Judge Warns Trump May Soon Face Jail Time in Hush-Money Trial

Judge Juan Merchan ruled Tuesday that Donald Trump will face consequences for repeatedly violating the gag order in his New York hush-money trial, though it remains to be seen if the imposed fines will be enough to deter him from future violations.

Trump will have to pay $1,000 per violation, amounting to a $9,000 fine for continually violating a court-imposed partial gag order that prevents him from speaking publicly about courtroom staff, prosecutors, jurors, witnesses, or any of their family members. The $1,000 fine is the maximum allowed for gag order violations by state law, though Merchan himself acknowledged the limitations of such a fine when the “contemnor can easily afford such a fine.”

In a decision noting that the court cannot craft an “appropriate” financial penalty, Merchan wrote that, in order to “protect the dignity of the judicial system and to compel respect for its mandates,” the court “must therefore consider whether in some instances, jail may be a necessary punishment.”

Trump was found in contempt for all but one of the 10 violations alleged by the prosecutors with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office earlier this month. At the time, the office requested the judge issue Trump a $1,000 sanction for three prior posts, along with another warning to the GOP presidential nominee that future violations could lead to jail time.

But that won’t be the end of it: Trump is scheduled for another gag order hearing on Thursday, when the judge will hear arguments on another four alleged violations.

Trump has been violating the order since the very beginning of the trial. Mere hours into the first day, prosecutors with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office announced that they believed Trump had violated the gag order via a series of posts on Truth Social made earlier in the morning.

“DA notes a 9:12 am post today, potentially made inside the courthouse, also violates the order,” reported MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin.

That might refer to a post in which Trump quoted a headline from a New York Post op-ed, writing that “a serial perjurer will try to prove an old misdemeanor against Trump in an embarrassment for the New York legal system.” If so, that would mean that leveraging the words of others, even media outlets, to benefit his own beliefs would be off the table.

But the level of punishment for Trump’s disregard for his gag order could vary, according to MSNBC analyst Caroline Polisi, who noted two weeks ago it might range from a “tongue lashing” to “monetary sanctions” to actually “putting him in jail.”

“The judge is in a tough spot here,” Polisi said during live coverage of the trial. “No judge wants to be that, you know, person. That is the one to throw former President Trump in jail for criminal contempt. I personally just don’t see that happening. But, the judge’s hands may be tied here. You know, we’ve seen previous judges issue these sort of escalating, sanctions, monetary sanctions.”

Trump is on trial for allegedly using former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He faces 34 felony charges in this case and stands accused of falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

This story has been updated.

Rudy Giuliani issued some bold advice to leaders of the Republican party on Monday: pull the same stunt that Donald Trump was impeached over.

“They should bring over from Ukraine about 20 Ukrainian witnesses—I can get ’em—that are still being held there,” Giuliani said on Newsmax, addressing House Speaker Mike Johnson and Representative Jim Jordan. “Somebody should lean on Zelenskiy. You want another penny, give us your Biden file.”

But that scheme has already been tried—by Giuliani himself. Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, Giuliani took to Ukraine to connect with 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 plan blew up in his face when it resulted in Trump’s first formal impeachment by the House of Representatives, which adopted two articles of impeachment in December 2019 after they determined Trump had solicited the aid of foreign governments in the 2020 election.

But the bombshell would have lingering ramifications when Giuliani’s conspiracy was utilized as fodder for a House probe into Hunter Biden’s business dealings, with Republicans accusing Joe Biden of orchestrating a political cover-up in the Eastern European nation while serving as vice president in order to protect his son’s seat on the board of Ukrainian oil company Burisma. In February, the singular witness supporting that astounding allegation reportedly admitted that the whole narrative was actually hand-crafted by top Russian intelligence officials.

And despite it being generally bad practice to lean on foreign governments, Giuliani is, arguably, the worst political operative to take advice from when it comes to involving other countries in campaigns against domestic political opponents. None of his previous efforts have seemed to work out for him. The man once affectionately known as “America’s mayor” is currently named as one of more than a dozen co-conspirators in the Georgia election interference case, and just last week was named in an Arizona indictment charging another slew of Republican officials and Trump allies for their alleged involvement in a scheme to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results.

One of Trump’s election fraud lawyers, Kenneth Chesebro, just had his Twitter DMs and emails turned over to Michigan prosecutors as part of search warrants in their ongoing investigation into plots to overturn the 2020 presidential election in their state. And it’s not looking good for him.

According to CNN, who got ahold of some of the documents, Chesebro’s emails show that he tried to bring some far-right celebrities to Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, so they could witnessTrump winning the election thanks to Chesbro’s fake electors strategy. The MAGA stars he tried to entice with free airfare and stays at Trump’s D.C. hotel included former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke and the founder of the Gateway Pundit website, Jim Hoft. But none of them took him up on the offer.

“It would help to publicize that if [Mike Pence] claims the power to resolve disputes about the electoral votes on Jan. 6, he’d simply be doing what (Thomas) Jefferson did,” Chesebro told Hoft in a Twitter direct message on December 27, 2020.

“Excellent!! Thanks,” came the reply from the @GatewayPundit account. Chesebro told Hoft two days later that he had reserved a block of rooms at the Trump International Hotel, and that Hoft could stay there “gratis” if he wanted.

Chesebro was trying to get right-wing pundits and influencers to promote his theories on subverting the election, while advising the Trump campaign on the very same thing. He also specifically targeted people from the swing-state of Wisconsin, including James Wigderson, who ran a conservative news site in the state, and local radio host Vicki McKenna.

“You can spare me this stuff. Thanks. Trump lost,” Wigderson replied to Chesebro, later adding, “I really don’t have time for conspiracy theories. Thanks for understanding.”

It’s not the first time Chesebro has been embarrassed by his private communications. In February, he was found to have been hiding and lying about a secret Twitter account, prompting the search warrants. The release of his text messages from a legal settlement in March also yielded embarrassing evidence of Chesebro’s deep involvement in Trump’s plot to overthrow the election, which included blaming Pence for the January 6 riots.

Chesebro was indicted in the Georgia election fraud case, but made a last-minute deal to cooperate with prosecutors. These new revelations will probably not help him avoid further charges and prosecution, though, as he and other members of Trump’s team were directly involved in Michigan’s fake electors plot.

Former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr revealed that Donald Trump would often remark about executing people during his time in the White House.

“I actually don’t remember him saying ‘executing,’ but I wouldn’t dispute it, you know,” Barr told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Friday. “The president would lose his temper and say things like that. I doubt he would’ve actually carried it out.”

“He would say things similar to that on occasions to blow off steam. But I wouldn’t take them literally every time he did it,” Barr added. “At the end of the day, it wouldn’t be carried out and you could talk sense into him.”

Trump’s remarks in the White House about killing people have been corroborated by other White House staffers, including former White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin on ABC’s The View in December.

Trump hasn’t held his tongue post-presidency either. In September, Trump said in a Truth Social post that Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed for treason over two phone calls the general made to the Chinese government. In late March, Trump also posted a video of Joe Biden hog-tied in the back of a pickup truck. Meanwhile, his legal team is arguing before the Supreme Court that a president could be immune from prosecution even if he orders SEAL 6 to assassinate his rival.

Despite all of this, Barr recently endorsed Trump in the 2024 election, even after expressing numerous criticisms and misgivings about the former president’s tenure and temperament. He’s called the former president a “consummate narcissist” whose second term would be “chaos” and a “horror show.” In June, he said, “Should we be putting someone like this forward as the leader of the country, leader of the free world?”

“He will always put his own interests, and gratifying his own ego, ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest, there’s no question about it,” Barr told CBS’s Face the Nation at the time. And even after Barr’s endorsement, Trump brutally mocked his former cabinet member in a Truth Social post and blamed him for failing to overturn the 2020 election.

Fox News is facing another bombshell defamation lawsuit, this time featuring accusations from Hunter Biden.

