Chants of “Crime Family” Greet Ivanka Trump at Courthouse

Ivanka Trump testified Wednesday in her family’s New York business fraud trial. But before she took the stand, protesters outside the courthouse made their feelings about her clear.

Ivanka was initially listed as a co-defendant in the lawsuit alongside her father and brothers when New York Attorney General Letitia James filed the suit in September 2022. But an appeals court dismissed the claims against her in June, ruling that the statute of limitations on her alleged involvement had run out.

The oldest Trump daughter was still called to testify about the Trump Organization’s business practices, though. As she walked up to the courthouse, a crowd of protesters began to chant, “Crime family!”

Trump did not acknowledge the protesters, who continued to chant as she entered the building. Once she took the stand, she promptly had to explain an email exchange that undermined her family’s entire defense.

James accused Donald Trump and his allies of fraudulently inflating the value of their real estate assets to get more favorable terms on bank loans. She alleges that Trump claimed his Trump Tower apartment in Manhattan was three times its actual size and worth $327 million. No New York City apartment has ever sold for that much.

He also valued Mar-a-Lago far more than its actual worth. Presiding Judge Arthur Engoron noted in October that Trump’s estimates went as high as 2,300 percent more than the Palm Beach County tax appraiser’s valuation.

The trial is only to set damages, because Judge Arthur Engoron determined in September that Trump committed fraud. Engoron ordered that all Trump’s New York business certificates be canceled, making it nearly impossible to do business in the state and effectively killing the Trump Organization.

Ivanka Trump was forced Wednesday, during her family’s New York business fraud trial, to explain an email exchange that could undo their entire defense.

Donald Trump’s oldest daughter took the stand to testify about the Trump Organization’s business practices. Ivanka Trump was presented with an email conversation she had with one of the company’s lawyers.

The lawyer, Jason Greenblatt, was worried about a 2012 deal with Deutsche Bank for the purchase of the Doral golf club in Miami, which required Donald Trump to maintain a minimum net worth of $3 billion. This requirement “would seem to me to be a problem?” he asked Ivanka.

Ivanka replied this was something they “have known from day one. We wanted to get a great rate and the only way to get the proceeds/term and principle where we want them is to guarantee the deal.”

Another email related to the Doral deal makes clear that her father’s financials were a big part of securing the purchase. “My father will also send you his most recent financial statement by hard mail,” she wrote in an email with the subject line “Doral.”

This exchange speaks directly to New York Attorney General Letitia James’s main accusation that Trump and his allies fraudulently inflated the value of their real estate assets to get more favorable terms on bank loans. Greenblatt was concerned that Trump would struggle to prove and maintain a net worth of at least $3 billion. But Ivanka didn’t seem worried.

In the Doral deal, Ivanka eventually got the requirement for Trump’s net worth lowered to $2.5 billion, but that’s still far higher than what James estimates Trump’s net worth actually was at the time of the purchase in 2012.

Trump himself effectively admitted Monday that the organization’s financial statements were made with an eye to encourage favorable loans. The New York attorney general’s office revealed that Trump had signed financial documents intended to look good for banks.

The trial, which is only to set damages, has not been going well for Trump. He has been grasping at straws in an attempt to avoid accountability, using an argument the presiding judge has already deemed “worthless” and incorrectly insisting he was president in 2021.

Judge Arthur Engoron already determined in September that Trump committed fraud. Engoron ordered that all Trump’s New York business certificates be canceled, making it nearly impossible to do business in the state and effectively killing the Trump Organization.

The lawsuit alleges that Trump claimed his Trump Tower apartment in Manhattan was three times its actual size and worth $327 million. No New York City apartment has ever sold for that much. He also valued Mar-a-Lago at $739 million, about 10 times its actual worth.

One day after 22 House Democrats voted alongside Republicans to censure Representative Rashida Tlaib for voicing support for a cease-fire in Gaza, the blue party also decided to pull its own censure resolution against Florida Representative Brian Mast, who compared “Palestinian civilians” to “Nazi civilians.”

Mast received blowback for comments he made on the House floor last Wednesday, saying he would “encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of ‘innocent Palestinian civilians,’ as is frequently said. I don’t think we would so lightly throw around the term ‘innocent Nazi civilians’ during World War II.”

