Hope Hicks Drops Major Bomb on Trump’s Main Hush-Money Defense

Another star witness in Donald Trump’s first criminal trial has opened up about the former president’s involvement in his staff’s communications, adding yet another dent to Trump’s legal defense.

Hope Hicks, a former Trump Organization employee turned Trump White House communications director, testified on Friday that she spoke with Trump every day while serving as the press secretary to his presidential campaign. She said that he was “very involved” and that the communications arm of Trump’s 2016 bid was always “following his lead.”

“He knew what he wanted to say and how we wanted to say it,” Hicks told the court. “We were always following his lead.”

Hicks continued to say that she had met David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer and former CEO of its parent company, American Media Inc., several times, and knew of Pecker as a “friend of Mr. Trump.” She noted that she had been present for Trump’s phone calls with Pecker, including ones about some of the Enquirer’s coverage, including hit pieces on one of Trump’s GOP opponents in the 2016 race, Dr. Ben Carson.

But she also said that she didn’t recall being in attendance at meetings in Trump Tower between Pecker and her former boss.

“Were you ever in and out of [Trump’s] office when Mr. Pecker was meeting with Mr. Trump at Trump Tower?” prosecutor Matthew Colangelo asked.

“I don’t have a recollection of that, but it’s certainly possible,” she said.

Still, Hicks’s testimony about her boss’s behavior runs counter to a portrait of Trump that his legal defense has tried to paint—claiming that Trump was thoroughly distanced from any knowledge of hush-money payments to his alleged mistress, porn actress Stormy Daniels, or any attempt to bury her story.

Notably, Hicks specified that although she is testifying in the trial under subpoena, she is paying for her own legal representation and hasn’t spoken to Trump in nearly two years.

Trump is accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The Republican presidential nominee faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans has come under fire as the target of a Louisiana sex-trafficking probe, according to an 11-page search warrant made public Tuesday. But a recent ruling by the Louisiana Supreme Court might stand in the way of any victims seeking to hold the church accountable.

The document requested that the archdiocese hand over “ANY and ALL documents that pertain in any way to the sexual abuse of a minor by clergy members employed or otherwise associated with the Archdiocese of New Orleans,” specifying that those records violate the state’s child sex-trafficking laws.

The warrant also demands any and all communications between Gregory Aymond, the archbishop of New Orleans, and “ANY department within the Vatican pertaining to child sexual abuse.”

Aymand reportedly led a cover-up of the sprawling child sex-trafficking scheme that targeted children for several decades, going so far as to ignore pleas by his advisers to punish and publicly reveal the identities of priests and deacons in at least six separate cases that the church had determined were credible accusations of sexual misconduct with minors, according to a bombshell 48-page memorandum leaked in 2023 to The Guardian.

The warrant, which was filed last week, included disturbing details of the pedophilic scheme—including that, in some instances, “‘gifts’ were given to abuse victims by the accused [molesters] with instructions to pass on or give the gift to certain priests at the next school or church,” noting that the “‘gift’ was a form of signaling to another priest that the person was a target for sexual abuse.” Abuse was also a common occurrence at the New Orleans Seminary, where children were encouraged to skinny dip in front of other members of the Archdiocese before being assaulted, according to the warrant.

But a judgment by the Bayou State’s highest court has effectively stripped sexual assault survivors of an avenue of justice against the church. The judges ruled 3–4 in March that it’s the due process rights of priests and their enablers to not be held accountable in instances of sexual assault.

The case, Bienvenu v. Diocese of Lafayette, was brought by Douglas Bienvenu and several other plaintiffs who claimed they were sexually molested by a Roman Catholic priest during the 1970s, when they were between the ages of 8 and 14.

In its majority opinion, issued on March 22, the court argued that while the facts of the case were largely undisputed, the priest—and the religious institution he was a part of—was actually protected under the U.S. Constitution’s due process clause. Therefore, a sexual assault “look-back” window established by the Louisiana legislature in 2021 was actually, according to the court, unconstitutional.

Less than two months after criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu and calling for his ouster, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer reportedly now plans to invite the Israeli prime minister to address Congress.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson drafted an invitation to Netanyahu last month and told The Hill Thursday that it was to be extended on behalf of both houses of Congress. But, Johnson said, Schumer has done nothing since then.

“I sent a letter draft, because it’s a bicameral invitation letter, it’s been sitting on Chuck Schumer’s desk. As far as I know he has not co-signed it yet,” Johnson said.

But now, Schumer’s office says, the Senate majority leader has changed his mind.

“He intends to join the invitation; the timing is being worked out,” a spokesperson for Schumer said.

In March, Schumer gave a speech in Congress saying that Netanyahu had “lost his way,” arguing that the Israeli prime minister had allowed his “political survival to take precedence over the best interests” of Israel and criticizing his alliance with the country’s far right.

