Free Republic

CNN — This much is certain: Former President Donald Trump’s name will appear on the ballot this year as voters in every state choose a president.But while the unsigned, 13-page opinion the Supreme Court handed down Monday decisively resolved the uncertainty around Trump’s eligibility for a second term, it left unsettled questions that could some day boomerang back to the justices.Could Democratic lawmakers, for instance, disqualify Trump next January when the electoral votes are counted if he wins the November election? Could a state keep a president seeking a third term, in violation of the 22nd Amendment, off its ballot?

In a surprise move, an Illinois judge has removed former President Donald Trump from the state’s ballot based on the 14th Amendment’s so-called “insurrectionist ban.” The decision is paused, giving Trump a short period of time to appeal.

A liberal group filed a lawsuit Tuesday to block former President Donald Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot in Minnesota, the second major lawsuit in two weeks that hopes to invoke the 14th Amendment’s arcane “insurrectionist ban.” The cases are seen as legal long shots. Trump denies wrongdoing and has vowed to fight to remain on the presidential ballot. The new Minnesota lawsuit was filed in state court by Free Speech For People, one week after another group initiated a similar challenge in Colorado.

Fox News argued in court Wednesday that its hosts and guests were merely raising questions and “presented a puzzle to unravel” when they repeatedly suggested, falsely, that January 6 rioter Ray Epps was a government agent who orchestrated the attack. The pushback came in a defamation suit that Epps filed against the right-wing network. He claims Fox figures, including ex-host Tucker Carlson, destroyed his reputation by repeatedly raising the baseless idea that he led a false-flag plot to hurt Donald Trump. “Tucker Carlson (and/or his guests) described the known (and undisputed) facts” about Epps, Fox said in the filing. “Then...

CNN - GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa on Thursday released an internal FBI document containing unverified allegations President Joe Biden was involved in an illegal foreign bribery scheme. The FBI had previously allowed members of the House Oversight Committee to privately view – but not obtain – the unclassified FBI document, known as an FD-1023. The 1023 form memorializes claims from an FBI informant, but it doesn’t provide proof that the allegations are true. Republicans, though, have seized on the unverified material as part of their broader investigation into the Bidens. The FBI document says an informant described a...

Judge Raymond Dearie, the special master overseeing the seizure of documents from Mar-a-Lago, signaled on Tuesday to lawyers for former President Donald Trump that if they don't make a case that any of the documents were declassified, he would determine that they're classified. Out of court, Trump has pushed the claim he declassified all the documents, and his lawyers have raised that possibility in court papers, though they have never explicitly argued that anything was declassified. Federal prosecutors have argued for weeks that documents seized from Mar-a-Lago that contain classification markings -- like "top secret" -- should be treated as...

A federal judge on Friday dismissed five former FBI officials -- including former director James Comey and deputy director Andrew McCabe -- from a lawsuit that former President Donald Trump filed against them and other political opponents related to the Russia investigation. Judge Donald Middlebrooks granted the Justice Department's request to substitute itself as defendants for the former FBI officials, after finding that Trump's lawsuit covered actions that they took while acting within the scope of their government employment. This is a victory for the former FBI officials, who no longer have to battle Trump in the civil litigation, which...

(CNN) - Special counsel John Durham has used his first trial as a vehicle to air some of the Hillary Clinton campaign's dirty laundry, but that was derailed Wednesday when the campaign's top lawyer, Marc Elias, promptly used his testimony to slam Donald Trump and the FBI for how they responded to Russian interference in the 2016 election. Durham's case against a different Clinton campaign lawyer, Michael Sussmann, is the first courtroom test of his three-year probe into potential misconduct in the FBI's early Trump-Russia investigation. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty to one count of lying to the FBI during...

Trump campaign officials, led by Rudy Giuliani, oversaw efforts in December 2020 to put forward illegitimate electors from seven states that Trump lost, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the scheme. The sources said members of former President Donald Trump's campaign team were far more involved than previously known in the plan, a core tenet of the broader plot to overturn President Joe Biden's victory when Congress counted the electoral votes on January 6. Giuliani and his allies coordinated the nuts-and-bolts of the process on a state-by-state level, the sources told CNN. One source said there were multiple...

Alleged US Capitol rioter Anthony Antonio was hooked on Fox News and developed "Foxitis," his lawyer said Thursday in a virtual hearing interrupted multiple times by another defendant's profane outbursts. Antonio, his lawyer Joseph Hurley said, had lost his job at the beginning of the pandemic and for the next six months watched Fox News constantly. Antonio developed what his lawyer called "Foxitis" and "Foxmania," and believed the lies about the 2020 election from Fox News and then-President Donald Trump. "He believed what was being fed to him," Hurley said. Many Capitol riot defendants have blamed Trump for their actions,...

Washington(CNN)The US intelligence community said in a landmark report Tuesday that the Russian government meddled in the 2020 election with an influence campaign "denigrating" President Joe Biden and "supporting" former President Donald Trump, detailing a massive disinformation push that successfully targeted, and was openly embraced, by Trump's allies. Russia's objectives were not limited to hurting Biden's candidacy and aiding Trump's reelection bid, the report says, as US intelligence found that Moscow also sought to undermine "public confidence in the electoral process and exacerbate sociopolitical divisions in the US." Overall, the report released by the Office of the Director of National...

Washington (CNN) -- President Donald Trump and his campaign are spreading disinformation about an incident in Pennsylvania where nine ballots were improperly discarded, and are falsely claiming it proves widespread "voter fraud" and that Democrats are "trying to steal the election." According to federal and local authorities, an election worker improperly threw out nine military ballots in Luzerne County, and seven of the ballots were marked for Trump. Election experts said the incident raised legitimate questions about election procedures, but also condemned the Justice Department for politicizing the situation by highlighting that the votes were for Trump. Team Trump has...

Twitter announced Thursday that it is expanding its policies against election-related misinformation, setting new rules that will likely force the platform to more aggressively fact-check President Donald Trump during the final months of the 2020 campaign.The social media giant rolled out the new policies in a blog post, which said that Twitter will either add fact-check labels to or hide altogether tweets that contain "false or misleading information that causes confusion" about election rules, or posts with "unverified information about election rigging." Twitter's porous and subjective policies have enabled Trump to spread a steady stream of misinformation about the election to...

(CNN)To President Donald Trump, the whole flap with Ukraine is over a "perfect" phone call. "It's based on a single phone call of congratulations to the President of Ukraine, which they fraudulently mischaracterized to sound absolutely horrible," Trump said a few weeks ago of his July 25 call with the Ukrainian President cited by a whistleblower complaint. But a review of more than 2,600 pages of transcripts released this week from eight witnesses who have testified in the House impeachment inquiry over the past six weeks shows how controversy over Trump's Ukraine policy had been brewing inside the US government...