.

    Some of Musk’s top engineers are also working on a “robotaxi,” a driverless vehicle that shows up like an Uber. This past summer, he spent hours each week preparing new factory designs in Texas to produce the next-generation Tesla cars that would look similar to Tesla’s cybertruck.

    Musk is also starting his own AI company called X.AI, which he told Isaacson will compete with Google, Microsoft and other companies surging ahead in the past year with public AI projects. Musk had co-founded OpenAi with Sam Altman in 2015 and contributed $100 million to the non-profit. He became angry when Altman converted the project into a for-profit. Musk also ended a friendship with Larry Page when the two disagreed on AI. According to the book, Musk believes he has a better vision for AI and humanity and thinks the data he owns from Tesla and Twitter will be an asset to his next AI plans.

    “Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged?” Isaacson asks in the last chapter.

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  • Two more Trump co-defendants plead guilty. What next? | CNN Politics

    Two more Trump co-defendants plead guilty. What next? | CNN Politics

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



    CNN
     — 

    With the frightening Israel-Hamas war and a major spoke of the US government – the House of Representatives – unsolvably speakerless and in a state of paralysis, a pair of guilty pleas in a Georgia courtroom almost feels like Page 2 news.

    But these particular guilty pleas this week come from two of former President Donald Trump’s co-defendants, the second and third such admissions of guilt in the criminal case brought against him for trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election result.

    • Sidney Powell, a public face of Trump’s attempts to challenge the election results in 2020 and 2021, pleaded guilty Thursday. The former Trump attorney will avoid jail time but agreed to testify as a witness and pleaded guilty to six misdemeanors for conspiracy to commit intentional interference, downgraded from felony charges she had faced.
    • Kenneth Chesebro, a less public face of the effort, was an attorney who helped engineer the fake electors plot. He pleaded guilty Friday to a single felony, conspiracy to commit filing false documents. He’s also likely to avoid jail time.
    • Scott Hall, a bail bondsman, pleaded guilty last month after being accused of conspiring to unlawfully access voter data and ballot-counting machines at the Coffee County election office on January 7, 2021.

    That leaves Trump and 15 other co-defendants awaiting trial in the case. Trial dates have not been set, and Trump has pleaded not guilty.

    Along with the three other upcoming criminal trials in New York, Washington, DC, and Florida and the ongoing civil trial in New York, the Georgia proceedings are part of a complicated web of legal problems percolating beneath the 2024 election.

    Chesebro admitted to entering into a conspiracy specifically with Trump to create a slate of fake electors in Georgia, along with two other attorneys, Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.

    CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams noted that the Georgia case, brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, has had its detractors, because it included 18 co-defendants along with Trump, which could make it seem politically motivated.

    But guilty pleas, Williams said, are now evidence that crimes were committed as Trump tried to make Joe Biden’s 2020 victory disappear.

    “This ought to pour cold water on the notion that this was just a partisan witch hunt to target the president and his allies,” Williams told Jim Sciutto on CNN Max.

    CNN’s report on his guilty plea notes that “Chesebro acknowledged in the plea that he ‘created and distributed false Electoral College documents’ to Trump operatives in Georgia and other states, and that he worked ‘in coordination with’ the Trump campaign.”

    All but one charge against Chesebro was dropped, and he has agreed to testify at trial.

    Just because Powell’s plea agreement did not mention Trump does not mean she might not be asked about him under oath, as CNN’s Marshall Cohen notes:

    Most notably, Powell attended a White House meeting on December 18, 2020, where some of Trump’s most extreme supporters encouraged him to name her as a special counsel to investigate supposed voter fraud, to consider declaring martial law and to sign executive orders that would direct the military to seize voting machines.

    Cohen adds that whatever Powell tells Georgia prosecutors could be used in the federal election subversion case brought by special counsel Jack Smith.

    One gag order was issued by Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the federal 2020 election subversion case in Washington, DC. Trump is appealing, arguing she “took away my right to speak,” and on Friday Chutkan put a temporary freeze on the order.

    Chutkan has been insistent that the federal case get underway on schedule, in March, at the pinnacle of primary season.

    Trump made those comments about his freedom of speech as he entered a courtroom in New York, where he faces a civil fraud trial brought by the state attorney general. He is also under a gag order in that case, and that judge, Arthur Engoron, fined Trump $5,000 on Friday for violating the gag order after a social media post targeting a court employee was left up on Trump’s campaign website.

    Engoron said future violations could even ultimately lead him to imprison Trump.

    The court developments are an important reminder that as Trump cruises toward the Republican presidential nomination, at least according to public opinion polls, he is also in very real legal peril – something Trump acknowledged, before the gag-order-related threat from Engoron in New York, when the former president talked about the prospect of prison during an event in Clive, Iowa.

    “What they don’t understand is that I am willing to go to jail if that’s what it takes for our country to win and become a democracy again,” Trump said at the rally.

    There is some bizarre irony in the comments since he’s charged in connection with trying to subvert an election, one of the fundamental pillars of democracy.

    Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is among those challenging Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, said on CNN that he doesn’t believe Trump is willing to go to jail.

    “The last place he wants to spend five minutes is in jail,” Christie said. He complained that Trump has failed to appear at Republican presidential debates.

    “Donald Trump doesn’t want any legitimate debate or discussion about his conduct,” Christie said.

    Republicans like Christie are running out of time and opportunity to challenge Trump. Another debate is scheduled for November 8 in Miami, but Christie has not yet qualified. NBC is sponsoring the debate, along with the right-wing outlets Salem Radio Network and Rumble.

    Oliver Darcy, CNN’s senior media reporter, argues the arrangement creates strange bedfellows.

    “It’s no surprise that the GOP, which veered sharply to the right during Donald Trump’s presidency, would select Salem and Rumble as partners,” Darcy writes, “but it is striking that NBC News would agree to link arms with such organizations.”

    Anti-Trump Republicans want some of the candidates challenging him to drop out of the race so that the opposition can coalesce around an individual alternative. The debate stage November 8 is expected to be much smaller, perhaps with only a few people.

    But don’t expect the former president to show. Trump is planning a rally nearby to draw attention away from his rivals.

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  • Here’s what DeSantis, Christie and other Trump 2024 rivals are saying about the Georgia indictment | CNN Politics

    Here’s what DeSantis, Christie and other Trump 2024 rivals are saying about the Georgia indictment | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Donald Trump’s biggest detractors in the 2024 Republican presidential race offered mixed reactions Tuesday to the former president’s indictment by a Georgia grand jury.

    Trump has remained defiant in the face of the new charges against him and 18 others stemming from their efforts to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat. He now faces four separate indictments at the same time that he’s running for president as the front-runner for the GOP nomination.

    Two rivals argued that the charges Trump faces in Fulton County are similar to the election interference charges brought by federal special counsel Jack Smith in Washington, and said the federal case should take precedence.

    Here’s what Trump’s 2024 GOP opponents are saying about the latest indictment:

    Christie told Fox News that he is “uncomfortable” with what he views as an “unnecessary” indictment from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

    “I think that this conduct is essentially covered by the federal indictment,” he said. “I would have less of a problem with this if she decided, ‘OK, I’m not going to charge Donald Trump here, because he has been charged for, essentially this conduct, by Jack Smith.’”

    However, Christie said the Fulton County prosecution of Trump’s close allies, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, was “more defensible” because they “have not been charged at the federal level” like Trump has.

    Christie defended the timing of Willis’ indictment, saying that Trump’s decision to run in 2024 was “not an excuse” for the justice system to stop operating.

    “I think all of these judges in the end will make decisions based upon the reasonable availability of all the witnesses and everyone else,” he said.

    Later, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Christie was asked whether Willis might have brought charges against Trump because he wouldn’t be able to shut down the state case and pardon himself if he is elected president again in 2024, Christie said, “I don’t think that’s the prosecutor’s job. The prosecutor’s job is to look at how do you administer justice in this case.”

    He said Republican voters should ask themselves, “Is someone out on bail in four jurisdictions really our best chance to beat Joe Biden?”

    “Are we really going to continue to act as if this is normal conduct? It’s not,” he said.

    Hutchinson, who has long called for Trump to drop out of the race because of his conduct, said the latest indictment further strengthens his belief that the former president should not be seeking the 2024 GOP nomination.

    But much like Christie, he said he believes Willis may be stepping outside her jurisdiction, given the federal charges Trump faces.

    “Generally, state cases are deferential to the federal cases that have been brought, and I think you can make the case that Georgia should have been deferential because there’s overlap there as well, but it is what it is,” Hutchinson said.

    Another strident Trump critic, Hurd said in a statement that Trump’s latest indictment was “another example of how the former president’s baggage will hand Joe Biden reelection if Trump is the Republican nominee.”

    “This is further evidence that Trump knew he lost the 2020 election and was ready to do anything it took to cling to power,” Hurd said. “It’s time we move beyond dealing with the former president’s baggage. The Republican Party needs a leader who isn’t afraid of bullies like Trump.”

    The tech entrepreneur was sharply critical of the charges Trump faces in Georgia.

    At a NewsNation town hall Monday night, Ramaswamy said he hadn’t read the details of the indictments but painted the multiple investigations into Trump in multiple jurisdictions as an effort to negatively impact the former president’s chances of winning the 2024 election.

    “These are politicized persecutions through prosecution,” Ramaswamy said. “It would be a lot easier for me if Donald Trump were not in this primary, but that is not how I want to win this election. The way we do elections in the United States of America is that we the people – you all – get to decide who governs, not the federal police state.”

