Why MAGA Is Furious About Hush-Money Jury Instructions

Donald Trump and his supporters are upset over the instructions given to the jury in his hush-money trial.

Judge Juan Merchan issued instructions to the 12-person jury that they had to reach a unanimous verdict on each of the 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Overall, they must agree that Trump used some unlawful means to interfere in the 2020 election, according to Merchan, but they don’t need to agree on which means it was.

“Although you must conclude unanimously that the defendant conspired to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means, you need not be unanimous as to what those unlawful means were,” Merchan instructed.

This was either misunderstood, or too much to handle for Trump and his supporters.

In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump complained, “IT IS RIDICULOUS, UNCONSTITUTIONAL, AND UNAMERICAN that the highly Conflicted, Radical Left Judge is not requiring a unanimous decision on the fake charges against me brought by Soros backed D.A. Alvin Bragg. A THIRD WORLD ELECTION INTERFERENCE HOAX!”

Trump’s political allies also echoed his sentiments.

Trump is on trial for allegedly paying off Daniels to cover up their affair before the 2016 election, and is awaiting a verdict from the jury after closing arguments concluded Wednesday.

Having some of the nation’s strictest abortion laws isn’t enough for the Texas GOP. Instead, Republicans in the Lone Star State are actually considering the death penalty as punishment for people who undergo the medical procedure.

A new platform proposed at the state’s GOP convention on Saturday included calls for legislation that would transform the fetal personhood ideology into law, which would effectively categorize any person receiving an abortion at any stage as a murderer.

The 50-page document claims that “abortion is not healthcare, it is homicide” and calls for lawmakers to extend “equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization.”

Not everyone in attendance was in support of the endeavor, however. Harris County Precinct 178 Chair Gilda Bayegan volunteered to speak at the event, calling on her party to drop its anti-abortion platforms on the basis that the state’s draconian restrictions to the medical procedure were alienating its base.

“I’m up here begging you not to make it one of our priorities,” Bayegan said.

Her party clearly did not listen. The GOP wish list is a revealing glimpse into which direction they are headed, but it wasn’t the first clue. In January, Hood County Republican Party officials were spotted attending an Abolish Abortion Texas function in which the death penalty was discussed as a possible repercussion for women and minors who seek out not just abortion but also in vitro fertilization treatments.

“There’s no difference in the value of born people and preborn people,” Paul Brown, the group’s director, said in leaked video footage, revealing the philosophy behind the extreme measures. “In short, abortion is murder. And that’s starting at the moment of fertilization even prior to implantation. So that Plan B pill, or what’s known as the morning-after pill, which is used to terminate or kill a baby prior to implantation, that is an abortion.”

(Plan B does not “kill” an embryo, as Brown claims. Instead, it prevents fertilization from occurring in the first place.)

Texas isn’t the only state to consider classifying the lifesaving medical procedure as homicide or even sentencing people to death for seeking the treatment. Republican lawmakers in Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina introduced similar legislation last year. All of those bills were defeated, with even some state Republicans deeming them too extreme.

As if any more proof was needed, a former producer for The Apprentice just revealed the depths of Donald Trump’s racism.

Recently freed from a 20-year nondisclosure agreement, Bill Pruitt, who worked on the television show that christened Trump as America’s Boss and arguably shaped the savvy businessman persona that he rode to the presidency in 2016, told the story of The Apprentice’s early days for the first time for Slate. Most notably, he recounted a 2004 incident in which Trump refused to hire Kwame Jackson, the Black finalist on the series’s first season. His reason, according to Pruitt?

“I mean, would America buy a n— winning?” Trump reportedly told the show’s producers.

The comment was reportedly caught on tape, though Pruitt said he’s sure the evidence will never be found.

It’s the most incendiary, if not exactly surprising, moment in a story full of characteristic details of the former president’s deceptive and crooked behavior: requiring NBC to rent out Trump Tower space for the set at a premium because his actual office was “cramped” and with “chipped or peeling” wood furniture; stiffing the architect of Trump National Golf Club, who realized legal fees to sue Trump would exceed the financial reward; and rambling incoherence retouched into slick boardroom operating in NBC’s editing room.

