DDT Trial Day 8: After lawyers for Deposed Donald Trump (DDT) finished cross-examining David Pecker from the National Inquirer, two new witnesses testified. Rona Graff, DDT’s executive assistant and long-time senior executive at the Trump Organization, handled his phone calls and schedule. She had a “vague recollection” of seeing Stormy “waiting in the reception area of the 26th floor” of Trump Tower. DDT is paying for Graff’s lawyers, and she testified under subpoena. Bank executive Gary Farro had worked at First Republic Bank and said that DDT’s personal lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen was his client when Cohen wired $130,000 in “hush money” to Daniels’ attorney shortly before the 2020 election. Farro described Cohen’s “urgency” in opening new accounts and wanting no address on the checks. Thirteen days later, Cohen said he didn’t want to open that new account and instead wanted one for another corporation registered in Delaware, described as a real estate consulting company.
The trial resumes on Tuesday, April 30, when Farro returns to testify, and the hearing on DDT’s alleged violations of the gag order has been moved to Thursday, May 2.
Earlier this week, he ranted that his payment to Stormy Daniels was a “legal expense” that he didn’t even deduct—which looks suspicious. Former FBI special agent Asha Rangappa said:
“This guy deducted his son’s $5 Boy Scout dues as a charitable donation. More evidence of trying not to leave a paper trail.”
Anyone watching the television series Bull is aware of jury consultants who develop jury profiles to determine how jurors may vote. DDT is using Magna Legal Services that examine jurors’ answers and body language and provide detailed research about them. DDT’s legal team used Magna in the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial that he lost.
The Supreme Court’s case about DDT’s absolute immunity concluded this year’s session, and the former conservative “originalists” who claimed that they strictly followed the text of the U.S. Constitution have morphed into activists to change the law—the same direction conservatives complained that liberal judges did. A majority of the justices indicate that any conclusion won’t happen for at least several months.
In 1974, the high court ruled that President Nixon had no right to withhold the Oval Office tapes from Congress in 99 days from the date that Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski served a subpoena for the tapes; the decision was 8-0 because William Rehnquist refused himself out of conflict of interest. In 2000, justices determined George W. Bush won the Florida election in only three days. The current court has already stalled the case for at least five months since Judge Tanya Chutkan declared the president is not a king and the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court concurred. Conservative justice show no sense of immediacy in making a decision. Will they decide that DDT was right when he told a rally that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue with no repercussions?
Giving up on President Joe Biden’s and Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachments, the House searched for a new victim and picked AG Merrick Garland. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Judiciary Chair, and James Comer (R-KY), Oversight chair, threaten to hold Garland in contempt for not giving them the audio recordings of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur in his classified documents investigation. The DOJ has already provided them with the transcripts and Hur’s interview with Biden’s ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer. DOJ Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte wrote:
“[T]he Committees’ inability to identify a need for these audio files grounded in legislative or impeachment purposes raises concerns about what other purposes they might serve.”
Uriarte implied that Comer and Jordan can’t be trusted with the audio, writing that it could be manipulated by “cutting, erasing, and splicing” with concern “that the Committees may be seeking conflict for conflict’s sake.”
Tennessee Republicans have been busy passing laws. A year after a shooter killed six people at a school near Nashville, legislators’ cure for gun violence is to permit teachers to carry concealed guns in school. The law bans parents from knowing which teachers are packing, and schools cannot opt out. A parent submitted a letter with over 5,300 signatures warning that the legislation “ignores research that shows the presence of a gun increases the risks posed to children.” In another objection to the new law, several teachers at the site of the school killing were armed. The GOP rejected all Democrats’ amendments including guns being locked up until a security breach and teachers’ civil liability for using their guns.
Another new Tennessee law forces LGBTQ+ identified youth to be taken in by anti-LGBTQ+ foster and adoptive parents. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) has signed a law explicitly allowing anti-LGBTQ+ foster and adoptive parents to take in LGBTQ+ youth with no provision to take into account the young person’s wishes on the matter. The legislation states that “such beliefs do not create a presumption that any particular placement is contrary to the best interest of the child.” The state will review a decade-long policy requiring children to be cared for in a way that “promotes dignity and respect for all children/youth and families inclusive of their gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation.” Many foster youth have already been rejected or mistreated from their family of origin because of their sexual identity or orientation, and the new “parents” can force children into conversion therapy.
The conservative party of law and order reports that they don’t need to follow it themselves. Louisiana Superintendent of Education told schools to ignore President Joe Biden’s Title IX rules prohibiting anti-transgender discrimination, conflicting with the law banning trans athletes playing sports. The directive doesn’t mention trans athletes. This refusal makes schools at risk of losing federal funding. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis followed Louisiana by saying his state “will not comply” with Biden’s Title IX changes.
The conservative majority on the board of the Murrieta Valley Unified School District (MVUSD) voted to ignore California’s order rescinding the policy requiring teachers and school administrators to out any trans or nonbinary student asking to be called by a name or pronoun different than those on their birth certificates. The district’s law firm warned that the decision could cost $500,000 in legal expenses. The district is in Riverside County southeast of Los Angeles.
DDT may pick South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as his running mate after she bragged about killing her 14-month-old puppy and gunned down a goat, both in the family’s gravel pit. She said she killed the dog because she couldn’t train it, and the “nasty and mean” goat allegedly chased her children because it had not been castrated and smelled “rancid.” About a week earlier she put down three horses. The stories are in her new book No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward. She wrote that this violence prove she is capable of dealing with anything that’s “difficult, messy and ugly.” In her book, Noem wrote, “hated that dog.”
Noem may have forgotten the criticism of Mitt Romney when he transported his dog on top of the car during a family vacation while he was a presidential candidate. Let’s wait for the GOP spin on Noem’s pride in killing animals because she can do “ugly” things.
Officials claim no problem, but bird flu has been detected in milk from 33 herds across at least eight states. Supposedly, pasteurization inactivates pathogens. The strain of avian flu, H5N1, has circulated for over 20 years but leaped into cows only recently. Jumping among animals increases the possibility of mutation for person-to-person transmission that can fuel a pandemic. Only one daily worker in Texas has tested positive for the virus in the current outbreak. Testing of cows has been voluntary, but a new federal rule requires testing and a 30-day wait before cows are moved across state boundaries. The nation has roughly 8 million lactating cows.
Another concern is the movement of the virus into pigs near the infected dairies because they are an intermediate host of avian viruses to humans. Scientists also worry that the USDA could be repeating mistakes that made Covid-19 devastating by moving too slowly and not providing enough information. The USDA also doesn’t require tests of asymptomatic herds although it found one herd was infected.
Eric Hovde, who lives in California and running against Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin for U.S. senator from Wisconsin, declares he is deeply patriotic who loves the U.S. He expressed outrage about anyone disparaging the Pledge of Allegiance—but can’t remember it. Somehow he failed to say “under God” after “indivisible” and had to catch up to the recitation. Older people may struggle with this change by President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, but Hovde was born a decade after Eisenhower added the phrase. Hovde’s patriotism includes his bank Sunwest Bank, where he is CEO, named as co-defendant alleging elder abuse in a senior living facility that the bank partially owns. He had ragged about his expertise “in the nursing home industry as a lender to such residences.” Hovde also wants to block people in nursing homes from voting because they’re going to die, and he agrees with DDT that the 2020 election had “irregularities.”
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