Trump Pleads the Fifth More Than 400 Times in New York Fraud Case, Deposition Video Shows

Video released Tuesday by CBS News shows Donald Trump invoking the Fifth Amendment hundreds of times during his deposition last summer in the New York attorney general’s fraud case against him.

Letitia James filed a $250 million civil fraud suit against Trump, his company, and three of his adult children (Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric). In the footage from August, the former president is seated in a Manhattan conference room answering James’s questions. By CBS’s count, Trump pleads the Fifth more than 400 times over the course of the nearly four-hour interview.

Trump pleads the Fifth so many times that at one point, he is told he can simply say “same answer” to speed up the proceedings. He declines to answer questions about the involvement of two Trump Organization executives in the fraud scheme or about his longtime accounting firm, which said that decades’ worth of his financial statements are unreliable.

At the end, Trump reads a prepared statement in which he calls the lawsuit “very unfair” and says that “anyone in my position not taking the Fifth Amendment would be a fool, an absolute fool.”

The Trump Organization was found guilty of tax fraud and fined $1.6 million earlier this month. James’s civil suit seeks to shut the company down in New York and sanction the four accused Trumps.

Trump also appears to have lied in sworn court documents for the civil suit. The presiding judge ordered him to provide defenses to James’s suit, resulting in a document that The Daily Beast says “read like a joke.”

In the document, Trump says he wasn’t president of the Trump Organization during his term at the White House, despite previously testifying he was an “inactive president.” He also said he didn’t have a financial stake in a real estate company, even though he previously testified that he did. His own lawyer even tried to argue there is no formal entity known as the “Trump Organization.”

Meanwhile, Trump is also facing investigations into his involvement in the January 6 attack, his alleged mishandling of classified documents, and his businesses’ finances. He is being sued by the Capitol Police and Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police for allegedly inciting January 6, and by writer E. Jean Carroll for both rape and defamation. The Manhattan district attorney is presenting evidence to a grand jury this week that Trump allegedly paid hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

Amid a continual stream of reports revealing how George Santos has lied about most, if not all, of his past, an overwhelming majority of his voters want him to resign.

Voters in New York’s 3rd congressional district want Santos to resign, at a margin of 78–13 percent, according to a Newsday/Siena College poll. That includes 89 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of independents, and even 71 percent of Republicans. Eighty-three percent of his constituents view him unfavorably.

The poll, released Tuesday, also showed a 2-to-1 margin of voters who say they voted for Santos now saying they would not have voted for him, had they known what they now know about the endlessly lying congressman.

What’s more, 71 percent of respondents said it was wrong for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to have seated Santos on two congressional committees; on Tuesday, Santos told his Republican colleagues he will temporarily recuse himself from serving on those committees while he remains under numerous investigations.

Santos insisted the recusal was his own decision, and also had little to say about the Siena poll showing his district’s voters overwhelmingly wanting him to resign:

While some Republican officials have called for Santos to resign, that momentary movement has trickled away. But in the meantime, this poll, coupled with Santos’s (voluntary or not) recusal, shows he’s not all in the clear yet.

At the same time, while Santos may face public pressure or moral quandaries (if those affect him), the basic political reality is that, unless Santos is forced out by the magnitude of something like an incriminating investigation, the narrow GOP House majority will want to hold on to Santos as long as they can.

At least three people have testified under oath saying Representative Matt Gaetz asked former President Donald Trump for a preemptive presidential pardon regarding a Justice Department investigation into whether the Florida congressman had violated federal sex trafficking laws. Now Gaetz is saying all of those testimonies, provided under risk of perjury, are lies.

On Ari Melber’s MSNBC program Monday, Gaetz repeatedly denied asking for a pardon.

Melber showed Gaetz footage of former Trump officials who testified to the House select committee investigating January 6 that Gaetz had indeed asked Trump for a pardon.

John McEntee, who served as director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in the Trump administration, also said Gaetz sought a pardon relating to the Justice Department investigation.

McEntee told the committee that Gaetz allegedly said “he did not do anything wrong but they are trying to make his life hell, and you know, if the president could give him a pardon, that would be great.” McEntee also recalled Gaetz saying he had asked Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows for a pardon.

Gaetz told Melber that he shared many conversations with McEntee “about pardons for other folks and different groups of people.”

