<....Biden revoked that order but Trump says he'll revive it should he win. And conservatives preparing thick policy books are strategizing on how to fire employees to make more room for Trump appointees.

A spokesman for Trump's campaign did not answer a message seeking comment and the Heritage Foundation, which is running “Project 2025,” declined to answer written questions. But Heritage's president, Kevin Roberts, told The New York Times Magazine that he wants to see “destruction" in the government.

“People will lose their jobs. Hopefully their lives are able to flourish in spite of that,” Roberts said. “Buildings will be shut down. Hopefully they can be repurposed for private industry.”

The OPM in September proposed the rule making it more difficult to reclassify employees and allowing anyone moved into a potential “Schedule F” to retain their protections against being fired.

It's been endorsed by 27 advocacy organizations whose policy interests don’t always align.

“I think you’ve seen the federal agencies, and the president himself, talk about the importance of a functioning government, the importance of a democracy and the importance of a government that works for all people,” said Skye Perryman, president of the advocacy group Democracy Forward, which has been a leading proponent of the proposed rule.

James Sherk, a former Trump administration official now working at the America First Policy Institute, another group strategizing for a second Trump term, opposed the rule in a letter sent to OPM. Sherk argued worker protections against termination “enable what are typically very liberal career staff to stymie conservative policies.”

“The federal workforce has ideologically polarized, and this rulemaking would impede the ability of presidents whose views differ from the bureaucracy’s to implement their agendas,” Sherk wrote.

Many liberals are also promoting a separate OPM rule that could slow future executive branch orders to relocate government agencies. That grew out of the Trump administration's announced plans to relocate agencies within the Department of Agriculture from Washington to Kansas City in 2019, and within the Bureau of Land Management from Washington to Grand Junction, Colorado, the following year.

Besides taking time to undo, federal rules can also be the basis for lawsuits — hundreds of which were filed to stop Trump priorities on issues ranging from immigration to the environment during his presidency.

Congress has also passed changes responding to issues that arose during the Trump administration. Lawmakers barred presidents from unilaterally withdrawing the U.S. from NATO and strengthened the Electoral Count Act, which Trump tried to put to the test on Jan. 6, 2021, when he pressed lawmakers to reject electors from states he lost on the basis of falsehoods he spread about voter fraud.

Advocates say Biden has more options to thwart a Trump administration, from promoting expanded collective bargaining agreements with federal personnel to beginning the complicated bureaucratic task of designating more government posts as policy-dedicated, thus making workers harder to fire.

“A lot of this about [sic] good governance,” said Ben Olinsky, senior vice president for structural reform and governance at the Center for American Progress’ Action Fund, the political arm of the Washington think tank. “If you believe in a functioning government, then you should want to use these tools to enshrine policy and make sure there’s continuity from one government to another, regardless of who you think might or might not be in the White House in a few years.”>

<Confronted with the reality of her party’s servility toward Russian President Vladimir Putin, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene blew her top on Wednesday.

Greene was asked to respond to former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s warning that people who appease Putin are comparable to those who sought to appease German dictator Adolf Hitler in the lead-up to World War II.

On Wednesday, Cameron published an op-ed in The Hill that called on Ukraine’s allies to continue supporting Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion. House Speaker Mike Johnson is currently bending to the Russophilic wing of his party by stalling a vote on a Senate-approved bill that would authorize $60 billion in aid for Ukraine. Cameron’s op-ed warned that such moves could prove catastrophic.

A reporter from Sky News referenced the article and asked Greene to comment on whether she’s an “appeaser for Putin.” To which she gave a rather acerbic response.

“I think that’s rude name-calling and I don’t appreciate that type of language,” she said, claiming Cameron should worry about “his own country.” Then came the kicker: “Frankly, he can kiss my ass.”

(So much for rudeness.)

I’d note that Cameron is worrying about his country by warning about Russia’s potential expansion and what that could mean for Europe (it was Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who became the poster boy for appeasement, after all). And Cameron is completely right to draw connections between those who capitulated to Hitler’s aggression and those who won’t stand against Putin’s power grab today.

Trump’s “America First” movement is an isolationist one that functionally cedes power to authoritarians and abandons the United States’ obligations to foreign allies — and it is the motivating force driving the GOP’s approach to Putin. It’s notable that the movement borrows its name from the America First movement of the 1930s and ’40s, which ... sought to appease Hitler, even if it meant letting him take control of Europe.

Greene apparently doesn’t like people highlighting these obvious and historically accurate comparisons (if she is even aware of them), and her outburst was certainly a spectacle. When it comes to playing the role of the ugly, ignorant American, Greene is like Meryl Streep: You can trust her to put on a perfect performance every time.

