Trump seeks new delay to Georgia trial with appeal against Fani Willis ruling: Live

The Manhattan district attorney’s office has asked Judge Juan Merchan if the gag order imposed on Donald Trump ahead of his hush-money trial applies to comments about family members of court staff after the former president attacked both the judge himself and his daughter three times on Truth Social.

Mr Trump’s legal team responded by saying that they cannot force the former president to do anything the gag order does not require and that to “clarify or confirm” the order would be to expand it. They argue no expansion is appropriate.

In a statement to The Independent on Thursday, retired Capitol Policer officer Aquilino Gonell said of Mr Trump: “As the opportunistic grifter that he is, he claims to support the police, law and order, the rule of law yet, he has not met with any officers from Capitol Police who were injured and assaulted or the ones that lost their lives because of his actions and inaction in his attempt to cling to power and the mob that he incited and wanted to lead.”

Gustaf Kilander has the story:

On Thursday, House Speaker Mike Johnson made two seemingly contradictory moves.

First, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced he had spoken with Johnson and explained that “quick passage of US aid to Ukraine by Congress is vital.”

Later in the day, Johnson announced the managers for the Senate trial of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas after the House voted to impeach him last month. Unsurprisingly, he named House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul and Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Greene as managers. He also threw a bone to the far-right by picking MAGA Republicans like Clay Higgins of Louisiana; Arizona’s Andy Biggs, one of the chief election deniers who voted to boot Kevin McCarthy; and Harriet Hageman, who beat Liz Cheney in they Wyoming Republican primary after Cheney vocally criticised the GOP and Donald Trump.

But more surprisingly, he also named Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the firebrand conspiracy theorist and ardent opponent of Ukraine aid, who last week filed a motion to vacate to initiate a no-confidence vote against Johnson.

Johnson’s decision to name Greene to the committee, especially after his talk with Zelensky, shows how the leader of the US House of Representatives has tried to balance keeping conservatives happy while also fulfilling his basic duties of governing: for every one act of governing, he has to pull one outrageous stunt that keeps the extremists in his conference from throwing him into the volcano the way they did his predecessors.

Judge Michael Luttig, the influential conservative and former federal judge who co-authored a report refuting claims of electoral fraud in 2020, has given a stark warning about former president Donald Trump.

Judge Luttig began: “​​The Nation is witnessing the determined delegitimization of both its Federal and State judiciaries and the systematic dismantling of its system of justice and Rule of Law by a single man – the former President of the United States.”

He continued: “In the months ahead, the former president can only be expected to ramp up his unprecedented efforts to delegitimize the courts of the United States, the nation’s state courts, and America’s system of justice, through his vicious, disgraceful, and unforgiveable attacks and threats on the Federal and State Judiciaries and the individual Judges of these courts.

“Never in American history has any person, let alone a President of the United States, leveled such threatening attacks against the federal and state courts and federal and state judicial officers of the kind the former president has leveled continually now for years.

“But suffice it to say, never in history has any person leveled such attacks and been met with such passivity, acquiescence, and submissiveness by the nation.”

Judge Luttig further wrote: “It is a regrettable commentary on our times that a lone federal judge, The Honorable Judge Reggie B. Walton — because no one whose responsibility it is to do so has had the courage and the will — would finally be left no choice but, himself, to express on national television the profound concerns of the entire Federal and State Judiciaries over Donald Trump’s contemptible attacks on the federal and state courts, the judges of these courts and their families, and the other participants in the judicial process.”

He continued: “It is the responsibility of the Supreme Court of the United States in the first instance to protect the federal courts, the federal judges, and all participants in the justice system from the reprehensible spectacle of the former president’s inexcusable, threatening attacks, just as it is the responsibility of the respective State Supreme Courts in the first instance to protect their courts and their state judges from the same.”

In conclusion, he wrote: “Ultimately, however, it is the responsibility of the entire nation to protect its courts and judges, its Constitution, its Rule of Law, and America’s Democracy from vicious attack, threat, undermine, and deliberate delegitimization at the hands of anyone so determined.”

Donald Trump and eight other defendants in the Fulton County, Georgia election interference case are appealing the ruling that allowed District Attorney Fani Willis to stay on the case after they accused her of impropriety regarding her relationship with lead prosecutor Nathan Wade.

They argue, among other things, that Judge Scott McAfee was mistaken when he determined that Ms Willis did not have a personal stake in the case.

The defendants argue that failure to disqualify her now will result in errors during every single trial going forward: “…the erroneous failure to disqualify a prosecutor is a structural error that would not just cause substantial error at trial – it would render each and every trial in this case a nullity.”

Further: “It is neither prudent nor efficient to require the courts, the parties, or taxpayers to run the significant and avoidable risk of having to go through this painful, divisive, and expensive process more than once when an existing structural error can be remedied by this Court now.”

The court filing includes a section concerning “the public’s faith in the integrity of the judicial system, especially the criminal justice system” in which they argue: “When the public perception of the integrity of the criminal justice system is at stake, no prejudice to defendants needs to be shown” and that it is: “Crucial to the public’s confidence is that prosecutors remain and appear to be disinterested and impartial.”

File this under: Are you kidding me?

Administrative Law Judge Lisa Boggs backed the State Election Board’s findings in a 25-page ruling on Wednesday, saying that Pritchard voted unlawfully nine times while under extended probation for felonies going back almost three decades.

Gustaf Kilander has the story:

Former Republican Rep Liz Cheney, now a fierce critic of Donald Trump, has reiterated her staunch opposition to the former president returning to the White House in damning comments at an event at Drake University.

Ms Cheney was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr Trump, following the January 6 Capitol riot, and one of just two who sat on the House select committee investigating the former president’s role in the events leading up to that day.

Speaking on the impact of Mr Trump on the Republican party, she said “Certainly, what’s happening in the Republican party is dangerous,” Ms Cheney said. “We now have one of our two major political parties that has abandoned the Constitution.”

“We all have a responsibility to encourage our public officials to engage in substantive debate [and] to be respectful,” She Cheney said. “I hope we will walk back from … the edge of the abyss that we’re looking into that has become so divisive and partisan — and so toxic — in so many ways.”

Speaking about November’s general election, she said the former president shouldn’t be so confident that things would go his way as they had in the primaries.

“In a number of these primaries, what we saw was that in some instances, close to 30% of the Republicans said they won’t vote for Donald Trump,” Ms Cheney said. “So although he won, that is not a basis on which someone should go into a general election feeling any comfort about being able to prevail in the general.”

On the importance of Mr Trump being defeated in November, she said: “We know [Trump] tried once not to leave office, and he will have no incentive to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power and to leave office should be selected again.”

“As frustrated as I know people get sometimes with policy disagreements you might have — and I certainly have policy disagreements with the Biden administration — I know the nation can survive bad policy. We can’t survive a president who is willing to torch the Constitution.”

Watch Ms Cheney speak about the former president’s actions on January 6th:

John Bowden digs into the numbers of the latest Quinnipiac University poll which has some sort of good news for the Biden campaign: