Trump

NBC - A judge in Illinois ruled that Donald Trump should be removed from the state’s ballot in the upcoming Republican primary election, but she paused the ruling from taking effect in order to give the former president time to appeal. The ruling, which comes ahead of the state’s March 19 primary, cites the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments regarding a similar Colorado ruling that said Trump should be removed from that state’s primary ballot, but no ruling has been issued yet by the high court.

Thom Hartmann -   Donald Trump needs money. Apparently, many of the documents Trump stole from the White House are still missing. Including the binder with raw intelligence about American spies in Moscow.It’s as if the media doesn’t want to confront the possibility that a former president and current candidate is actually a traitor. But consider the facts. We are right now in the midst of the third presidential election featuring massive interference from Russian intelligence. Most recently, we found that they sent an agent to the FBI to claim that Biden had taken a bribe in Ukraine: James Comer and Jim Jordan have been running with it, trying to use this Russian disinformation to damage Biden in his run against Trump this fall.

Similarly, the 2020 and 2016 elections featured substantial and persistent interventions by Russian intelligence to help get and keep Trump elected. One of the first things Trump did when he became president in 2017 was to invite the Russian Foreign Minister and their ambassador to the US for a secret meeting in the White House, where he gave them a spy we and Israel ran in Syria.  He had dozens of private phone conversations with Putin while in the White House, for which no meaningful records exist, and at Helsinki took Putin’s side against American intelligence to lie about Russian involvement in the 2016 election. He stole thousands of top-secret (and above) classified documents from the White House, transported them to Florida, and stored them in publicly-accessible locations at Mar-a-Lago. It’s the perfect way to hand off intelligence to agents of foreign governments without getting caught. He lied to both the National Archives, the FBI, and the American people about them. And now apparently many are missing. MORE

Daily Beast -  The Supreme Court will hear arguments as to whether Donald Trump can be prosecuted for actions taken while in office, the court said Wednesday, substantially pushing back the start date for the former president’s criminal trial in Washington D.C. for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The unsigned order, which set arguments for the week of April 22, said the justices will consider whether—and potentially to what degree—a former president has “immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.” On Feb. 6, after hearing wild arguments from Trump's lawyers about a president’s powers, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously found that Trump is not immune from prosecution. “We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a president has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power — the recognition and implementation of election results,” the three judges wrote then. After Trump requested that the Supreme Court put a hold on that ruling, Special Counsel Jack Smith urged the justices to allow the D.C. trial to proceed. But at least four justices decided otherwise, keeping that trial paused while they decide the matter. A ruling could come as late as July.