But her theatrics are a distraction. The main takeaway here is that in Vladimir Putin, the world faces an authoritarian strongman intent on expanding his power. And Republicans like Greene see no problem with letting him do so.>

<Trump supporter Dinesh D'Souza's election fraud documentary "2,000 Mules," which was widely panned even by some conservatives, was dealt another blow this week when the group whose claims were at the center of the film acknowledged they had no evidence to back them up.

The Washington Post's Philip Bump shoveled dirt on D'Souza's film, as he called anti-voter fraud organization True the Vote's court admission that it lacked evidence to support its claims to be a "final repudiation" of "2,000 Mules."

"D’Souza’s argument depends entirely on True the Vote’s data, as he explained when we spoke in 2022," wrote Bump. "Much of it was immediately disproved, like the scene in the film where [True the Vote organizers Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips] intimate that they had used cellphone location data to solve a murder that, it turns out, had already been solved. ... At no point do they show a person at a ballot box matched to geolocation data, the purported evidence on which their allegations rest. In fact, only one map of an alleged ballot harvester’s path is shown in the film. In an email to The Washington Post, Phillips admitted that it was artificial."

This is particularly embarrassing for D'Souza, who repeatedly cited True the Vote's purported research when asked to defend flaws in his movie's claims about widespread ballot fraud.

In fact, D'Souza at one point told Bump in the 2022 interview that True the Vote could provide him with direct evidence of voter fraud that, it turns out, the group never had.

Commenting separately on Twitter, Bump wrote of "2,000 Mules" that "the whole thing was obviously a hustle.">

<Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) walked into the Georgia courtroom Thursday afternoon where lawyers were arguing over whether she would have to take the stand. It was the back half of the long day’s hearing on whether Willis should be removed from the sprawling election tampering case her office has brought against former president Donald Trump and his associates. But the debate between the dueling teams of lawyers became moot when Willis announced that she wanted to testify. Willis settled into the high-backed witness chair. And then she loosed her fury.

She began by declaring that defense attorney Ashleigh Merchant had lied in court filings when she suggested that Willis had slept with special prosecutor Nathan Wade after their first meeting. She fumed that her privacy had been invaded. She reminded Merchant that, “You think I’m on trial. These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020.” And she held up paperwork filed by defense lawyers in a display of disgust. For no small amount of time, it seemed that judge Scott McAfee was a mere bystander in his courtroom.

The hearing had been taken over by Willis and her outrage. Whether her anger was defensive or righteous, it was something to behold.

She sat with her body positioned at a slight angle and rested her fingers on her cheek. Sometimes, she’d lean forward into the microphone but mostly her posture was one of powerful repose. If there is a female equivalent to man-spreading, that tendency of men to sit with their legs akimbo as they take up more than their share of space on a bench or a bleacher, Willis’s stance may well be it. She filled the room with her presence.

She might be more accustomed to asking the questions in a courtroom than answering them, but Willis didn’t have the rigid posture that one so often sees from witnesses who might be fighting off nerves. She sat in the hot seat like it was her throne and she was ready to slice off some heads.

Willis’s testimony followed that of Wade, with whom she’s had a romantic relationship — a relationship that sparked these court proceedings. One of the issues at the heart of whether she should be removed from the case is whether she benefited financially from having appointed Wade to it. And so much of the day’s questioning focused on whether Wade footed the bill for plane tickets and cruises to places such as Belize, Aruba and Napa Valley. Wade explained that the two split costs, with Willis paying him back in cash — thousands of dollars in cash. At a time when many businesses only accept electronic payments and many people never carry cash, Wade made a mess of explaining why Willis was handing over wads of untraceable dollars. He began many sentences with, “Here’s the thing …” And by the time he reached the end of the sentence, well, there was no “thing” there.

Wade sat in the witness chair in his gray plaid three piece suit, with his white French-cuffed shirt, gold cuff links and powder blue pocket square. He grimaced and smiled and repeatedly referenced his wife’s affair as the cause of his filing for divorce in 2021 even though no one asked him why he split with his wife but rather when he started his relationship with Willis. The two have said their romance began after he became special prosecutor, but Merchant presented a witness, Robin Bryant-Yeartie, who contradicted that. Wade repeated his version of the timeline of his relationship with Willis. He drank lots of water, dabbed his face and sniffled ever more vigorously....>

<....Bryant-Yeartie said she’s known Willis since college and that they were once good friends; she also worked in the District Attorney’s office until she was forced to resign. When presented with Bryant-Yeartie’s testimony, Willis made one thing clear immediately. The two might have known each other when they were college students; they might have gone to the same parties; but they did not attend the same college. Willis said she was a student at Howard University and Bryant-Yeartie went to Morgan State, and Morgan State is most definitely not Howard. Then she summed up Bryant-Yeartie as someone who was not her friend and didn’t know what she was talking about. And then Willis pursed her lips, blinked a few times and that was that. She was just getting started.

Willis lectured the gathered attorneys on the philosophy behind keeping cash on hand. Her father taught her that cash was king and a woman should always be financially self-reliant. And so, yes, she had a stash of cash accumulated over time and she used it to reimburse Wade. She dipped into it before a trip so she could pay taxi drivers or barter with vendors. Her description of her father’s advice was a compressed version of a complicated history and modern-day habit. She didn’t go into the discomfort that some Black people have with financial institutions or the ways in which banks have made it more difficult for Black people to do business with them. She didn’t mention that more older people believe in keeping ready cash and that a significant percentage of Black and Hispanic Americans use cash as their predominant payment method. She didn’t have to. She simply talked about what her father had told her to do as a matter of independence and power. “I don’t need any man to foot my bills,” Willis said.

Willis sat in the witness chair for hours. Or, more precisely, she reclined in the chair, woman-splaining how men define relationships and how they end them. She did so wearing a fuchsia dress with a single strand of beads around her neck. Her hair was styled in soft, shoulder-length curls and her eye makeup was precise and intentional. She was a singular bright spot surrounded by a black-robed judge and lawyers in mostly somber suits. Only Willis and her main inquisitor, Merchant, who wore a cobalt blue dress under a white blazer, stood out in the room’s sobriety.

During a November interview with The Washington Post, Willis was asked what advice she’d give to younger women who are trying to be heard. Willis said, in part, “You should be comfortable enough in your own skin to be authentically you, to be a woman. It’s okay to be pretty. It’s okay to, you know, think of things that are feminine things and still be a strong leader.”

Willis walked into court as a woman on the ropes. Some would say the hearing was a mess of her own making. Others might believe the whole mess is a distraction from more important matters. Either way, Willis fought back with gobsmacking fury — defiant in power pink.>

<Journalist Marc Caputo told The New Republic's Greg Sargent on his podcast this week that Trump's takeover of the Republican National Committee could cause friction if he uses it to pay his legal bills at the expense of down-ballot races in the 2024 election cycle.

In particular, Caputo said the prospects of a worsening legal landscape for Trump could have a cascading effect on party finances.

"There's concern that that could happen and this could drain party resources," said Caputo.

"You think?" Sargent replied jokingly.

"Four criminal cases is a lot," he said. "And the number of witnesses in the January 6th case and the documents case, that's just time consuming... when you talk about lawyers, time is money."

Sargent then quoted a passage from one of Caputo's most recent reports in which he said that Trump was displeased that the RNC under McDaniel had remained an "independent body" that wasn't wholly dedicated to defending and promoting him.

He then asked if this dynamic would make it harder for RNC members to raise objections to spending plans by Trump if they thought those plans would be bad for the party as a whole, and Caputo confirmed that it would.

"Republicans, by and large, are very scared of bucking Donald Trump and/or his voters," he said. "If you're a politician and you want to get reelected, you don't want to get crosswise with your voters. And those who do usually end up losing.">

<Montana Republican Congressman Matt Rosendale dropped his U.S. Senate bid on Thursday, less than a week after he got into the race only to see former President Donald Trump quickly endorse his opponent.

Rosendale, a hard-line conservative, said in a statement that with Trump's backing of fellow Republican Tim Sheehy and a lack of resources, “the hill was just too steep.” Trump’s endorsement came just hours after Rosendale had signed paperwork to formally launch his campaign on Feb. 9.

His exit from the race avoids what was likely to be a monthslong fight within the GOP leading up the June 4 Montana primary.

Republicans in Washington had worked to keep Rosendale on the sidelines, with leading members of the party supporting Sheehy as the party's best chance to topple three-term Democratic Sen. Jon Tester — part of their strategy to take control of the Senate by targeting a few vulnerable Democratic seats in the 2024 election.

Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL who now owns an aerial firefighting company with extensive government contracts, is a political newcomer backed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Montana Sen. Steve Daines — the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

In Washington, Rosendale is among the House’s most hard-right conservatives and a member of the House Freedom Caucus. He banded with seven other members of his party in October to oust Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He supports Trump and voted against certifying the 2020 election.

