Trump classified documents judge slammed by Jack Smith as ex-president sues Truth Social co-founders: Latest

Here’s Mike Bedigan to round up yesterday’s primaries, which had more than a whiff of futility about them, given that both Trump and Biden have long since sewn up their parties’ nominations in all but name.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr said he believes President Joe Biden poses a larger threat to democracy than former president Donald Trump because the Biden administration has censored misinformation on social media platforms.

Joining Erin Burnett on CNN Monday night, Kennedy argued that the Biden administration had violated the First Amendment in asking social media companies to reduce misinformation, which he claims is more dangerous than Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

Hope Hicks, a former aide to Trump during his presidential administration, could be called as a witness for the prosecution at his upcoming New York hush money trial, according to reports.

Sigh. We’re never going to get there are we?

I’m not sure it’s fair to “empty chair” someone who has not refused to debate you and especially when you yourself ducked out of all of your own party’s televised debates but whatever.

You Know Who is suing two co-founders of Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), the parent company of his Truth Social network, claiming that they set up the company improperly and should lose their stock in the venture.

TMTG went public last week, enjoying a remarkable debut on the Nasdaq exchange with shares trading at a high of $78 before plunging days later as the company’s extraordinary 2023 losses came to light – leading some to warn that it is the latest example of a volatile “meme stock” offering that has little underlying value.

Now, the Republican presidential candidate has filed a new lawsuit against Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, two former contestants from his NBC reality show The Apprentice turned co-founders of the company.

In a late-night filing on Tuesday, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith urged US district judge Aileen Cannon, overseeing Trump’s classified documents case in Florida, to reject his contention that he had any claim to personal ownership over the boxes of top secret files reclaimed by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 after the former president refused to return them to the National Archives when requested.

Smith argued that Judge Cannon accepting Trump’s argument that he had the power to designate the documents as personal would not only be “pure fiction” but would be “meritless and fatally undermined” by the evidence the government had gathered as part of its case.

The special counsel cites as evidence his interviews with Trump’s own Presidential Records Act representatives and “numerous” high-ranking White House officials, none of whom said they “had heard Trump say that he was designating records as personal”.

“To the contrary, every witness who was asked this question had never heard such a thing,” Smith said.

Here’s a little timely fact-checking of two of the former president’s claims from yesterday’s rally: he did not win Wisconsin and suburban women still don’t like him.

Some more gross pandering from Trump, this time over the Republicans’ faux-outrage over Trans Visibilty Day falling on Easter Sunday.

Also on the immigration front, Trump shamelessly exploited the murder of a young Michigan woman yesterday as he used her death to criticise Joe Biden’s border policies – and didn’t even have the decency to get the details right.

In his speech on Tuesday afternoon in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the former president invoked 25-year-old Ruby Garcia. Law enforcement officials say Garcia was murdered by Brandon Ortiz-Vite, also 25, a man from Mexico with whom she was romantically involved.

Speaking about Garcia’s death, Trump incorrectly told his supporters: “On 22 March, [Ortiz-Vite] shot 17-year-old Ruby, actually, she was a beautiful, beautiful young woman. Ruby Garcia was shot multiple times.”