Ken Chesebro has lost his appeal to sever his charges from Sidney Powell, another Georgia RICO defendant in the election interference case but may not leave the two of them tried with the other 17 co-defendants. Both Chesebro and Powell want speedy trials. The state judge is waiting for Fulton County DA Fani Willis to give more information about whether all 19 co-defendants should be tried in October 2023.
New York AG Letitia James asked the state’s supreme court to sanction Deposed Donald Trump (DDT), his oldest sons Eric and Don Jr., and other associates for $20,000 after they raised “previously-rejected arguments” in motions. The case concerns a $250 million civil fraud lawsuit regarding false, misleading valuations of business assets. Sanctions are $10,000 against DDT and his co-defendants and the remainder against his legal team over the “frivolous and sanctionable” motions.
A judge also refused DDT’s request to delay the October 2 trial because “defendants’ arguments are completely without merit.” That date makes the trial DDT’s first one since he left the White House.
According to the judge, DDT’s liability in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case was already established by a jury. His trial on January 15 only decides how much the award to Carroll is and the damages won’t be capped. She was awarded $5 million and asked for another $10 million after DDT continued to defame her at his CNN Town Hall after the jury’s decision in May.
In August 2022, DDT expressed shock when the FBI came to Mar-a-Lago for classified documents, but he was told this would happen almost three months earlier. His lawyer at the time, Evan Corcoran, told DDT that he had to comply with the subpoena to return the documents. Corcoran added that the FBI might search Mar-a-Lago if he didn’t return them. A new lawyer, Christopher Kise, proposed a negotiated settlement with the DOJ, including the return of all documents. DDT, however, got advice from Tom Fitton, leader of the conservative Judicial Watch, “who urged a more pugilistic approach,” according to a WaPo report. Because of the decision, DDT lost.
Corcoran’s audio notes report his warning DDT. Shortly after that conversation, another DDT attorney told Corcoran that if he pushed DDT to comply with the subpoena, “he’s just going to go ballistic.” The recordings show how DDT allegedly deceived his own attorney and how the classified documents came to Mar-a-Lago. He said he didn’t want anyone going through “my boxes” and asked, “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”
In another part of DDT’s Florida classified documents case, Yuscil Taveras, the Mar-a-Lago IT worker who alleged that DDT, his aide Walt Nauta, and his property manager Carlos de Oliveira tried to delete incriminating videos about the handling of classified national security documents from surveillance cameras, is cooperating with special counsel Jack Smith’s office. He will testify against DDT, Nauta, and de Oliveira In exchange for not being prosecuted.
Closing arguments are scheduled for September 7 in the contempt trial against DDT’s former advisor Peter Navarro before the case goes to a jury. He stood in the court room for the entire six hours of the trial, sometimes pacing. Navarro had refused to obey a subpoena to appear before the House January 6 investigative committee, claiming “executive privilege.” Last week, a federal judge ruled that he failed to prove this method of blocking his cooperation. Prosecutors only need to prove that his failure to comply with the subpoena was deliberate and intentional.
Navarro has been desperately searching for funding. He said that the legal case is costing him $1.7 million in fees, $750,000 for this trial and another million dollars for “the appeal process all the way up to the Court of Appeal and likely the Supreme Court.” and a guilty verdict could cost him a fine of up to $100,000 in addition to a maximum of one year in prison. According to Navarro, he’s received only $360,000 thus far and needs “another $150,000 in the next two weeks.”
While he spoke outside the courthouse and asked for money, two protestors called him a traitor and waved their signs. One of them blew a loud whistle every time he tried to give the website where people could donate for his legal defense.
A judge ordered Texas to remove the 1,000 line of buoys and mesh in the Rio Grande and stop building obstructions in the river; Gov. Greg Abbott immediately appealed the order to the 5th Circuit Court. He claimed that he wasn’t “asking for permission” for his anti-immigration program Operation Lone Star, but Judge David Ezra wrote that federal law mandates permission to install obstructions in the nation’s navigable waters. Texas has until September 15, the day before Mexican Independence Day, to remove the barrier.
