Panicked Trump Makes Last-Ditch Effort to Delay First Criminal Trial

In a move we should all have seen coming, Donald Trump asked Monday to delay his hush-money trial until the Supreme Court rules on whether he has presidential immunity.

Trump is currently set to face trial in New York on March 25 for his role in hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He faces 34 felony charges for business fraud and has pleaded not guilty to all of them.

Although the payments took place before Trump became president, his lawyers argued in court documents Monday that prosecutors intend to introduce evidence at trial that “implicate the concept of official acts” and therefore should be protected by presidential immunity.

Trump’s lawyers argued that the trial should be delayed until the Supreme Court issues its decision, which would in turn determine whether prosecutors in the hush-money trial would be barred from introducing certain evidence.

“President Trump respectfully submits that an adjournment of the trial is appropriate to await further guidance from the Supreme Court, which should facilitate the appropriate application of the presidential immunity doctrine in this case to the evidence the People intend to offer at trial,” the court filing said.

Prosecutors are expected to respond later this week. It is unclear if Trump will be successful. His lawyers had requested in February to delay the trial, arguing that Trump was being sued too many times and couldn’t keep up with the workload. Presiding Judge Juan Manuel Merchan denied the motion. 

The Supreme Court handed Trump a major win two weeks ago when it agreed to hear his case on whether he is immune from prosecution over his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. That trial was supposed to start on March 4 but has now been indefinitely postponed.

Last week, the Supreme Court announced the case’s arguments will begin on April 25. A ruling will not come until several weeks later, potentially as late as June or July. Whether or not the justices rule in favor of Trump, he has essentially already won.

Trump’s main strategy in his myriad legal battles has been to delay them as long as possible. If he is reelected in November, he could instruct the Department of Justice to drop the two federal cases against him, or even try to pardon himself and avoid ever facing accountability for his actions.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump struggled Monday to give a coherent answer on whether he thought the United States should actually ban TikTok.

The House of Representatives is poised to pass a bill this week that would ban TikTok from U.S. app stores unless ByteDance, the app’s Chinese parent company, sells TikTok to an American company. Trump was one of the original arbiters of anti-TikTok sentiment on Capitol Hill.

But last week, Trump advocated against banning TikTok. His reasoning? He doesn’t want Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to reap any unintended benefits in the fallout.

“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. They are a true Enemy of the People!” Trump warned on TruthSocial.

When asked Monday about his apparent flip on banning TikTok, Trump insisted, “I had it done.”

“And then Congress said, well, they never, they ultimately, usually fail,” he continued on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “They are a gooch—like, extremely political, and they’re extremely subject to people called lobbyists who happen to be very, very talented, very good and very rich.”

“I could have banned TikTok. I had it banned just about, I could have got that done. But I said, ‘You know what? But I’ll leave it up to you.’ I didn’t push them too hard because, you know, let them do their own research and development, and they decided not to do it. But as you know, I was at the point where I could have gotten it done if I wanted to. I sort of said, ‘You guys decide, you make that decision.’ Because it’s a tough decision to make.”

While he was in office, Trump made banning TikTok a pet project. In 2020, he signed an executive order prohibiting any transactions between ByteDance and U.S. citizens, citing national security concerns. The order was eventually blocked in court.

Trump admitted Monday that his main incentive for keeping TikTok around is preventing Facebook from expanding—and he threw in some election fraud conspiracy for good measure.

“I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media. What Facebah-book did with lock boxes, with a $500 million, Zuckerberg’s, lock boxes that he put in. I mean, I considered illegal,” Trump said, referring to a conspiracy he started that Facebook had paid for “lock boxes” of fraudulent ballots that made up “96 percent” of votes for Joe Biden.

Trump told CNBC that he still believes TikTok poses a threat to national security. “We have to very much go into privacy and make sure that we are protecting the American people’s privacy and data rights,” he said. “But, you know, we also have that problem with other, you have that problem with Facebook and lots of other companies too.”

“I mean, they get the information, they get plenty of information, and they deal with China and they’ll do whatever China wants. You know, if you look at, some of our American companies, when you talk about, highly sophisticated companies that you think are American, they’re not so American. They deal in China, and China, if China wants anything from them, they will give it. So that’s a national security risk also.”

