Former president Donald Trump will likely face additional sanctions for violating the gag order in his criminal case in New York City after a brutal contempt hearing Thursday morning. He had already been fined $9,000 on Tuesday for nine violations. Trump is facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for his role in a 2016 scheme to cover up an alleged extra-marital affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels. (Trump denies any affair.) Before the trial started, Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing Trump’s hush-money case, issued a gag order prohibiting Trump the former president fr ..read more

Eight years ago, in his 2016 run for president, Donald Trump said that women who have abortions should be criminally charged. “There has to be some form of punishment,” Trump said at the time. The comment caused a firestorm and his campaign walked it back within hours. It marked one of the few times that Trump recanted.  But as he mounts another run for president, both Trump and the anti-abortion movement that’s supported him now feel unrestrained. In an interview Time published Tuesday, the former president said that he would not stop states from prosecuting a woman for having an abortio ..read more

On Saturday, just as Utah Republicans were gathering for their annual nominating convention, former President Donald Trump endorsed Senate candidate Trent Staggs, an upstart small-town mayor who has been carefully cultivating endorsements from national MAGA celebrities. The endorsement helped Staggs prevail over nine other candidates in the crowded convention race to replace retiring Sen. Mitt Romney, including Brent Orrin Hatch, the son of the late six-term Sen. Orrin Hatch. After three rounds of voting, Staggs won more than 50 percent of delegate votes, which allows him to advance to the Jun ..read more

Once again, there’s not much love lost between Bill Barr and the man he accused of betraying the Oval Office, Donald Trump. When the former attorney general confirmed this week that he would support the Republican presidential ticket in November, his former boss took the opportunity to mock Barr as “slow-moving” and “lazy.”  “That’s classic Trump,” Barr chuckled on Friday when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked about the insults. “What’s the question?” He went on to express frustration that voters are faced with a rematch between Joe Biden and Trump. But given that choice, Barr explained th ..read more

Donald Trump is on trial in Manhattan facing 34 counts of falsifying business records as part of another crime: conspiring to influence the 2016 election. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg argues that, to squelch negative publicity that might hurt Trump’s 2016 campaign, Trump directed the creation of fake records to hide hush-money payments to women who claimed they’d had extramarital sex with him.  That’s a complicated case to prove. And one in which it does not matter one whit, at least legally, who Trump actually had sex with. All Trump’s lawyers have to argue is that the payoffs ..read more

In a little-noticed court filing earlier this month, federal prosecutors described Steve Bannon as a “co-conspirator” in a massive criminal fraud and racketeering case against a flamboyant, far-right Chinese fugitive, compounding the legal headaches of the former Donald Trump adviser. FBI agents in March 2023 arrested Guo Wengui, a self-styled anti-Chinese government activist Bannon once advised, charging him and two associates with using a series of fraudulent investment opportunities to defraud thousands of Guo’s supporters in the Chinese diaspora of more than $1 billion. Guo used the procee ..read more

The Supreme Court on Thursday will hear arguments over former President Donald Trump’s unprecedented and novel theory that former presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for anything that involved alleged “official acts” while in office. But this long-shot theory was only one component of Trump’s overall legal strategy; his main goal was to delay his criminal trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election. And in that effort, the justices have already given him what he wants. Special Counsel Jack Smith brought a four-count indictment against Trump last August for his attempt to subvert ..read more

Once again, former president Donald Trump is about to find out just how far he can push a judge. On Tuesday morning, Trump’s attorneys faced an angry barrage of questions from New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan, demanding they explain why Trump should not be fined for what prosecutors in his hush-money case say was “willfully and flagrantly” violating a gag order Merchan imposed on March 26.  The hearing kicked off the second day of testimony in the historic case that focuses on whether Trump had falsified business records to pay off adult film star Stormy Daniels, among others, to ..read more

Last week, Justice Juan Merchan pulled off an impressive feat in the New York Supreme Court’s criminal division: He finished empaneling 18 jurors in the first-ever criminal trial of a former president. This was not easy. Donald Trump’s first criminal trial—of the four he faces in the coming months—concerns 34 counts of falsifying business records, including a reported hush money payment he made to pornstar Stormy Daniels to cover up an alleged affair, in an attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election. Trump has pleaded not guilty. In putting together a jury, Justice Merchan needed to f ..read more

Last week, in a bid to clarify his historically nebulous stance on abortion, Donald Trump said that if reelected, he intends to leave abortion rights “to the states,” seemingly contradicting his prior stance in favor of a 16-week national ban.  But Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis and leading abortion historian, thinks that a complete ban could be on the agenda for a future Trump administration—and the vehicle for it would be the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law still on the books. Ziegler and other legal experts warn the law could be marshaled to ban all abor ..read more