    DeSantis, Trump’s top-polling primary rival who has criticized the prosecution of the former president, told New England reporters Tuesday that the Georgia indictment is an example of the “criminalization of politics.”

    “They’re now doing an inordinate amount of resources to try to shoehorn this contest over the 2020 election into a RICO statute, which was really designed to be able to go after organized crime, not necessarily to go after political activity,” the governor told WMUR at a news conference, referring to a racketeering charge brought against Trump. “And so, I think it’s an example of this criminalization of politics. I don’t think that this is something that is good for the country.”

    DeSantis later told reporters in New Hampshire that he thinks Trump is currently leading in the 2024 GOP primary in polls in part because of how Republican voters have responded to the indictments.

    “Clearly, there’s been a change in some of the polling since the Alvin Bragg case was brought,” DeSantis said in reference to the indictment brought by the Manhattan district attorney against Trump related to an alleged hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. “I think that’s just irrefutable.”

    Much like DeSantis, Scott, rather than criticizing Trump’s actions, lambasted the prosecution of the former president.

    “We see the legal system being weaponized against political opponents,” the senator told reporters Tuesday at the Iowa State Fair. “That is un-American and unacceptable.”

    Scott said he hopes to “restore confidence and integrity” to the legal system if he were to become president.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Francis Suarez ends campaign for Republican presidential nomination | CNN Politics

    Francis Suarez ends campaign for Republican presidential nomination | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Miami Mayor Francis Suarez announced Tuesday that he was ending his bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, becoming the first major candidate to do so.

    “While I have decided to suspend my campaign for President, my commitment to making this a better nation for every American remains,” Suarez said in a statement.

    Suarez’s move comes after he failed to fully meet the requirements set by the Republican National Committee to make the first presidential debate in Milwaukee last week. He had told CNN prior to the debate that candidates who do not make the stage should drop out – even if that included himself.

    “I look forward to keeping in touch with the other Republican presidential candidates and doing what I can to make sure our party puts forward a strong nominee who can inspire and unify the country, renew Americans’ trust in our institutions and in each other, and win,” Suarez said Tuesday.

    Suarez launched his long-shot bid for the presidency just over two months ago, in mid-June, urging Republicans to unify and evoking Ronald Reagan’s call for the party to rebuild its “big tent” coalition.

    The son of Cuban immigrants, Suarez was the lone major Hispanic candidate in the Republican primary, which includes two higher-profile fellow Floridians: former President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis.

    “I will continue to amplify the voices of the Hispanic community – the fastest-growing voting group in our country. The Left has taken Hispanics for granted for far too long, and it is no surprise that so many are finding a home in America’s conservative movement,” he said Tuesday.

    Over his short-lived campaign, Suarez acknowledged he did not have the same name recognition as many of his GOP rivals.

    “My opponents have been national figures for many years. I’ve been a national figure for 60 days. So, you know, I’m competing from behind,” Suarez said earlier this month at the Iowa State Fair.

    He ultimately did not meet the polling criteria set by the RNC to make the Milwaukee debate stage, his campaign said. Candidates had to register at least 1% support in three national polls or in two national and two early-state polls that met the RNC’s criteria.

    Suarez said he had met the 40,000 individual donor threshold to qualify for the debate. His campaign employed some unconventional methods to meet that goal, including accepting bitcoin donations, offering $20 gift cards and raffling off tickets for soccer superstar Lionel Messi’s debut at Major League Soccer club Inter Miami. The pro-Suarez super PAC, SOS America, also offered a chance to win a free year of college with a $1 donation.

    Shortly after launching his campaign, Suarez stumbled in an interview on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, indicating that he was unfamiliar with the plight of the Uyghur Muslim ethnic minority in China, whose treatment has been the subject of worldwide condemnation for years.

    The conservative talk radio host asked Suarez if he would be “talking about the Uyghurs in your campaign?”

    Suarez responded, “The what?”

    “The Uyghurs,” Hewitt said, prompting the candidate to ask, “What’s a Uyghur?”

    At the end of the interview, Suarez told Hewitt, “You gave me homework, Hugh. I’ll look at – what was it? What’d you call it, a weeble?”

    In a later statement to CNN, Suarez denied that he had been unaware of the Uyghur situation and the accusations against China of human rights abuses.

    “Of course, I am well aware of the suffering of the Uyghurs in China. They are being enslaved because of their faith. China has a deplorable record on human rights and all people of faith suffer there. I didn’t recognize the pronunciation my friend Hugh Hewitt used,” he said.

    China denies the allegations of human rights abuses against the Uyghurs in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Ramaswamy looks to distinguish himself from Trump with conservative policy address | CNN Politics

    Ramaswamy looks to distinguish himself from Trump with conservative policy address | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is focused on a new objective weeks after his standout debate performance, when he just wanted to get his name out. Now he’s looking to differentiate himself from former President Donald Trump, display his policy chops and establish himself as an authentic MAGA-aligned Republican candidate.

    His campaign is widely touting a speech he’s giving Wednesday, when he’s also releasing a white paper on his domestic policy proposals. In a sharpening of his message toward the former president, whom he’s defended and praised since launching his campaign in February, he’s expected to focus on an issue he believes Trump failed to adequately address – shrinking the size of the federal government.

    The positioning of this first-time candidate – and the way he’s now setting out his own ideas to prove he’s not a Trump acolyte – suggests his campaign is looking for staying power in the 2024 Republican primary still dominated by the former president.

    “He needs to differentiate himself from Donald Trump,” a veteran Republican campaign strategist said, stressing the importance of candidates coming across as authentic. “If he wants to go to the next level, he needs to start figuring a way to differentiate himself [from Trump] instead of trying to be him.”

    The Ohio-based entrepreneur is expected on Wednesday to lay out the details of a policy to eliminate multiple federal agencies and implement mass layoffs of federal employees – part of his effort to set himself apart from other Republicans, including Trump, ahead of the next debate later this month.

    Contrasting Trump’s record with his own proposals is a new tactic for Ramaswamy. He has resoundingly defended the Trump administration on several issues and the former president amidst criminal indictments in four different investigations. He has repeatedly pledged to pardon Trump of any federal charges on his first day in office, frequently denouncing Trump’s legal jeopardy as “political persecution by prosecution.” During last month’s debate, he called Trump “the greatest president of the 21st century.”

    Wednesday’s speech at the America First Policy Institute, a think tank founded in 2021 by former Trump administration officials, gives Ramaswamy an opportunity to make the case for his conservative vision and how it might go further than Trump’s. Ramaswamy has regularly touted his vision for eliminating the “deep state” as going beyond what Trump’s was able to do in office and what he’s suggested for another four years. The speech is expected to detail what Ramaswamy’s campaign sees as the legal justification for his argument that the president has the authority to overhaul the structure of the federal government.

    “I think that’s going to be a groundbreaking, seismic leap for our movement. Takes the America First movement to the next level,” Ramaswamy said in a preview of his speech to reporters in Durham, New Hampshire, on Sunday.

    A policy paper prepared by the campaign and obtained by CNN spells out the legal framework Ramaswamy believes would give him authority as president to eliminate the Department of Education, the FBI and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and lay off thousands of workers in the process. It details how Ramaswamy would navigate around civil service protections for federal employees by using a loophole that he says allows for a “reduction in force” to fall under different criteria than individual firings. And it cites provisions in a 1977 law outlining a pathway for a short-term reorganization of the executive branch during the Carter administration, which Ramaswamy says are still in effect and give the president power to change the organization of any federal agency.

    “Conservatives have long been frustrated by an expansive and unaccountable federal administrative state, but the good news is that the democratically elected leader of the executive branch is already empowered by Congress to dramatically reduce the size and scope of sprawling federal agencies,” Ramaswamy says in the policy paper. “The missing element is a U.S. President who reads the law carefully and is prepared to act accordingly.”

    A graduate of Yale Law School, Ramaswamy often cites his familiarity with constitutional law as a key differentiator between himself and Trump, whom he has characterized as being naively misled by advisers in his efforts to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy.

    “I think the combination we’re going to need is, on one hand, a president who is an outsider, who is not a product of that swamp, who is willing to have complete and total disregard for the norms of that bureaucracy, and I do have that,” Ramaswamy told the audience at a campaign event in Hollis, New Hampshire, on Sunday.

    “But it also has to be an outsider who has a first-personal understanding of the law and the Constitution of this country, or else the adviser class that comes from that same swamp is going to say, ‘Hey, here are all the reasons why you can’t do it.’”

    “I think that’s where my predecessor, Donald Trump, fell short, is the adviser class duped him,” he added.

    Ramaswamy proved last month that he could be a formidable debater, squabbling at times on stage with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, while also trying to avoid alienating Trump-aligned voters.

    That debate earned him more attention – which has included questions about what exactly his reasoning for running for president is and whether he is a true champion of the MAGA movement who wants to usher in a new more conservative era.

    Ramaswamy has stressed in recent interviews that he’s not attracted to the allure of the presidency; he just wants to have more of an impact achieving conservative policy goals than Trump did.

    “I don’t relish the idea of being president,” Ramaswamy said in an interview with the “REAL AF with Andy Frisella” podcast. “When we started this campaign, we were playing to win, my heart was in it to win. But now it’s real, right? We’re on a trajectory, the same trajectory that Trump was. Honestly, I was talking to my wife two nights ago and saying, ‘I think this is going to happen.’ Neither of us is looking forward to it. But by the time we get out in January 2033, our older son, he won’t even be in high school yet, I think we will feel good about what we did for this country.”

