Court officers, who were standing outside the building, rushed over, pulled out their guns and ordered the woman to drop the knife, the bystanders said. She was arrested without incident.
No one was injured. Rucker, who could not immediately be reached for comment, was placed in custody and charges are pending, according to a court spokesperson.
“The court officers were standing on the corner and within 20 seconds they were here and she had dropped the knife,” said one bystander who could not be named because of his job. “The woman yelled, ‘Knife, knife’ and the court officers were on the Trump-supporter like Voltron,” the bystander said.
The altercation came after Trump called on supporters to protest the probe and predicted “potential death & destruction” if he is charged for his alleged role in a 2016 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
So far, significant support for Trump has failed to materialize.
The Trump-supporter was the only protester present outside the courthouse Tuesday. The grand jury usually only hears evidence on the case on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Last week, activists clamoring for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to indict Trump far outnumbered the president’s supporters outside the courthouse.
Police and court officials did not immediately release the protester’s name, age or other personal information.
Julia Marsh contributed to this report.
[ad_2]
#Trump #supporter #pulled #knife #family #children #Manhattan #courthouse
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Naglieri is Trump’s second big hire in New Hampshire. Two months ago, POLITICO first reported that former state GOP Chair Steve Stepanek, a longtime ally, would serve as a senior adviser to the former president in the first-in-the-nation primary state. The two join Alex Latcham, one of Trump’s Iowa hires, who’s overseeing all early state operations.
New Hampshire handed Trump his first primary win in 2016 — in which he defeated both Bush and Cruz. But he went on to lose the state in both the 2016 and 2020 general elections.
The Naglieri hire further illustrates the dual tracks that Trump is currently on: moving aggressively on a third run for the White House while simultaneously battling legal woes on several fronts.
His rivals have yet to take similar steps on the staffing front.
Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley has been leaning on volunteers including former U.S. Senate candidate Don Bolduc and former congressional hopeful Matt Mayberry to help coordinate her meetings and events in New Hampshire. Mayberry also volunteered at a recent county GOP event for former Vice President Mike Pence.
And when former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who’s also mulling a bid, came to Manchester this week for a town hall and dinner with his 2016 supporters, former aide Matt Mowers was there to lend a helping hand.
[ad_2]
#Trump #big #move #Granite #State
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Christie’s former supporters in New Hampshire hope it’ll be him.
“We definitely need somebody strong and optimistic,” said Hillary Seeger, a conservative activist who backed Christie’s 2016 presidential bid. “We need to have somebody that can win the primary and the general election.”
Christie reunited a group of his New Hampshire backers on Monday night, when he returned to the state for a town hall at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics — a prerequisite for any presidential hopeful — followed by a private dinner with close friends, former supporters and some donors.
Christie was cagey about whether he is actually running for president again. But if he is — he’s said a decision could come in 45 to 60 days — he spelled out a clear lane for himself as Trump’s critic in chief.
Christie doesn’t see one in what is shaping up to be the 2024 Republican field.
“They’re going to wriggle right up next to him and say ‘I’m almost like him, but I’m not quite as bad,’” Christie said of his would-be rivals. “Let me tell you something, everybody. That’s going to lose as certain as he lost in ‘20, as we lost the House in ‘18, as we lost the Senate in ‘21, as we underperformed in ‘22.”
Christie later told reporters that “no one has to wonder” whether he’s got the chutzpah to take on Trump.
But just as Christie puffed up his own abilities, one audience member at Saint Anselm College openly questioned his credentials in that arena. Christie had plenty of opportunities to take down Trump in 2016, before he dropped out after a dismal sixth-place finish in New Hampshire’s primary, so why didn’t he do it then?
Christie chalked his performance in that primary up to “strategic error” — one that he doesn’t plan on making again.
“Trump said a few weeks ago: I am your retribution. Guess what everybody? No thanks,” Christie said. “The only person he cares about is him. And if we haven’t learned that since Election Day 2020 until today, we’re not paying attention.”
