Georgia Appeals Court Hands Trump Massive Win With Fani Willis Ruling

Donald Trump just got some good news on another legal front.

A Georgia appeals court has agreed to review the decision to keep Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on the RICO prosecution against Trump in his Georgia election interference case. That criminal trial charges Trump and more than a dozen of his associates with trying to steal Georgia’s 2020 election from the candidate that actually won the majority of votes, Joe Biden. Now, with Tuesday’s decision from the appeals court, it’s not clear when the case will actually go to trial.

This is a huge win for Trump, who had appealed a lower court ruling to allow Willis to continue overseeing the case. The appeal court’s order says Trump can file a notice of appeal within the next 10 days.

Willis was allowed to remain on the Georgia RICO case after she was accused of hiring special prosecutor Nathan Wade—a man she had a relationship with and who billed her office (and taxpayers) more than $728,000 in legal fees—for personal financial gain. The couple was also accused of taking several international vacations together that were allegedly partially bankrolled by public funds. However, after weeks of intense questioning, a Georgia judge ruled in March that Willis would be allowed to continue prosecuting Trump so long as Wade took the fall.

In a letter submitted to the District Attorney’s Office filing, Wade wrote that his leave, effective immediately, was in the “interest of democracy” and to move the case forward “as quickly as possible.”

That expediency may have been for naught, however. Deliberating Trump’s appeal is expected to push back the election interference trial significantly, with some attorneys predicting it could easily push past November.

“Trump & his allies will always find something, anything to delay their day in Court,” wrote former Justice Department official Anthony Coley. “Bottom line: This November, the people will decide if Trump will ever face accountability for trying to overturn the will of voters.”

As if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. couldn’t get any weirder, the presidential candidate has admitted that a doctor once suspected a worm ate part of his brain and then died inside his head.

The New York Times reports that in 2010, Kennedy was experiencing severe mental fog and memory loss, so he went to see specialist doctors, including some of the same neurologists who had treated his uncle Senator Ted Kennedy’s brain cancer. After brain scans, doctors thought that he had a tumor and quickly scheduled a surgery to have it removed.

But, while he was preparing, another doctor called him with a different opinion: Kennedy had a dead parasite in his head, “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Kennedy said in a 2012 deposition from his divorce proceedings reviewed by the Times.

In the deposition, Kennedy said, “I have cognitive problems, clearly. I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.”

The 70-year-old independent presidential candidate claims to be in better shape, mentally and physically, than his opponents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who are 81 and 77, respectively. He’s posted videos skiing and lifting weights shirtless at an outdoor gym in Venice Beach, California. In an interview with The New York Times, Kennedy said he had recovered from symptoms including memory loss and fogginess.

But he’s also had his own health issues over the years, such as atrial fibrillation, a heart issue linked to an increased risk of stroke or heart failure; mercury poisoning, which can cause neurological issues; and spasmodic dysphonia, which results in a shaky, tight or strained-sounding voice.

Kennedy’s campaign has had mixed news as of late, gaining ballot access in California and Delaware and worrying the Trump campaign. But he’s also faced calls to drop out from his allies in the environmental movement, and one of his campaign consultants was arrested for allegedly choking and punching a woman.

Nikki Haley is still haunting Donald Trump’s bid for the White House.

Three months after abandoning her long-shot campaign, Haley still managed to nab 128,000 votes in Indiana’s GOP presidential primary on Tuesday, according to polling results compiled by Decision Desk HQ. That constituted 21 percent of the Republican vote in the Hoosier State, meaning one in five registered conservatives still preferred Haley over their party’s presumptive nominee.

It’s the continuation of an anti-Trump GOP movement that has persisted even as Trump mows down an empty political field. Last month, Haley also managed to pull a significant portion of votes in Pennsylvania’s GOP primary—more than 158,000 votes, or 16.6 percent.

On her exit from the race, Haley skirted actually endorsing Trump as Trump’s other GOP contenders did. Instead, the ambassador suggested it would be up to the former president to “earn” the vote of all Republican and independent voters.