    Ramaswamy, who’s restarting his podcast with a second season this week, so far has taken an always-visible-always-available approach, which may have helped boost his name recognition in the primary. A CNN poll conducted after the first debate showed Ramaswamy with 6% support among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, far below Trump’s 52%. But he was the only participant in that debate whose standing improved significantly since June polling.

    Alice Stewart, a Republican strategist and CNN political commentator, noted that Ramaswamy’s campaign is now in a moment where the scrutiny is greater.

    “This is the time when, as a campaign and a candidate, you have to be careful about what you say and how you say it because everything is going to get picked apart,” Stewart said.

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  • Fact check: Republicans make false, misleading claims at first Biden impeachment inquiry hearing | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Republicans make false, misleading claims at first Biden impeachment inquiry hearing | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Republican-led House Oversight Committee is holding its first hearing Thursday in the impeachment inquiry of President Joe Biden – and Republicans on the committee have made a series of false and misleading claims, as well as some other claims that have left out critical context.

    Below is a CNN fact check. This article will be updated as additional fact checks are completed.

    Republican Rep. James Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said in his opening remarks at the hearing on Thursday that the committee has uncovered how “the Bidens and their associates created over 20 shell companies” and “raked in over $20 million between 2014 and 2019.”

    Facts First: The $20 million figure is roughly accurate for Joe Biden’s family and associates, according to the bank records subpoenaed by the committee, but the phrase “the Bidens and their associates” obscures the fact that there is no public evidence to date that President Joe Biden himself received any of this money. And it’s worth noting that a large chunk of the money went to the “associates” – Hunter Biden’s business partners – not even Biden’s family itself.

    So far, none of the bank records obtained by the committee have shown any payments to Joe Biden. And a Washington Post analysis in August found that, of about $23 million in payments the committee had identified from foreign sources, nearly $7.5 million went to members of the Biden family – almost all of it to Hunter Biden – and the rest to people Hunter Biden did business with. (The Post also questioned the use of the vague phrase “shell companies,” noting that “virtually all of the companies” that had been listed by the committee at the time had “legitimate business interests” or “clearly identified business investments.”)

    A Republican aide for the House Oversight Committee disputed the Post’s analysis on Thursday, saying that bank records obtained by the panel actually show that, of $24 million in payments between 2014 and 2019, $15 million went to members of the Biden family and $9 million went to associates. CNN has reached out to the Post for comment; the committee has not publicly released the underlying bank records that would definitively show the breakdown in payments.

    The records obtained by the committee have shown that during and after Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president, Hunter Biden made millions of dollars through complex financial arrangements from private equity deals, legal fees and corporate consulting in Ukraine, China, Romania and elsewhere. Again, Republicans have not produced evidence that Joe Biden got paid in any of these arrangements.

    Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio repeated a false claim about Hunter Biden that CNN debunked when Jordan made the same claim last week.

    Jordan claimed that Hunter Biden himself said he was unqualified to sit on the board of directors of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings.

    “Hunter Biden’s not qualified, fact number two, to sit on the board. Not my words, his words. He said he got on the board because of the brand, because of the name,” Jordan said Thursday.

    Facts First: It’s not true that Hunter Biden himself said he wasn’t qualified to sit on the Burisma board. In fact, Hunter Biden said in a 2019 interview with ABC News that “I was completely qualified to be on the board” and defended his qualifications in detail. He did acknowledge, as Jordan said, that he would “probably not” have been asked to be on the board if he was not a Biden – but he nonetheless explicitly rejected claims that he wasn’t qualified, calling them “misinformation.”

    When the ABC interviewer asked what his qualifications for the role were, he said: “Well, I was vice chairman on the board of Amtrak for five years. I was the chairman of the board of the UN World Food Programme. I was a lawyer for Boies Schiller Flexner, one of the most prestigious law firms in the world. Bottom line is that I know that I was completely qualified to be on the board to head up the corporate governance and transparency committee on the board. And that’s all that I focused on. Basically, turning a Eastern European independent natural gas company into Western standards of corporate governance.”

    When the ABC interviewer said, “You didn’t have any extensive knowledge about natural gas or Ukraine itself, though,” Biden responded, “No, but I think I had as much knowledge as anybody else that was on the board – if not more.”

    Asked if he would have been asked to be on the board if his last name wasn’t Biden, Biden said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. Probably not.” He added “there’s a lot of things” in his life that wouldn’t have happened if he had a different last name.

    A side note: Biden had served as the board chair for World Food Program USA, a nonprofit that supports the UN World Food Programme, not the UN program itself as he claimed in the interview.

    Jordan cited new documents obtained from IRS whistleblowers, made public by House Republicans on Wednesday, to argue that the Justice Department improperly blocked investigators from asking about Joe Biden in a 2020 search warrant related to Hunter Biden’s overseas dealings.

    “We learned yesterday, in the search warrant…examining Hunter Biden electronic communications, they weren’t allowed to ask about Political Figure 1,” Jordan said. “Political Figure number 1 is the big guy, is Joe Biden.”

    Facts First: This is highly misleading. The Justice Department official who gave this instruction said Joe Biden’s name shouldn’t be mentioned in the search warrant because there wasn’t any legal basis to do so. Furthermore, this occurred during Trump’s presidency, so it doesn’t prove pro-Biden meddling by the Biden-era Justice Department.

    The August 2020 email from a deputy to now-special counsel David Weiss, the Trump-appointed federal prosecutor who is leading the Hunter Biden probe, said the warrant was for “BS,” an apparent reference to Blue Star Strategies, a lobbying firm that represented Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden was on the board.

    The Weiss deputy said in the email that “other than the attribution, location and identity stuff at the end, none if it is appropriate and within the scope of this warrant” and that “there should be nothing about Political Figure 1 in here,” according to emails released by House Republicans. Another document released by the GOP confirm that Joe Biden is “Political Figure 1.”

    Before obtaining a search warrant, investigators need to establish probable cause and secure approval from a judge. If federal prosecutors believed the references to Joe Biden weren’t within the legal scope of what the warrant was looking for, it wouldn’t have been appropriate or lawful to include them.

    Comer said in his opening remarks that the committee recently uncovered “two additional wires sent to Hunter Biden that originated in Beijing from Chinese nationals; this happened when Joe Biden was running for president of the United States – and Joe Biden’s home is listed on the beneficiary address.”

    Facts First: This lacks important context. Comer was correct that the committee has found evidence of two wire transfers sent to Hunter Biden from Chinese nationals in the second half of 2019, during Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, but he did not explain that Joe Biden’s home being listed as the beneficiary address doesn’t demonstrate that Joe Biden received any of the money. Nor did he explain that there may well be benign reasons for the inclusion of the address. Hunter Biden has lived at his father’s Wilmington, Delaware, home at times and listed that address on his driver’s license; Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said in a statement to CNN this week that the address was listed on these transfers simply because it was the address Hunter Biden used on the bank account the money was going to, which Lowell said Hunter Biden did “because it was his only permanent address at the time.”

    “This was a documented loan (not a distribution or pay-out) that was wired from a private individual to his new bank account which listed the address on his driver’s license, his parents’ address, because it was his only permanent address at the time,” Lowell said in the statement. “We expect more occasions where the Republican chairs twist the truth to mislead people to promote their fantasy political agenda.”

    White House spokesman Ian Sams wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Wednesday: “Imagine them arguing that, if someone stayed at their parents’ house during the pandemic, listed it as their permanent address for work, and got a paycheck, the parents somehow also worked for the employer…It’s bananas…Yet this is what extreme House Republicans have sunken to.”

    Comer told CNN this week his panel is trying to put together a timeline on where Hunter Biden was living around the time of the transfers, which occurred in July 2019 and August 2019. Joe Biden was a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary at the time.

    Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina claimed at the Thursday hearing, “We already know the president took bribes from Burisma,” a Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden sat on the board of directors.

    Facts First: Mace’s claim is false; we do not “already know” that Joe Biden took any bribe. The claim about a bribe from Burisma is a completely unproven allegation. The FBI informant who relayed the claim to the FBI in 2020 was merely reporting something he said he had been told by Burisma’s chief executive. Later in the hearing, a witness called by the committee Republicans, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, called “the bribery allegation” the most concerning piece of evidence he had heard today – but he immediately cautioned that “you have to only take that so far” given that it is “a secondhand account.”

    According to an internal FBI document made public by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa earlier this year over the strong objections of the FBI, the informant said in 2020 – when Donald Trump was president – that the CEO of Burisma, Mykola Zlochevsky, had claimed in 2016 that he made a $5 million payment to “one Biden” and another $5 million payment to “another Biden.” But the FBI document did not contain any proof for the claim, and the document said the informant was “not able to provide any further opinion as to the veracity” of the claim.

    Republicans have tried to boost the credibility the allegation by saying it was in an FBI document and that the FBI had viewed the informant as highly credible. But the document merely memorialized the information provided by the informant; it does not demonstrate that the information is true. And Hunter Biden’s former business associate Devon Archer testified to the House Oversight Committee earlier this year that he had not been aware of any such payments to the Bidens; Archer characterized Zlochevsky’s reported claim as an example of the Ukrainian businessman embellishing his influence.

    Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, falsely claimed that Hunter Biden never paid taxes on his foreign income.

    He said Hunter Biden “failed to pay any taxes” on the millions of dollars he got from Ukrainian companies, and that this shows how “the Biden family doesn’t have to” pay taxes.

    “Who’s going to write the check for the money Hunter Biden didn’t pay?” Burchett asked, adding that “hardworking Americans” would end up footing the bill.

    Facts First: This is false. Hunter Biden repeatedly missed IRS deadlines, and his conduct was so egregious that federal investigators believe it was criminal, but he eventually belatedly paid all of his back taxes, plus interest and penalties, to the tune of about $2 million.