Christie also took direct shots at former Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — hitting the former for not doing more to stand up to Trump and the latter over his mangled forays into foreign policy.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not a “territorial dispute,” as DeSantis said in now-walked-back remarks, but an act of “authoritarian aggression,” Christie said. And the U.S. doesn’t have to worry about being dragged into a “proxy war” with China over Ukraine — as DeSantis suggested — because “we’re in one.”
But even as he jabbed his would-be rivals, Christie also spoke repeatedly of injecting optimism and civility back into politics that these days is defined by “anger and retribution.”
And his old supporters who gathered in Manchester on Monday consider that to be a selling point for potential presidential candidates like Christie and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, another moderate-leaning Republican considering a run.
“You have Trump, and you have the alternative to Trump,” former New Hampshire GOP Chair Wayne MacDonald, who chaired Christie’s 2016 campaign in New Hampshire. “Once you start comparing his record in New Jersey with DeSantis’ record in Florida, you’re going to see a much more viable and effective leader than Governor DeSantis is. And I think that’s going to enable him to emerge as the alternative to President Trump.”
[ad_2]
#Christie #sees #lane #GOP #primary #Trump #destroyer
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Monday was the first time in a week that the grand jury heard evidence in the Trump case. The panel was called off Wednesday and then examined an unrelated matter Thursday. The delay prompted a fiery response from Trump, leading some Democrats to rally around Bragg on Monday morning.
Bragg’s investigation is centered on a $130,000 payment facilitated by Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, and made to the porn star, Stormy Daniels. The adult entertainer alleged she had an affair with Trump and considered selling her story to the National Enquirer, at a time when Pecker was the tabloid’s publisher, according to federal prosecutors. Instead, Cohen paid Daniels directly, a step he told a court he took “in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump.
Trump has denied the affair and any wrongdoing with the payment.
Pecker previously testified before the Manhattan grand jury examining the Trump investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter. It wasn’t clear why he was called back to provide further testimony. Before the publisher, the grand jury heard from Robert Costello, a former legal adviser to Cohen, who is the prosecution’s central witness in the case.
Costello said at a press conference after his testimony that he sought to discredit Cohen while speaking to the grand jury.
A Manhattan DA spokesperson declined to comment.
[ad_2]
#National #Enquirer #publisher #testifies #Trump #grand #jury
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Rep. Adriano Espaillat speaks at a news conference to discuss the targeting of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg amid the criminal investigation of former President Donald Trump on Monday in New York City. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
By Wesley Parnell
NEW YORK — A House Democrat stepped into the fray around Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation of Donald Trump, holding a rally in support of the progressive prosecutor Monday after his Republican counterparts demanded information about the probe.
“We are here to say let the process continue and no one is above the law, not even a president of the United States,” said Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who represents Upper Manhattan, at a Harlem rally attended by a dozen other local Democratic leaders.
On Saturday Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), James Comer (R-Ky.) and Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) — the chairs of the Judiciary, Oversight and Administration Committees, respectively — sent a letter to Bragg setting a March 31 deadline for documents from his office about possible federal funding or involvement in his work. They also want Bragg to testify in private. The asks are voluntary since the Republican leaders have not issued a subpoena.
[ad_2]
#House #Democrat #leads #rally #backing #Manhattan #DAs #Trump #probe
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
When playing offense, the first thing DeSantis must understand is that you cannot beat Trump by going after his many negatives, a rule the Florida governor has yet to grasp. Last week, when discussing the expected hush-money prosecution of Trump by the Manhattan district attorney, DeSantis tippled a little shade on Trump by saying, “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some kind of alleged affair.” The remark gathered ooohs and ahhhs from pressies, but did it move the conversation? Nearly everybody, including Trump supporters, believes he had a fling with Stormy Daniels and paid her to shut up about it. And that realization is already baked into Trump’s political value. The same goes for Trump’s purloining of classified documents or his jigging with the Georgia election count. Taunting Trump with his bad behavior never seems to do him any harm.
