Trump Kicks Off E. Jean Carroll Appeal by Begging for Another Lawsuit

Donald Trump is trying to appeal a multimillion-dollar judgment against him for defaming writer and author E. Jean Carroll. In a press conference Friday, though, Trump continued to attack her, accusing Carroll of lying.

“I should be suing [E Jean Carroll] for defamation,” Trump said, noting that “this is not the kind of publicity you’d like.”

“She has gone around for years saying this story, and it’s a total lie.… This whole thing started, along with just about every case I’ve been involved with, with the political campaign of Harris, who’s having a bad time,” Trump added.

Trump described Carroll as “a woman I have never met, I don’t know, I have no idea who she is,” before accusing her of making up the sexual assault to promote her book. These were the exact grounds that opened Trump up to the first defamation lawsuit in 2019.

Repeating such a lie probably isn’t the best idea, as Trump already owes Carroll $88.3 million for sexually abusing and defaming her. On Friday, oral arguments began in his appeal against a $5 million defamation judgment, which spurred his press conference rant. Carroll could easily have more legal ammunition from Trump’s press conference alone, where he even accused her of taking her accusations from a Law and Order episode.

It’s a recurring pattern for the former president and convicted felon, who can’t stop complaining about and attacking Carroll despite the legal judgments against him. During Friday’s press conference, Trump even went off on a tangent mentioning other possible sexual assault accusations against him, which probably freaked out his lawyers.

While Trump experienced some good news earlier on Friday when Judge Juan Merchan decided to delay the sentencing in his hush-money trial until after the election, his press conference Friday isn’t likely to help his appeal against Carroll. Maybe he thinks he can keep escaping the consequences of his actions, no matter what he does.

The guy who pushed the #Pizzagate conspiracy theory in 2016 and the #StoptheSteal lie in 2020 is a part of the official Republican “protect the vote” initiative—because of course he is.

According to an email shared by HuffPost politics reporter Igor Bobic, RNC’s Election Integrity Department is advertising a webinar with Jack Posobiec to teach Wisconsinites “how YOU can help protect the vote.”

The effort is part of the RNC’s “Protect the Vote” project, a battleground state initiative to recruit and train “thousands of poll watchers” for the November election. But their surrogates are just as sketchy as you might imagine.

Posobiec, whom the RNC calls a “great patriot,” is a political operative who has “collaborated with white nationalists, antigovernment extremists, members of the Proud Boys, and neo-Nazis in his capacity as an operative,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. He is probably most remembered for his role in Pizzagate, in which he spread the 2016 conspiracy theory that Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton were running a pedophilic sex dungeon below a D.C. pizza joint. His story led to a gunman opening fire inside the pizzeria.

Two months prior to the 2020 election, he tweeted “StoptheSteal 2020 is coming,” allowing lies about the election to spread before ballots were even cast. More recently, the “social media influencer” has been peddling lies about Ukraine and celebrating what he called the “end of democracy” at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year.

Clearly, this is exactly the kind of person the official Republican Party wants teaching poll watchers how to preserve election integrity.

Tenet Media is no more.

The conservative media network folded Thursday night, just one day after the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment accusing it of being funded by Russian state-controlled media, according to Tenet Media field reporter Tayler Hansen.

The indictment accused Tenet and its founders of receiving nearly $10 million from employees of Russia Today as part of “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement.

The company’s founders, Canadian Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovon, have not yet commented publicly on the scandal. The fallout from the alleged propaganda scheme lost Chen her broadcasting gig with another far-right media group, Blaze Media, which has already wiped episodes of her podcast from Spotify and deleted her contributor page from its website. Blaze Media CEO Tyler Cardon told Semafor that the conservative anchor had been “terminated.”

The Russian funds paid for videos by popular far-right personalities, including podcaster Tim Pool and Lauren Southern. Pool has since described himself as a “victim” in the Tenet scandal.

“I have been contacted by the FBI as a potential victim of a crime,” Pool posted on X on Thursday. “The FBI believes I have information relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation and have requested a voluntary interview. I will be offering my assistance in this matter.”

YouTube also wiped Tenet Media’s content from its platform “after careful review” following the indictment, telling NBC News that its decision to erase the channel and its affiliates was part of “ongoing efforts to combat coordinated influence operations.”

Tenet is just the latest flavor of Russian-backed misinformation campaign that has plagued American politics, but it is a sign of just how sizable the foreign country’s budget is in 2024 for influencing the November election.

Donald Trump on Friday inexplicably started detailing two horrific sexual assault allegations made against him, as part of a hapless attempt to discredit a completely different sexual assault allegation.

During a press conference in New York City, Trump gave rambling remarks in which he made gross references to two women who claim he sexually abused them. His comments came shortly after oral arguments concluded for the day in Trump’s appeal of the verdict in E. Jean Carroll’s sexual abuse and defamation case against him. 

Trump’s lawyers argued in court Friday that  Carroll’s 2023 rape trial was tainted by the presence of other allegations. While attempting to follow their lead to downplay Carroll’s claims against him, Trump recapped the accusations two women made against him during the trial—as if that would somehow make him seem less guilty. 

“There were two witnesses. One is a woman who followed me for years,” Trump said, talking about Jessica Leeds, who told jurors at Carroll’s civil trial that Trump had groped her when they sat next to each other on a plane to New York City in the late 1970s. 

“There was no conversation. It was like out of the blue. It was like a tussle,” Leeds claimed at the time. 