Rosendale had said when he announced his campaign that he would be able to challenge Tester despite losing to him in 2018. Trump played a large role in that election, too, visiting Montana repeatedly to stump for Rosendale, who lost by about 3.5 percentage points.

“I’ve won two elections since then,” Rosendale, 63, told reporters Friday as he entered the race. “And the most important thing is that my name ID and my trust factor is elevated dramatically. People know who I am.”

While a large contingent of conservative state lawmakers cheered Rosendale's filing, Daines issued a statement saying: “It’s unfortunate that rather than building seniority for our great state in the House, Matt is choosing to abandon his seat and create a divisive primary.”

It’s not clear if Rosendale will seek re-election to his U.S. House seat following Thursday's announcement. Several other Republicans have already announced their intentions to enter that race, which is in a solidly GOP district.

Sheehy said in a statement that Rosendale has held the line on reckless spending in Washington, D.C., and that he looked forward to working together with Rosendale to defeat Tester.

Former Montana Secretary of State Brad Johnson is also vying for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination.

Tester, a political moderate, has held onto his Senate post even as Montana tilted increasingly Republican over the past several election cycles.

When he entered the Senate in 2007, Democrats held almost every statewide elected office in Montana, from governor and attorney general, to two of the state’s three seats in Congress. Since 2020, that’s down to Tester’s seat.

Montana Democrats had relished the possibility of an ugly primary fight between Sheehy and Rosendale, which could have distracted GOP voters in advance of the general election and drained some of the party's campaign funds.

“Rosendale spent months making the case that Tim Sheehy has no place representing Montana in the Senate and he was right: Sheehy is an out-of-state tech millionaire completely out of touch with Montana’s way of life," Montana Democratic Party Executive Director Sheila Hogan said Thursday.

Tester's campaign declined comment on Rosendale's announcement.

The race is on track to be among the most expensive in Montana political history. Spending on advertising by the candidates and outside political groups already topped $18 million. An additional $95 million in advertising has been reserved for the coming months, according to data from AdImpact, a firm that tracks political advertising.

Maneuvering by Republicans to increase their chances of beating Tester began last year when Republican state lawmakers proposed election rule changes that would have allowed only the top two candidates to advance out of the state's 2024 Senate primary. That likely would have kept third-party candidates off the general election ballot and could have tipped the election for Republicans.

Past races for Tester’s seat were close enough that some Republicans blamed third-party candidates for the Democrat’s victories.>

<Late Thursday afternoon, the Republican effort to impeach President Biden received an unexpected, wobbling blow. An FBI informant whose allegation that Biden and his son Hunter had received multimillion-dollar bribes from a foreign businessman was indicted on charges that he fabricated the story.

The idea that the Bidens received these bribes persisted on the right despite a complete lack of corroborating evidence. When then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced the launch of an impeachment inquiry in September, he specifically cited the alleged bribes as a reason. In a 37-page indictment, special counsel David Weiss and his team make a convincing case that the entire allegation was contrived by someone who wanted to see Biden lose in 2020.

As is so often the case, the Republican effort to elevate the story of the bribes was aided by their allies in the conservative media — specifically Fox News and even more specifically Fox News host Sean Hannity. So would Hannity, for the second time in two weeks, cop to an error? Would his colleagues in Fox’s popular prime-time lineup address the abrupt change in the story they had been promoting?

Reader, they would not. There were apparently too many other important stories for them to chase.

Let’s begin with “The Ingraham Angle,” hosted by Laura Ingraham.

Ingraham spent 45 minutes of her hour-long show exploring developments in the hearing focused on alleged misconduct involving Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani T. Willis. This is national news, as you likely know, because Willis obtained a sweeping indictment of Donald Trump and a number of his political allies for their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. This has made her a popular target for Trump, and the outcome of the hearing could derail or damage the case against the former president.

Apparently feeling that 45 minutes was not enough time to explore the nuances of this important issue, Ingraham followed the initial flurry of discussion by interviewing a body-language expert. Her assessment? Willis’s body language was “strong.”

The hour culminated with a discussion between Ingraham and radio host Jimmy Failla, who bills himself as a comedian. They riffed on the Willis hearing, and that was that. The indictment of the FBI source was not mentioned.

Ingraham was followed by “Jesse Watters Primetime,” hosted, as you might expect, by Jesse Watters.

Watters had a more varied lineup than Ingraham. He spent the first 20 minutes of his show discussing Willis, including a graphic showing the Black district attorney and her colleague in a swimming pool surrounded by flying cash and captioned with an unsubtle “LIVING LARGE.”