The same goes for attacks on Trump’s vulgarity. His cruelty. His penchant for interruption (Slate’s Jeremy Stahl counted 128 interruptions of Joe Biden or moderator Chris Wallace at one of the 2020 presidential debates.) Or his vile treatment of the truth. Remember during a 2020 campaign rally when he baselessly alleged that Biden was on drugs: “Look, he’s been doing this for 47 years, and I got a debate coming up with this guy,” Trump said. “They gave him a big fat shot in the ass, and he comes out and for two hours he’s better than ever before.” It makes sense to fact-check a guy like this for the historical record, but not for political purposes. Challenging his lies won’t slow his advances because he’s got a bottomless supply of lies he can spend down.
Even the rumored indictments and prosecutions of Trump won’t give DeSantis much in the way of ammunition. Again, these allegations are already discounted in the Trump price. Trump in prison orange wouldn’t be much of an aid, either.
If you don’t agree that accentuating Trump’s negatives will cut him down to size, just look at the body count of Republican presidential candidates from 2016 who incorrectly thought they could beat Trump by calling out his racism, misogyny, sociopathy or ideological heterodoxy. Not even opponent Ted Cruz, a college debate champion and graduate of Harvard Law School, could land a punch on him in 2016. Should DeSantis take this well-trod route, he’d end up sputtering and defeated, just like all of his Republican countrymen who have gone before him. “You’re not going to win in an insult slugfest with Donald Trump,” an advisor to Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaign told POLITICO’s Sally Goldenberg recently. “That’s his strength.”
Trump’s vulnerabilities reside in his positives, and that’s where DeSantis should probe for cracks and fissures. This is no independent discovery. GOP campaign strategist Karl Rove was famous for eroding an opponent’s strengths. For example, under the Rove lens during the 2004 presidential campaign, patriotic war veteran Sen. John Kerry was portrayed as something of a weakling as he challenged President George W. Bush (who, unlike Kerry, spent the Vietnam War in the Texas Air National Guard). “Sometimes people’s strengths turn out to be really big weaknesses,” Rove told Fox News in 2007. “We tend to — you know, people tend to sometimes in campaigns accentuate things that they think are big and important, and they exaggerate them.”
What are Trump’s positives? In his campaign 2016 kickoff, he promised, “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall,” and continued to praise his wall throughout the 2020 campaign. The wall turned out to be a Potemkin affair, with PolitiFact finding in 2020, “What the administration has mostly done is replace old and outdated designs with newer and improved barriers.” DeSantis could easily out-wing and out-demagogue Trump on the border (remember his airlift of asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard?) by savaging Trump’s wall as an illusion.
DeSantis could squeeze Trump on his Covid response, and already has, moving to the right of the former president with vaccine skepticism. When Trump fired back, DeSantis taunted him by saying that voters approved of his policies and rejected Trump’s because he won reelection and Trump lost.
Trump’s North Korea policy, one of the biggest slices of cake on the Trump vanity menu, would also be a ripe target for DeSantis. He could ridicule Trump for having achieved nothing more in his romance with Kim Jong-un than the exchange of perfumed love letters. Trump has long claimed to represent working- and middle-class voters who have been discarded by political elites; DeSantis could puncture his populist appeal by depicting that crusade as a sham of hot air. He could compile a greatest hits compilation of the goofiest White House moments from the tell-alls and investigative books about the Trump administration to tarnish Trump’s alleged leadership skills. He could accuse Trump of going soft on Biden because in one recent week, Trump attacked Biden on Truth Social once for every time he attacked DeSantis.
To defeat Trump, DeSantis must play offense, and the best example of how to play offense against Trump can be found in a recent piece by scholar Jennifer Mercieca, whose 2020 book, Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, throws bright light on his dark rhetorical skills.