Six GOP and unaffiliated Coloradans sued to keep DDT off the state ballot, citing his constitutional ineligibility.
Former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is ginning up violence on the part of the far right. On his Trinity Broadcasting Network program, he warned that DDT’s failure to take the White House because of multiple indictments would “be the last American election that will be decided by ballots rather than bullets.” He threw fuel on the fire by saying that Biden is using tactics of “third-world dictatorships, banana republics, and communist regimes” to make sure that DDT isn’t his 2024 opponent by using “police agencies to arrest their opponents for made-up crimes in an attempt to discredit them, bankrupt them, imprison them, exile them, or all of the above.”
Elon Musk, purchaser of Twitter now called X, has found a scapegoat for his failures—the anti-Defamation League (ADL). He threatens to sue them for defamation, blaming the group for much of his lost revenue and value in the company, about $4 billion. ADL campaigns against antisemitism and bigotry that found a home on X after Musk’s purchase. He says advertising sales are down 60 percent and claims that advertisers say that ADL is “responsible for most of our revenue loss.”
Musk recently sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), another anti-hate speech group, alleging it improperly accessed data from X “so that it could cherry-pick from the hundreds of millions of posts made each day on X and falsely claim it had statistical support showing the platform is overwhelmed with harmful content.” The CCDH combats antisemitism, anti-vaxx disinformation, and false statements about the climate crisis. Its recent report on X deals with how the platform elevates anti-LGBTQ+ content and how Musk has personally been involved in promoting this material.
The choice of ADL as Musk’s target is not explained. Scores of civil rights-oriented organizations, research groups and media commentators criticized his welcoming hate speech onto the platform under the guise of being a “free speech absolutist.” Advertisers anticipated these problems and soon pulled out their spending when he said he wanted more unrestricted content on the site. Hate speech surged the day after he was the legal owner.
An irony comes from Musk’s attack on Jewish people. Mark Sumner wrote:
“After months in which Musk has supported racist rants; encouraged hate speech; elevated literal Nazi propaganda; fired every Twitter employee in Brazil on suspicion of being too liberal; fired the entire company press office and the entire company communications department; decimated the team responsible for content moderation; terrified advertisers with chaos, irresponsibility, and perpetuating racism; and thrown away global brand recognition by renaming the whole platform to indulge a personal whim, Musk has put his finger on the real issue. It’s the Jews.”
Shortly before Musk considered a lawsuit against ADL, he suggested a poll to ban the ADL from X in response to a Dutch commentator whose posts have complained about immigration, “wicked globalists,” the “fake” Covid pandemic, and vaccines being “gene therapy.” In a civil U.S. lawsuit, X has been accused of assisting Saudi Arabia in committing grave human rights against its users, including the disclosure of confidential user data requested by Saudi authorities at a much higher rate than for the U.S., UK, or Canada. Last week, a filing was added to the May lawsuit after the Saudis sentenced a man to death for his Twitter and YouTube activity.
Musk also faces about 2,200 arbitration cases filed by ex-employees who never received their severance pay. Fees of $3.5 million are added to the cost of owed severance. When he laid off over half Twitter’s employees soon after his purchase of the company, he promised most of them at least two months’ salary plus a week’s pay for every year they had worked at the firm. He also refuses to pay arbitration fees of almost $4 million.
Since Musk’s acquisition, Twitter/X has faced multiple legal battles, many of them from failure to pay its bills. At least six non-payment lawsuits were filed in February alone. An Australian infrastructure firm sued X in June for nonpayment of a $600,000-plus bill for work in Twitter’s offices. Several landlords have taken the company to court for failing to pay rent on multiple offices, including in Boston, Seattle, and Oakland.
Nel's New Day 