Trump skips fraud court as Rudy Giuliani trial begins: Live

An answer would mark the first time the nation’s highest court has weighed in on the criminal prosecutions of the former president, who was charged in a grand jury indictment for his alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Mr Trump has argued that he is protected from prosecution for crimes committed while in office, citing “presidential immunity” that the federal judge overseeing the case has rejected.

In a filing to the Supreme Court on Monday, Mr Smith’s team with the US Department of Justice asks for the justices to determine “whether a former President is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted before the criminal proceedings begin.”

“The United States recognizes that this is an extraordinary request,” according to the filing. “This is an extraordinary case.”

The House of Representatives has a mountain of work that it needs to complete. After buying itself some time by passing a “laddered” continuing resolution wherein half of the spending bills expire in January and the other in February, the House is still not on track to pass spending bills. The package it passed to aid Israel was little more than a right-wing gimmick that would have stripped funding from the IRS, something it knew Democrats in the Senate would never agree to passing.

But instead of focusing on the business of governing, the House will go down another boodoggle and begin the process of opening up an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. This is, of course, a continuation of the boondoggle attempt to impeach the sitting president that began during former speaker Kevin McCarthy’s tenure, which in and of itself was an attempt to appeal to the most extreme factions in the House Republican conference.

On Tuesday, the House Rules Committee will hold a hearing on the resolution to begin the impeachment inquiry. But the fact remains that the House Republican conference so far has not definitively made the case to the American public that any of Mr Biden’s actions have amounted to the level of a crime worthy of impeachment.

That matters because, despite what proponents will say, impeachment is and always will be a political act. The public needs to at least believe that the president committed a crime.

The first witness for the plaintiffs in the Rudy Giuliani defamation trial is Regina Scott, a senior consultant with Jensen Hughes.

The company has provided threat and reputational monitoring as well as physical security for Ms Freeman and Ms Moss since late 2020.

A spreadsheet is introduced documenting public references to the two plaintiffs since they began appearing on 3 December 2020 when Mr Giuliani spoke to the Georgia State Senate. There are repeated objections to basic questions about the document to the annoyance of Judge Howell.

The document was compiled in May 2023 and reports there were more than 710,000 mentions of the pair between 21 November 2020 and 1 May 2023. More than 600,000 (approximately 90 per cent) were on Twitter and analysis shows they found “largely negative sentiment trends”.

Ms Scott reads out one of the mentions of Ms Freeman in which the poster says they would die happy if she were convicted of treason and they would love to see her executed. Another mentions the “Day of the Rope” a reference to mass hangings in a white supremacist book.

Another report finds that between August and November of this year, there were a further 320,000 mentions of the two women. During this same period, Ms Scott says Mr Giuliani has referenced them a total of 20 times including as recently as last Monday.

She says of the case: “The type of violent, and racist, and graphic material, that’s on a level that we don’t see at all in our work.”

Carlson was speaking at a fundraiser for the American Principles Project in Virginia and was asked by an audience member about a report published in Axios claiming that Melania Trump wanted him to join her husband on his 2024 ticket.

“God would have to yell at me very loud,” he told the audience, according to The Messenger.

Regarding Ms Trump, he said he didn’t “know her, really,” and recognised the absurdity of him seeking elected office.

In his opening statement, Mr Giuliani’s attorney Joseph Sibley admitted his client did something wrong and there was “no question” Ms Freeman and Ms Moss were harmed.

However, he contended that Mr Giuliani’s role was minimal because of the “breadth and scope” of the action against the mother and daughter.

“You’re going to see a lot of evidence that these women were harmed, but not much evidence that Mr Giuliani was the cause,” said Sibley.

He said that what they are asking for in damages dwarfs what Johnny Depp was awarded in his 2022 defamation case ($10m) — Judge Howell asked him to stick to the facts of the case.

Sibley said at the end of the trial he would suggest a damages amount that is “fair and proportional” to his client’s role but did not say what that figure was.

“If you award the damages they are asking for, it will be the end of Mr Giuliani.”

A man has been arrested after allegedly threatening to kill Vivek Ramaswamy and his supporters at an event on Monday, according to newly released court records.

The suspect, 30-year-old Tyler Anderson, was first reported to police by the Republican presidential hopeful’s staff last week after he allegedly responded to one of the campaign’s texts about an upcoming campaign event.

“We are grateful to law enforcement for their swiftness and professionalism in handling this matter and pray for the safety of all Americans,” Ramaswamy campaign spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement shared with The Independent.