Mercieca judges that porn star Stormy Daniels has bested Trump over the course of her five-year public battle with him. Daniels refused to be intimidated by Trump’s threats (ad baculum) and shrugged off his lawyer’s attempts at coercion. She didn’t let Trump reduce her to an object (reification) of scorn or hatred. And when she retaliated against him, it was with the artillery of humor, insulting his manhood. “In addition to his…umm…shortcomings, he has demonstrated his incompetence, hatred of women, and lack of self-control on Twitter AGAIN! And perhaps a penchant for bestiality. Game on, Tiny,” Daniels tweeted.
Maybe Daniels should be running against Trump instead of DeSantis.
DeSantis should enter the contest with real optimism because, as 2020 showed, Trump can be beaten. Not only can he be beaten, but beaten by a wide margin by a wobbling Democrat who is barnacled to a half-century of liberal Democratic policies and is nobody’s idea of a demagogue-tamer. Trump threw everything he had at Joe and still came up a loser. Never mind the early national polls, which show Trump whipping DeSantis. The primaries are a long way away, Gov. DeSantis! It’s not too late for you to go into training with Stormy Daniels for your big bout!
******
Send TKOs to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed is an object. My Mastodon and Post accounts have been coerced. My RSS feed is behind their oppression.
[ad_2]
#Stormy #Daniels #Karl #Rove #Beat #Trump
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“I think that was an ill-advised post that one of his social media people put up, and he quickly took down when he realized the rhetoric and photo that was attached to it,” Tacopina added.
Trump has not been indicated in the New York case, though he still could be.
When asked whether he was concerned that Trump’s barrage of social media posts on Truth Social, the platform Trump helped found, could lead to violence similar to the Jan. 6 riots, Tacopina said that he did not believe it was Trump’s rhetoric that let to the violence at the Capitol in 2021, and declined to condemn “anything regarding social media.”
“Well, I’m not accepting that proposition, that his rhetoric created violence [on Jan. 6]. I think violence was on the way that day,” Tacopina said.
“I’m not going to defend or condemn anything regarding social media. That’s not what I do. I’m not a Trump PR person. I’m a litigator and a lawyer,” he told NBC’s Chuck Todd.
[ad_2]
#Trump #attorney #defend #condemn #Trumps #rhetoric #Manhattan
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Jordan, Comer and Steil, in their Saturday letter, set a new deadline of March 31 for a swath of documents they are requesting regarding Bragg’s office, including any related to potential federal funding of or involvement in his work. They also doubled down on their request for Bragg to provide testimony behind closed doors.
Those requests are currently voluntary since Republicans haven’t issued a subpoena for either the documents or an interview with Bragg. The GOP chairs haven’t ruled out trying to compel him and, in their letter, they appear to briefly argue that a subpoena would meet the bar for having legal legs.
“Your reply letter did not dispute the central allegations at issue—that you, under political pressure from left-wing activists and former prosecutors in your office, are reportedly planning to use an alleged federal campaign finance violation … [to] indict for the first time in history a former President of the United States,” Jordan, Comer and Steil wrote in their letter.
Bragg is reportedly preparing for the possibility that the former president will be indicted on charges related to alleged hush money payment to Stormy Daniels. Bragg, in his statement on Saturday night, hit back at the accusation of playing politics, saying that his office evaluates “cases in our jurisdiction based on the facts, the law and the evidence.”
“This unprecedented inquiry by federal elected officials into an ongoing matter serves only to hinder, disrupt and undermine the legitimate work of our dedicated prosecutors. As always, we will continue to follow the facts and be guided by the rule of law in everything we do,” Bragg added.
Bragg’s office didn’t immediately respond to questions about if they would be sending a separate, formal response to House Republicans responding to their latest letter.
The investigation by House Republicans is raising questions about the scope of Congress’ jurisdiction over state and local criminal matters. Leslie Dubeck, Bragg’s general counsel, wrote in a letter to House Republicans earlier this week that Bragg’s office would submit a letter describing its use of federal funds, while emphasizing that questions about the office’s use of federal funds does not justify a congressional attempt to unearth nonpublic information about the ongoing probe.