It also comes in the wake of Trump’s rally in the South Bronx last week, held in an effort to “woo” Black and Latino voters.

That Trump is an anti-Black racist is hardly revelatory: a lifetime of discriminatory housing practices, advocacy for the execution of the exonerated Central Park Five, attacks on kneeling NFL players, and many refusals to condemn white supremacists indicate as much.

Still, the remark, stripped of the gloss of plausible deniability his public dog whistles often possess, is alarming.

As his hush-money trial wraps up, Donald Trump thinks key witnesses were not called in his defense.

“A lot of key witnesses were not called. Look at your list. Look at the players, and you know who I’m talking about. You can take five or six of them. Why didn’t they call those witnesses? They didn’t call them because they would have been on our side, and it’s a shame,” Trump told reporters outside of court after the trial wrapped up for the day Wednesday.

“And in particular, one witness, who’s now suffering greatly because of what’s happened, because of the viciousness of these thugs. They’re vicious people, what they’ve done to that person, and you know who I’m talking about,” Trump added.

Who Trump is talking about is unknown. If it’s Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, he’s serving a prison sentence for lying under oath during Trump’s fraud trial, and thus wouldn’t be a credible witness for either side.

What is known is that Trump’s defense team had every opportunity to call any of their own witnesses in his hush-money trial, and they only called two: a paralegal who entered phone records into evidence, and Robert Costello, an attorney who spoke to Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen in 2018 after the FBI raided his home and office. Trump can hardly expect the prosecution to call witnesses to aid in his defense, unless he has a profound misunderstanding about how a trial proceeding works. If the Republican presidential nominee has complaints, he should be making them to his own lawyers. (Or maybe he could have testified himself.)

Trump is on trial for allegedly paying off adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up their affair before the 2016 election with Cohen’s help, and is awaiting a verdict from the jury after closing arguments concluded Wednesday. He faces 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime.

A bankrupt Rudy Giuliani is so deep in the red that his creditors have described his lavish lifestyle as “gross mismanagement.”

Court documents filed Tuesday by unsecured creditors for the disbarred attorney indicate that Giuliani was blowing off other financial responsibilities—such as paying back his lawyers, accountants, or ex-wife—while racking up more debt, even after filing for bankruptcy last year.

“More than five months ago, the Debtor commenced his bankruptcy case,” reads the legal notice. “One might ask what he has accomplished during that time. An objective review leads to one conclusion: he has accomplished almost nothing.”

According to the notice, Giuliani has continued his “exorbitant spending” to fuel his “extravagant lifestyle.” That included dishing out more than $26,000 for “60 Amazon transactions,” as well as“charges for entertainment such as Netflix, Prime Video, Kindle, Audible, Paramount+ and Apple services and products and numerous Uber rides.”

The creditors slammed Giuliani’s “egregious spending habits,” noting that while making practically zero progress in the debt-induced legal process, he has repeatedly filed inaccurate financial disclosures, even after being told to correct the wrong information, and has delayed the sale of his multimillion-dollar properties around the country.

After “months of empty promises,” Giuliani filed an application to retain a broker on his New York City apartment, for which he paid $21,000 in fees during April alone. Still, he has made no movement on listing his Palm Beach condominium, “despite such property not being an exempt asset,” the notice reads.

“That is how the Debtor spent the last five months in his bankruptcy case: filing false and misleading financial reports, delaying the inevitable monetization of his assets, ignoring this Court’s orders, trying to retain professionals and attempting to relitigate the Freeman Judgment,” the notice continued, referring to the $148 million that Giuliani was ordered to cough up for defaming a pair of Georgia election workers during the “Stop the Steal” initiative.

The telling filing is just the latest in a long series of legal woes Giuliani has suffered since he risked it all to allegedly help Trump steal the 2020 presidential election. In September, Giuliani faced a suit from his former legal representation, who accused him of failing to pay his bill and allegedly only dishing out $214,000 of nearly $1.6 million in legal expenses—after Giuliani claimed he himself was stiffed by his favorite client, Trump, to the tune of millions of dollars.

That resulted in an embarrassing show in which Giuliani had no other option than to beg Trump for help settling his seven-figure legal fees, to which the stingy developer refused but offered to throw a couple of fundraisers for him instead.