A letter sent to the network and obtained Monday by NBC News revealed that the president’s son will be filing a lawsuit against the conservative media behemoth “imminently,” alleging “conspiracy and subsequent actions to defame Mr. Biden and paint him in a false light.” The letter was dated April 23 with a request that Fox respond by April 26, which they did not. It’s the second such attempt by Biden’s legal team to reach Fox regarding the suit.

In a statement, Biden attorney Mark Geragos claimed the network had “relentlessly attacked” his client for the last five years, and had “made him a caricature in order to boost ratings and for its financial gain.”

“The recent indictment of FBI informant [Alexander] Smirnov has exposed the conspiracy of disinformation that has been fueled by Fox, enabled by their paid agents and monetized by the Fox enterprise,” Geragos said. “We plan on holding them accountable.”

Another Biden attorney, Tina Glandian, told Axios that in addition to “routinely defaming and disparaging Mr. Biden, FOX has simultaneously sought to profit by the unlawful exploitation of Mr. Biden’s image, name, likeness for commercial purposes and reprehensible dissemination of salacious photographs depicting Mr. Biden,” referring to the network airing nude images of the president’s son.

The letter claimed Fox knew the images were “hacked, stolen, and/or manipulated digital material” but continued to publish them, “in violation of the majority of states’ laws against the nonconsensual disclosure of sexually explicit images and videos,” also known as revenge porn.

Republicans have continually published the nude images taken from Biden’s laptop in an effort to discredit his character. One of the most egregious instances was when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene waved around poster-sized printouts of the images during a House hearing and then sent those photos out in her email newsletter (potentially showing them to minors).

Fox News’s last major defamation suit was brought by Dominion Voting Systems for the network’s platforming baseless allegations brought by allies of Donald Trump, who claimed that the electronic voting machine company had partaken in a conspiracy to rig the 2020 election against Trump. Fox ended up settling the lawsuit for a historic $787.5 million settlement, and released a statement admitting that the network had aired a false story.

Fox is still working through other lawsuits related to the network’s coverage of alleged 2020 election fraud, including a $2.7 billion suit filed by another electronic voting systems company, Smartmatic, and several others brought by Fox’s shareholders, accusing the company of embracing a business strategy that placed profit over journalism and verifiable facts.

In a statement, Fox claimed that they had accurately covered relevant events pertaining to Hunter Biden, including investigations by the Department of Justice and Congress, and indictments by U.S. Attorney’s offices.

“Consistent with the First Amendment, Fox News has accurately covered these highly publicized events as well as the subsequent indictment of an FBI informant who was the source of certain claims made about Mr. Biden,” a spokesperson for the network said.

This story has been updated.

Columbia University has a message for the pro-Palestine student protesters: cut it out or get suspended.

After nearly two weeks of national attention on Columbia University’s student-led protest encampments calling on the university to divest from weapons manufacturers and other companies associated with Israel’s war on Gaza, university officials’ declared Monday they won’t won’t commit to any real policy changes.

The university told student protesters they must leave the campus by 2 p.m. Monday or else “be suspended pending further investigation” and prohibited from completing the spring semester.

That threat achieved exactly nothing.

Interestingly, Columbia’s X account also posted a summary from Columbia President Minouche Shafik’s statement, noting that after a dialogue between “academic leaders” and student organizers, the university would not commit to divesting. Instead, Shafik outlined steps to consider student proposals and allow for more transparency in the university’s investments. The university ended up deleting that post and replacing it with a much shorter summary, presumably after blowback.

Since students set up protest encampments at Columbia over the war in Gaza earlier this month they have been met with a massive police response. Similar protests quickly spread at other campuses across the country, as many politicians missed the point and urged more punitive measures. Some pundits and politicians even tried to compare the peaceful, diverse protests to the white nationalist riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

As commencement approaches, university officials are desperate to make these protests go away, and avoid a situation like that of University of Southern California, where commencement ceremonies were ultimately canceled, following keynote speakers backing out and the initial cancellation of pro-Palestinian valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s speech. But as long as the U.S. continues its support for Israel’s deadly war on Gaza, students will continue to protest against their university connections to the war. And if universities persist in ignoring protest demands, or worse, massively cracking down on protests, they will not surely ignite a firestorm. 

