“Melania Trump’s much-discussed online auction, featuring a hat she wore at the White House during a 2018 visit by President Emmanuel Macron of France, is turning into a potential victim of the crash in the cryptocurrency market,” the New York Times reports.
“Only a few bids appeared to have been made on Mrs. Trump’s items as of early Tuesday evening, and the value in dollars of the highest bid was around $170,000, with the exact dollar value fluctuating along with the volatile crypto market.”
David French: “When you walk through the evidence of Trump’s brazen effort to bully, threaten, and command subordinates and state officials to steal an election, his actions quite obviously demand a close criminal inquiry.”
“For a sitting American president to seek to engineer a coup is unprecedented, but our law contains ample precedents that punish other citizens for similar misconduct. The law is not just for the little people. Trump is not a king. He does not enjoy sovereign immunity. He is presently nothing more than a private citizen, and if President Trump broke the law, then Citizen Trump should face the consequences.”
Roger Stone lashed out against former Trump spokesman Jason Miller calling him a liar and a “despicable piece of shit,” Insider reports.
Stone also accused Miller of perjuring himself during the 2016 Mueller Investigation.
Former President Donald Trump’s team has been involved in discussions about a legal defense fund created to support aides targeted by the House panel investigating January 6, CNN reports.
Former President Donald Trump slammed the Jan. 6 committee investigating the Capitol insurrection after it asking his daughter Ivanka Trump to sit for an interview, The Hill reports.
Said Trump: “It’s a very unfair situation for my children. Very, very unfair.”
He added: “It’s a disgrace, what’s going on. They’re using these things to try and get people’s minds off how incompetently our country is being run. And they don’t care. They’ll go after children.”
“The retired federal judge assigned to review the contents of 18 electronic devices seized from Rudy Giuliani’s home and offices in Manhattan last spring has withheld about half of what former president Donald Trump’s personal lawyer argued should be kept out of the hands of investigators because it was privileged,” the Washington Post reports.
“More than 3,000 communications were released to prosecutors.”
Politico has obtained Donald Trump’s never-issued draft executive order that would have seized voting machines.
Washington Post: “Donald Trump’s rationale for seizing voting machines was worse than you might have assumed.”
Aaron Blake: “Among the many things Donald Trump is prone to hyping and often vastly overselling, his endorsement record is near the top of the list.”
“The events of the next several months will severely test his ability to sell that record, as his 2022 endorsements are in many cases struggling to deliver an early return on his investment — and at a crucial time when it comes to Trump’s campaign to retain his hold on the GOP.”
Former President Donald Trump was interviewed by Sean Hannity on Fox News:
HANNITY: There’s no course correction (with Biden). He seems locked into every one of these failed policies. So, you know, you know, you keep banging your head against the wall. Why would you expect a different result?
TRUMP: So, we would have the wall completed in 3 weeks. It was largely completed. We did almost 500 miles of wall.
New York Times: “The Fox News host Sean Hannity had some blunt advice for President Donald J. Trump on Jan. 7, 2021: ‘No more stolen election talk.'”
“His guidance did not take. But documents disclosed on Thursday showed in vivid detail just how closely Mr. Hannity had worked with White House aides in a fervent, if brief, effort to persuade Mr. Trump to abandon his false claims about voter fraud after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.”
“A flurry of decisions by the Supreme Court and federal and state investigators have forced Donald Trump and his adult children to defend their conduct on multiple fronts, potentially jeopardizing their futures — or perhaps yet again allowing the former president to escape unscathed,” the Washington Post reports.
Daily Beast: “Ivanka Trump has largely avoided the national spotlight for the last year. Now, investigators in two separate probes think she could be key to her father’s undoing.”
Donald Trump insisted to the New York Post has a “very good relationship” with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).
He added: “You know, when he wanted to run, he asked for my support and I supported him and he went, you know, up immediately very, very high.”
Playbook: “Donald Trump has floated the idea of doling out dual endorsements in some of the key midterm races as he becomes increasingly suspicious of his advisers who are pushing competing candidates.”
“The GOP kingmaker-in-chief has grown so distrustful of all the advice he’s getting from various aides — and so wary of being lured into picking the wrong horse — that he’s floated an idea that would essentially dilute his endorsement.”
“Another source of Trump’s endorsement apprehension: He isn’t clear about which advisers have significant personal or financial ties to the candidates they’re bending his ear about.”
Close associates and advisers to Donald Trump told Axios they’re concerned “by his decision to use a relatively inexperienced New Jersey attorney, Alina Habba, in his high-stakes legal fight against New York Attorney General Letitia James.”
“A former president typically has access to the country’s most prestigious experts, including lawyers. Trump has turned to the former general counsel for a parking garage company, who works from a small law office near his Bedminster, N.J., country club.”
The five-year deadline is closing in to charge Donald Trump with the obstruction of justice crimes detailed by special counsel Robert Mueller, Insider reports.
“In his more than 400-page final report, Mueller’s special counsel team documented 10 episodes of possible obstruction of justice by Trump. Among them were Trump’s efforts in early 2017 to pressure then-FBI Director James Comey to close an investigation into Michael Flynn, who at the time was national security advisor. Trump later fired Comey, setting in motion the events that led to Mueller’s appointment as the special counsel in charge of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.”
Amanda Carpenter: “Donald Trump’s actions to overturn the 2020 election were dedicated, intentional, and sustained over time. The insistent notion that Trump and his allies are ‘too stupid to coup’ should not be reassuring. Like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, shake enough door handles, and eventually one opens. By the end of the 2020 story, Trump had learned just how loose are the dusty old frameworks like the Electoral Count Act.”
Buried in a New York Times story: “Ms. James already questioned another of Mr. Trump’s sons, Eric Trump, in October 2020. He invoked his Fifth Amendment right against incriminating himself in response to more than 500 questions, the new court filing said.”
“Steve Bannon declared war on Fox News this week over the conservative cable behemoth’s lack of live coverage of Donald Trump’s unhinged Saturday evening rally in Arizona,” the Daily Beast reports.
Said Bannon: “You’re not a news organization. What the Murdochs want is the—they want a Glenn Youngkin, or they want some nice guy who will sit there and give them tax cuts and deregulation.”
He later wrote on Gettr: “Fox News, which did not give one second of coverage to Donald J. Trump’s massive rally, showed no respect to anyone in the MAGA movement.”
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Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.