    Documents from Hunter Biden’s criminal cases indicate that he repeatedly missed tax deadlines, even though he had the funds and was repeatedly warned by his accountant and business partners. He was prepared to plead guilty to two misdemeanors in July, for failing to pay taxes on time in 2017 and 2018, before the plea deal collapsed.

    But there’s a difference between failing to pay taxes on time and failing to pay taxes at all. In 2021, while the criminal investigation was still underway and before any charges were filed, Hunter Biden paid roughly $2 million to the IRS to cover all the back taxes, plus penalties and interest.

    Hunter Biden was able to make the massive payment thanks to a roughly $2 million loan from a friend and attorney who has been supporting him during his legal troubles, according to court filings.

    Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York accused a Republican member of the committee, Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, of cutting out “critical context” from an image of a purported text message that Donalds displayed earlier in the Thursday hearing. Ocasio-Cortez also said that Donalds had displayed a “fabricated image.”

    The dispute was over an image Donalds showed of a purported 2018 text message from the president’s brother James Biden to the president’s son Hunter Biden – provided by IRS whistleblowers and released by House Republicans on Wednesday – in which James Biden purportedly wrote, “This can work, you need a safe harbor. I can work with you father [sic] alone !! We as usual just need several months of his help for this to work.”

    After showing the image, Donalds asked a witness at the committee, “If you saw a text message like this between the president’s brother and the president’s son, wouldn’t you be concerned about them trying to give plausible deniability for the president of the United States to not have any knowledge of said business dealings?”

    Facts First: Donalds didn’t invent the James Biden text message, but Ocasio-Cortez was correct that Donalds left out critical context – specifically, context that showed there was no sign that the purported text exchange between James Biden and Hunter Biden was about business dealings. The information released by House Republicans this week appeared to show that James Biden’s purported text about getting “help” from Joe Biden came in direct response to a purported Hunter Biden text saying he could not afford alimony, school tuition for his children, food and gas “w/o [without] Dad.” Donalds did not display this purported Hunter Biden text at the Thursday hearing.

    In other words, when James Biden purportedly mentioned the possibility of several months of help from Joe Biden, he gave no indication he was referring to some sort of business transaction, much less the foreign transactions that House Republicans have been focused on in their investigations into the president. But Donalds didn’t make that clear.

    With that said, Ocasio-Cortez herself could have been clearer about what she meant when she claimed the image Donalds showed was “fabricated.”

    The contents of the purported James Biden text Donalds displayed were not made up, according to the IRS whistleblowers. What appeared to be novel was the graphic Donalds used; he showed the text in a form that made it look like a screenshot from an iPhone text conversation, with white words over a blue background bubble. The House Republican spreadsheet that the words were taken from did not include any such graphics, and, again, it did include the preceding purported Hunter Biden message that Donalds didn’t show.

    Republican Rep. Pat Fallon of Texas said at the Thursday hearing, “In an interview back in 2019 with The New Yorker, even Hunter admitted that he talked to his dad about business, specifically Burisma.”

    Facts First: This needs context. The 2019 New Yorker article in question reported that Hunter Biden said he recalled Joe Biden discussing Burisma with him “just once” in a brief exchange that consisted of this: “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do.’”

    It’s fair for Fallon to say that this counts as Joe Biden discussing business with his son, but Fallon did not mention how brief and limited Hunter Biden said the purported discussion was.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Michael Cohen to take stand in fraud trial of his former boss, Donald Trump | CNN Politics

    Michael Cohen to take stand in fraud trial of his former boss, Donald Trump | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Michael Cohen was once one of Donald Trump’s most loyal allies.

    But after going to jail for tax crimes and lying to Congress, Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer,” became a star witness against his former boss, testifying before Congress about the hush-money payments he made to women claiming affairs with Trump and writing books highly critical of the former president.

    Tuesday, Trump and Cohen are expected to be face to face in a New York courtroom as Cohen delivers testimony as part of the New York attorney general’s civil fraud case against the former president.

    When Cohen takes the stand, he will face down a very angry Donald Trump. It’s the first time the two have been in the same room or even spoken in five years, according to multiple sources.

    “It appears that I will be reunited with my old client @realDonaldTrump when I testify this Tuesday, October 24th at the @NewYorkStateAG civil fraud trial. See you there!” Cohen posted last week on the social media site Threads.

    Cohen’s testimony is the latest high-profile moment in the civil fraud trial, in which New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking to bar Trump from doing business in the state. While Trump has played only a passive role in the trial to date, he is expected to be called as a witness later on.

    Michael Cohen reacts to testimony about Eric Trump

    Trump voluntarily attended the civil trial’s opening days, and the former president returned last week, when Cohen was initially supposed to be called to testify, though Cohen’s appearance was delayed after he cited a medical issue.

    Trump is also returning to the courtroom after he was fined $5,000 last week by Judge Arthur Engoron – and warned about possible imprisonment – for violating a gag order not to speak about any members of the court staff. Engoron fined Trump over a social media post attacking Engoron’s clerk that had not been removed from Trump’s campaign website.

    Cohen is expected to testify about meetings with former Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg and Trump regarding Trump’s financial statements and net worth. Cohen has claimed there were meetings with Weisselberg and Trump about Trump’s net worth before the financial statements were filed. Weisselberg testified earlier in the trial, “I don’t believe it ever happened, no.”

    The attorney general’s office has said Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee in February 2019 – when Cohen alleged that officials at the Trump Organization inflated the value of its assets to secure loans and insurance and that they lowered the values for tax benefits – was the impetus for its investigation that led to the lawsuit against Trump.

    Assistant Attorney General Colleen Faherty is expected to question Cohen on direct examination.

    Cohen’s testimony is also a crucial part of the criminal case against Trump brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who charged Trump earlier this year with falsifying business records related to the hush-money payments.

    Cohen testified before Congress in 2019 about Trump’s involvement in the hush-money scheme involving both former Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who alleged having affairs with Trump (Trump has denied the affairs). Cohen even released a recording in which he and Trump can be heard discussing how they would buy the rights to McDougal’s story.

    Tuesday’s testimony, however, is expected to focus not on the hush-money payments but on Trump’s financial statements. Before Cohen testifies, the first witness will be Bill Kelly, the general counsel of Mazars, Trump’s onetime accounting firm.

    The trial is now in its fourth week. The attorney general’s office has called 12 witnesses to testify, including six current or former Trump Organization employees, two of whom are defendants in the case: Weisselberg and former Controller Jeff McConney.

    Trump’s lawyers have cross-examined only about half the witnesses so far, opting to reserve their right to call them in the defense case. Engoron set aside more than three months for the trial, which could continue through late December.

    An appraiser for Cushman & Wakefield testified last week that Trump’s son Eric Trump was closely involved in several appraisal consultations with the real estate firm for Trump assets Seven Springs and Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, New York, that valued the properties substantially lower than the amounts that appeared on Trump’s financial statements in those years.

    Eric Trump said in a deposition for the case that he didn’t remember being involved in any appraisals for Trump properties.

    The attorneys are scheduled to argue at a hearing Friday morning whether Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter, can be forced to testify at trial even though an appellate court dismissed her as a defendant because the claims against her were too old.

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  • Who are the Trump co-conspirators in the 2020 election interference indictment? | CNN Politics

    Who are the Trump co-conspirators in the 2020 election interference indictment? | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The historic indictment against Donald Trump in the special counsel’s probe into January 6, 2021, and efforts to overturn the 2020 election says that he “enlisted co-conspirators to assist him in his criminal efforts.”

    The charging documents repeatedly reference six of these co-conspirators, but as is common practice, their identities are withheld because they have not been charged with any crimes.

    CNN, however, can identify five of the six co-conspirators based on quotes in the indictment and other context.

    They include:

    Among other things, the indictment quotes from a voicemail that Co-Conspirator 1 left “for a United States Senator” on January 6, 2021. The quotes in the indictment match quotes from Giuliani’s call intended for GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville, as reported by CNN and other outlets.

    Ted Goodman, a political adviser to Giuliani, said in a statement that “every fact Mayor Rudy Giuliani possesses about this case establishes the good faith basis President Donald Trump had for the actions he took during the two-month period charged in the indictment,” adding that the indictment “eviscerates the First Amendment.”

    Among other things, the indictment says Co-Conspirator 2 “circulated a two-page memorandum” with a plan for Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election while presiding over the Electoral College certification on January 6, 2021. The indictment quotes from the memo, and those quotes match a two-page memo that Eastman wrote, as reported and published by CNN.

    Charles Burnham, an attorney for Eastman, said the indictment “relies on a misleading presentation of the record,” and that his client would decline a plea deal if offered one.

    “The fact is, if Dr. Eastman is indicted, he will go to trial. If convicted, he will appeal. The Eastman legal team is confident of its legal position in this matter,” Burnham said in a statement.

    The indictment says Co-Conspirator 3 “filed a lawsuit against the Governor of Georgia” on November 25, 2020, alleging “massive election fraud” and that the lawsuit was “dismissed” on December 7, 2020. These dates and quotations match the federal lawsuit that Powell filed against Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.

    An attorney for Powell declined to comment.

    The indictment identifies Co-Conspirator 4 as “a Justice Department official.” The indictment also quotes an email that a top Justice Department official sent to Clark, rebutting Clark’s attempts to use the department to overturn the election. The quotes in that email directly match quotes in an email sent to Clark, according to a Senate report about how Trump tried to weaponize the Justice Department in 2020.

    CNN has reached out to an attorney for Clark.

