Jack Smith accuses Trump of aiming to try election case in media

The ex-president’s legal team also asked Judge Tanya Chutkan to allow ‘volunteers’ to access discovery materials.

Many years after leaving the presidency in disgrace, Richard Nixon spoke to CNN about his time as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president and said that a vice president should consider themselves dispensible “and should do what the man wants.”

“Because otherwise, the man’s got to get down there in the ring,” Mr Nixon said. Those words resonate when it comes to his successor, Vice President Kamala Harris. Like Mr Nixon, Ms Harris spent only a brief time in the United States Senate before a presidential candidate who was considered an elder statesman picked her to be his vice president.

No vice president has probably struggled more with their image than Ms Harris. But recently, she’s assumed one of the more traditional roles of a vice president: the attack dog. Essentially, vice presidents engage in the fights that the president don’t to keep the boss’s hands clean and to make sure “the man” doesn’t have to “get down in the ring.”

Former president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign is asking supporters whether they think he should participate in the first Republican primary debate – in a not-so-subtle way.

On his campaign site, it provides a poll: “Should President Trump show up to the GOP debate?” The clickable choices are: “Yes” or “No – let all of the many other candidates attack each other while President Trump unites the rest of our party to focus on the important battle of beating Biden.”

A judge has dismissed former President Donald Trump’s counter-lawsuit against writer E Jean Carroll.

Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in an order made public on Monday that Mr Trump hadn’t proven that Ms Carroll’s statements on CNN the day after a civil trial jury found that the ex-president had sexually abused Ms Carroll and subsequently defamed her were false or “not at least substantially true”.

Mr Trump sued Ms Carroll in June following her CNN appearance the previous month. Ms Carroll was asked about the verdict – the jury found that while Mr Trump sexually abused her, they didn’t state that Mr Trump had raped her under New York state law, to which Ms Carroll said, “Oh, yes he did”.

The latest indictment against Donald Trump for conduct growing out of the post-election efforts to retain power reveals what a formidable adversary Trump has collided with in Jack Smith.

The supposed watchword of Smith’s investigation from the start has been to treat Trump like any other defendant. Indeed, a chief charge in the indictment – obstruction of an official proceeding – already has been brought against some 300 of the marauders; how could a fair justice system give a pass to the man who spearheaded it?

But this conventional storyline overlooks the several ways in which Smith has acted with careful attention to Trump’s qualities and weaknesses. Smith is the very antithesis of a generic prosecutor: he has sussed out his quarry as meticulously as Ahab sussed out the white whale.

Bill Barr is open to testifying in Donald Trump’s upcoming criminal trial should he be asked, the former attorney general revealed on Sunday.

Mr Barr was speaking with CBS’s Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation when he was asked the same question that Mike Pence was asked on NBC — would he testify in Mr Trump’s January 6 trial when it goes to court?

And while the former vice president hemmed and hawed before indicating that he wouldn’t try and dodge a subpoena for his testimony, Mr Barr got straight to the point.

“Of course,” he responded.

Ron DeSantis has not ruled out enacting a national abortion “ban” if elected president, after the Florida governor implemented state restrictions on abortion access at 15 weeks and six weeks of pregnancy within the last two years.

But he suggested that there is no “consensus” in the US for members of Congress to implement a national ban, as abortion restrictions and the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade remain overwhelmingly unpopular.

An attorney and spokesperson for former president Donald Trump on Monday claimed the Department of Justice is seeking a protective order to prevent the ex-president from publicising discovery materials because he’s “afraid” and accused the prosecutor overseeing the case of playing “victim” over the dispute.

Alina Habba, a civil attorney who currently serves as a spokesperson for Mr Trump through his political action committee, said during an appearance on Fox and Friends that the dispute between Mr Trump’s defence team and Special Counsel Jack Smith over a proposed protective order is different from other cases and said the ex-president’s team hasn’t objected to other protective orders in the different court cases against him.

The ex-president’s legal team also asked Judge Tanya Chutkan to allow ‘volunteers’ to access discovery materials.

Andrew Feinberg has the story.

Mexican officials informed the state of Texas that two bodies were found in the Rio Grande: one ensnared in Governor Greg Abbott’s controversial floating border wall, and another in a nearby area. Their official cause of death hasn’t been determined yet, but sooner or later, the razor-wire-tipped buoys are going to get people killed. And that, all but explicitly, is the point.

The buoys are part of a three-decade push from state and national leaders of both parties to make crossing the border as deadly as possible, under the theory, proven wrong by data, that this will reduce migration overall. Until we change course, the bodies will keep piling up.

Mr Abbott insisted last month in a letter to the White House that no one “wants to see another death in the Rio Grande River,” and spun his efforts at the border as a way to save lives and drive people towards legal immigration at US ports of entry.

The reality on the ground would suggest otherwise.

In July, a Texas state border medic named Nicholas Wingate went public with allegations that the border barriers were already causing severe injuries, and that he and his fellow troopers were ordered, as part of the governor’s Operation Lone Star, to push exhausted migrants back into the river and refuse to offer them water. (The state denies this order existed.)