The next five minutes of Watters’s show focused on an evidence-free allegation, popular in the online right, rewriting the history of Russia’s effort to interfere in the 2016 election. Or, put another way, Watters elevated a new, dubious conspiracy theory instead of spending time noting that the previous one amplified by his employer was wrong. But, then, it’s Jesse Watters.

After that, another five-minute segment focused on blaming the Biden administration for a Republican legislator’s public statement earlier this week about a new threat from Russia. Including commercials, that brought him to the 45-minute mark....>

<....The last quarter of his show, Watters dug into the heavy issues: Rachel Dolezal’s reemergence in the national conversation, a teacher in West Virginia wearing high heels and something about “woke kindergarten.” His show is nothing if not consistent, offering his viewers all sorts of reasons to dislike and fear the people they already dislike and fear.

In the last few minutes, Watters plugged his new book. The end.

It is probably the case that no one on Fox News invested more heavily in the “Biden bribe” story than Hannity. An analysis from Media Matters determined that he has covered the allegation in at least 85 segments since it first emerged in May 2023.

On Thursday night, he had nothing to say about the new development.

Instead, he began by focusing, once again, on Willis. Viewers who tuned in at 7 p.m. had, by 9:30, gotten an hour and 40 minutes of commercial-interspersed discussion of the hearing involving the Georgia official.

Then Hannity turned to Trump’s other pressing legal case in Manhattan. For this, he sought comment from Trump lawyer Alina Habba. She suggested that the criminal case in New York was unwarranted.

Forty minutes into his show, Hannity did address developments in the House Republican effort to bring down Biden: a request from the House Judiciary Committee to the ghostwriter of a Biden memoir for information potentially related to his access to classified information. Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) had appeared on Hannity earlier this week and tried to turn the page away from the existing impeachment efforts and toward the aftermath of the Biden classified-documents probe. Hannity hosted Newt Gingrich to explore this new terrain.

After a break, Hannity talked about Fox News polling that shows Trump leading Biden in swing states and discussed possible third-party challengers with Trump’s former adviser Kellyanne Conway. With that, his show ended, Hannity having presented all of the information that he felt his audience needed to know.

There were mentions of the new development on Fox News. Bret Baier’s 6 p.m. program — categorized by the channel as part of its news coverage rather than its opinion lineup — offered a brief discussion of the indictment of the FBI informant. It included no on-air graphics detailing what the Justice Department alleges occurred but did include a response from House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), a central figure in promoting and spreading the original bribery allegation.

In his response, Comer blamed the FBI.

On Friday morning, Fox’s early-morning program also mentioned the new indictment briefly and again gave screen time to Comer. Instead of blaming the FBI, the statement shown on Friday morning had Comer insisting that the Biden impeachment effort would push forward with the other evidence that Republicans have collected — evidence that, like the bribery allegation, is broadly overheated, misinterpreted or false.

Stay tuned to Fox News to hear more about it.>

<Trump attorney Alina Habba had an interview on Fox News on Friday, and the internet has been having fun with the lawyer's phrasing.

Habba, who represented Trump in the civil fraud case that ended with the former president facing an order to pay hundreds of millions of dollars, was asked on Newsmax about her "reaction" to the ruling. She said to the friendly interviewer: "That's a loaded question."

She went on to criticize New York Attorney General Letitia James, who wrote a poem on Valentine's Day which many said was directed at Trump.

But that wasn't the end of Habba's media crusade, as she also appeared on Fox News. ALSO READ: 'Unconstitutional overreach': Trump VP contenders clash on Jan. 6

Habba went on to say some things that stood out to social media users and political onlookers. For example, she said, "I want to say something different than I normally do. We have the order now, and I am free to speak." She added, "They will not get away with it. We will come at them. We will come hard."

"Alina, ma’am, please, I beg of you … check your wording next time," said national security attorney Bradley Moss.

Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele said, "You may wanna see your doctor about that."

A commenter with the name of "Renegade Cowboy" also chimed in: "Sounds like her bio in OnlyFans."

Political strategist Cheri Jacobus simply posted a GIF image with a woman putting her hands on her face.

Lincoln Project veterans affairs adviser Fred Wellman had a slightly different take: "Oh lord...I've never been less intimidated. If history is any judge you will manage to get the penalties doubled."

In a separate instance, Habba said her strategy is to "make a record even when they try and gag us."