The GOP lawmakers, in their letter, argued that they weren’t overstepping jurisdictional boundaries because they could use Bragg’s testimony and the documents to pass potential legislation. The letter provides new details on what House Republicans could pursue in response to the investigation into Trump, including legislation to “insulate current and former presidents from such improper state and local prosecutions,” reforms to special counsel authorities, changes to the Federal Election Campaign Act and to how Congress dishes out public safety funds.
“We believe that we now must consider whether Congress should take legislative action to protect former and/or current Presidents from politically motivated prosecutions by state and local officials, and if so, how those protections should be structured,” the GOP chairs added.
[ad_2]
#Manhattan #House #GOP #chairs #ramp #battle #Trump #investigation
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Texas: Former US President Donald Trump is all set to hold his Presidential campaign rally on Saturday in Waco, Texas, amid the multiple criminal probes going on which threaten his bid for the White House, CNN reported.
The rally at the Waco Regional Airport is very significant for Trump as he sees his chance to return to the White House as the Republican field for the 2024 presidential race begins to take shape.
Currently, Trump is facing investigations over a hush money payment, Georgia over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith over classified documents the FBI found at Mar-A-Lago, his attempts to steal the 2020 election and his role on January 6, 2021, insurrection.
In recent days, the former president has made increasingly bellicose remarks about those probes, including predicting last week his own indictment and arrest in Manhattan – something that has not come to pass — and urging supporters to protest, according to CNN.
Earlier, on Friday, raging against Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg on his Truth Social social media platform Friday, Trump said criminal charges could lead to “potential death and destruction” and “could be catastrophic for our Country.”
“PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT!,” Trump said in another post.
On Thursday, he said Bragg “would rather indict an innocent man and create years of hatred, chaos, and turmoil, than give him his well deserved ‘freedom.’ The whole Country sees what is going on, and they’re not going to take it anymore. They’ve had enough!” as per a report in CNN.
Last week, Trump claimed “he will be arrested on Tuesday” next week as part of a yearlong investigation into a hush-money scheme. He also asked his supporters to protest the move, reported CNN.
“THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!,” he thundered in an all-caps message to his followers on Truth Social, his social media platform on Saturday (local time).
According to CNN, meetings have been going on throughout the week between the city, state and federal law enforcement agencies in New York City about how to prepare for a possible indictment of Trump in connection with a yearlong investigation into a hush-money scheme involving adult film actor Stormy Daniels.
Any indictment of the former President, who is running for re-election in 2024, would mark a historic first and quickly change the political conversation around an already divisive figure. While Trump has an extensive history of civil litigation both before and after taking office, a criminal charge would represent a dramatic escalation of his legal woes as he works to recapture the White House.
The white powder was in a USPS envelope. It was been transported to a city lab for further analysis, the NYPD spokesperson said.
Neither the office nor the courthouse was evacuated, the spokesperson said.
The scare comes after Trump took to Truth Social to predict “potential death & destruction” if a grand jury votes to indict the former president for his alleged role in a 2016 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
The grand jury was not sitting Friday since it typically only hears evidence on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. The panel took a two-day break this week after a flurry of witnesses, leading some to speculate the case was in trouble. But legal experts told POLITICO there were more likely routine reasons for the pause.
Last week, Bragg told office employees in an email that “we do not tolerate attempts to intimidate our office or threaten the rule of law in New York.”
“Our law enforcement partners will ensure that any specific or credible threats against the office will be fully investigated and that the proper safeguards are in place so all 1,600 of us have a secure work environment,” Bragg wrote.
That message followed an earlier warning by Trump that his supporters should “Protest, take our nation back!” if he was arrested in connection with Bragg’s probe.
A spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams said, “While we cannot comment on the specifics of any ongoing investigation, no public official should ever be subject to threats for doing his or her job. I’m confident that every elected official in the City, including Manhattan DA Bragg, will continue to do their work undeterred, and anyone found to be engaging in illegal conduct will be brought to justice.”
[ad_2]
#Suspicious #powder #Manhattan #office #probing #Trump #nonhazardous
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
