Trump’s Bizarre Claim on Hush Money Trial Gets Brutal Fact-Check

Donald Trump claimed that a massive police presence has shut down traffic for blocks around the Manhattan courthouse where his hush-money trial is being held, preventing his supporters from showing their support and protesting on his behalf. But reality looks a little different.

NBC News reporter Vaughn Hillyard posted a video outside the courthouse Tuesday morning. The clip shows a pretty quiet street fully open to traffic, with only one Trump supporter there, according to Hillyard.

Either Trump has no idea what’s going outside of court, he’s deluding himself, or he’s trying to make excuses about a poor show of support. It’s not the first time, either: When the former president was initially indicted in his hush-money case in March 2023, the show of support outside of the court was abysmal, with trolls and media outnumbering supporters. When he was charged with 34 felony counts in the following month, news crews again dwarfed the MAGA faithful.

Trump clearly is hoping for January 6-level turnout at his trials, even calling for his supporters to show up in large numbers. But it seems he’s going to be repeatedly disappointed. Many Republicans, clinging to conspiracies about the Capitol riot, think that the government was behind the whole thing, and don’t want to play into a “deep state” plot.

But that hasn’t stopped Trump from continuing to urge his supporters to show up—something that might not bode all that well for the presidential election in November.

An attorney for Donald Trump’s legal defense in his New York criminal trial took a serious misstep on Tuesday that resulted in a critical warning from Judge Juan Merchan.

On the second day of the trial, attorney Todd Blanche attempted to portray Trump as an individual fully aware of the limitations of the partial gag order imposed on him in the trial, which forbids him from speaking publicly about courtroom staff, prosecutors, or any of their family members. Comments about jurors are also prohibited, as well as comments about witnesses, though comments about Merchan and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg are still on the table.

Still, Trump has already managed to violate the gag order about a dozen times, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

“President Trump does in fact know what the gag order allows him to do and what it does not allow him to do,” Blanche told the court, insisting that his client had not violated the court order since Trump’s comments toward witnesses, including adult film actress Stormy Daniels and his former fixer Michael Cohen, allegedly came after they had spoken about him first.

“He’s allowed to respond to political attacks, your honor,” Blanche said, according to MSNBC’s Adam Klasfled.

But Merchan remembered the order of events, reminding Blanche that Trump’s disparaging remarks had in fact come before the others’.

“President Trump ‘Truths’ repeatedly, all day, virtually seven days a week, your honor,” Blanche replied.

The ensuing back-and-forth between Blanche and Merchan continued to a rolling boil until Blanche suddenly claimed that the violations at hand—which involve Trump “reposting an article from a news site” or a “news program”—don’t actually violate the order. Still, Blanche had no precedent or case law to support such a claim.

“I don’t have any case law,” Blanche said, instead calling it “common sense” and doubling down that Trump had been “very careful to comply” with the order.

That was, apparently, the straw that broke the camel’s back, after which Merchan dropped that the attorney had gone too far.

“Mr. Blanche, you are losing all credibility with the court,” Merchan said, according to LawFare’s Anna Bower.

“You say the posts are ambiguous, you say he didn’t know, but you’re not offering me anything to support your argument. You’re not giving me anything to hang my hat on,” Merchan continued.

“The fact that the prosecution did not come running in here as [soon] as your client posted things too close to the line is not probative of anything here,” he added before telling the court to take a break.

A former associate of Rudy Giuliani is still dishing out the dirt on the inner machinations of Donald Trump’s administration.

Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian American businessman, helped Giuliani connect with Ukrainian officials in his effort to “find dirt on the Bidens” that could potentially hurt then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s chances at taking the White House. That included connecting the Trump administration with an assortment of Ukrainian leaders, including the former Minister of Internal Affairs Yuriy Lutsenko.

Parnas dropped an eyebrow-raising story about Lutsenko Monday night, revealing how twisted international affairs became under the Trump administration.

“Lutsenko told me, ‘I’m the General Prosecutor of Ukraine, I want to meet A.G. Barr,’ so, I tell that to Rudy and he’s like, ‘Look, you want to meet Attorney General [Bill] Barr, the way things work here is you pay a lobbyist and they will get you in there, so you can pay me $200,000 and I will introduce you to Attorney General Bill Barr,’” Parnas told MediasTouch in a sprawling story about Giuliani’s meeting with the Ukrainian official.

