The Scene at Trump’s Supreme Court Case Is Creepily Cultlike

Steps away from where a Donald Trump–backed mob attempted to thwart the 2020 presidential election results, in Washington, D.C., fans of the former president set up chairs and stood by in anticipation of a U.S. Supreme Court hearing that would decide whether Colorado could ban Trump from appearing on the state’s presidential primary ticket.

Crowds grew from a couple dozen people to more than 100 overnight, with protesters braving frigid temperatures in order to show up, even though Trump himself was not expected to make an appearance.

Some mega pro-Trump fans drove from hundreds of miles away in order to attend, like Aranda Maher and her husband, who “left their children with grandparents and drove about 350 miles to Washington,” reported The New York Times.

“It was kind of spur of the moment,” Maher, 24, told the outlet, dressed in Ugg boots and pajamas.

Others made the trek more deliberately.

“My hope is that the Supreme Court has the courage to read the Constitution as it’s written, and not torture the text in defense of Trump,” Richard Zipper, a retired software engineer from Crofton, Maryland, told Politico.

Counterprotesters also made their mark outside the halls of the country’s highest judiciary, insisting that Trump be held accountable for his role in the January 6 riot.

“We’d like to see the Supreme Court uphold justice and read the law,” Jennifer Hobbs, a lawyer who drove down from New York, told Politico.

Trump, meanwhile, appeared optimistic about the proceedings, in an appearance outside his Florida estate.

“I thought the presentation today was a very good one. I think it was well received—I hope it was well received,” Trump told a gaggle of reporters outside Mar-a-Lago.

In December, Colorado’s Supreme Court issued a historic ruling removing Trump from the ballot on the basis that Trump had been involved in an “insurrection,” thereby violating the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.

Rudy Giuliani, who is so low on cash he filed for bankruptcy, says that Donald Trump owes him about $2 million in unpaid legal fees for helping try to overturn the 2020 election.

Giuliani filed for bankruptcy in December, faced with insurmountable debt after he was found liable for defaming two Georgia state election workers. During a hearing on Wednesday, Giuliani told a Manhattan federal bankruptcy court that Trump had asked the former mayor to take over his campaign’s legal team in November 2020.

At the time, Trump’s lawyers and Trump-aligned lawyers were working to overturn the presidential election results. Courts across the country threw out every single one of the dozens of cases that Trump’s allies filed.

Giuliani said Wednesday that when he took over the Trump campaign’s legal staff, “it was my understanding that I would be paid by the campaign for my legal work and my expenses to be paid.”

“When we submitted the invoice for payment, they just paid the expenses. Not all but most. They never paid the legal fees,” Giuliani said. He added that he never calculated how much Trump still owes him, but he estimated it was about $2 million.

Giuliani was hurting financially even before the defamation ruling against him. He listed his Manhattan apartment for sale in July and began representing himself in court to save on legal fees. In August, after he was indicted in Georgia, Giuliani asked his social media followers to donate to his defense fund.

He also flew to Mar-a-Lago to beg Trump to pay his legal fees. That didn’t work, but Trump did host a fundraiser dinner for Giuliani in September. Entry cost $100,000 a plate.

When Giuliani declared bankruptcy in December, the filing showed that Giuliani owes as much as $500 million in debt but has only up to $10 million in assets. His biggest debt is to Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. Giuliani owes the pair $148 million in damages for defaming them.

He owes money to Hunter Biden, electronic voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion, and an accounting firm. Giuliani is also in debt to his former associate Noelle Dunphy. Dunphy sued Giuliani in May, accusing him of promising to pay her a $1 million annual salary but instead sexually harassing and abusing her over two years.

Ironically, the man once affectionately known as “America’s mayor” owes money to multiple law firms for unpaid legal fees. Several of Giuliani’s former lawyers, including his longtime attorney Robert Costello, have sued Giuliani for failing to pay their legal fees.

The lawyer representing Donald Trump at the Supreme Court on Thursday is no stranger to controversial legal battles: Jonathan Mitchell is one of the primary architects of Texas’s brutal anti-abortion law.

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments about whether Trump should appear on the Colorado primary ballot—and by extension, any other state’s ballot. Mitchell argued that the former president should not be disqualified.

But before Thursday’s arguments, Mitchell was best known for crafting Texas’s so-called vigilante law, which allows private citizens to sue someone they suspect got an abortion. The law, which was implemented in 2021, bans abortions after six weeks, before most people even know they’re pregnant.

Because it empowered private citizens, instead of state officials, to target people who got an abortion or people who helped someone get an abortion, the law could circumvent the regulations established by Roe v. Wade, which at the time had not yet been overturned. The state couldn’t punish someone for getting an abortion, but an individual could.

Mitchell has said he specializes in strategies for creating legislation that can “withstand a court challenge if one arises.”

One of his former law professors, Richard Epstein at the University of Chicago Law School, told NPR in 2023 that Mitchell is “a kind of a technical magician.”

The Texas law, of course, has had devastating effects on state residents. Women have been unable to get abortions, whether elective or medically necessary. Often, they have been forced to either wait until they suffer life-threatening complications from the pregnancy before they can get an abortion, or they have been forced to give birth to infants that die within hours of birth.