“It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him, and I hope he does that,” Haley said during a speech suspending her campaign in March. “At its best, politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away. And our conservative cause badly needs more people. This is now his time for choosing.“

Haley’s ability to offer an intraparty alternative to Trump’s politics proved an incredible boon to her campaign. In January CBS News/YouGov matchups between the top Republican contenders and President Joe Biden, Haley came out head and shoulders above her competition, leading with 54 percent of the vote against Biden’s 45 percent thanks to support from moderates, independents, and voters with college degrees. That was a much wider margin than Trump, who was predicted at the time to win against Biden by just two percentage points with 50 percent of the vote.

A Biden administration report that could cut off military aid to Israel has been indefinitely delayed.

The State Department was anticipated to issue the report Wednesday, but that’s no longer the case, reported Politico. The report would have defined whether Israel violated humanitarian law since its conflict with Gaza broke out on October 7. If the State Department determined Israel had broken humanitarian law, then it would have been even harder to justify continued U.S. military assistance to Israel.

In an email shared by three Senate aides and one House aide with Politico, the Biden administration notified Congress that the report would be “briefly delayed,” without any further clarification or issue of a new deadline.

But comments from the State Department itself weren’t so assuring.

“We are trying very hard to meet that deadline,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters Tuesday, who outright admitted that the report wasn’t finished. “It’s possible it slips just a little bit, but we are trying to get it done by tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, Israel blatantly rejected a cease-fire opportunity, launching more airstrikes onto Rafah and capturing the Palestinian side of the Rafah Crossing in the hours after Hamas agreed to a cease-fire proposal organized by Egypt, Qatar, and the United States.

“The last couple of days have proved that Israel was not really negotiating in good faith,” Omar Rahman, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the Middle East Council for Global Affairs, told Al Jazeera. “The moment that Hamas agreed to a deal, Israel was willing to blow that up by commencing their assault on Rafah.”

“The goal is to destroy Gaza in its totality,” Rahman said.

The international criminal court at The Hague is weighing whether to charge Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with war crimes as the country’s war on Gaza claims so many lives that local authorities say they can no longer keep count. More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, and more than 77,000 Palestinians have been injured in the conflict, according to data from the Gaza Health Ministry. Most of the victims have been women and children.

Israel has advanced its attacks on the beleaguered nation by blocking humanitarian aid from reaching those who need it. Israel has also utilized mass starvation, as well as blocked or destroyed access to critical resources such as water, food, fuel, electricity, and medical aid.

Judge Aileen Cannon, who coincidentally was appointed by Donald Trump, announced Tuesday afternoon that she is indefinitely postponing his classified documents case in Florida.

The case was originally scheduled to begin on May 20. Tuesday’s written decision says that that start date is being vacated due to concerns about classified evidence, but Cannon makes no indication of when the trial will be placed back on the calendar.

“The Court also determines that finalization of a trial date at this juncture—before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and [Classified Information Procedures Act] issues remaining and forthcoming—would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions before the Court, critical CIPA issues, and additional pretrial and trial preparations necessary to present this case to a jury,” Cannon’s decision reads.

In other words, Cannon says the case must be delayed because of the number of pretrial motions that remain unresolved. There’s just one problem with that justification: The motions remain unresolved because she has failed to resolve them. Cannon has dragged her feet and given concessions to Trump’s legal team at seemingly every opportunity thus far.

The latest decision means that Trump is all but certain to avoid trial in the classified documents case until after the November election. If he wins, he could instruct the Department of Justice to drop the case altogether or even try to preemptively pardon himself. Cannon has set two hearings for May 22 on Trump’s motions to dismiss the trial entirely.

In court Tuesday during Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, some new and unusual nicknames were entered into the legal record during adult film actress Stormy Daniels’s testimony.

Trump attorney Susan Necheles displayed a tweet from Daniels dated November 9, 2022, where Daniels states, “I don’t owe him shit and I’ll never give that orange turd a dime.”

Now, “orange turd” is officially part of New York case law.

