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Appeal court upholds Steve Bannon contempt conviction
A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has reportedly upheld Steve Bannon’s conviction on contempt charges for defying a congressional subpoena issued by the United States House select committee on the January 6 capitol attack.
BREAKING: Steve BANNON's conviction for defying the Jan. 6 committee has been upheld by a unanimous three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
His four-month jail sentence has been on hold pending this ruling.
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Paul Manafort returned to international consulting after Donald Trump pardoned him in 2020, The Washington Post reports.
Manafort, in the years since obtaining clemency, worked on a Chinese streaming media venture. Now, the Post reports, Manafort is poised to join Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Manafort denied that his work on the Chinese media project would form a conflict of interest in the U.S.-China relationship.
Before chairing Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Manafort’s former firm, called Black, Manafort, and Stone notoriously lobbied U.S. congress on behalf of foreign governments – including on behalf of human rights-abusing dictatorships, among them the regime of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.
Former president Donald Trump has adopted the legal strategy of stalling and stalling to ensure his most sensitive trials will take place after the election. That strategy is working, reports Sam Levine:
As had been expected for months, Judge Aileen Cannon on Tuesday scrapped a 20 May trial date that had been set in south Florida over the former president’s handling of classified documents. The delay was almost entirely the doing of Cannon, a Trump appointee, who allowed far-fetched legal arguments into the case and let preliminary legal matters pile up on her docket to the point where a May trial was not a possibility.
On Thursday, the Georgia court of appeals announced it would hear a request from Trump to consider whether Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, should be removed from the election interference case against him because of a relationship with another prosecutor. The decision means both that Trump will continue to undermine Willis’s credibility and draw out the case. “There will be no trial until 2025,” tweeted Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University who has been closely following the case.
The third pending case against Trump, a federal election interference case in Washington, also appears unlikely to go to trial before the election. The US supreme court heard oral arguments on whether Trump has immunity from prosecution last month and seemed unlikely to resolve it quickly enough to allow the case to move forward ahead of the election.
Swing state GOP officials say they have not received key campaign resources ahead of the 2024 general presidential election, The Washington Post reports. This comes amid a funding crunch for Donald Trump’s campaign, which is looking lean as the former president faces mounting legal costs.
Top campaign officials rejected the idea that their operation was suffering.
But Republican Party officials in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan said they worried that their funding and operations would be insufficient – and that the campaign had not built out enough of an infrastructure in those key states.
“There is no sign of life,” Kim Owens, an Arizona Republican Party operative, told the Post.
Attendees recite the Pledge of Allegiance at a campaign event with former US President Donald Trump in Wisconsin 1 May. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
Mike Johnson touts bipartisanship after failed bid to oust him
Good morning! After easily surviving an attempt to oust him by the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, House speaker Mike Johnson appears to be basking in it. In an interview with Politico, Johnson – the conservative Republican who developed his career in the legal world of the Christian right and joined his colleagues in contesting the results of the 2020 election – waxed poetic about bipartisanship and consensus.
He had high praise for House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, and proclaimed – of bipartisanship – that the American political system “doesn’t work unless you understand the principles that undergird it.”
His praise came after the House easily quashed far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resolution to oust Johnson on Wednesday, as members of both parties came together in a rare moment of bipartisanship to keep the chamber open for business.
The vote on the motion to table Greene’s resolution was 359 to 43, as 196 Republicans and 163 Democrats supported killing the proposal.
Having said this, Johnson was just as quick to defend his role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Johnson, who led the effort to garner congressional Republican support for a Texas lawsuit attempting to overturn the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, said he had no regrets over the legal maneuver.
Here’s what’s going on today:
Amid the former president’s mounting legal costs, Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign is taking a “lean” approach, Washington Post reports.
Trump returns to court today, rounding out a week marked by detailed testimony from adult film star Stormy Daniels about her alleged affair with Trump.
Joe Biden will participate in campaign events on the west coast this afternoon.
