Trump

Daily Beast - Donald Trump’s mother-in-law immigrated to the U.S. using a process that the former president denounced and sought to scrap, according to a report. His wife, Melania, sponsored her mom, Amalija Knavs, to come to the U.S. using a legal avenue that Trump denigrated as “chain migration,” in which U.S. citizens have the right to sponsor their parents for a green card, according to The Washington Post. Trump said during his presidency that the U.S. needed an “END to the horrible Chain Migration.” Slovenia-born Knavs—who died at the age of 78 in January—became a legal permanent resident in March 2010, the Post reported based on Knavs’ immigration records. She then applied for full U.S. citizenship in August 2017 shortly after Trump took office. In a citizenship test the following year, she reportedly answered enough questions correctly to pass but gave no response to the question: “What is the ‘rule of law?’” She also said she was living in Trump Tower in New York City on her application, according to the Post.  MORE

See Trump’s busy legal and election calendar in 1 chart 

 Daily Beast - Donald Trump’s lawyers are playing legal whack-a-mole to try to help the former president continue to avoid accountability for several decades of alleged illegal activity. In two different New York courts on Monday, Team Trump seemed to have won a bit of a victory in one, but certainly not in the other. While Trump’s camp is likely relieved that he doesn’t have to post a nearly half-billion-dollar bond to continue his appeal, the fact remains that both that case and the Stormy Daniels hush money case are still moving full steam ahead. Earlier this year, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron found that the former president, family members, and many of the companies they run engaged in massive fraud against lenders, other companies, and government entities. According to that ruling, the defendants benefited from the ways in which they falsely stated the value of many properties in order to get more advantageous loan terms. The award was based in part on the ill-gotten gains from that fraud: the interest payments the Trump Organization saved by getting those favorable terms. In addition to the finding of the harm from this fraud itself, the defendants were tagged—like most litigants in New York who lose—with interest on that judgment, from the day the illegal windfall first started bestowing benefits on the defendants. Now that might not sound like a big deal, but, according to statute in New York, a judgment creditor—as the people of the State of New York are in this case—gets to earn 9 percent interest on that judgment.