"Alina, please, the words… you’re killing me," Moss added.>

<In Houston, state District Judge Andrea Beall has dismissed efforts by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to have his felony securities fraud charges dismissed. These allegations have been looming over the Republican politician for nearly ten years, and with this recent ruling, he is slated to face trial in April. Paxton is accused of defrauding investors in connection with a technology company and could face a maximum of 99 years in prison if convicted. Paxton, who asserts his innocence, has faced numerous delays in his trial since his 2015 indictment, leading his defense team to argue for dismissal on the grounds of a right to a swift trial.

The legal standoff has seen arguments regarding the trial location and payment for prosecutors, with the defense asserting that these delays are undermining Paxton’s legal rights. Still, prosecutors insist that Paxton’s own legal maneuvers are responsible for the prolonged timeline.

This court case is one of several complications for Paxton, who has served three terms as a prominent state attorney general. Despite his legal entanglements, including impeachment charges of misconduct that he survived, his political career has demonstrated remarkable tenacity, earning him reelection even after his indictment and support from prominent figures including former President Donald Trump.

Paxton’s legal challenges do not end with the upcoming trial as he continues to be the subject of a federal investigation and is embroiled in a whistleblower lawsuit brought forth by his former aides, both addressing issues related to the indictment.>

<A seven-figure verdict, an eight-figure verdict and, now, a nine-figure verdict.

Donald Trump has been hit with all three in the past nine months, with Friday’s $354 million penalty for New York business fraud by far the most massive.

He is now on the hook for over $440 million in civil judgments as he heads toward the Republican nomination — and as he prepares for one or more criminal trials this year.

Those criminal cases could put him in jail. And in the meantime, his escalating troubles in his civil cases are packing a devastating financial punch.

Even for a man who claims to be a billionaire, $440 million is a potentially crippling amount of cash to turn over. Can Trump afford the judgments? When does he have to pay them? And what happens if he says he can’t — or if he outright refuses? Here’s a look at what comes next.

Can Trump afford to pay?

Trump’s company isn’t public, and he has famously refused to disclose his tax returns, so his cash flow situation is shrouded in mystery.

Even if he has $440 million in cash on hand — and it’s far from clear that he does — paying the judgments could wipe out his accounts, since Trump himself has placed his cash reserves in the ballpark of that amount.

Trump claimed in a deposition last year that he had “substantially in excess” of $400 million in cash on hand.

“We have, I believe, 400 plus and going up very substantially every month,” he said, adding: “My biggest expense is probably legal fees, unfortunately.”

But it’s unclear whether that number is accurate. That deposition, after all, was part of the very lawsuit in which a judge found that Trump has repeatedly inflated his net worth.

If he doesn’t have enough cash on hand, would he have to sell properties?

Trump would likely have to sell something, although it wouldn’t necessarily have to be property. He could sell investments or other assets.

What happens if he resists paying?

In the civil fraud case, which is in New York state court, if Trump can’t post the funds or get a bond, then the judgment would take effect immediately and a sheriff could begin seizing Trump’s assets.

The rules are slightly different in federal court, which is the venue for the $83.3 million judgment that Trump owes for defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll after she accused him of raping her. (He also owes Carroll an additional $5 million from a separate verdict last year.) Carroll could pursue post-judgment discovery under the jurisdiction of the judge who oversaw the trial. Through that process, the judge could order Trump to produce his bank account records, place liens or garnish his wages.

“I think he’s going to have to pay. And whether it requires him to sell or to put a lien on something to get a loan, that’s his problem, not ours. He’s going to pay,” Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan said on CNN last month....>

<....The judge, Kaplan added, will use “judgment enforcement mechanisms” to “make sure that he pays.”

If Trump truly can’t afford the judgments, he would have to declare bankruptcy.

Can Trump delay payment by appealing the verdicts?

No. In all three cases, he has to put money in an escrow account with the court or get a bond while he’s appealing the verdicts.

With the civil fraud verdict, which Trump has vowed to appeal, the amount to be posted or bonded is set by the court. It is typically about 120 to 125 percent of the judgment amount, to account for additional post-judgment interest that accrues during the appeal.

With last year’s Carroll verdict, which Trump has appealed, he turned over $5.5 million to the court, which was worth 111 percent of the judgment.

For the more recent Carroll verdict, which Trump has also vowed to appeal, 111 percent of the judgment would be $92.46 million. Trump has a 30-day window after the Jan. 26 verdict to either pay cash into the court’s escrow or get a bond while he appeals. If he chooses to file a bond, he will likely have to pay a 20 percent deposit ($16.66 million) and put up collateral, but it could come with fees and interest, making it more expensive in the long run. And it would require Trump to find a third party willing to take on the risk of loaning him money.