“There is not this far stretch to say there are very few innocent Palestinian civilians,” Mast said.

That was enough for Representative Sara Jacobs to put Mast in the hot seat, drafting her own censure resolution against the Florida congressman on Monday.

Two days later, however, a Democratic aide familiar with the legislation told The Hill that the legislation has been dropped for now. The source added that Jacobs is still working with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on what the timing on the bill should be.

Meanwhile, nearly two dozen Democrats voted with Republicans to censure Rashida Tlaib in a late-night vote on Tuesday.

In the month since Hamas militants killed 1,400 Israeli civilians in the October 7 massacre, more than 10,000 Palestinian lives have been lost in the conflict, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

The Biden administration has urged the Israeli government to avoid civilian casualties but has so far rejected calls for a cease-fire in the region. Meanwhile, the White House has also called for emergency aid to Israel as part of a $105 billion national security package that includes military and humanitarian assistance to U.S. allies around the world, including Ukraine and Taiwan.

Those decisions have decimated Biden’s popularity among Arab American voters, with support plummeting from 59 percent to 17 percent since the presidential election, according to a poll by the Arab American Institute.

“Something horrible is happening to these people, and this administration is turning a blind eye to it,” James Zogby, the group’s president, told Democracy Now! “There are going to be electoral consequences.”

Iowa chapters of the far-right group Moms for Liberty endorsed 13 candidates in school board races across the state. Only one was elected.

The Tuesday loss is a stinging rebuke of Moms for Liberty, a “parental rights” organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center designated as an extremist group. What happened in Iowa mimics similar defeats suffered by the group and by Republicans in general throughout the U.S.

In Iowa, the only Moms for Liberty candidate who won was Nathan Gibson. He was elected school director for the Interstate 35 district, a rural district with fewer than 1,000 students.

Moms for Liberty was founded in 2021 to push back against Covid-19 restrictions in schools. It has since expanded to opposing classes on diversity, curbing the rights of LGBTQ students, and banning books.

But on Tuesday, voters across the country pushed back on the Moms for Liberty agenda. The organization endorsed more than 130 candidates across the country, and the vast majority of them lost—with some failing to get more than single-digit support.

All four Moms for Liberty-backed candidates in Minnesota lost, as did all four in Washington state. The group endorsed 19 candidates for school boards in New Jersey, but only four won.

Moms for Liberty backed 25 candidates throughout Ohio, but just five were elected. And of the six candidates the group endorsed in Virginia, only one won her race.

Voters issued similar rebukes to the Republican Party in general. Ohioans also voted overwhelmingly Tuesday night to enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution, despite the state GOP making multiple desperate attempts to prevent such an outcome. In Virginia, Democrats took control of both the state House and Senate in a stunning upset.

This story has been updated.

Conservatives reeled in shock and awe Tuesday night as traditionally red states voted blue in their off-year elections, defying polls over one key issue: abortion rights.

Abortion was a linchpin issue in states like Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia, where voters showed up en masse to steer their options toward access. Yet for many Republicans, the results came as a surprise. Despite a swath of polling results that indicated Americans increasingly view abortion access as an essential right, Republicans geared their hopes on polls hinting at sinking morale among Democrats under President Joe Biden’s leadership.

“Kentucky is a red state. Ohio is a red state,” Kayleigh McEnany said on Fox News’s Hannity. “Tonight, the midterm elections, the last few elections, we must recognize as a party, good polling does not always translate into resounding victory.”

“On the issue of abortion, in Ohio tonight, we continue a losing streak in the pro-life movement. Every ballot initiative has been lost post-Dobbs for the pro-life movement,” McEnany said.

McEnany also pointed out that conservatives won’t win women back on this issue until conservatives get behind initiatives to bolster young mothers.

“As a party, Sean, we must not just be a pro-baby party. That’s a great thing. We must be a pro-mother party,” McEnany said.

“There’s legislation we must put forward as a party to support women,” McEnany added. “We’ve got to get Trump behind it, the speaker of the House behind it, and have a national strategy to help vulnerable women because the results of next year’s election could be determined by that.”

Sean Hannity himself conceded that although he’s pro-life, he “recognize[s] that’s not where the country is.”

“Voters vote, polls don’t,” a Biden-Harris fundraising email noted after the results began to roll in.