TikTok is one of the few issues that unites Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill. A company associated with the Chinese government owns a 1 percent stake in TikTok parent company Bytedance. With both political parties eager to seem tough on China, cracking down on TikTok is an easy move. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew has testified twice before Congress and has faced far tougher, and sometimes more racist, grilling than any of his American tech CEO counterparts.

Republicans also regularly use TikTok as a scapegoat because the platform is popular with young people, the majority of whom tend to lean left. Many lawmakers say they want to ban TikTok to protect both national security and children’s privacy and well-being.

Bizarrely, Trump got one thing right during his weird rant: When it comes to security, both national and personal, TikTok is far from the only bad actor.

Google and YouTube have violated children’s privacy. Livestreaming platform Twitch is rife with sexual harassment and child predators. Apple and Google parent Alphabet design their products to be addictive to teenagers.

Facebook parent company Meta knew its products were destroying teens’ mental health, particularly teenage girls’, but made no changes to its platform. Zuckerberg was aware of this but lied to Congress under oath about it.

Meanwhile, the United States has no overarching data security legislation. Instead, data privacy and security is regulated by a patchwork of state laws. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass laws that would actually protect children online. In fact, in the past decade, Congress passed just one narrow children’s online safety law.

The sex trafficking survivor who was mentioned by Republican Senator Katie Britt in the State of the Union rebuttal says her story was totally warped by the senator as part of an attack on Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

“I hardly ever cooperate with politicians, because it seems to me that they only want an image. They only want a photo—and that to me is not fair,” Karla Jacinto Romero told CNN on Sunday. Jacinto Romero also confirmed that no one from Britt’s team had reached out to her asking to share her story.

In her widely criticized State of the Union response, Britt shared the graphic story of a woman who was raped by human traffickers for years.

“When I first took office, I did something different. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas, where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12,” Britt said in her speech, seeming to imply that this happened in the United States during Biden’s presidency.

Britt’s communications director has already stated that the woman in the story was Jacinto Romero. And Jacinto Romero, in her interview with CNN, is confirming a viral TikTok that Britt got all the dates—and some other details—wrong.

In reality, Jacinto Romero was kept in captivity in Mexico from 2004 to 2008, when President George W. Bush was president. She was not trafficked in the United States, nor was she trafficked by drug cartels as Britt alleged in her speech, but by a pimp who kidnapped young girls.

Jacinto Romero also disputes Britt’s version of the story, which made it seem like the two women met in a private meeting.

Jacinto Romero told CNN that she actually met Britt at an anti-trafficking event last year at the southern border, with several other government officials in attendance, including Republican Senators Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi.

As these clarifications have come to light, how has Britt responded? Well, she’s doubling down of course.

When Fox News host Shannon Bream asked Britt Sunday if she meant to imply that this all happened during Biden’s presidency, Britt responded, “No. I very specifically said, ‘This is what President Biden did during his first 100 days.’ He stopped all deportations, he halted construction of the border wall and he said, ‘I’m going to give amnesty to millions.’ Those types of things act as a magnet to help more and more people here.”

She followed up that sentence with the statement, “President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace. It’s despicable. And it’s almost entirely preventable.”

Donald Trump may have just landed himself in hot water—again—over E. Jean Carroll, as the former president simply cannot accept that he lost both of her lawsuits against him.

Trump appeared Monday on CNBC’s Squawk Box, and he promptly took aim at Carroll. He called her “Ms. Bergdorf Goodman,” referring to the store where he assaulted her, and said her story was a “false allegation” and that he had never met her before.

Just two days prior, during a rally in Georgia, Trump told supporters he had been forced to post bond on a “totally made up story.”

“Based on false accusations made about me by a woman that I knew nothing about, didn’t know, never heard of it. I know nothing about her,” Trump continued.

He also claimed Carroll’s lawyers are “Democratic operatives” and the presiding judge—with whom Trump and his lawyers repeatedly clashed—was a “disaster.”

Trump posted a whopping $91.6 million bond last week, which covers the $83.3 million he was ordered to pay in damages for defaming Carroll and interest for putting off payment for so long. Trump only just beat the deadline to post: Had he waited one more business day, Carroll’s lawyers could have started seizing his assets to collect.