Trump’s characterization of the interaction was quite a bit different: “She said in 1979 I was in an airplane with her, commercial flight, and … we became very intimate,” said the former president.

As he told the story, Trump interrupted himself to say, “I was famous then too. I’ve been famous for a long time,” apropos of nothing. Later Trump tried to return to this point, dismissing the claims, saying, “It’s very funny, when you’re rich and famous, you get lot of people come up with a lot of stories.” Combined, Trump’s remarks sounded eerily similar to his infamous Access Hollywood tape, where he claimed that “when you’re a star they let you” grab their genitals.

Throughout his explanation of the supposedly “totally made-up story,” Trump continued to insist that he didn’t know when exactly their interaction had taken place, noting that this likely happened “a long time ago,” in 1979.

“I believe I had some pretty big success then, and I was being talked about a lot. Maybe The Art of the Deal was out, you know, sometime after that, I’m not sure. But I was well known,” Trump said. As it happens, The Art of the Deal came out almost 10 years later, in 1987. In attempting to make light of the serious allegation, Trump boasted about his popularity and seemed to reveal his own faulty memory. 

“And passengers are coming into the plane, and she said I was making out with her, and then, after 15 minutes—and then she changed her story a couple of times, maybe it was quicker—that I grabbed her at a certain part, and that was when she had enough,” Trump said. 

“So think of the impracticality of this,” Trump urged. Later, he implied that her story made no sense because “back in those days” there was an arm rest between passengers on airplanes. 

“What are the chances of that happening? What are the chances?” Trump questioned. “And, frankly, I know you’re going to think it’s a terrible thing to say, but it couldn’t have happened. It didn’t happen. And, she would not have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.”

The story was “a total lie,” according to Trump. “Now, I assume she’ll sue me now for defamation like I got sued by E. Jean Carroll.”

“No police reports, no witnesses, no corroboration of any kind. No criminal suggestions. No nothing,” Trump said, appearing to read off a card in front of him. 

Trump then moved on to the allegations made against him by journalist Natasha Stoynoff, who’d testified that while she visited Mar-a-Lago to interview Trump and Melania for an article in 2005, the former president had pushed her against a wall and forcibly kissed her, before they were discovered by Trump’s butler.

Throughout Trump’s remarks Friday, he repeatedly referred to pieces of paper he was holding, but that did not seem to help him recall key details—like, who he was actually choosing to defame in the first place. 

“Her name was … whoever. Let’s see. Her name … was who?” Trump leaned back so his lawyer, Alina Habba, could feed him the answer. 

“Swornov? Yeah. I don’t have it,” Trump said, confused. “Whatever her name was—I don’t know the lady, so. Perhaps it’s better that way, but I don’t know the lady.”

Trump claimed he couldn’t possibly have assaulted her, because she had ultimately written a “beautiful story.”

Throughout his remarks, Trump’s lawyers looked increasingly displeased with their client’s ramblings—but it seems that Trump wasn’t too happy with them, either.

“I’m disappointed in my legal talent, I’ll be honest with you,” Trump said while standing right in front of them, complaining that they had not brought up “such a famous dress” that was “Monica Lewinsky part two,” which he claimed would have exonerated him.

Donald Trump will now be sentenced for his hush-money case on November 26, more than three weeks after the presidential election. This is a massive victory for the convicted felon.

Judge Juan Merchan in a four-page decision ruled that the delay should help relieve any concerns that sentencing would influence the November election.

“Unfortunately, we are now at a place in time that is fraught with complexities rendering the requirements of a sentencing hearing, should one be necessary, difficult to execute,” Merchan said in his ruling.

“This is not a decision this Court makes lightly but is the decision which in this Court’s view best advances the interests of justice,” Merchan added.

The case’s sentencing ran into some procedural issues after the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity in July. New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan ominously warned just after the ruling that a sentence may never come, initially delaying the sentencing hearing until September 18.

In a court filing last month, Trump’s defense team asked Merchan to delay sentencing until after the November elections, claiming that Merchan had “appearances of impropriety” due to his daughter’s work for Democratic political candidates. Trump unsuccessfully pushed for Merchan’s recusal three times, only to be rebuffed.

Trump ally Andrew Bailey, the Missouri attorney general, sued the state of New York on his behalf, appealing to the Supreme Court following its immunity ruling to delay the former president’s sentencing. The long-shot effort failed, as the high court declined to postpone the hearing.

Bailey was also seeking to have Trump’s gag order in the case fully lifted, but the court similarly denied that request. The order had been partially lifted in June, allowing Trump to talk about the witnesses and jurors in the case, but he’s still barred from talking about court staff, prosecutors, Merchan and his family, and others connected to the case.

Trump still has attempted to skirt the gag order, which could worsen his sentence. He had his political allies act as surrogates to criticize the people he couldn’t, even editing their words at times. Some politicians, such as Representatives Bob Good and Lauren Boebert, admitted that they traveled to Trump’s Manhattan trial for this reason. Trump also criticized one of the prosecutors in the case without mentioning his name. And there are the 10 documented violations of the gag order, which Merchan has already punished Trump for to the tune of $10,000 in fines.

Trump was found guilty in May on 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime in the first degree. The Republican presidential nominee covered up his affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election with help from his fixer at the time, Michael Cohen. Merchan’s decision means that Trump will not face consequences at least until the end of November, if at all.

This story has been updated.