Giuliani is also one of 19 co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case and was named in April 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.

The jury is still out, but Donald Trump’s campaign has already suggested that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee will seek revenge against whoever was involved in his myriad legal trials.

Speaking to Fox News’s Jesse Watters, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt warned that people need to be “held accountable” for their “crimes” committed against Trump—that is, all the people who have attempted to prosecute Trump and give the former president the same legal treatment as they would any other private citizen.

“Let’s say he does win reelection this November, will there be any revenge directed at the people that put this hoax case together?” asked Watters.

“Well, certainly people need to be held accountable for the crimes that have been committed over the last several years. We’ve seen them lie, we’ve seen them abuse our justice system, we’ve seen Joe Biden target innocent Americans across this country such as the protesters on January 6, who they’ve thrown in the gulag in Washington, D.C.,” Leavitt said, referring to the Soviet Union–era work camps for criminals and political prisoners.

“President Trump said he will pardon those protesters on day one of his presidency. Yes, justice needs to be served for the good-hearted Americans across this country who want to see an equal application of the law,” Leavitt said, seemingly insinuating that Trump’s followers do not expect to be held to the law if they commit a crime.  “And this trial proves we don’t have that in America right now.”

Donald Trump is praising Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s “courage” for refusing to recuse himself from 2020 election-related cases, as he blames the upside-down flag outside his home on his wife devolving into a fascist mega-Karen in a fight with the neighbors.

Posting to his social media site, Trump showered adulation on Alito:  “Congratulations to United States Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for showing the INTELLIGENCE, COURAGE, and ‘GUTS’ to refuse stepping aside from making a decision on anything January 6th related,” Trump wrote on Truth Social with inexplicable punctuation choices. “All U.S. Judges, Justices, and Leaders should have such GRIT—Our Country would be far more advanced than its current status as A BADLY FAILING NATION, headed by the Worst President in American History, Crooked Joe Biden!”

Alito’s “GUTS” were well obscured in the letter he sent to Senators Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse on Wednesday, where he argued he was faultless because he’s powerless to stop his wife from engaging in conspiracy-addled nonsense.

“As soon as I saw it, I asked my wife to take it down. But for several days, she refused,” wrote the yellow-bellied judge. Alito further strained the definition of courage by explaining that the appearance of flags associated with anti-government extremists is simply because “my wife is fond of flying flags.”

Alito positioned the extremist flag and inverted U.S. flag—both incredibly niche for the average flag lover but intensely prominent among the far right—as part of a rotating selection of flags his wife loves, including “college flags, flags supporting sports teams, state and local flags, flags of nations from which the ancestors of family members came, flags of places we have visited, seasonal flags, and religious flags.”

“I was not familiar with the ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flag when my wife flew it,” Alito claimed, saying his wife “may have mentioned that it dates back to the American Revolution, and I assumed she was flying it to express a religious and patriotic message.” This coming from a man who is evidently neither capable of reeling in his untethered wife nor doing a basic Google search, while still being allowed to make monumental decisions about our civil rights.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be openly bullying President Joe Biden after the latter rejected a Republican effort to sanction the International Criminal Court.

Netanyahu told the Sirius XM radio program The Morgan Ortagus Show in an interview set to air Sunday that he was “surprised and disappointed” that Biden would not be supporting sanctions against the ICC, according to Politico. The publication obtained a clip of the interview, which took place on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the White House said it would reject the GOP-led effort in Congress to reprimand the ICC after its chief prosecutor filed warrants for Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and top Hamas leaders—a startling reversal of previous statements from Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

“The United States said that they would, in fact, back the sanctions bill,” Netanyahu said. “I thought that was still the American position because there was bipartisan consensus just a few days ago.”

“Now you say there’s a question mark, and frankly I’m surprised and disappointed,” Netanyahu told host Morgan Ortagus, a former State Department spokesperson under Donald Trump.

While Biden previously called the ICC’s move “outrageous,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday that “sanctions on the ICC are not an effective or appropriate tool to address U.S. concerns.”

Netanyahu and the rest of Israel’s leadership have little to gripe about, as the country has enjoyed nearly unceasing diplomatic and military support from the Biden administration since its brutal assault on Gaza began in October, after a Hamas invasion of southern Israel. Israel’s latest assault on displaced Palestinians in Rafah hasn’t resulted in any policy changes, despite gruesome images of charred and burned civilians—and a new report that the bombs used were made in the United States.

