Felon Trump Just Escalated His Most Insane Lie About Biden

Donald Trump is now looping his baseless conspiracies into his fundraising emails.

On Monday, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee escalated his claims that President Joe Biden authorized the FBI to shoot and kill him during its 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago, this time promising to punish his two-time opponent for the alleged assassination attempt.

“Biden’s day of reckoning is coming,” the Trump campaign wrote in a fundraising email distributed Monday. “He tried to publicly torture and humiliate me … but he failed. He tried to raid my home and take me out with deadly force … but he failed.”

Trump’s blow-up accusation that the Biden administration had authorized the FBI to shoot him during its search and seizure of Mar-a-Lago is, in actuality, a wild misread of a standard policy statement regarding the agency’s use of deadly force during investigations.

But the ominous threat of revenge is a particularly odd attack from a man whose legal team argued that presidential immunity could cover political assassinations. In January, Trump’s legal team suggested that even a direct order for SEAL Team Six to kill a political opponent could avoid prosecution under a former president’s broad immunity.

The former president faces 42 felony charges in the case related to willful retention of national security information, corruptly concealing documents, and conspiracy to obstruct justice. But the judge actually overseeing the former president’s classified documents case seems to have no motivation to move forward with the trial.

In May, Judge Aileen Cannon ordered a stay on Trump’s legal requirement to give the government advance notice of which classified materials will be discussed in his classified documents case—but offered no expiration date for the theoretically temporary reprieve.

The Georgia Court of Appeals has set a date to hear the Trump legal team’s appeal to remove Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the Georgia election interference case. Oral arguments are set to begin in October—all but guaranteeing to delay the election racketeering trial until past the election and well into 2025.

In mid-March, Judge Scott McAfee ruled that Willis could continue to prosecute the case, so long as she cut ties with her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, with whom she was accused of having an improper relationship. Two weeks later, Trump and eight of his 18 co-defendants in the case filed an application with the Georgia Court of Appeals asking it to reconsider McAfee’s decision, and last month, the court agreed to hear the case.

With Willis’s status on the fraud case pushed late in the year, the odds of the trial even beginning before the election in November have shrunk to zero. It’s a success for the convicted felon and Republican presidential candidate, whose legal strategy in the many cases against him has been to delay them so they can’t affect his chances of winning back the presidency.

Between this delay, Judge Aileen Cannon stalling Trump’s classified documents trial, and the Supreme Court’s examination of presidential immunity, Trump’s conviction on 34 felony charges in his hush-money trial may be the only legal consequences he faces for a long time. Even though sentencing is set to be decided in July in that case, Trump still can appeal the conviction and push his sentence further down the road.

If he’s elected president, the convicted felon plans to recruit his Republican allies to make it illegal to prosecute him for the crimes he commits, forever. He also wants to go after everyone who has tried to hold him accountable before the law.

It seems that, except for his hush-money trial conviction, what started out as a perilous year for Trump is looking better and better as his other legal cases get delayed and he evades further consequences. The only avenue for accountability may be for Trump to be soundly defeated In five months.

Appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday, Republican Senator and Trump V.P.-hopeful Tom Cotton intently avoided answering whether he’d support the verdict if Trump loses the appeal in his hush-money trial—and weaseled away from his stance on other topics that went against Trump’s position too.

“Republicans are attacking the judge, the jury, the legal system here instead of letting the process play out,” Meet the Press anchor Peter Alexander asked. “If Donald Trump wins on appeal, is that valid?”

Cotton quickly answered the softball question, responding, “I think there’s no question Donald Trump should win on appeal.” On follow-up, Cotton was asked if he would find the verdict valid if Trump loses on appeal. Cotton blew off the question entirely, instead opting to speak straight through it to falsely assert, “He’s an innocent man who did nothing wrong.”

“This judge, again, violated New York rules by giving money to Joe Biden in 2020, specifically to stop Donald Trump,” Cotton continued. “I hope that the Court of Appeals in New York actually applies the law in an even-handed way as opposed to do what this judge did, what Joe Biden’s Department of Justice has done, which is bending the rules in return solely to stop Donald Trump. The only thing Donald Trump is guilty of is being a threat to Joe Biden’s reelection.”

Alexander noted to Cotton that “Joe Biden’s Department of Justice” is in the midst of prosecuting Robert Menendez, Henry Cuellar, and Hunter Biden. Alexander also noted to Cotton that the case against Trump began in 2018—well before Biden was the presidential nominee, and before he’d ever announced he was running for president.