“Nobody expects Prime Minister Netanyahu to do the things that must be done to break the cycle of violence, preserve Israel’s credibility on the world stage, and work towards a two-state solution,” Schumer said.

Just a week later, though, when Johnson announced he intended to invite Netanyahu to address Congress, Schumer appeared to hedge his bets.

“Israel has no stronger ally than the United States and our relationship transcends any one president or any one Prime Minister. I will always welcome the opportunity for the Prime Minister of Israel to speak to Congress in a bipartisan way,” Schumer said in a statement.

So, what caused Schumer to welcome Netanyahu? It may be that misguided framing and discourse regarding college protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, where Netanyahu and the Israeli military have been accused of war crimes, have changed his outlook. Some Democrats have made outrageous criticisms and claims about the student movement, even going as far to compare them to neo-Nazis. Meanwhile, many Republicans have engaged in grandstanding over the protests to boost their pro-Israel credibility, despite being mocked by the students.

Schumer also was attacked after his March speech by the pro-Israel lobbying organization AIPAC, which still wields considerable influence in Congress. It’s quite telling that Schumer’s speech didn’t mention Congress’s long history of hindering peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians, perhaps demonstrating that nothing was really going to change. It looks like anything that would actually bring a cease-fire to Israel’s war in Gaza and make definite steps toward a Palestinian state, such as ending weapons sales to Israel, isn’t coming from Congress anytime soon.

Yet another Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign worker is in trouble, but this time for a very serious reason: allegedly choking and punching a woman.

Trent Pool, a paid ballot-access consultant on the campaign, was charged Saturday with criminal obstruction of breathing and assault after getting into an argument with a 25-year-old woman at the Soho Grand Hotel in downtown Manhattan at 5 a.m. that day.

Pool “wrapped his hand around her neck making it hard for her to breath[e] and then struck her in the face with a closed fist, causing pain,” Mediaite reported Thursday, citing police. The woman turned down medical attention, and Pool was then arrested.

Pool and his firm Accelevate 2020, which specializes in ballot-access, petition, and general campaign consulting, were brought onto Kennedy’s campaign to help the long-shot independent candidate get onto state election ballots. But perhaps Pool should have been screened before being hired: He was also arrested for fourth-degree assault in Seattle in February.

Last month, Kennedy’s campaign director for New York, Rita Palma, was caught on video telling state Republicans that the real goal was to stop Joe Biden from winning. Palma was also found to have extensive ties to Donald Trump, and may have been present at the Capitol insurrection on January 6. She was later fired by the Kennedy campaign.

Kennedy’s personal record when it comes to women isn’t good, either. He has been called a compulsive womanizer, and it was a major contributing factor in the collapse of his first marriage and suicide of his first wife. But that hasn’t stopped him from apparently managing to endear himself to Trump—until this week.

Despite praising Kennedy extensively in recent months, Trump and his advisers are suddenly worried that Kennedy will take away crucial votes. Kennedy is also facing calls to drop out from his former allies in the environmental movement, who say that he has turned against science and embraced conspiracy theories.

The Gaza solidarity encampments have actually made progress at several universities across the nation, pushing school administrators to meet with student protest leaders to consider divestment away from companies that facilitate the Israeli occupation of Palestine. But Representative Nancy Mace doesn’t see any of that—instead, she insisted that the protesters were just a bunch of “terrorist-loving kids” who “hate our country so much.”

“They should take their terrorist flags, they should go to Gaza in their crop tops and nose rings and see how long they would last, because Hamas would chop off their heads, throw them off the roof of a building, before they ever had the chance to tell them their pronouns,” Mace told Fox News Thursday afternoon.

“I want to know where the adults are on campus, putting a stop to this kind of violence,” the South Carolina lawmaker continued. “They are preventing Jewish students from going to class. They are trashing these college campuses. This is not what America stands for. We stand for freedom and liberty of all people, but this is what Biden, this is what the left and Democrats … created this mess, and they need to own it.”

But the violent police response that Mace seems to be endorsing to break up the protests has already happened at a slew of other institutions, and it didn’t exactly paint the United States as an international bastion of freedom or free speech. Instead, the actions taken by police at Columbia University on Tuesday shocked human rights and press freedom advocates around the globe after authorities ripped apart a peaceful protest, fired a gun inside an administrative building occupied by protesters, and threatened to arrest the dean of one of the country’s top journalism schools for shielding the media’s First Amendment right to cover the event.

Meanwhile, on the opposite coast, police allowed pro-Israel counterprotesters to violently attack an otherwise peaceful encampment set up by UCLA students in support of Gaza.

The international criminal court at The Hague is currently weighing whether to charge Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with war crimes, as more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 77,000  injured in the conflict—the majority of whom were women and children, according to data from the Gaza Health Ministry.