In another instance, a Truth Social post containing Trump’s insults toward Daniels were entered into the public record by prosecutor Susan Hoffinger, specifically the words “Horseface” and “SleazeBag.” Daniels said that the terms referred to her.

Early on in Daniels’s testimony, she noted that the former president always called her “honeybunch,” and that she’d put his phone calls to her on speakerphone.

These aren’t the first colorful nicknames to be entered into the record during this trial. Last week, Trump attorney Todd Blanche displayed Twitter (now X) posts in court where Trump’s former attorney and fixer turned adversary Michael Cohen calls the former president “Von ShitzInPantz” and also refers to him as a “racist jackass who referred to African nations as ‘shithole countries.’”

Trump is facing 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime for paying off Daniels to cover up their affair ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He has pleaded not guilty. Earlier Tuesday, Daniels’s testimony revealed  several salacious details about the affair, including Trump comparing the adult film actress to his daughter Ivanka and an excuse that Daniels used in one instance to avoid sex with the former president.

Stormy Daniels used an all-too-familiar line to get out of having sex with Donald Trump.

Recounting one instance in 2007 when the pair met at a bungalow in Los Angeles, Daniels testified Tuesday that Trump had once again tried to pressure her into sex, including putting his hand on her leg. But she knew how to shake him off.

“I told him I was on my period,” Daniels told the court.

Daniels also recalled several other sexual encounters with Trump, at times diving into great detail, which appeared to bother even Judge Juan Merchan. Those moments included their infamous initial 2006 encounter at a hotel suite, in which Daniels claimed Trump goaded her into having sex under the guise that he would advance her film career by landing her a spot on his hit reality TV show, The Apprentice. Daniels described the tryst as brief and condomless.

“I thought you were serious about what you wanted,” she recalled Trump telling her at the time, before reportedly climbing on top of her.

After rejecting Trump a year later at the bungalow, she recalled Trump calling her to reveal that he wasn’t able to get her on The Apprentice as he had promised.

Daniels’s get-out-of-jail-free card is a lighthearted anecdote in an otherwise heavy description of a relationship that stemmed from what she described as an “imbalance of power.” Daniels has previously said she was mad at herself for not seeing right away that Trump didn’t want to help her career and just wanted to have sex with her, and told the court Tuesday that she hates Trump.

Trump is accused of using Cohen to sweep an affair with Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The Republican presidential nominee faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Stormy Daniels’s testimony in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial Tuesday went too far and warrants a mistrial, his lawyers tried to argue. Part of the culprit? A detail about condoms on the night of the alleged sexual encounter.

The adult film actress testified about her affair with Trump in 2006, including some salacious details, and according to Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche, she told a story that was “way different” from her previous descriptions of her time with Trump.

According to Blanche, Daniels’s account of Trump not wearing a condom, of Daniels being blacked out, “the height of the two individuals,” the spacing in the room, and “the fact of the bodyguard not being in the room” were different from the consensual encounter Daniels described in news interviews in 2016.

“That’s not the story that we heard today,” Blanche said to Judge Juan Merchan, adding that Daniels’s testimony Tuesday was a “completely different story.”

“How can you unring the bell?” Blanche argued.

Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger responded that Daniels’s testimony was “highly probative” of Trump’s intent, and said it’s “not true” that Daniels was telling a new story, since the actress had previously spoken about the lack of a condom.

“This is not new. This is not a new account,” Hoffinger said. “Their position that this is an entirely new story is not accurate.”

Merchan said that he did agree with Blanche’s account that some things should not have been said and that Daniels as a witness was a “little difficult to control,” but that a mistrial still wasn’t warranted. In fact, he told Blanche that Trump’s legal team should have made more objections to Daniels’s testimony.

“I will also note that I was surprised that there weren’t more objections” coming from the defense table, Merchan said, adding that the defense needs to take more responsibility.

“I do not believe we have reached the point that a mistrial is on order,” Merchan said, noting, “The more times a story has been changed,” the more opportunities Trump’s team would have to cross-examine Daniels.