    Among other things, the indictment references an “email memorandum” that Co-Conspirator 5 “sent” to Giuliani on December 13, 2020, about the fake electors plot. The email sender, recipient, date, and content are a direct match for an email that Chesebro sent to Giuliani, according to a copy of the email made public by the House select committee that investigated January 6.

    CNN has reached out to an attorney for Chesebro.

    The indictment says they are “a political consultant who helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.” The indictment also further ties this person to the fake elector slate in Pennsylvania.

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  • Hunter Biden is a sensitive topic that advisers rarely broach with the president | CNN Politics

    Hunter Biden is a sensitive topic that advisers rarely broach with the president | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Long among the most sensitive subjects inside the West Wing, Hunter Biden’s legal saga now appears destined to play out amid his father’s bid for reelection, frustrating the president but so far causing little real concern among his advisers.

    The probe into Hunter Biden is now one of two special counsel investigations – the other being an inquiry into his father’s handling of classified documents after leaving the Senate and the vice president’s office – that both appear poised to extend for months to come.

    Even some of Biden’s allies acknowledge they threaten to complicate or erode the moral high ground the president asserts as he seeks reelection. Hunter Biden, of course, is not himself running for president and the White House has taken pains to avoid interference in the case – all points of contrast with the president’s most likely Republican rival.

    The cases and consequences are entirely separate for both investigations. Although President Biden is so far not a part of special counsel David Weiss’s investigation into his son, his aides expect that he may be interviewed as part of special counsel Robert Hur’s documents probe.

    Still, both investigations take away the fundamental element of control for a White House heading into an election cycle. As multiple Biden advisers conceded privately this week, special counsels have a history of uncovering information they hadn’t set out initially to discover. The fact that it’s also a delicate family matter, people close to Biden say, is creating a level of personal angst unlike any other challenge for the president.

    David Weiss, left, and Hunter Biden

    ‘This is just a debacle’: Ex-federal prosecutor on length of Hunter Biden investigation

    How and whether those factors play into Biden’s reelection chances remains to be determined. Next to a likely rival who has now been indicted four times, Biden’s predicament is vastly different. Democratic strategists believe swing voters see Hunter Biden as a private citizen and are more concerned about the economy.

    Given the facts currently known, strategists say, these voters don’t believe President Biden has been implicated in any wrongdoing. Yet Biden’s advisers also concede the topic is mostly verboten with the president, raising the prospect of a critical blind spot heading into a bruising campaign where nothing will be off limits with their Republican rivals.

    “Hunter Biden is not a topic of discussion in campaign meetings,” a senior aide said, speaking on condition of anonymity, given the sensitivity of the subject. “It’s just not addressed.”

    It was a surprise to the West Wing last week when Attorney General Merrick Garland announced he was giving special counsel status to Weiss – originally a Trump appointee – a fact that further underscores the separation between the White House and the Justice Department on the case. The decision was met with a range of responses by Biden’s allies last week, from resignation to frustration.

    Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks at the Department of Justice, Friday, Aug. 11, 2023, in Washington. Garland announced Friday he is appointing a special counsel in the Hunter Biden probe, deepening the investigation of the president's son ahead of the 2024 election. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)

    Garland appoints special counsel to Hunter Biden case

    For the president himself, the decision to name a special counsel amounted to another page in a chapter he would like to close. Even as the president and first lady try to move on from a dark period surrounding their son’s addiction, Republicans and now the Justice Department are extending the scrutiny into an indeterminable future.

    Just two weeks ago, the couple had hoped Hunter Biden’s expected plea deal would be a moment to admit mistakes and move on, one person familiar with the president’s thinking had said.

    But that plea deal fell apart and the special counsel appointment moves the legal issues into a new phase, including potentially a trial.

    From the beginning, the Bidens have tried to approach Hunter Biden’s issues through a personal lens, expressing their love and support for their son but otherwise declining to comment on the investigation. They have kept him close amid the legal proceedings with Hunter Biden appearing at family events and White House functions including a lavish state dinner days after his initial plea agreement was announced.

    President Joe Biden hugs his son Hunter Biden upon returning from a trip to Ireland, at Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, on April 14.

    For some close to the president, however, there are now questions over how the matter has continued to persist, despite work toward a plea deal on tax and gun related charges, the resolution of a child support battle and no evidence yet that President Biden himself was implicated in any wrongdoing.

    They pin the blame mainly on Republicans, whom the White House blasted this week for waging years-long investigations into the president that haven’t produced evidence showing President Biden engaged in wrongdoing.

    “If you think about what Republicans in Congress have tried to do for years, they have been making claims and allegations about the president on this front over and over again. And month after month, year after year, they have been investigating every single angle of this and looking for any evidence to back their allegations,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said this week. “And what’s been the result of that, if you ask yourself what we have seen from that? They keep turning up documents and witnesses showing that the president wasn’t involved.”

    Beneath the surface, however, private questions are now brewing among some Democrats about the abilities of Hunter Biden’s legal team and the wisdom of his visible presence around his father.

    On Tuesday, Hunter Biden’s lead criminal defense attorney asked a federal judge on Tuesday for permission to withdraw from the case because he could now be called as a witness in future proceedings. To some Biden advisers, the surprise collapse of a plea deal only exacerbated existing concerns about Hunter’s legal team.

    “I’m sure this didn’t land all that well over in the White House because I think they’d love this Hunter Biden case to be behind them. The Republicans are sort of pointing to it for purposes of what-about-ism,” said David Axelrod, a senior adviser in the Obama White House and CNN senior political commentator, who said Republicans were eager to make false comparisons – essentially saying, “what about” Hunter’s legal issues?

    “They need to have a countervailing argument and their countervailing argument is, ‘Oh two standards of justice, they’re not indicting Hunter Biden,’” he said. “And they’re beating that horse to death, even though they’ve failed to make the connection between Hunter Biden and Joe Biden in the way that they allege. So I think that anything that extends the Hunter Biden case into the election year is not welcome news for Joe Biden.”

    Hunter Biden walks to a waiting SUV after arriving with US President Joe Biden on Marine One at Fort McNair in Washington, DC, on July 4, as they return to Washington after spending the weekend at Camp David.

    CNN reporter details why Hunter Biden’s top lawyer asked to withdraw from case

    Indeed, the actions of Hunter Biden are now becoming a central discussion point for Republicans in Congress and presidential candidates, who frequently point to the president’s son in their argument of a false equivalency in the Justice Department.

    Republicans have criticized the now defunct plea agreement between Hunter Biden and federal prosecutors as a “sweetheart deal,” and they scoffed when Weiss was appointed as special counsel, despite many previously supporting the appointment of a special counsel.

    Some of the president’s potential Republican rivals also blasted the special counsel decision. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis argued Hunter Biden would receive “soft glove treatment.” A spokesperson for former President Donald Trump argued the Biden family has “been protected by the Justice Department for decades” – even though Trump appointed Weiss to his position and Biden kept him in the post upon taking office.

    Hunter Biden at a ceremony at the White House in Washington, July 7, 2022.

    The matter is likely to arise at the first Republican presidential debate next week in Milwaukee. The Democratic National Committee is not preparing specific responses to any criticism leveled against Hunter Biden at the Republican presidential debate but will be ready to respond as needed, a party official says.

    In 2020, plans were similarly laid ahead of general election debates with Trump, who seized on Hunter Biden as an attack line. Biden’s defense of his son and his pride in his sobriety proved one of the most memorable moments of that year’s debate circuit.

    First lady Dr. Jill Biden had previously told CNN that the investigations into their son Hunter did not impact the president’s decision to seek reelection this year.

    Some Democrats view the development as an opportunity to demonstrate the party’s view of a fair judicial system – a contrast to many Republicans who have cried foul at the multiple indictments of Trump.

    “If Hunter has done something beyond the tax issue and beyond the gun issue that deserves to be investigated, then that should happen. No one is above the law,” said Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat. “That’s why you’re not hearing Democrats say that, you know, this is the weaponization of the Justice Department. No. We’re being consistent. When we say no one’s above the law when it comes to Donald Trump, we mean it even if it’s one of our own.”

    This story has been updated to clarify that the DNC may respond to criticism leveled against Hunter Biden but has not prepared any specific responses.

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  • 2 Trump co-defendants ask judge to break apart Georgia election interference case and hold separate trials | CNN Politics

    2 Trump co-defendants ask judge to break apart Georgia election interference case and hold separate trials | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Two Trump co-defendants in Georgia who requested speedy trials asked a judge Wednesday to formally separate their cases from the sprawling overall indictment, a move that would undercut Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ attempt to hold one massive trial for all 19 defendants in the election interference case.

    Former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell and pro-Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro separately asked the judge overseeing the case to “sever” their trials from the other defendants. If granted, this would break apart the case and allow their cases to go to trial as soon as October.

    These are the first attempts in court by former President Donald Trump’s co-defendants to break apart the case. The motions filed Wednesday are part of the increasingly convoluted pretrial wrangling among Trump, his 18 co-defendants and Willis, who wants a trial for all 19 defendants to occur in October.

    Powell and Chesebro, who both deny wrongdoing in the case, already invoked their right to a speedy trial, which would need to begin before early November, per Georgia law. Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee ordered Chesebro’s trial to begin October 23. Powell’s request is pending. Trump wants to slow things down and opposes that timeline.

    Trump’s lawyers have also said they want to sever his case from the other defendants but haven’t yet filed a motion in court.

    Raskin: Trump could learn from early Georgia trials

    In the filing, Powell’s attorneys also argued that she “did not represent President Trump or the Trump campaign” related to the 2020 election because she never had an “engagement agreement” with either.