Does he personally have to pay the verdicts? Could he get his campaign or PAC or the RNC to pay?

The courts don’t have restrictions on the sources of funds used to pay judgments, and Trump would surely like to tap other funds than whatever money is in his own personal accounts.

He could transfer assets from the Trump Organization to himself in order to help satisfy the judgments.

Using his political vehicles to pay would be far trickier. There is a general ban on using campaign donations for personal uses unrelated to a campaign or the official duties of an officeholder. And as for his political action committees, Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at New York University law school, said they can’t pay Trump’s judgments.

“Campaign funds cannot be used for that purpose regardless of whether the PAC is the decision-maker,” he wrote in an email.

Besides, Trump’s PACs may not be able to afford the judgments, since he has been using them to pay the many lawyers defending him across his criminal and civil cases.

Two of Trump’s PACS spent $29 million in legal consulting and legal fees in the second half of last year, leaving only $5 million in his leadership PAC’s coffers.

The Republican National Committee doesn’t have the same ban on the personal use of funds as Trump’s campaign committee, but paying Trump’s judgments could jeopardize its nonprofit status.>

Back to 'puffing up legacies with tainted and/or imaginary games':

<[Event "Framingham Open"] [Site "Framingham Mass"]
[Date "1987.09.20"]
[EventDate "1987"]
[Round "3"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Mercuri, Louis A"]
[Black "Nute, Gary A"]
[ECO "B16"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<Crooked Hillary Radical Democrats, lunatics, election interference.>

<I've paid taxes like no one has ever paid them before>

<The banks love me, they love Trump!>

The same old clown... the same old tropes.

If he had been in the Ziegfield Follies they would have hooked him off the stsge at warp speed.

<[Event "Framingham Open"] [Site "Framingham Mass"]
[Date "1987.09.20"]
[EventDate "1987"]
[Round "4"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Mercuri, Louis A"]
[Black "Gurevich, Ilya"]
[ECO "B06"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "Framingham Open"] [Site "Framingham Mass"]
[Date "1987.09.??"]
[EventDate "1987"]
[Round "?"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Loyte, John W"]
[Black "Fried, James"]
[ECO "C57"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "Boston Met League"] [Site "Boston Mass"]
[Date "1983.11.11"]
[EventDate "1983"]
[Round "1"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[White "Kelley, J"]
[Black "Shaw, Alan"]
[ECO "B16"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has said the Lone Star State wouldn't have joined the American Union had Texans known about "the federal government not protecting our border" from irregular migration.

The series of remarks from Paxton, a Republican, were branded dangerous and vengeful by a progressive campaign group. They were made during his interviews with local or conservative-leaning radio shows and podcasts: The Joe Pags Show, DFW Morning News and The Truth With Lisa Boothe. Newsweek reached out to the office of Ken Paxton on Saturday morning by telephone and online contact form. This article will be updated if the Texas attorney general wishes to comment.

Tensions between Texan authorities and the Biden administration surged on January 22 when the Supreme Court ruled federal agents could remove razor-wire placed along the Texas-Mexico border on the orders of Governor Greg Abbott. In response, the Republican said Texas was being subject to an "invasion" and invoked "Texas's constitutional authority to defend and protect itself." Donald Trump, by some margin the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, said other GOP-controlled states should send National Guard troops to Texas to support Abbott's work.

In response to Paxton's comments, Philip Shulman, a spokesperson for progressive super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, told Newsweek: "Abuse of office, election conspiracies, and now talk of secession—Ken Paxton is a dangerous manipulator of the law who is more focused on his personal and vengeful politics than he is on defending Texans."

Appearing on The Joe Pags Show on January 27, Paxton said there is "no way that Texas agrees to come into the union under this premise that the federal law preempts your ability to protect yourself."

Paxton made similar remarks three days later on DFW Morning News: "I can't imagine when Texas joined the union, they said, well, maybe someday we'd be OK with the federal government not protecting our border, not defending us.

"And if we have incursions across into our state, if they don't do anything, we're OK with letting whatever happens happen. I cannot imagine that any state would have joined the union under that premise," Paxton added.

Paxton reiterated this point on February 2 during an appearance on the podcast of Fox News commentator Lisa Boothe, during which he said: "I cannot imagine any of these states joining a union, including Texas, if you had told them that the federal government wasn't going to defend the border and that they had to just sit on their hands, and it would be illegal and a violation of some court order to protect your own citizens. No one would have joined."