But now, Trump has handed Carroll’s legal team fresh ammunition. The day after Trump’s comments in Georgia, legal analyst Lisa Rubin said since Trump had made the comments after he posted bond, it would be difficult to keep penalizing him for the same lawsuit.

“Should E. Jean Carroll and her team want any further relief now, their only option is to file another case,” Rubin said on MSNBC’s The Weekend.

“I think her recourse here is to sue again or at the very least to oppose the bond.”

Carroll’s attorneys sent a letter Monday to presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan indicating that they do not oppose the bond. But Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) has indicated that they haven’t ruled out a third defamation lawsuit.

“The statute of limitations for defamation in most jurisdictions is between one and three years,” Kaplan told reporter Maggie Haberman. “As we said after the last jury verdict, we continue to monitor every statement that Donald Trump makes about our client, E. Jean Carroll.”

Carroll’s other lawyer, Shawn Crowley, had also hinted that there might be another lawsuit in Trump’s future. “We’re watching, we’re listening,” she said in February. “We had really hoped that, as I think the jury found, that $83 million would maybe be enough to convince him to keep E. Jean Carroll’s name out of his mouth. Apparently, he showed us this weekend that he really cannot control himself and that maybe it wasn’t.”

Representative Nancy Mace, an outspoken sexual assault survivor, had a baffling response when asked why she continues to support rapist Donald Trump for president.

Mace, who endorsed Trump in January, appeared Sunday on ABC’s This Week. When host George Stephanopolous asked Mace how she can “square” her support for Trump with his being found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and then defaming her, Mace immediately began repeatedly accusing Stephanopoulos of trying to “shame” her for being sexually assaulted.

When Stephanopolous reiterated that a jury had found Trump liable for rape, a decision upheld by the presiding judge and then reinforced by a second jury, Mace snapped, “It was not a criminal court, number one.”

“Number two, I live with shame, and you’re asking me a question about my political choices, trying to shame me as a rape victim, and I find it disgusting,” Mace continued. “And quite frankly, E. Jean Carroll’s comments, when she did get the judgment, joking about what she was gonna buy? It makes it harder for women to come forward when they make a mockery out of rape.”

Stephanopolous pointed out that getting defamed by the sitting president also makes it harder for women to come forward, but Mace stuck to her guns. As of Monday morning, the pinned post on her X (formerly Twitter) account says, “There is nothing ‘valiant’ about shaming a rape victim.”

The irony was lost on Mace, but not Carroll. The popular author tweeted Sunday afternoon, “I wish Representative @RepNancyMace well. And I salute all survivors for their strength, endurance, and holding on to their sanity.”

Obviously, survivors of sexual assault should never be shamed for the attack. But Mace’s mental gymnastics here are just the latest demonstration of the congresswoman’s stunning hypocrisy.

According to Mace, it only counts as rape if the attacker is found guilty in a criminal court, not a civil court as Trump was. By this logic, sexual assault isn’t such a big deal, because out of every 1,000 instances of rape, only 13 get referred to a prosecutor. Only seven actually result in a felony conviction.

In fact, by her own logic, was Mace even attacked? Because she did not report the assault to the police. Again, that is her completely within her right, but she can’t then argue that being found liable for rape doesn’t count.

Mace has made her story of surviving sexual assault a major part of her political identity. She said it took her 25 years to share the story, after she was raped at just 16 years old, and it was one of the hardest things she’s ever done.

But for all her talk about helping victims of sexual assault, she hasn’t fully showed up for them when it comes to actual votes. Despite urging her party to adopt more moderate stances on abortion, for example, she then turns right around and falls in line with her party every single time.

As a reminder, Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting Carroll. The judge in the case went out of his way to clarify that as we understand the common definition of the word “rape,” Trump can be considered a rapist. The former president owes Carroll a total of $88.3 million—$5 million for assaulting her and defaming her, and the rest for defaming her a separate time.

After being awarded the $83.3 million in damages, Carroll vowed to spend the money on “something Donald Trump hates.”

“Perhaps a fund for the women who have been sexually assaulted by Donald Trump,” she said.