    “She appears on no pleadings for Trump or the Campaign,” Powell’s attorneys wrote. “She appeared in no courtrooms or hearings for Trump or the Campaign. She had no contact with most of her purported conspirators and rarely agreed with those she knew or spoke with.”

    Despite these assertions, Trump publicly announced in mid-November 2020 that he “added” Powell to his “truly great team” of lawyers working on the election. One week later – after she promoted wild conspiracy theories that millions of votes were flipped as part of an international anti-Trump scheme – the Trump campaign dropped her from the legal team and said she was “practicing law on her own.”

    In an effort to distance Powell from the other Trump lawyers charged in the Georgia case, her attorneys pointed out that she “went her own way” after the 2020 presidential election and that “many of her purported coconspirators publicly shunned and disparaged Ms. Powell beginning in November 2020.”

    In the filing, Powell’s attorneys also lauded her legal career and her commitment to “integrity” and “the rule of law.” They also amplified the debunked right-wing claim that her former client, retired Gen. Michael Flynn, was the victim of “charges completely concocted against him by a politicized FBI.”

    Kenneth Chesebro Jan 6

    CNN reveals where accused Trump co-conspirator was on Jan. 6

    Additionally on Wednesday, Chesebro’s attorneys asked the judge to force Willis to “disclose” the identities of the 30 unindicted co-conspirators named in the indictment. Chesebro, who was the architect of the Trump campaign’s fake electors plot, said he needs these names to help his defense.

    Earlier this month, after the indictment was filed, CNN published a report identifying many of the unindicted co-conspirators based on public information that matches what was in the indictment.

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  • FBI agent contests whistleblower claims in Hunter Biden case, transcript shows | CNN Politics

    FBI agent contests whistleblower claims in Hunter Biden case, transcript shows | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The FBI agent managing the team on the Hunter Biden criminal case testified to the House Judiciary Committee that US Attorney David Weiss had ultimate authority over the case, contesting testimony brought forward by whistleblowers.

    Thomas Sobocinski, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore field office, told committee investigators in a closed-door interview last week that from his perspective, Weiss had the authority to bring forward whatever charges he wanted in whatever venue he preferred.

    “It was my understanding that David Weiss had the authority, and at no point did I ever differ from that,” Sobociniski said, according to a copy of his interview transcript obtained by CNN. “There’s never been anything in my view that changed that.”

    Sobocinski’s transcript, which was first reported by The Washington Post, comes as House Republicans continue to investigate allegations that the criminal case of President Joe Biden’s son was mishandled. It’s all part of the House GOP impeachment inquiry into the president, even though Republicans have yet to find evidence that the president did anything illegal.

    Sobocinski’s testimony disputes a number of claims from an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower about a key October 2022 meeting including FBI and IRS agents, Weiss, and other Justice Department prosecutors that occurred at a critical point in the criminal probe. IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, who was in the meeting and worked on this case, said Weiss revealed in that meeting that he is not the deciding person on whether charges are filed. Shapley provided his notes on that meeting and email exchanges about it to Congress to support his claim. The notes say, “Weiss stated – He is not the deciding person.”

    But Sobocinski was also in that October 2022 meeting and said Weiss never said that.

    “I went into that meeting believing he had the authority, and I have left that meeting believing he had the authority to bring charges,” Sobocinski testified.

    Reflecting on Shapley’s accusation of Weiss, Sobocinski said, “In my recollection, if he would have said that, I would have remembered it.”

    In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee responding to Sobocinski’s testimony, Shapley’s legal team contested Sobocinski’s testimony, noting that Shapley took notes of the October 2022 meeting while Sobocinski did not.

    “Mr. Sobocinski apparently acknowledged that he took no notes in the meeting, nor did he document it in any contemporaneous fashion afterwards,” wrote Empower Oversight President Tristan Leavitt and attorney Mark Lytle, according to the letter obtained by CNN. “By contrast, SSA Shapley took notes during the meeting. These notes, combined with his fresh memory of the meeting, formed the basis for the email he sent later that day and corroborate his current recollection.”

    House Republicans responded to the comments saying that the whistleblowers, Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, a 13-year IRS special agent with the Criminal Investigation Division, were “wholly consistent.”

    “Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler have been wholly consistent throughout their disclosures to Congress, and the only people who haven’t are people like David Weiss, Merrick Garland, and their liberal cronies,” said Russell Dye, a spokesperson for Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican.

    Sobocinski also disputed Shapley’s claim that Weiss said in the October 2022 meeting he was denied special counsel status and denied venues to bring forward charges.

    Sobocinski told the House Judiciary panel he was informed of Weiss’ special counsel status the day Attorney General Merrick Garland announced it last month, and that Weiss was not previously denied special counsel status as Shapley has claimed.

    “I don’t have a recollection with him saying that there or at any point in my communication with Mr. Weiss,” Sobocinski said. “That would have been a total 180 from all our previous conversations about authorities.”

    When asked if anybody at FBI headquarters ever prevented Weiss from taking any steps or accessing any necessary resources, Sobocinski replied, “Not that I’m aware of.”

    Sobocinski told congressional investigators that he did raise concerns repeatedly about the pace of the investigation into Hunter Biden.

    “I would have liked for it to move faster,” he said.

    Republicans on the committee raised the question of why Weiss was eventually given special counsel status if Weiss had the ultimate authority as Sobocinski has argued. Sobocinski acknowledged that Weiss would be the best person to answer these questions, and more specifics about how special counsel status was granted.

    On whether Weiss was denied venues to bring forward charges against the president’s son, Sobocinski said he only had “high-level conversations” about the specific charges, but from his understanding “there was a process” within the Justice Department for US attorneys to bring forward charges outside of their district that involved a lot of “bureaucracy” but was “not a permission issue.”

    “Without going into specifics, there were discussion about taxes and venue,” Sobocinski said. “And, once again, Mr. Weiss had the authority to bring it.”

    Shapley’s notes on the October 2022 meeting included that an FBI agent asked the group if they were concerned about the investigation being politicized. Sobocinski noted that part of why the meeting was called was in response to a media leak about the status of the criminal investigation. He told congressional investigators that he wanted to ask anyone in the room if they felt the investigation into the president’s son had been politicized, and he said no one in the room, not even Shapley, raised any concerns.

    “I wanted to go on record in the room of the leaders who were involved in this investigation,” Sobocinski said. “Thought that it was no, and nobody in that room raised their voice to say anything other.”

    Sobocinski also addressed broader claims made about how the Hunter Biden criminal investigation has been handled. To discredit GOP claims that prosecutors colluded with Hunter Biden’s Secret Service by informing them they wanted to interview Hunter, Sobocinski said that as a former Secret Service agent, he said it was “expected” for an investigative entity to speak with him ahead of interviewing a protectee of his. Sobocinski also said he is not aware of any evidence that the Department of Justice has retaliated against the IRS whistleblowers who have come forward.

    The Department of Justice sent Sobocinski a letter the day before his interview giving him permission to discuss the details of the October 7, 2022, meeting and Weiss’ authority on the case. But Sobocinski was not permitted to discuss the ongoing criminal investigation.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Biden defers to Justice Department in first public answer on special counsel investigation into his son | CNN Politics

    Biden defers to Justice Department in first public answer on special counsel investigation into his son | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden on Friday said he had no comment and deferred to the Department of Justice when asked for his reaction to the special counsel appointment in the case of his son, Hunter Biden.

    “I have no comment on any investigation that’s going on,” the president said during a trilateral news conference with the leaders of Japan and South Korea at Camp David. “That’s up to the Justice Department, and that’s all I have to say.”

    The answer to a reporter’s question was the first time the president had spoken publicly about the appointment of a special counsel since David Weiss was elevated to the role last week. Biden had previously ignored reporter questions on the matter.

    Attorney General Merrick Garland announced last week that Weiss – a Trump-appointed US attorney who has been leading an investigation into Hunter Biden for years – had been given special counsel status after plea talks between the Justice Department and the president’s son fell apart. Weiss asked for the new authority after plea talks to resolve tax and gun charges fell apart.

    The probe appeared to reach its conclusion when a plea deal was announced in June. In a two-pronged agreement, Hunter Biden planned to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and prosecutors would drop a separate felony gun charge in two years if he stayed out of legal trouble and passed drug tests.

    Federal prosecutors also agreed to recommend probation, and no jail time, for the president’s son. The GOP had criticized the plea deal, accusing Weiss of giving Hunter Biden preferential treatment.

    But at a stunning three-hour court hearing last month, the deal nearly collapsed under scrutiny from the federal judge overseeing the case. District Judge Maryellen Noreika said the intertwined deals to resolve the tax and gun charges were “confusing,” “not straightforward,” “atypical” and “unprecedented.” At the end of that hearing, she ordered the Justice Department and Hunter Biden’s lawyers to file additional legal briefs defending the constitutionality of the agreement. Weiss said last week that the talks had failed.

    By naming Weiss as a special counsel, Garland gave him further independence from the Justice Department as he embarks on an unprecedented trial against the son of the sitting president, and as Republicans claim the department is politicized.

    The probe into Hunter Biden is now one of two special counsel investigations – the other being an inquiry into his father’s handling of classified documents after leaving the Senate and the vice president’s office – that both appear poised to extend for months to come. But the probe into Hunter Biden is among the most sensitive subjects inside the West Wing.

    Multiple Biden advisers conceded privately this week that special counsels have a history of uncovering information they hadn’t set out initially to discover. The fact that the probe into Hunter Biden is also a delicate family matter, people close to Biden say, is creating a level of personal angst unlike any other challenge for the president.

    This story has been updated with additional reporting.