Trump is being tried for 34 felony counts for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime by paying off Daniels to cover up their affair through his fixer Michael Cohen, prior to the 2016 election. The details Daniels provided in court Tuesday of their sexual affair leave Trump with little room to reject her claims under penalty of perjury. He is subject to a gag order in the case that he has already violated 10 times to the tune of $10,000 in fines, and has been warned that the next violation will send him to jail.

Stormy Daniels’s testimony in the hush-money trial may have restricted Donald Trump’s ability to testify on his own terms.

The porn actress’s firsthand account of the pair’s sexual affair—and its salacious details, including spanking Trump on the butt with a rolled-up magazine—under penalty of perjury leaves Trump little room to reject her claims.

As per a gag order that he has already violated 10 times, Trump can’t speak publicly about courtroom staff, prosecutors, jurors, witnesses, or any of their family members. That includes attacking them on his social media platform, Truth Social, where Trump’s previous remarks have earned him a couple warnings of potential jail time from presiding Judge Juan Merchan. But Daniels’s testimony may squeeze Trump even further, according to legal experts, who argue that her deep dive may curtail Trump’s ability to spend time on the stand himself.

“Stormy Daniels’ testimony about sexual encounter also has implications for gag order showdown and for Trump ever testifying,” wrote Ryan Goodman, a former special counsel for the Department of Justice. “If Trump goes to public airways to rebuke witness testimony, he’ll bump right up against gag order. If he testifies, he risks perjury.”

Trump already had a difficult time keeping his mouth shut about Daniels’s testimony early Tuesday, flaming the adult film star in a Truth Social post that was quickly removed, likely for fear of violating the gag order.

And Goodman expects that Trump’s bombastic behavior would only land him in more hot water with the court.

“I wouldn’t hold my breath on Trump ever testifying in this trial. It would be enormously self-destructive,” Goodman continued, noting that more potential gag order violations may be on the way. “It may require unusual self-control on Trump’s part.”

Trump is accused of using Cohen to sweep an affair with Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The Republican presidential nominee faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Donald Trump got a day off from his hush-money trial next week after requesting to attend his son Barron’s high school graduation. But on the same day, he’s actually scheduled to attend a fundraising dinner in Minnesota.

Trump is required by New York state law to attend all of the proceedings in his hush-money trial, so his legal team had to file a motion with Judge Juan Merchan asking permission for the trial to be put on hiatus on May 17. Merchan agreed to do so, but Trump is also scheduled to be the headline speaker at the Republican Party of Minnesota’s annual Lincoln Reagan Dinner in St. Paul that day. (Barron is graduating from Oxbridge Academy in Palm Beach, Florida.)

Trump has complained to reporters since mid-April that Merchan was not allowing him to go to his son’s graduation.

“It looks like the judge will not let me go to the graduation of my son who’s worked very, very hard and he is a great student,” Trump said outside of the courtroom three weeks ago. “It looks like the judge isn’t going to allow me to escape this scam. It’s a scam trial.”

At the time, Trump’s former fixer and attorney Michael Cohen called Trump’s complaints “comical,” saying he wasn’t aware of Trump attending any of his other children’s graduations. Reportedly, Trump’s wife, Melania, was not happy with the former president mentioning their son’s graduation in court and bringing unwanted attention upon the younger Trump.

“He talked about missing Barron’s graduation to the cameras and then again on Truth Social because it caused a lot of coverage about that, and it’s just not something she would have liked,” said Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary under Trump.

So how do Barron and Melania feel about the former president appearing at a campaign event on the same day as the graduation? It’s not yet known. Trump could use his private jet to attend both Barron’s graduation and the Minnesota dinner, assuming his son’s graduation isn’t later in the day. Regardless, the Minnesota Republican Party is happy to have Trump as a guest.

“We are thrilled to welcome President Trump back to Minnesota to headline our Lincoln Reagan dinner, an annual tradition that reminds us of the roots of our Party and the leaders who have been most impactful in promoting our American values. I can think of no one more fitting to join us this year than President Trump,” Minnesota GOP chair David Hann said in a statement.