Free Republic

Save America, the political action committee financing former President Trump’s 2024 presidential bid, spent over $40 million on legal fees in the first half of 2023. These expenses reflect the ballooning costs of defending the embattled former president as he faces a growing list of legal challenges. (snip) Even where the charges against Trump are contrived (Alvin Bragg Slowly Realizes His Trump Indictment Is Going to Backfire, and He’s Getting Desperate), he has to spend a lot of money protecting his interests until the case is closed. Should he prevail in all the cases, the final legal bill will dwarf...

On Friday night, a judge dismissed former President Donald Trump's lawsuit against CNN in which the current 2024 front-runner for the Republican nomination claimed CNN’s coverage of his election lies equated him to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Judge Raag Singhal, a Trump-appointed judge, ruled that CNN referring to Trump’s claims about the election being stolen as “The Big Lie” did not meet the criteria for defamation despite Trump’s belief to the contrary. "There is no question that the statements made by CNN meet the publication requirement for defamation under Florida law," Singhal wrote. "The next question is whether the...

WASHINGTON — A Trump supporter who stormed the Capitol wearing a “Make Space Great Again” hat had two guns and 400 rounds of ammunition in his van when he was arrested Thursday near former President Barack Obama’s home, federal authorities said Friday. A federal prosecutor said in court Friday that Taylor Taranto, a 37-year-old man first identified by online sleuths in August 2021, also had a machete in the van he appeared to be living in. Taranto's van has been parked near the D.C. jail in recent weeks and he has appeared at protests in support of other Jan. 6...

Washington — A California man who prosecutors described as "one of the most violent defendants on January 6, 2021" was sentenced to 151 months — about 12 ½ years — in prison Wednesday after pleading guilty to violent and obstructive conduct during the Capitol riot. Daniel "DJ" Rodriguez admitted as part of a plea agreement in February that he attacked former Washington, D.C. police officer Michael Fanone with a taser, causing him to lose consciousness, and that he worked to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. Rodriguez will also have to pay $96,000 to cover...

John Eastman, the Trump-allied lawyer who created a memo arguing that then-Vice President Mike Pence could overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election win, is set to face disciplinary hearings starting Tuesday in Los Angeles. The counsel for the State Bar of California is asking a court to revoke Eastman’s license to practice law in the state. Eastman faces 11 disciplinary charges for allegations that he engaged in a plot to push a far-fetched legal strategy for Pence to overturn Biden’s electoral victory during the certification of Electoral College votes by a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. Prosecutors alleged...

Eight of the so-called "fake electors" in Georgia who were allegedly involved in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state have accepted immunity in the Fulton County probe into the matter, according to their lawyer. In a court filing in the case on Friday, an attorney who represents 10 of the fake electors said the Fulton County district attorney's office reached out in April to provide an immunity offer for eight of her clients. "After reviewing the actual, written offers of immunity, each of those eight electors accepted their immunity offer," the filing by the...

WASHINGTON — At least four members of the far-right Proud Boys organization were found guilty Thursday of seditious conspiracy in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Enrique Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean and Zachary Rehl each faced nine counts, and were found guilty on the rare charge of seditious conspiracy under a Civil War-era statute. They were also found guilty of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. The jury has only reached a partial verdict, U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly said Thursday, and the verdicts on other charges are still being read.

A New York judge tossed Donald Trump’s $100 million lawsuit against the New York Times and ordered him to pay all of the paper’s legal fees, according to a ruling Wednesday. The former president’s claims that the Gray Lady and three of its reporters hatched an “insidious plot” to get his private tax records “fail as a matter of constitutional law,” New York Supreme Court Justice Robert Reed wrote in the decision. In the 2021 suit, the embattled 45th president alleged that Times reporters Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russ Buettner schemed with Trump’s niece, Mary, to disclose his 20-year-old...

A federal judge in New York on Monday denied former President Donald Trump's bid for a mistrial in writer E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit alleging that Trump raped her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. In an 18-page filing hours ahead of his second day of cross-examining Carroll, Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina accused U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is overseeing the case, of making “pervasive unfair and prejudicial rulings” against his client. Barring a mistrial ruling, Tacopina requested that Kaplan “correct the record for each and every instance in which the Court has mischaracterized the facts of this...

The Fulton County District Attorney’s office has offered immunity deals to some of the alternate GOP electors who met at the Georgia Capitol and cast phony Electoral College votes for Donald Trump following the 2020 election. In a court motion filed Tuesday, the DA’s office also disclosed that it has been interviewing several of those Republicans in recent weeks, and that some of them accused a fellow elector of committing “acts that are violations of Georgia law,” the motion stated, without revealing specifics. The DA’s office filed the motion in an attempt to disqualify from the case attorney Kimberly Burroughs...