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  • When John Roberts wants things done, he acts. What that means for ethics rules | CNN Politics

    When John Roberts wants things done, he acts. What that means for ethics rules | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Soon after he became chief justice of the United States, John Roberts faced what he believed was a “crisis” involving the judiciary: Federal judges were underpaid.

    What Roberts did next to address the situation stands in stark contrast to the way he has tiptoed through the current controversy over the Supreme Court’s integrity.

    As he pushed for a pay raise, he arranged a meeting at the White House to win support from then-President George W. Bush. He encouraged emissaries to talk to members of Congress. And he devoted an entire year-end report to the situation.

    “I am going to discuss only one issue – in an effort to increase even more the chances that people will take notice,” Roberts wrote on January 1, 2007. “That is important because the issue has been ignored far too long and has now reached the level of a constitutional crisis that threatens to undermine the strength and independence of the federal judiciary.”

    His concern: “I am talking about the failure to raise judicial pay.”

    Today, Roberts is at the center of the controversy over the court’s lack of transparency and absence of a formal code of ethics. The justices have been inconsistent in reporting travel and gifts bestowed on them by wealthy benefactors who may be trying to influence the court.

    The 68-year-old chief justice, who will be starting his 19th term in October, has moved with little apparent urgency.

    On Thursday, the issue was again in the spotlight as Justice Clarence Thomas filed a long-awaited annual financial disclosure form that pointed up his relationship with Texas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow. Thomas acknowledged that he had traveled on private jets at Crow’s expense for Dallas events and taken a separate vacation excursion to Crow’s opulent estate in the Adirondacks.

    Thomas also reported that Crow had in 2014 bought property in Savannah, Georgia, from Thomas and his family. Thomas’ lawyer said any delays or other filing errors were “inadvertent” and described public criticism of Thomas as “political blood sport.”

    Justice Roberts wrote ‘condescending’ letter to Senate when asked to testify about ethics

    The backdrop to Thursday’s filing by Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, both of whom had sought extensions from a May deadline, is the rising attention to the Supreme Court’s inability to monitor itself on this front. The justices’ extracurricular activities and lack of any process for resolving complaints has become as much a topic of public scrutiny as their rulings pushing the law in America to the right.

    For years, individual justices have said the court was considering its own code of conduct, as now covers lower court judges. But that consideration has never produced any public result.

    Members of Congress, advocacy groups and even some justices have looked to Roberts for leadership, to no avail.

    Roberts told an audience of lawyers in Washington, DC, in May: “I want to assure people that I am committed to making certain that we as a court adhere to the highest standards of conduct. We are continuing to look at things we can do to give practical effect to that commitment.”

    Yet when the justices left town for their summer recess in June, they were at a stalemate on whether a formal code was even necessary.

    In separate public appearances this summer, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Elena Kagan, when asked about a possible ethics code, said they didn’t want to get out ahead of Roberts on the issue.

    While Roberts has sent muted signals, he has made his resistance to congressional involvement clear.

    Roberts in April declined an invitation to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about judicial ethics, referring to “separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence.”

    The Democratic-run Senate committee in July advanced legislation that would require a Supreme Court ethics code and a set of procedures for resolving complaints regarding their behavior. Given the tight partisan divide in the Senate and Republicans’ control of the House, the bill is unlikely to become law.

    So, much depends on the justices themselves.

    Roberts is known for formidable powers of persuasion. Before he became a US appeals court judge in 2003 and a Supreme Court justice in 2005, he was a star appellate advocate at the high court. But there are limits to his authority as chief, and the regard he engenders among individual colleagues varies.

    There may also be limits to the personal capital Roberts wants to put toward a dilemma that lies beyond the consideration of cases.

    The chief justice had made the judiciary’s pay raise a singular concern, and eventually judges and justices obtained full cost-of-living increases and higher pay.

    Unlike with judicial pay, which naturally generated support among black-robed colleagues, the ethics issue has defied consensus in Roberts’ ranks.

    Alito said in a Wall Street Journal interview published in July that he “voluntarily follows” the rules that apply to lower court judges, and he denigrated congressional efforts in this area: “I know this is a controversial view, but I’m going to say it. No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court – period.”

    Last month in Portland, Oregon, Kagan also referred to internal differences.

    “It’s not a secret for me to say that we have been discussing it,” she said, referring to a formal set of ethics rules. And it won’t be a surprise to know that the nine of us have a variety of views about this, as about most things. We’re nine free-thinking individuals.”

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  • ADL says it will resume advertising on X following feud with Elon Musk | CNN Business

    ADL says it will resume advertising on X following feud with Elon Musk | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The Anti-Defamation League on Wednesday said it plans to resume advertising on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, following a spat with owner Elon Musk.

    Musk last month threatened to sue the ADL for defamation, claiming that the nonprofit organization’s statements about rising hate speech on the social media platform had hurt X’s advertising revenue. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt pushed back on the claims, saying that while the ADL was part of a coalition of groups that called on companies to pause advertising on the platform immediately following Musk’s acquisition last year, it had not been engaged in such calls in recent months.

    Musk’s statements about the group also amplified a campaign of antisemitic hate against the organization that had begun prior to Musk’s legal threat, leading to a surge of threats directed at the ADL, Greenblatt told CNN last month.

    The rights group reiterated in a statement Wednesday that “any allegation that ADL has somehow orchestrated a boycott of X or caused billions of dollars of losses to the company or is ‘pulling the strings’ for other advertisers is false.”

    “Indeed, we ourselves were advertising on the platform until the anti-ADL attacks began a few weeks ago,” the group said. “We now are preparing to do so again to bring our important message on fighting hate to X and its users.”

    Musk responded to the ADL’s statement in a post Wednesday saying, “Thank you for clarifying that you support advertising on X.”

    The statement appears to mark a resolution — for now — to weekslong tension between Musk and the ADL, which has coincided with incidents of antisemitism rising across the United States. But the group says it will continue to monitor for antisemitic content on X.

    “As we have noted in our research over the past several years, X – along with other social media platforms — has a serious issue with antisemites and other extremists using these platforms to push their hateful ideas and, in some cases, bully Jewish and other users,” it said. “A better, healthier, and safer X would be a win for the world … As we do with all platforms, we will credit X as it moves in that direction, and we also will call it out when it has not.”

    The ADL and other similar organizations, including the Center for Countering Digital Hate, have said in reports that the volume of hate speech on the website has grown dramatically under Musk’s stewardship. (Musk has criticized the findings.)

    Two brands in August paused their ad spending on X after their advertisements ran alongside an account promoting Nazism. X suspended the account after the issue was flagged and said ad impressions on the page were minimal.

    X has emphasized its new “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” policy that aims to limit the reach of so-called lawful but awful content on the platform and to protect brands from having their ads appear alongside such content. CEO Linda Yaccarino has also promoted additional brand safety controls for advertisers, including the ability to avoid having their ads show next to “targeted hate speech, sexual content, gratuitous gore, excessive profanity, obscenity, spam, [and] drugs.”

    Asked about Musk’s threats to sue the ADL in an interview last week, Yaccarino said, “I wish that would be different … We’re looking into that.” She added that the ADL should acknowledge X’s progress on addressing antisemitism.

    It appears the platform may have more work to do. A search on Wednesday for Greenblatt’s name immediately surfaced multiple hateful and antisemitic tweets about the ADL leader.

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  • Trump rages as former acolytes turn against him under legal heat | CNN Politics

    Trump rages as former acolytes turn against him under legal heat | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Donald Trump’s wealth, power and fame acted like a magnet for new associates keen to enter his orbit. But now, key figures who sought a share of his reflected glory are turning against him to save themselves.

    The ex-president absorbed a trio of blows Tuesday that worsened his legal peril and underscored how the 2024 election – in which he is the front-runner for the GOP nomination – will play out in the courts rather than traditional voting battlegrounds.

    In the most significant development, ABC News reported that Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had met federal prosecutors multiple times and had categorically undermined the ex-president’s narrative about a stolen election. Meadows was the gatekeeper to the Oval Office in the critical days when Trump was allegedly plotting to steal the 2020 election after voters rejected his bid for a second term. CNN has reached out to Meadows’ attorney for comment.

    In another damaging twist, former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, who blanketed television networks after President Joe Biden’s victory to falsely claim he was elected because of fraud, reached a plea deal with Georgia prosecutors. Ellis on Tuesday tearfully confessed to the felony of aiding and abetting false statements that she and other lawyers told Peach State lawmakers. She was the third former Trump acolyte to agree to testify against the ex-president and others this week. The election subversion prosecution brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is now following the classic playbook of a racketeering case wherein smaller fish are peeled away for reduced sentences to secure their testimony against the alleged kingpin.

    “If I knew then what I knew now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges. I look back on this experience with deep remorse,” Ellis said.

    Ellis was a comparatively junior figure in Trump’s schemes to overthrow the election, although there is reason to believe she was in critical meetings of interest to prosecutors. Her guilty plea also looks like terrible news for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who also served as a Trump lawyer after the election and with whom Ellis worked closely.

    Her repudiation of her own behavior marks an ominous omen for Trump because it shows that while falsehoods about election fraud are still a potent political force in the GOP and conservative media, it’s the truth that matters in court. Under the legal system, the former president could face a level of accountability that the US political system, which is still buckling under his influence, can’t match.