Disgraced former Representative George Santos is still trying to hold on to his 15 minutes of fame—even if it means blowing up his purported beliefs.

The ousted lawmaker announced Monday he was gunning for another Cameo grabbag, this time offering up $350 videos featuring his long-denied drag alter ego Kitara Ravache.

“Y’all weren’t ready for this drop?” Santos wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, alongside a Cameo booking link. “I’ve decided to bring Kitara out of the closet after 18 years!”

In a video posted on the personalized messaging platform, Santos claimed that the campaign would only last a couple of days, with 10 percent of the proceeds going to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which donates to first responders and military veterans, and another 10 percent going to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. His last run on the platform in December ushered in thousands of video requests, raking in more than six figures—a sum significantly more than his $174,000 congressional salary.

The campaign is a complete reversal of where Santos stood little more than a year ago, after news first emerged that the Queens resident had actually been a queen. At the time, Santos claimed that the anecdotes and photographs of his alternate persona were simply “​​outrageous claims” peddled by the media.

“The most recent obsession from the media claiming that I am a drag Queen or ‘performed’ as a drag Queen is categorically false,” Santos said in January 2023. “I will not be distracted nor fazed by this.”

But just a couple of days later, Santos fessed up, claiming the photographs were from a time when he was “young and [having] fun at a festival.” Still, the admission didn’t sway Santos, who is gay, from his war on the rest of theLGBTQ community, which included “full blown support” for Florida’s 2022 Don’t Say Gay law, speaking out against Drag Story Hour, and even suggesting that LGBTQ Americans were grooming children.

And with the way the rest of the year is shaping up for the known fabulist, he’ll definitely need the extra cash on hand. Last week, Santos announced that he was dropping his bid for New York’s 1st Congressional District against his apparent Long Island nemesis, Representative Nick LaLota. But he still has a huge hurdle on the horizon.

The reputed hustler—who was caught fabricating his entire résumé and lying about his relation to Holocaust survivors, his connection to the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, and the kidnapping of his niece, among many other things—is currently facing 23 counts related to illegally receiving unemployment benefits, aggravated identity theft, and credit card fraud. Santos’s next court proceeding is scheduled for August 13, with a trial expected in September.

Ron DeSantis is apparently considering helping the man who once called him “Ron DeSancitmonius,” “Meatball Ron,” and “Pudding Fingers.”

DeSantis privately met with Donald Trump in Miami Sunday morning, according to The Washington Post. Trump’s hope is that DeSantis will help him raise a lot of money for his presidential campaign, as the former president grows increasingly desperate for cash.

Trump and DeSantis clashed very early on in the 2024 presidential race, with DeSantis becoming an early favorite of Republican donors eager to shed Trump and his baggage, in spite (or possibly because) of the Florida governor’s disturbing authoritarian streak. A story that DeSantis once ate pudding with his fingers became fodder for an entire campaign ad from a Trump-aligned political action committee. Trump had quite a few nicknames for the Florida governor, calling him Meatball Ron, Rob, Ron DeSanctimonious, and Ron DeSanctus— and even went as far as to call him a “groomer.”

In the end, DeSantis failed to gain ground on Trump in the polls, quickly alienating voters with his weird people skills and mannerisms. Nikki Haley ended up overtaking him among Republican voters desperate for an alternative to Trump, and DeSantis dropped out of the race in January.

Now, DeSantis is probably looking at the future and seeing that he doesn’t have one without at least tolerance from Trump. The two reportedly haven’t spoken since the primaries, even though DeSantis endorsed Trump the day he dropped out. The fact that DeSantis scoffed at a proposal for Florida to pay Trump’s legal bills probably didn’t help, and who can blame him? The former president’s bills keep piling up, and he reportedly can’t even pay his legal counsel.

One of Congress’s most powerful Republicans apparently feels powerless in the face of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Sitting for an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell explained that he didn’t see any other option than to endorse the GOP presidential nominee—despite having made previous declarations against Trump, including blaming him for the violent events that unfolded on January 6.