In the same interview, Cotton revealed he would do Trump’s bidding elsewhere, adding a condition to whether he would accept the 2024 election results. Cotton was further grilled on his previous statements about the January 6 Capitol riot and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Notably, Trump has promised to pardon everyone convicted for the Capitol riot—including those who assaulted police—while Cotton has only gone so far as to call for pardoning people who did not assault anyone or vandalize anything. Cotton was also asked if he’d condemn extreme threats made against jurors, the judge, and prosecution in Trump’s hush-money trial that MSNBC pulled from Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social. Cotton initially dodged by deriding the comments as coming from an “obscure platform” and insinuating they must have come from “some obscure account” before admitting “I will always say that violence has no place in our politics.”

On Monday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene screamed at and berated Dr. Anthony Fauci in a petty fight that earned her a reprimand from the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Greene called Fauci’s medical credentials into question during a hearing on the U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“That is completely unacceptable to deny Dr. Fauci, who is here as a respected member of the medical community, his title, and that’s actually a personal attack on his character,” Representative Robert Garcia, a Democrat, said.

“He’s not respected,” Greene shot back. Others on the committee quickly moved to correct Greene and have her words stricken from the record when she refused to comply.

Representative Brad Wenstrup, the Republican chair of the subcommittee, eventually reprimanded Greene and ordered, “The gentlelady will suspend.”

Garcia later tore into Greene and other Republicans for their conduct in the hearing.

“I am so sorry that you are subjected to those level of attacks and insanity,” Garcia said, addressing Fauci. “Your quote-unquote ‘so-called science’ that the gentlewoman is referring to has saved millions of lives in this country and around the world.”

Garcia went on to praise Fauci and other medical officials for saving lives during and outside of the pandemic, pointing out that Greene introduced the Fire Fauci Act and that she accused the infectious diseases specialist of creating the Covid-19 virus. Garcia noted that he lost both of his parents to Covid-19.

It’s pretty clear that Greene’s attack is part of her and other far-right Republicans’ culture-war posturing on vaccination and the Covid-19 pandemic. Rather than achieve anything, their attacks on Fauci and other medical professionals, both on Monday and throughout the pandemic, only achieve attention for themselves and dangerous health outcomes for their supporters.

Greene hasn’t had a good spring. Last month, her attempt to insult Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett backfired and turned her into a bankable meme for Crockett, and she’s lost a lot of goodwill from her fellow Republicans over her failed effort to oust Speaker Mike Johnson.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is setting out on a new MAGA crusade: defunding the state of New York to avenge Donald Trump.

Greene* has proposed cutting the Empire State off from federal funding in a bid to punish residents after 12 jurors convicted Trump on Thursday. The extremely unlikely initiative would cut off access to federal resources for education, housing, law enforcement, veterans’ benefits, and other social needs.

But that’s not Greene’s only Trump-saving effort. The Georgia Republican also wants Congress to step in to prevent special counsel Jack Smith from prosecuting Trump in the federal election interference case and the classified documents trial.

The first step: pressure House Speaker Mike Johnson—whom Greene tried and failed to force out of Congress just last month—to lead the charge.

“The speaker of the House is one of the most powerful people in the country,” Greene said last week. “We control the budget, we control the power of the purse. If Speaker Johnson supports Trump like he claims, he should stop the special counsel, Jack Smith, and he should be using the power of the purse to hold New York accountable for the sham convictions against President Trump. The entire thing is political, it’s outrageous, and our country has completely turned a corner.”

While Johnson is unlikely to be on board with defunding an entire state, he has made clear he disagrees with the ruling. Johnson called on the Supreme Court to intervene, indicating that he thought some of the justices were “deeply concerned” about the trial outcome.

“I think that the justices on the court—I know many of them personally—I think they are deeply concerned about that, as we are,” Johnson told Fox & Friends on Friday. “So I think they’ll set this straight.”

Trump has 30 days to appeal the conviction, according to New York penal law. Appealing the case would most likely turn into a referendum on the judge that oversaw it, Judge Juan Merchan, who endured Trump’s mud-slinging throughout the seven-week trial primarily over a gag order, which prevented Trump from attacking witnesses, jurors, and courtroom staff’s family—but did not prevent him from hurling vitriol at Merchan.

Trump could potentially push the state case to federal courts if he were reelected as president, but doing so would be incredibly unlikely unless he had already exhausted all other avenues via the appeals process, which could take years.

*This article originally misstated that Representative Mike Lawler supported Greene’s plan.