Trump campaign spends $40m on legal fees – latest news

Former president Donald Trump mocked Ron DeSantis, his chief rival in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, on Sunday evening by posting a video of the Florida governor wiping his nose with his hand while greeting people.

Mr Trump posted the video on his Truth Social site, which featured the children’s song “One of These Things is Not Like the Other” with Mr DeSantis talking with supporters while holding a beer. The video was created on the right-wing video site Rumble by the pro-Trump Dilley Meme Team.

At a moment of growing legal peril, Donald Trump ramped up his calls for his GOP rivals to drop out of the 2024 presidential race as he threatened to primary Republican members of Congress who fail to focus on investigating Democratic President Joe Biden and urged them to halt Ukrainian military aid until the White House cooperates with their investigations into Biden and his family.

“Every dollar spent attacking me by Republicans is a dollar given straight to the Biden campaign,” Trump said at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Saturday night. The former president and GOP frontrunner said it was time for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others he dismissed as “clowns” to clear the field, accusing them of “wasting hundreds of millions of dollars that Republicans should be using to build a massive vote-gathering operation” to take on Biden in November.

A Mar-a-Lago IT worker has been hit with a target letter from the DOJ as part of its probe into Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents on leaving the White House.

Sources told CNN that Yuscil Taveras, who oversees the surveillance cameras at the Florida club, received a letter from federal prosecutors telling him he was a target of the investigation after Mr Trump was first indicted in the case in early June.

Mr Taveras has met with investigators in the case though it is unclear if he is cooperating with prosecutors.

The Mar-a-Lago staffer has not been charged with any crime.

He was mentioned – named only as Trump Employee 4 – in the superseding indictment issued last week.

Former president Donald Trump floated his potential defence for the charges he may face for promoting lies about the election during a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania.

The already-twice-impeached and twice-indicted former president now faces a potential third indictment for spreading lies about the 2020 presidential election and the attack on the Capitol that was fuelled by them.

But speaking to the crowd in Pennsylvania, a state where he lost 43 lawsuits as he tried to dispute the 2020 presidential election results, Mr Trump pushed back on the potential accusations.

“Why didn’t the corrupt Marxist prosecutors bring these radical and unjustified charges against me two and a half years ago,” Mr Trump asked the crowd. “They had two and a half years. Two and a half years. Nobody even knew they were looking at it. I don’t think they were.”

Only four out of dozens of former Trump cabinet members say he should be re-elected in 2024.

NBC News contacted 44 of those who served in then-President Donald Trump’s cabinet between 2017 and 2021. While many declined to comment or didn’t answer, only four have publicly endorsed Mr Trump for the office he once held.

Several of them have been trying to remain as neutral as possible as the Republican primary plays out. There are those who oppose Mr Trump’s return to the presidency. Former Attorney General Bill Barr told NBC, “I have made clear that I strongly oppose Trump for the nomination and will not endorse Trump”.

Mr Barr was asked how he would cast his vote if the 2024 general election ended up being a rematch between Mr Trump and President Joe Biden.

“I’ll jump off that bridge when I get to it,” he said.

An employee of Donald Trump‘s Mar-a-Lago estate, Carlos De Oliveira, is expected to make his first court appearance Monday on charges accusing him of scheming with the former president to hide security footage from investigators probing Trump’s hoarding of classified documents.

De Oliveira, Mar-a-Lago’s property manager, was added last week to the indictment with Trump and the former president’s valet, Walt Nauta, in the federal case alleging a plot to illegally keep top-secret records at Trump’s Florida estate and thwart government efforts to retrieve them.

De Oliveira faces charges including conspiracy to obstruct justice and lying to investigators.

He’s scheduled to appear before a magistrate judge in Miami nearly two months after Trump pleaded not guilty in the case brought by special counsel Jack Smith.

Donald Trump returned to the roots of his first impeachment when he suggested that aid to Ukraine should be conditioned on congressional investigations of President Joe Biden.

The Saturday night tirade at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania echoed the conduct that led to Mr Trump’s first of his two impeachments when he used military aid to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open an investigation into then-candidate Biden in 2019.

“Congress should refuse to authorize a single additional shipment of our depleted weapons stockpiles … to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden Crime Family’s corrupt business dealings,” Mr Trump said on Saturday.

He argued that all Republicans who don’t join the efforts should be challenged in their primaries – Mr Trump endorsed challengers in the 2022 midterms of the Republicans who voted for his impeachment after the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has said that the investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia is “ready to go” – in a hint suggesting a potential indictment could be imminent.

“The work is accomplished,” she told WXIA over the weekend. “We’ve been working for two and half years. We’re ready to go.”

DA Willis said that there will be people unhappy with the outcome of the probe and praised the actions of local officials who ramped up security around the courthouse in Georgia last week.

“I think that the sheriff is doing something smart in making sure that the courthouse stays safe,” she said.

“I’m not willing to put any of the employees or the constituents that come to the courthouse in harm’s way.”

The DA previously indicated that any charging decisions would likely come in August.

At 24, Alberto Rodriguez has grandparents younger than Joe Biden. But he’s more interested in the 80-year-old president’s accomplishments than his age.

“People as young as me, we’re all focusing on our day-to-day lives and he has done things to help us through that,” Rodriguez, a cook at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, said of Biden’s support among young voters. Rodriguez pointed specifically to federal COVID-19 relief payments and government spending increases on infrastructure and other social programs.

Voters like him were a key piece of Biden’s winning 2020 coalition, which included majorities of young people as well as college graduates, women, urban and suburban voters and Black Americans. Maintaining their support will be critical in closely contested states such as Nevada, where even small declines could prove consequential to Biden’s reelection bid.

His 2024 campaign plans to emphasize messages that could especially resonate with young people in the coming weeks as the anniversary of the sweeping Inflation Reduction Act approaches in mid-August. That legislation includes provisions that the White House will embrace to argue that Biden has done more than any other president to combat climate change.

Such efforts, however, could collide with Biden’s personal reality — like when he recalled that, while attending a St. Patrick’s Day parade at age 14, he appeared in a photo with President Harry S. Truman.