“That evening I go meet with Lutsenko… they get drunk. Lutensko is pouring his heart out to me, like he can’t believe what just happened, he looked up to Giuliani as his hero and here Giuliani is basically shaking him down for $200,000 to meet with Attorney General Barr.”

“I explained to him that, ‘Listen, you know how things work all over the world, this is just how things work in the United States,’” Parnas added.

The information that Giuliani extracted from meetings with a host of Ukrainian officials transformed into a conspiracy accusing Biden of orchestrating a political cover-up in the Eastern European nation while serving as vice president in order to protect his son Hunter’s seat on the board of Ukrainian oil company Burisma. Once Biden became president, that conspiracy became the primary allegation in a Republican-led impeachment effort—even though Parnas had warned Giuliani long before that the entire story was false.

“The American people have been lied to, by Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and various cohorts of individuals in government and media positions. They created falsehoods to serve their own interests knowing it would undermine the strength of our nation,” Parnas testified at a House impeachment inquiry hearing in March.

Donald Trump allegedly asked his valet Walt Nauta to lie to the FBI about whether the former president was hoarding classified documents, promising to pardon Nauta if he was ultimately charged with lying to the agency.

The shocking revelation came from an FBI interview with a witness identified only as a White House employee under Trump, CNN reported Monday night. In the interview, the transcript of which was released Monday, the witness paints Trump as paranoid as he was investigated for withholding classified documents, and increasingly desperate to ensure absolute loyalty from those who worked for him after his presidency ended.

“NAUTA was told by FPOTUS’ people that his investigation was not going anywhere, that it was politically motivated and ‘much ado about nothing,’” an interview summary states. FPOTUS refers to the Former President of the United States. “NAUTA was also told that even if he gets charged with lying to the FBI, FPOTUS will pardon him in 2024.”

The witness, referred to as “Person 16,” didn’t want the FBI to record the interview, claiming that it would be “a far bigger risk for him in the Trump world.” The interview notes do not indicate how Person 16 came to know about the promised pardon.

Monday was full of bad news for Trump, who faces 40 felony charges in the classified documents case, including 32 counts of willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding documents, and concealing records. In another interview transcript released Monday, a different witness in Trump’s orbit said that, when Trump refused to return classified documents to the federal government, the witness resorted to begging members of the former president’s family to convince him to return the material.

Trump himself has even admitted to taking and keeping classified documents after his presidency, but insists that he took and kept them “very legally.” Statements like that, along with revelations that he misled his attorneys, are probably why Trump’s lead attorney in the classified documents case reportedly quit.

Nauta and a co-defendant in the classified documents case, Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira, are each accused of helping Trump move boxes of classified documents so that federal investigators could not find them, and of trying to delete security footage that showed them moving boxes. The pair claim that they had no idea what was in the boxes, and they are seeking to have the cases against them dismissed.

Donald Trump took aim at Joe Biden on Monday for trying to ban TikTok, conveniently forgetting how hard he worked to ban the popular app during his own presidency.

Trump posted an angry screed on TruthSocial claiming that “Crooked Joe Biden” is responsible for banning TikTok after a bill attached to a major foreign aid package passed the House of Representatives over the weekend. The bill would ban TikTok from U.S. app stores if its parent company, China-based ByteDance, doesn’t sell the platform within a year.

“He is the one pushing it to close, and doing it to help his friends over at Facebook become richer and more dominant, and able to continue to fight, perhaps illegally, the Republican Party,” Trump wrote, urging young people to remember this on Election Day.

Either Trump’s memory is suspect, or he’s trying to pull a fast one on the public. He attempted to ban the popular video-sharing app in an executive order back in 2020, ostensibly to protect Americans’ data from the Chinese government. The ban was later shot down in court.

Just last month, however, he claimed in an incoherent TV interview that a ban would help Facebook, and even expressed support for the social media platform on TruthSocial.

“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” Trump posted in March. “I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better.”

Since then, two possible explanations for Trump’s dramatic shift in position have emerged. One of Trump’s allies, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, revealed plans to purchase TikTok. And billionaire Jeff Yass, a powerful backer of Trump’s reelection campaign, reportedly owns a 15 percent stake in TikTok worth billions of dollars.

Over the last several months, the app, popular with younger Americans, has come under fire for allegedly being too pro-Palestinian from the right, as well as from pro-Israel Democrats. As inflated an argument as that seems, Trump may see supporting TikTok as helping his reelection efforts by encouraging more criticism of Biden’s policies in Israel and Gaza. Not to mention that keeping the app around keeps powerful allies happy.