Michael Gottlieb, who is also representing Ms Freeman and Ms Moss explained to the jury about the damages that the mother and daughter are seeking from Mr Giuliani.

Their suit seeks between $15.5m and $43m in both compensatory damages for emotional and reputational harm and punitive damages due to the outrageous conduct of the defendant.

Gottlieb explained that since Mr Giuliani began targeting the two women, the “vile, racist, hateful comments” have never stopped.

One witness, Dr Ashlee Humphreys of Northwestern University, will testify that the statements made by the former mayor of New York generated anywhere between 146-400 million impressions online.

“We will ask you to think about how needless, how cruel, it is for powerful figures like Mr Giuliani to target election workers and volunteers and brand them as fraudsters and criminals without evidence,” said Gottlieb.

“In the United States of America, behaviour like Rudy Giuliani’s is not the inevitable result of politics. It is not acceptable, and it will not be tolerated.”

Former California police chief Alan Hostetter went on a conspiratorial rant moments before a federal judge sentenced him to more than 11 years in prison for conspiring to bring weapons to the US Capitol during the January 6 riot.

The 58-year-old, who represented himself at trial, told the court on Thursday that the January 6 insurrection was an “obvious set up” that was faked by “crisis actors,” and claimed that Ashli Babbitt, a rioter killed by a police officer at the Capitol, was actually still alive.

The former chief of the La Habra Police Department was convicted in July on four felony counts, including conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and carrying a dangerous or deadly weapon onto Capitol grounds.

Hostetter joined the Capitol riot with a hatchet in his backpack, and incited others to violence with a bullhorn on January 6, according to prosecutors. He was not accused of entering the Capitol building itself.

“Through his words and deeds on January 6, Alan Hostetter was a terrorist and it’s important that be said,” assistant US attorney Anthony William Mariano said during the sentencing, WUSA9 reports.

After his incendiary testimony, Hostetter was reportedly confronted by Babbit’s mother, and claimed, “This feels like it’s staged,” according to the station.

Von DuBose, representing Ms Freeman and Ms Moss, delivered his opening statement to the jury, emphasising how Mr Giuliani “stole the lives” of his clients by “destroying their names”.

A montage of voicemails they received is played to the court involving offensive, violent, and racist language directed at the mother and daughter. They are referred to as prostitutes and in one call the n-word is chanted again and again.

Following the montage, a clip is played of Mr Giuliani making his false claims set to a video timeline of his tweets. This culminates with his claim to the Georgia State Senate about the two using “USB ports” to somehow flip the election.

“As you will hear, none of that – none of that – was true. But the millions of people who heard the lies didn’t wait for confirmation,” said DuBose.

He added that the response to Mr Giuliani’s words was “swift, it was racist, and it was vicious”.

Returning to the topic of the USB drive, DuBose told the jury there is no video of them handing it around as it doesn’t exist. They were exchanging a pack of ginger mints, which he held up in court.

DuBose added that there was a “strategic communications plan” for Trump and his surrogates to use the claims about the mother and daughter as part of their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

In audio of Trump’s call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger the jury heard how he mentioned Ms Freeman and Ms Moss 18 times. He called Ms Moss “a professional vote scammer and hustler”. Trump also mentioned Fulton County in his January 6 speech in Washington,

Wisconsin’s Democratic secretary of state on Monday called for a Republican who served as a fake elector for former President Donald Trump and admitted that their work was used in an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election to be removed from his position on the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Bob Spindell was one of 10 Republicans who signed certificates in 2020 falsely stating that Trump had won Wisconsin. President Joe Biden won the battleground state.

Spindell and other nine fake electors conceded in a legal settlement last week that Biden had won the state and agreed to not serve as electors in next year’s election or in any in which Trump is running. They also agreed that their actions were “part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results.”

But they also avoided paying any damages and didn’t accept any liability or admit any wrongdoing for their actions.

Spindell, who didn’t respond to voicemails or text messages left last week and on Monday seeking comment, is one of three Republicans on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which also has three Democratic members. The commission is tasked with administering the state’s elections, but it is Wisconsin’s more than 1,800 local election clerks who actually run elections.

On Monday, Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski became the latest Democrat to call for Spindell to lose his seat on the bipartisan elections commission.

“He is clearly not fit,” Godlewski said in an interview. “He doesn’t have the moral compass or ability to follow the law and he needs to be removed.”