Mitchell told NPR that result “concerns” him because “the statute was never intended to restrict access to medically necessary abortions.” But the reality is that he helped create a culture of fear in Texas, with medical professionals too worried about legal repercussions to advise someone to get an abortion, let alone perform the procedure.

And Mitchell is looking to expand that atmosphere. Since Roe was overturned, he has argued for the enforcement of the Comstock Act, a nearly two-centuries-old anti-obscenity law. The measure bans, among other things, the transport of abortion-related materials across state lines. Mitchell, and many other conservative legal figures, believe the Comstock Act can be used to ban the sale of abortion medication.

Now Mitchell’s helping Trump, the man who helped overturn Roe, remain on the ballot.

A Republican candidate seeking to replace New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez has scrubbed nearly her entire campaign website after being caught for plagiarism.

Christine Serrano Glassner, a New Jersey mayor with ties to Donald Trump, announced her campaign in September. On her website, her platform covered multiple popular Republican talking points, including federal spending, the southern U.S. border, and Covid-19 policies. The thing is, almost the whole section was lifted word for word from Ohio Senator J.D. Vance’s website.

Serrano Glassner’s website initially listed 13 issues that she said she wanted to focus on. Currently, only three issues remain. The other 10 were copied almost verbatim from Vance’s website. The section headings were exactly the same. Her descriptions of each issue included some changes, either to make them about New Jersey or to swap in a different nonessential word, but the bulk of the text was the same as the text Vance wrote.

When asked by The New Republic if she could explain the similarities, Serrano Glassner blamed a campaign worker. “While we are big fans of J.D. Vance and his America First policies, we would never intentionally replicate content from his or any website. That was the work of a campaign volunteer who posted some Vance issues content onto our website without proper approvals,” Serrano Glassner’s campaign said in a statement.

“We will be updating the content on our website and making sure that doesn’t happen again, but we won’t stop loving J.D. Vance and patriots like him who are working to save America from the corruption of the Democrats like we are doing in New Jersey.”

Immediately after responding to TNR, Serrano Glassner’s team deleted all the copied sections from her website, leaving up just three issues that Vance had not discussed.

The race to replace Menendez kicked off in September after he was indicted for allegedly taking bribes from Egypt. A superseding indictment was then filed against Menendez in January for allegedly taking bribes from Qatar. Menendez has now been indicted a total of three times, but he emerged unscathed the previous times.

Since announcing her candidacy, Serrano Glassner has fully embraced her ties to Trump. Her husband, Michael Glassner, served as chief operating officer and deputy campaign manager for the former president from July 2015 to November 2020. He currently runs one of Trump’s legal defense funds.

So it’s no surprise that the bulk of Serrano Glassner’s campaign website was lifted from Vance. Once a Trump critic, Vance has since changed his stance dramatically. He is now one of Trump’s most outspoken supporters on Capitol Hill, and he is reportedly being considered as a potential Trump running mate for the 2024 election.

But that proximity to Trump, both real and copy-pasted, could backfire for Serrano Glassner. New Jersey hasn’t elected a Republican to the Senate since 1972. And in 2018, Menendez was reelected with an 11-point margin over his Trump-backed Republican opponent. At the time, Menendez had just been tried for corruption. The case ended in mistrial after the jury deadlocked.

The judge presiding over Donald Trump’s classified documents lawsuit just did the former president a massive favor in his efforts to delay the trial.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon—a Trump appointee—ruled Tuesday that special counsel Jack Smith’s team, which has been investigating Trump for hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, must release some classified information to Trump’s lawyers during discovery. Those details include the names of certain potential witnesses, the conduct of some individuals (which they haven’t been charged for), and the FBI code name for a separate investigation.

Smith has opposed unsealing certain documents, arguing that doing so would give Trump an opportunity to seek even more information. That would delay the trial, which is currently scheduled to begin in May.

“Putting the special counsel to his proof and requiring him to turn square corners in discovery is likely to slow and prolong the proceedings, advantaging Defendants’ strategy of delay,” Anthony Alfieri, a University of Miami School of Law professor, told Newsweek in a story published Thursday.

Cannon’s decision “indicates that she intends to closely scrutinize the evidentiary grounds put forward by the Special Counsel” when Smith tries to redact or keep sealed documents requested by Trump’s lawyers, Alfieri said.

Trump was charged in Florida with keeping national defense secrets, making false statements, and conspiracy to obstruct justice, among other things, for hoarding classified materials at Mar-a-Lago. His body man, Walt Nauta, and a Mar-a-Lago employee Carlos De Oliveira have also been charged.

Cannon received nationwide scrutiny at the start of the investigation after she appeared favorably inclined to the former president. Trump filed a motion requesting a “special master” review all of the material the FBI found at Mar-a-Lago before the investigation could proceed, and Cannon agreed—a victory for Team Trump.

The Justice Department appealed the decision, and the Eleventh Circuit Court ultimately ruled that neither Cannon nor Trump had had any legal right for their actions. The appeals court threw Cannon’s decision out entirely.

But Tuesday’s ruling could backfire on her. Before she issued her decision, Roger Parloff, the senior editor of Lawfare, warned that granting Trump’s request would be “highly controversial” and could spur more intense scrutiny of Cannon.

After Cannon ruled, Parloff noted that Smith’s team could file an interlocutory appeal based on the impression that Cannon has been too favorable to Trump. Cannon could potentially be removed from the case altogether.