Texas existed as an independent state between 1836, after successfully breaking away from Mexico, and 1845, when it was annexed into the United States. It ceded from the U.S. in 1861 to join the pro-slavery Confederate States of America, before being reintegrated at the end of the American Civil War.

A survey of 814 eligible voters in Texas conducted for Newsweek by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, from February 1 to 3, found 44 percent were either "more likely" or "significantly more likely" to back Texan independence due to the situation on the southern border. Another 35 percent said this made no difference, while 16 percent replied it made them less likely to support secession from the U.S.>

<Nancy Pelosi is past pulling punches for former President Donald Trump.

"He's grotesque," the House speaker emerita told Newsweek in an exclusive interview on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in southern Germany on Saturday.

The annual event sees leaders and lawmakers from around the world gather in Germany for three days of "diplomatic speed dating," as attendees often jokingly refer to them. The summit has for decades been a fixture for world leaders, senior government officials, and all manner of politicos.

This year's iteration has been shrouded in anxiety. Trump's recent denigration of NATO's bedrock principles, frustration at the stalling of the Ukraine aid bill in Congress, and sadness over the untimely death of Russian political prisoner and veteran anti-President Vladimir Putin campaigner Alexei Navalny have all hung heavy over the gathering.

Trump talk has been constant—much to Pelosi's frustration.

"I think we spend too much time on him," she said during an interview in the Hotel Bayerischer Hof suite transformed into the weekend hub for the large U.S. delegation dispatched to Germany.

The group—which included Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Pelosi, and numerous representatives and senators of both parties—arrived intending to reassure American allies unsettled by partisan division in Washington D.C. and the looming prospect of a second Trump presidency.

"I'll say to you what I say to them: it's not going to happen," Pelosi said.

In response to Pelosi's remarks, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told Newsweek in an emailed statement: "Does Nancy Pelosi know where she is half the time?"

"Under President Trump there was peace and prosperity. Under Crooked Joe Biden and Democrats, there has been more misery, destruction, and chaos as they have become the biggest threat to democracy in American history."...>

<....The November presidential election is almost certain to be a repeat of the 2020 contest, pitting an ever-more aggrieved Trump against incumbent President Joe Biden. "We have to win that election," Pelosi said, echoing the White House framing of the race as a battle for the survival of American democracy.

"It cannot be considered an option," the veteran California congresswoman added of a Trump return, describing the 45th president with whom she has had repeated high-profile run-ins as "despicable."

Trump has brushed off a litany of personal scandals, two impeachments, and 91 felony charges on his path to the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Various polls put Trump close to the Biden in voter support, his challenge buoyed by concerns over the incumbent's age of 81.

"I'm very proud of Joe Biden," Pelosi said, having this week defended the president as "very sharp" and "always on the ball."

Regardless, it appears Biden is in for a fight in November. "Democracy is on the ballot," Pelosi said, echoing appeals from Biden and his allies for voters to turn out in historic numbers, as they did in 2020. According to the Pew Research Center, 62.8% of Americans of voting age cast their ballots in that election.

Americans, she added, should pay attention to "his coziness with Putin, his disrespect for the greatest force for freedom in NATO—for all these years after World War II—and of course the personal 'kitchen table' freedoms like a woman's right to choose the size and timing of your family; that's an economic issue at the kitchen table."

"Other freedom issues that are under assault from him as well," Pelosi said, noting in particular the pressures from the right on LGBTQ+ communities. Democrats, she added, want to "address the 'kitchen table' issues" and convince Americans "that there's a place for them in the economy of the future." The feeling to the contrary, she said, is what Trump "preyed upon before."

American influence at Munich has been strong throughout the event's 60 years, but the 2024 iteration has been dominated by the presidential election campaign and Congress' continued failure to pass a new Ukraine funding package.

"It's awkward to even talk about the election, except for the fear that people have that a grotesque person could be president of the United States," Pelosi said, "a person who takes pride in depriving women of their reproductive health choices, a person who toadies up to Putin, praises the president of China, chums up to [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Un. I mean, really, what happened?"

For all his rhetorical bombast, Trump's first term NATO track record included increased defense spending across the alliance, the commitment of troops to Poland, and the provision of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. Several Republican lawmakers in Munich this weekend noted that under Trump, Russia did not make the territory grabs it did under President Barack Obama or Biden.

Some allies are hoping that a second Trump term will mean similar bite accompanying the inevitable bark.

"I don't know what bite they are talking about," Pelosi said. "I think a bit more of a bite of a poisonous snake, and I think it's very horrible.">

Like snakes, <stalker>?

No: yew don't git ta dictate content heah. Capisce?