Former Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson similarly told the committee that Gaetz “was personally pushing for a pardon.” She testified that “Mr. Gaetz had reached out to me to ask if he could have a meeting with Mr. Meadows about receiving a presidential pardon.” Hutchinson had also listed several other members, including Andy Biggs, Louie Gohmert, and Scott Perry, who had all asked for pardons.

Gaetz told Melber that Hutchinson is “a known liar,” without specifying when exactly she has lied.

Former Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann also said Gaetz sought a pardon. “The general tone was we may get prosecuted because we were defensive of the president’s positions on these things. The pardon that he was discussing, requesting, was as broad as you could describe,” Herschmann said. “I remember he said, from the beginning of time up until today for any and all things.”

“I do not remember it the same way Eric Hershmann does,” Gaetz said. “I did have conversations with [him] about groups of people that could potentially receive pardons, even including some of the people who may have committed a technical violation of federal law but weren’t engaged in violence on January 6.”

“Was I asking something specifically for me and only me under those circumstances, the answer would be no,” Gaetz told Melber, with careful word choice.

Gaetz’s associate Joel Greenberg, a former Florida tax collector, pleaded guilty to federal charges including a count of sex trafficking a child. No charges have been filed against Gaetz, however, and he has denied any involvement in the sex trafficking allegations.

Embattled congressman and serial fabulist George Santos told his House Republican colleagues Tuesday that he would temporarily recuse himself from his committee assignments, amid ongoing investigations into his past behavior.

Santos was assigned seats on the Small Business Committee and the Science, Space, and Technology Committee.

A spokesperson for Santos has confirmed the news. “He has reserved to see it until he has been cleared up both campaign and personal financial investigations,” the spokesperson said.

Other Republican House members have also confirmed the news. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene told CNN the decision was Santos’s own: “He just felt like there was so much drama really over the situation, and especially what we’re doing to work to remove Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee.”

Santos, who appears to have fabricated the bulk of his background, is the target of multiple ethics probes and criminal investigations. Democrats and Republicans alike have called for him to resign. But House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who needs all the votes he can get as his party holds a razor-thin majority, refused to penalize Santos for his lies and instead seated him on two committees.

Santos has repeatedly insisted he has done “nothing wrong,” but said Tuesday in closed-door meetings that he would not sit on the committees.

The freshman congressman’s falsehoods range from bizarre—he says he was a volleyball star at Baruch College, which has no record of him attending—to unethical, including that his grandparents fled the Holocaust, his mother died in the 9/11 attacks, and some of his employees were killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting.

Santos is facing multiple ethics complaints with the House Ethics Committee and the Federal Election Commission. He is also under criminal investigation in Brazil for fraud and at the New York state and county levels into his background and finances.

A recent report by Mother Jones found that many of the donors listed on Santos’s campaign finances reports do not seem to exist.

Santos could even face a Department of Justice investigation into his financial issues, including his dramatic increase in reported wealth and income, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars he loaned his campaigns from personal accounts, a potential violation of campaign finance law.

Santos has remained mum about the issues plaguing him, though, giving evasive responses to the more out-there accusations but refusing to address his professional background, his finances, or his apparently nonexistent animal charity.

A slew of bills attacking transgender and LGBTQ rights will go up for debate across the United States this week.

State governments in Iowa, Missouri, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Virginia will hold hearings on bills covering everything from gender-affirming care to bans on drag performances.

Some of the bills will prevent trans people from changing their birth certificates to reflect their gender identity or will set a legal definition of gender that excludes them. In Iowa, the House Education Committee will discuss a bill that would require teachers to out transgender students.

Bills in Virginia, New Hampshire, South Dakota, and Tennessee ban gender-affirming care for anyone under the age 18 and prohibit the use of public funds such as Medicaid for gender-affirming care for people over 18.

Proponents of anti-trans legislation argue they are trying to protect children. But as critics point out, it’s not about the kids—it’s about stopping anyone from transitioning. And if anything, bills such as these could make life more dangerous for young queer people, as protests against drag shows and even children’s hospitals have escalated.

“State lawmakers pushing anti-LGBTQ+ bills and spewing dangerous rhetoric towards our community has led to more stigma, discrimination, and ultimately, deadly violence—particularly against the transgender community,” Sarah Warbelow, the legal director of the Human Rights Campaign, told Salon.

Republicans have made it very clear that they are targeting women and gender minorities. The raft of cruel legislation comes just days after a Florida panel recommended requiring student athletes to give their menstrual history to their school. Meanwhile, on a national level, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives included transphobic policy items in the new rules package.