    One of Trump’s former associates was feeling no remorse when he arrived in court in New York on Tuesday seeking to undermine another Trump legal defense. The former president’s longtime fixer, Michael Cohen, came face to face with his ex-boss for the first time in five years when he took the stand in a civil trial in which prosecutors are seeking to end Trump’s ability to do business in the state. Cohen has already gone to jail for tax fraud, making false statements to Congress and campaign finance violations – some of which were linked to his work for Trump before he launched his political career. Cohen once vowed to take a bullet for his former boss but has left no doubt that he’s been itching to testify against him for many months. While his own conviction raises credibility issues about his testimony, Cohen implicated Trump on Tuesday, saying his former boss directed him to inflate his net worth on financial statements.

    “Heck of a reunion,” Cohen told reporters after testifying under Trump’s gaze.

    Each of Tuesday’s legal dramas threatened to undermine Trump’s position in separate cases, to which he has pleaded not guilty, and emphasized how the Republican front-runner’s bid to recapture the White House will be shadowed by his criminal liability.

    And for someone who has the exaggerated sense of loyalty harbored by Trump – albeit one that mostly goes one way – the spectacle of three former associates turning against him will be especially irksome.

    While the crush of legal cases bearing down on him hasn’t diminished his dominance in the GOP presidential race, there are increasing signs that the courtroom pressure is beginning to grate on a former president who, in a lifetime of business, personal and political scrapes, has made an art form of dodging accountability.

    In a rage-filled stream of consciousness on his Truth Social network on Tuesday night, Trump lashed out at the ABC report about Meadows.

    “I don’t think Mark Meadows would lie about the Rigged and Stollen 2020 Presidential Election merely for getting IMMUNITY against Prosecution (PERSECUTION!),” the former president wrote.

    “Some people would make that deal, but they are weaklings and cowards, and so bad for the future our Failing Nation. I don’t think that Mark Meadows is one of them, but who really knows? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

    This came only a day after Trump absurdly compared himself to Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison – much of it in a tiny cell on Robben Island – enduring forced labor in a quarry for opposing the racist apartheid system in South Africa. After his release, the Nobel Peace Prize winner remade his divided nation as president and became a symbol of unity, humility, racial healing and forgiveness – qualities rarely shown by Trump.

    “I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela, because I’m doing it for a reason,” the ex-president told supporters in New Hampshire.

    Trump’s persecution complex is revealing, however. The former president is portraying himself as a bulwark against a government that he claims is weaponized against him and his supporters. The idea that he is a political martyr who is being unfairly targeted by the Biden administration – despite 91 charges across his four criminal indictments – may be his only credible campaign tactic. After all, he may be a convicted felon by Election Day in less than 13 months. While that prospect doesn’t seem to faze Republican primary voters, it may be a serious vulnerability among a broader electorate.

    Legal watchers in Washington have speculated for months about the activity of Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman who became the last chief of staff of Trump’s turbulent White House term.

    During his testimony before a federal grand jury, Meadows was also asked about efforts to overturn the election as well as Trump’s handling of classified documents, CNN previously reported.

    But if, as ABC News has reported, he has been granted immunity by special counsel Jack Smith and met federal prosecutors multiple times, that qualifies for the over-used term of “bombshell.”

    Haberman on why latest news on Mark Meadows feels ‘different’

    Meadows is also a key figure in the Fulton County, Georgia, probe, where he made a failed effort to have his case elevated to federal court after unsuccessfully arguing his actions at the behest of Trump’s election thwarting effort fell under his official duties.

    Meadows, who met Smith’s team at least three times this year, told investigators he did not believe the election was stolen and that Trump was being “dishonest” in claiming victory shortly after polls closed in 2020, according to ABC.

    The agreement is the first publicly known in the special counsel’s investigation into the events around January 6, 2021. The exact terms of Meadows’ deal with prosecutors are not clear, but often such agreements allow a person with valuable information about an investigation immunity from prosecution in exchange for fully cooperating.

    The reported details of Meadows’ testimony could be hugely damaging for Trump because a fundamental plank of the ex-president’s defense relies on the notion that he sincerely believed that the election was stolen and that his actions were not therefore criminal because they were an exercise of his right to free speech.

    It has long been the case that while those around Trump in business and politics often find themselves slipping deep into legal trouble, he skips free. The apparent decisions of Meadows, Ellis and Cohen – together with the mass of legal threats now facing the former president – suggest that charmed life is about to meet its biggest challenge yet.

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  • Hunter Biden’s former business partner testifying behind closed doors for GOP-led committee | CNN Politics

    Hunter Biden’s former business partner testifying behind closed doors for GOP-led committee | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer is meeting behind closed doors Monday with the House Oversight Committee on Capitol Hill, the latest development in the Republican-led investigations into the president’s son.

    The Justice Department submitted a new request over the weekend asking a judge to schedule a date for Archer to surrender to prison and begin serving out his one-year sentence resulting from a conviction in an unrelated fraud case, according to court filings. The move prompted immediate speculation among some Republicans that the Biden administration was attempting to prevent Archer from answering questions about Hunter Biden before the GOP-led committee, though in a court filing, the government explicitly requested that Archer’s sentence begin after he completes his congressional testimony.

    In a statement, Archer’s attorney said his client does not believe the DOJ request is connected in any way to the upcoming closed-door interview, despite continuing to fight demands related to scheduling a surrender date. “We are aware of speculation that the Department of Justice’s weekend request to have Mr. Archer report to prison is an attempt by the Biden administration to intimidate him in advance of his meeting with the House Oversight Committee on Monday,” Matthew Schwartz, an attorney for Archer, said in a statement Sunday.

    “To be clear, Mr. Archer does not agree with that speculation. In any case, Mr. Archer will do what he has planned to do all along, which is to show up on Monday and to honestly answer the questions that are put to him by the Congressional investigators,” Schwartz added.

    While House Oversight Chairman James Comer would only go as far as to call the timing of DOJ’s letter “odd” in an interview with Fox News on Sunday, the letter prompted more bombastic reactions from other House Republicans.

    Archer’s testimony comes as House Republicans appear to be shifting their focus away from trying to impeach members of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet and prioritizing efforts to impeach the president himself by linking him to controversial business dealings by his son, Hunter.

    And they are doing so with the apparent support of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, CNN recently reported.

    As a result, House investigations related to Hunter Biden are now expected to take center stage as Republicans continue to try to link the President to his son’s controversial business dealings.

    But speaking to CNN in recent weeks, McCarthy signaled that Republicans have yet to verify the most salacious allegations against Biden, namely that as vice president he engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national in order to benefit his son’s career, an allegation the White House furiously denies.

    But he said that launching an impeachment inquiry would unleash the full power of the House to turn over critical information, mirroring an argument advanced by House Democrats when they impeached then-President Donald Trump in 2019.

    McCarthy – who sources said has also been consulting with former House GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich on the issue – has warmed up to an idea of going after the president rather than members of his Cabinet. In recent weeks, he delivered his most explicit threat yet to Biden, saying House Republicans’ investigations into the Biden family’s business deals appear to be rising to the level of an impeachment inquiry.

    This story and headline have been updated with additional details.

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  • Wagner chief Prigozhin seen back in Russia for first time since rebellion | CNN

    Wagner chief Prigozhin seen back in Russia for first time since rebellion | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner private military company, was spotted inside Russia on Thursday for the first time since he led an armed rebellion against the Russian military last month.

    Prigozhin was seen in St. Petersburg, meeting with an African dignitary on the sidelines of the Russia Africa summit, according to accounts associated with the mercenary group.

    The dignitary is part of the Central African Republic delegation to the summit. Wagner has had a presence in the Central African Republic for several years, as previously reported by CNN.

    CNN was able to geolocate the photograph of Prigozhin and the dignitary to the Trezzini Palace Hotel in St. Petersburg, where, according to Russian media, the Wagner founder has kept an office. The hotel was one of the locations searched by Russian authorities on July 6, after the rebellion.

    Since then, Prigozhin had only been seen in public on July 19, when he seemingly appeared in a video inside Belarus, apparently greeting Wagner fighters at a base in Asipovichy.

    Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko – a longtime ally of Russian President Vladimir – claimed he convinced Putin not to “destroy” Wagner and Prigozhin during the rebellion.

    Video purportedly shows Prigozhin in public for first time since mutiny

    Prigozhin’s rebellion posed one of the biggest challenges to Putin’s long rule.

    Typically a figure who has preferred to operate in the shadows, Prigozhin and his fighters were thrust into the spotlight following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, with Wagner mercenaries playing a key role in multiple battles.

    Prigozhin and Putin have known each other since the 1990s. Prigozhin became a wealthy oligarch by winning lucrative catering contracts with the Kremlin, earning him the moniker “Putin’s chef.”

    His apparent transformation into a brutal warlord came in the aftermath of the 2014 Russian-backed separatist movement in the Donbas in eastern Ukraine.

    Prigozhin founded Wagner as a shadowy mercenary outfit that fought both in Ukraine and, increasingly, for Russian-backed causes around the world.

    CNN has tracked Wagner mercenaries in the Central African Republic, Sudan, Libya, Mozambique, Ukraine and Syria. Over the years they have developed a gruesome reputation and have been linked to multiple human rights abuses.

    After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Wagner forces were heavily involved in taking the Ukrainian cities of Soledar and Bakhmut.

    At times, Wagner forces seemed to be the only ones on the Russian side winning battles with the Ukrainians.

    But Prigozhin was often critical of Russian military leadership and the support it was giving his troops.

    In one particularly grim video from early May, Prigozhin stood next to a pile of dead Wagner fighters and took aim specifically at Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and chief of the Russian armed forces Gen. Valery Gerasimov.

    “The blood is still fresh,” he says, pointing to the bodies behind him. “They came here as volunteers and are dying so you can sit like fat cats in your luxury offices.”

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