The federal judge presiding over E. Jean Carroll's civil rape and defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump ruled Thursday he'll use an anonymous jury in the case, noting Trump's inflammatory rhetoric about the justice system. "It bears mention that Mr. Trump repeatedly has attacked courts, judges, various law enforcement officials and other public officials, and even individual jurors in other matters,” U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan of New York said in his decision. He also said he'll refuse to allow jurors' names to become public, adding, "If jurors’ identities were disclosed, there would be a strong likelihood of unwanted...

Fox News sued one of its senior producers Monday over the $1.6 billion defamation claim it is fighting concerning allegedly knowingly broadcasting disinformation regarding the results of the 2020 presidential election. Fox News's lawsuit came the same day that the producer, Abby Grossberg, who has worked with hosts Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo, filed lawsuits against the company, accusing Fox lawyers of attempting to coerce her into lying to investigators to protect top executives and slamming the television network for being misogynistic. According to Fox's lawsuit, Grossberg told the network last month that she intended to sue it for discrimination....

A judge on Monday ordered sanctions against Republican Mark Finchem, the losing candidate in Arizona’s secretary of state race who challenged the election results in court. In granting the sanctions, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Melissa Iyer Julian said Finchem and his attorney, Daniel McCauley III, filed their lawsuit “without substantial justification.” Finchem lost the election to Democrat Adrian Fontes by 120,208 votes. Julian in December dismissed Finchem's lawsuit, which requested a new election, alleged that then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs had engaged in misconduct and claimed that illegal votes were cast because of errors in the laboratory testing of...

Paul Manafort, the former chairman of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, has agreed to pay $3.15 million to settle a civil case filed by the Justice Department over undeclared foreign bank accounts. When the civil case was filed in April 2022, prosecutors alleged that Manafort had failed to disclose more than 20 offshore bank accounts he ordered opened in the United Kingdom, Cyprus, St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The government sought an order for Manafort to pay fines, penalties and interest, alleging he'd failed to file federal tax documents detailing the accounts and failed to disclose the money on his...

PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) -- Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes has released three separate documents related to the investigation into the 2020 General Election. In a news release issued Wednesday morning, the AG’s office said that agents and staff spent 10,000 hours looking at any possible irregularities and pieces of evidence of voter fraud but lacked to find any. “In each instance and in each matter, the aforementioned parties did not provide any evidence to support their allegations. The information that was provided was speculative in many instances and when investigated by our agents and support staff, was found to be...

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Virginia voters on Tuesday elected Democrat Jennifer McClellan, a veteran state legislator from Richmond, to fill an open seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, where she will make history as the first Black woman to represent the state in Congress. “We will make this commonwealth and this country a better place for everyone,” McClellan said in a victory speech at a party with supporters in Richmond. “I am ready to get to work.” McClellan, 50, prevailed over right-wing Republican nominee Leon Benjamin in the special election for the blue-leaning 4th District, which has its population...

Fox News anchors and producers privately acknowledged that former President Donald Trump and his allies' allegations of election fraud in the aftermath of the 2020 election were false despite their network's promotion of those claims, according to a new court filing by Dominion Voting Systems. In a nearly 200-page document filed as part of its billion-dollar defamation suit against the network, Dominion Voting Systems shared emails, texts, testimony, and other private communications from Fox News personnel that cast doubt on claims that Dominion's voting machines had somehow rigged the presidential election in Joe Biden's favor. The voting company is suing...

A New York state appeals court on Tuesday upheld an order finding Donald Trump in civil contempt for having failed to comply with a subpoena from New York Attorney General Letitia James in her probe of his business practices. In a 5-0 decision, the Appellate Division in Manhattan said James had established by "clear and convincing evidence" that Trump's response to the Dec. 1, 2021, subpoena was inadequate. The court said Trump's claim that a diligent search had failed to uncover relevant documents in his possession, without explaining what steps were taken to ensure nothing would be lost or discarded,...

<p>Former President Trump’s 2020 election campaign hired an outside research firm to try to prove allegations of voter fraud, but never released the results because the company disputed many of its theories and, according to Four, could not provide any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election was people who are familiar with the matter.</p>

A Florida federal judge...sanctioned former President Donald Trump and his lead attorney Alina Habba nearly $1 million in Trump's racketeering lawsuit against Hillary Clinton for what the judge called a "pattern of misuse of the courts." In a scathing order, U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks said Trump and Habba... are jointly liable for $937,989.39 in attorney fees and costs of the 31 defendants... which claimed that Clinton conspired with the Democratic National Committee and others to "weave a false narrative" that Trump colluded with Russians..." Judge Middlebrooks said the lawsuit "should never have been filed" and was brought simply...