Trump

Independent UK - Donald Trump’s pledge that Evan Gershkovich, the American reporter imprisoned in Russia, will be released by Vladimir Putin assuming Trump wins November’s presidential election has been branded “obscene and disgusting” by a top journalist. The former president first made the claim in May and repeated it in a campaign video posted to Truth Social this week, declaring: “Evan Gershkovich, the reporter for The Wall Street Journal who is being held by Russia, will be released almost immediately after the election. “But definitely before I assume office, he will be home. He will be safe. Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, will do that for me. And I don’t believe he’ll do it for anyone else.

“And we will be paying nothing. Biden likes to pay massive numbers. We will be paying nothing. Thank you very much.” Addressing the claim on MSNBC’s morning show Way Too Early in conversation with Jonathan Lemire, Eugene Robinson, associate editor of The Washington Post, said: “It’s obscene. It is absolutely obscene and disgusting that he would use this as some sort of a campaign ploy.”

New Republic  - Upset over being convicted on 34 felony counts in his hush-money trial, Donald Trump is floating the idea of imprisoning his enemies if he’s elected to the White House.  The Republican presidential nominee brought up the idea during a rambling phone interview with Newsmax on Tuesday. Host Greg Kelly asked whether the trial and guilty verdict were a net positive for Trump, who didn’t even answer the question. “Does that mean the next president does it to them? That’s really the question,” Trump replied. He went off on a tangent, discussing the “Lock her up” chants against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and how terrible it would be to put her in jail. “I thought it would be a terrible precedent for our country,” Trump said about locking up Clinton. “And it’s very possible that it’s gonna have to happen to them,” Trump added.

Bill Pruitt, Slate - Weeks before the embattled executive editor of The Washington Post abruptly resigned on Sunday, her relationship with the company’s chief executive became increasingly tense.In mid-May, the two clashed over whether to publish an article about a British hacking scandal with some ties to The Post’s chief executive, Will Lewis, according to two people with knowledge of their interactions. Sally Buzbee, the editor, informed Mr. Lewis that the newsroom planned to cover a judge’s scheduled ruling in a long-running British legal case brought by Prince Harry and others against some of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids, the people said. As part of the ruling, the judge was expected to say whether the plaintiffs could add Mr. Lewis’s name to a list of executives who they argued were involved in a plan to conceal evidence of hacking at the newspapers. Mr. Lewis told Ms. Buzbee the case involving him did not merit coverage, the people said.

When Ms. Buzbee said The Post would publish an article anyway, he said her decision represented a lapse in judgment and abruptly ended the conversation. The interaction rattled Ms. Buzbee, who then consulted with confidants outside The Post about how she should handle the situation. When the judge ruled several days later, on May 21, that Mr. Lewis could be added to the case, The Post published an article about the decision. Mr. Lewis did not prevent the article from publishing. But the incident continued to weigh on Ms. Buzbee just as she was considering her future at the paper, according to the two people with knowledge of her decision-making process. Her eventual decision to resign has shaken one of the country’s top news organizations.

CNN - A Georgia appeals court has halted the election subversion conspiracy case against former President Donald Trump and several of his co-defendants — a massive victory for the Trump team seeking to push his legal issues until 2025 if they can't beat them altogether. The new order from the Georgia Court of Appeals is the latest indication that a trial in the state-level Georgia election subversion case will not occur before the 2024 presidential election. The court said the case will be on hold until a panel of judges rules on whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified. On Wednesday, Trump and his allies also vowed legal revenge against his opponents if he regains control of the White House. Trump promised to prosecute President Joe Biden using state and local prosecutors, the Justice Department, or even a special counsel.

House speaker appoints Trump loyalists Perry, Jackson to Intelligence Committee: Perry, a hard-line Republican who previously served as the chair of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, played a key role in promoting false claims of election fraud and pushed the Trump White House and Justice Department to investigate baseless claims and prevent the transfer of power to President Biden. The FBI seized Perry’s cellphone records in 2022 as part of the criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to subvert the election, and Perry sought to block what the federal investigators would be able to access on his phone. In December 2023, a federal judge ordered that Perry disclose nearly 1,700 records from his cellphone to the investigation being conducted by special counsel Jack Smith. Perry’s lawyer has said that U.S. officials never described Perry as a target of their ongoing investigation in their discussions with the congressman, and he has not been charged.  Jackson, a retired U.S. Navy officer who joined Congress in 2021, served as the physician to Presidents Barack Obama and Trump. He was demoted in rank from retired rear admiral to captain in July 2022 following a damaging Pentagon inspector general’s report that substantiated allegations about his inappropriate behavior as a White House physician. Jackson has denied the report’s allegations and claimed they were politically motivated.  The appointments of Jackson and Perry come a day after Johnson, a staunch Trump ally, broadly outlined a “three-pronged approach” on how the Republican majority can target the Justice Department, New York and other jurisdictions for investigating Trump — using, among other things, House oversight powers. 

How Donald Trump Could Weaponize US Surveillance in a Second Term: Nixon and former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover famously surveilled the president’s political opponents and activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., through a program called COINTELPRO. One of the main goals of the program was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” civil rights groups.If he so desired, Trump could create his own version of this program, but he’d be working with much more advanced technology—and it’d be in a time when there are countless data points available on every American. Hoover could have only dreamed of a world where everyone was walking around with tracking devices. The administration may not even need to come up with a justification for surveilling Americans without a warrant, because it could simply purchase scores of people's personal data. The federal government has been known to purchase data from private brokers in the past, and doing so doesn’t require a warrant.