“The issue is, what kind of influence, even if I had chosen to get involved in the presidential election, what kind of influence would I have had?” McConnell said after insinuating he was duty-bound as the most powerful Republican in the Senate to support the candidate that Republican delegates voted for.

“I’m the Republican leader of the Senate. What we do here is try to make law,” McConnell continued. “I like us to be in the majority. I’m spending my political time and my political capital, whatever amount I have, on trying to flip the Senate so that my successor is the majority leader and not the minority leader.”

In a heated back-and-forth with host Margaret Brennan, McConnell continued to dodge questions that poked at his purported policy agenda, skirt overtly offering advice to Trump’s campaign, and refuse to admit that he was ideologically more aligned with President Joe Biden’s idea of American leadership.

“Look, I wouldn’t have withdrawn from Afghanistan. I wouldn’t have submitted four budgets in a row for defense that don’t even keep up with inflation. I’ve got plenty of differences with the current administration,” McConnell said, referring to actions taken during Biden’s administration. “Whether I will have differences with the next administration remains to be seen. And so I’m not going to predict what might happen on this issue. I know what I think and it doesn’t make any difference what the outcome of the presidential election is. I’m going to be focusing on this remainder of my time in the Senate.”

McConnell has struggled in recent months to unify his party, even around typically popular Republican issues. He is one of a shrinking number of GOP lawmakers who support sending more military aid to Ukraine in its counteroffensive against Russia, and he was forced to watch as his party tanked a bipartisan border security bill at Trump’s behest.

The Kentucky Republican has spoken out against the right’s fight for a new brand of American isolationism—which includes Trump’s threats to withdraw from NATO and Republican infighting over aid for Ukraine, among other national security issues—but he placed the blame on former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson rather than Trump.

“He had a huge audience among rank and file Republicans. And I think it was very destructive, very impactful on regular Republican voters and created a big problem,” McConnell said about Carlson, adding that the political conspiracy peddler “certainly ended up where he should have been all along, interviewing [Russian President] Vladimir Putin.”

An Arizona state lawmaker indicted for his involvement in Donald Trump’s 2020 fake elector scheme has announced that he’s getting a promotion in the Republican Party.

State Senator Jake Hoffman was charged by Arizona on Wednesday alongside 17 other people, including Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former attorney Rudy Giuliani, for orchestrating a scheme to use fake electors to flip Arizona’s 2020 election results over to Trump. The former president is named in the documents as an unindicted co-conspirator. But on Saturday, Hoffman revealed that the conservative party had rewarded that behavior by electing him as a state delegate for the GOP.

“I’m humbled and honored to have been elected as the next RNC National Committeeman for Arizona!,” Hoffman said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“For the next 4 years I will work tirelessly to ensure that the RNC makes Arizona its #1 priority not only in 2024, but every year,” he wrote, continuing to decry Democrats as “fascists” who want to “destroy opportunity and prosperity” for Arizonans.

“Make no mistake, our Party is unified, focused, and motivated to win the White House for President @realDonaldTrump, the US Senate seat against far-Left extremist Ruben Gallego, the Legislative Majority at the State Capitol, and other offices up and down the ballot,” Hoffman said.

On a web page that lists the lawmaker as a 2021 fellow with the The Club for Growth Foundation—a fiscally conservative nonprofit funded by billionaires Richard Uihlein and Jeff Yass that donated roughly $20 million to the campaigns of 42 Republicans who worked to overturn the 2020 presidential election results—Hoffman is described as someone whose work on a digital campaign for Trump “played a key role in helping elect” the former president in 2016. The site also notes that Hoffman was invited to attend Trump’s inauguration, had visited the White House for several meetings, and was allegedly described by Trump as one of his “very good friends.”

Still, Trump didn’t seem to outwardly notice the local win for his supposed good friend, failing to acknowledge it on TruthSocial and opting instead to spend the day posting about his New York hush-money case, 2024 presidential election polls, and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

All of the indicted individuals in Arizona are facing the same slew of charges, which includes counts for conspiracy, forgery, fraudulent schemes and practices, and fraudulent schemes and artifices—the last of which holds a potential sentence of up to five years in prison.