Trump Corruption

Law.com reports: President Donald Trump’s brother sued his niece in Dutchess County Supreme Court Friday in his latest attempt to block publication of her upcoming book about the president and his family. The suit, which was filed by Robert Trump’s attorney, Charles Harder, follows the speedy dismissal of a petition filed in Queens County Surrogate’s Court in connection with the …

Bloomberg News reports: The Senate Judiciary Committee blocked an effort by Chairman Lindsey Graham to give the attorney general the power to veto investigations of Justice Department lawyers by the inspector general. The committee instead backed — over the objections of Graham and Attorney General William Barr — a bipartisan bill by Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah that would …

The Daily Beast reports: A New York judge has tossed an application by President Donald Trump’s brother to try and halt the publication of his niece’s book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. Queens County Surrogate Court Judge Peter Kelly cited “several improprieties” in Robert Trump’s filing that rendered it “fatally defective”—including …

Vox reports: If Joe Biden wins the presidency, he’s promising at least one staffing change: firing the CEO of a US-funded global media agency who’s accused of trying to turn it into a propaganda shop aligned with Donald Trump’s ideology. Andrew Bates, a spokesperson for the former vice president’s campaign, told me Biden will oust Michael Pack from his Senate-confirmed …

Mediaite reports: President Donald Trump complained on Thursday that nobody on Fox News defended him after contributor Jessica Tarlov ripped his visit to St. John’s Episcopal Church the day after it was set on fire by protesters last month. Trump’s complaint came after Tarlov, a liberal commentator on Fox News, criticized his walk to the church that followed protestors and …

The Daily Beast reports: Attorney General William Barr has agreed to attend a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on July 28, Department of Justice spokesperson Kerri Kupec said Wednesday. The announcement comes as the Judiciary Committee convened for another Department of Justice oversight hearing and just days after the complicated firing of Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern …

The Insider reports: The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday held an oversight hearing focusing on Attorney General William Barr’s decisions as head of the Justice Department. As part of the proceedings, the committee heard testimony from two DOJ officials: Aaron Zelinsky, a federal prosecutor at the US attorney’s office in Baltimore, and John Elias, a senior official in the department’s …

Bloomberg News reports: A federal appeals court ordered a judge to immediately dismiss the criminal case against President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, Bloomberg News reports. A three-judge appellate panel on Wednesday denied U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan the authority to examine whether the government’s surprise motion to dismiss the case, in which Flynn pleaded guilty twice …

Trump has been having a lot of angst over books lately: President Trump’s family is seeking a temporary restraining order to try to block publication of a tell-all book by the president’s niece, Mary L. Trump. Ms. Trump is the daughter of the president’s late brother, Fred Trump Jr., and her book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family …

“In the many cases I have been privileged to work on in my career, I have never seen political influence play any role in prosecutorial decision making. With one exception: United States v. Roger Stone. “What I saw was the Department of Justice exerting significant pressure on the line prosecutors in the case to obscure the correct sentencing guidelines calculation …

Just in this morning from the Lincoln Project: During Trump’s poorly-attended rally in Tulsa, Trump admitted what Americans across the country feared: that he commanded public health experts to impede COVID-19 testing for personal, political advantage. As it stands, 122,000 American lives have been lost and the virus is surging in many of the states President Trump coerced into hasty …

FactCheck.org reports: Contrary to President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that he inherited a Strategic National Stockpile with “empty” or “bare” cupboards, the federal government had more ventilators in stock than it ended up distributing amid the COVID-19 pandemic, FactCheck.org has learned. The SNS had 16,660 ventilators “immediately available for use” when the federal government began deploying the breathing machines to …

The Associated Press reports: President Donald Trump slammed his former National Security Adviser John Bolton again on Tuesday in the continued fallout over Bolton’s White House memoir. In a tweet, the president described Bolton as a “washed-up creepster” and a “lowlife,” while stating the ex-administration official should be in prison. Titled The Room Where It Happened, Bolton’s book portrays Trump …

The Hill reports: President Trump on Monday suggested without evidence that his predecessor, Barack Obama, committed treason in connection with the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia. “Treason, treason. It’s treason,” Trump said in an interview with CBN News. The president did not elaborate on the specific charge but repeated his assertion that the previous administration “spied” …

Politico reports: The State Department’s top spokeswoman on Monday muted the line of a reporter asking about John Bolton’s book during a briefing extolling press freedom. The Department convened a telephone briefing ahead of its designation of four additional Chinese news outlets as foreign missions. But when David Brunnstrom, a journalist from Reuters, asked whether U.S. allies had reached out …

The Hill reports: President Trump on Monday refused to say whether he told staff to slow down COVID-19 testing to make it look like the U.S. had fewer cases, but argued that the country has done “too good a job” on testing. “If we did slow it down, we wouldn’t show nearly as many cases,” Trump said in an interview …

The New York Times reports: President Trump said he resisted punishing China for its mass internment of ethnic Uighurs last year for fear of jeopardizing trade talks with Beijing, a blunt admission of his transactional approach to human rights and willingness to subordinate other U.S. policy priorities to a potential trade deal he considers vital to his re-election. “Well, we …

Mediaite reports: President Donald Trump went ALL-CAPS in a Monday morning warning of a looming election fraud scandal surrounding potential mail-in voting during an ongoing pandemic. Trump first tweeted a Breitbart blog post that cited Attorney General William Barr saying that mail-in ballots “absolutely opens the floodgates to fraud in an interview with Fox News Maria Bartiromo that aired Sunday …

The Guardian reports: John Bolton, the former national security advisor, has said he will not vote for Donald Trump at the November election and hopes history will remember him as a “one-term president who didn’t plunge the country irretrievably into a downward spiral.” In an interview with ABC News to promote his book, The Room Where It Happened, Bolton, who …

Jonathan Swan reports at Axios: In his first public comments on the matter, President Trump told Axios that his niece, Mary Trump, is “not allowed” to write her forthcoming book about him because doing so would violate a nondisclosure agreement she signed. Driving the news: “She’s not allowed to write a book,” Trump told me. “You know, when we settled …