While shocking, Israel’s new offensive is a continuation of what experts have described as war crimes from Netanyahu and the rest of Israel’s leaders, who recently said that their war could last another seven months. If Netanyahu and co. aren’t getting the message from the ICC or international protests to stop adding to the conservative estimate of more than 36,000 Palestinians killed, perhaps Biden needs to stand up to Netanyahu’s humiliation and take a more concrete step: ending weapons shipments to Israel.

Barbara “Barby” Balmaseda’s career as a Republican operative finally hit a new despicable milestone: The former intern for Marco Rubio, volunteer for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign, and ex-director of the Miami Young Republicans was indicted by a grand jury last week for participating in the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, according to newly available court documents.

A D.C. grand jury convened earlier this month indicted Balmaseda on all five charges presented to them, which include felony and misdemeanor charges of obstruction of an official proceeding (the certification of the 2020 election) and entering restricted grounds.

“We look forward to presenting a vigorous defense on her behalf as we have entered a plea of not guilty,” said Balmaseda’s attorney, Nayib Hassan, in a statement to the Miami New Times. Hassan also represented Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, who was sentenced to a whopping 22 years in federal prison—the longest sentence related to the Capitol riot to date.

Balmaseda was arrested in December, days after an FBI warrant was requested for her arrest—which came nearly two years after internet sleuths identified her inside the Capitol on January 6 alongside Proud Boys—and after a Vice City Proud Boy who attended the Capitol riot confirmed anonymously to the Miami New Times that “Barby was there.”

The subsequent FBI investigation into Proud Boys who attended the Capitol turned up texts from Balmaseda on the phone of convicted Proud Boy and Miami-Dade GOP committee member Gabriel Garcia, including a text sent two days after the Capitol riot where Balmaseda allegedly texted Garcia, “Hey! Good morning! You left a hat and a gas mask in Adolfo’s car, I also have your sunglasses in my purse and you have my taser.”

Three years after the January 6 Capitol riot, more than 1,230 people have been charged with federal crimes, according to AP, as sleuths and the federal government continue to identify participants. Balmaseda’s long-awaited indictment is a reminder that the wheels of justice turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine.

Donald Trump’s representatives are not happy about a new report from The Daily Beast of Trump allegedly bragging about sleeping with adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

On Tuesday, an unnamed celebrity athlete told the publication that Trump was boasting about his affair with Daniels during the 2006 celebrity golf tournament in which Daniels and Trump met.

The athlete said that those who heard Trump’s boasts could hear him saying he had slept with Daniels, according to the article.

“It was clear to me and everyone who heard him that he was talking about Stormy,” the athlete said, and added that Trump encouraged other celebs to try to have sex with Daniels, which the athlete described as “crass,” “gross,” and “stupid.”

Perhaps even more damning, the anonymous athlete also said he received phone calls from strangers asking him about the tournament shortly before the 2016 elections—around the time that Daniels’s hush-money payment was being determined.

The Daily Beast reached out to the Trump campaign for comment, who blamed President Biden.

“The Biden campaign is in freakout mode and will try anything to cling to power,” said Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung. “Crooked Joe Biden is a failed president trying to distract from his disastrous tenure. Publishing lies, rumors and innuendos are the hallmarks of losing campaigns and desperate failing media outlets trying to stay afloat. It’s time to Make America Great Again and re-elect President Trump.”

Every political campaign will say that it’s important to stay on message, but blaming the Biden campaign for this type of bad news doesn’t refute the allegations at all. Trump has denied ever having sex with Daniels and didn’t testify himself, possibly because he couldn’t refute any of the accounts from the defense’s witnesses while under oath, making the campaign’s statement seem even more hollow. Besides bragging about sex with Daniels, Trump was also cheating while playing golf, according to the anonymous athlete—a claim that surely irked Trump just as much.

Trump is on trial for allegedly paying off Daniels to cover up their affair before the 2016 election, and is awaiting a verdict from the jury after closing arguments concluded Wednesday. He faces 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime.