<....Some members here receive free speech to hoot, holler and harass others however they wish, whenever, wherever, including foul and purposely blatant defamation directed at members as a matter of routine (or just frequent off-topic posting). That in itself is malevolent, sick, improper, not the purpose of this chess website....>

Defamation--as in comparing me to Hitler and Ted Bundy? That what y'all had in mind?

<....Other member posts are purged and given suspensions for much kinder, gentler posts, including posts about chess. If FTB posts about Hans Niemann on a chess page -- poof -- Stonehenge deletes it because he can. That's NOT free speech nor fair monitoring. Free Speech is tolerant of opposing, disagreeable viewpoints, unpopular viewpoints. Tolerance is hardly fashionable at CGs. Therein lies the Chessgames double standard. The website monitoring here is lazy or absent, highly inconsistent, and woefully imbalanced, targeted....>

Your speciality is giving a nugget of content which is actually pertinent to the topic at hand, but using that wedge as a vehicle to launch into off-topic screeds on politics at game pages, or against your perceived enemies, all while proclaiming yourself a victim.

<....Fredthebear's CGs account began in 2009.

Despite years of false accusations by the troll master disaster and his pal my #1 cyberstalker, Fredthebear's personal forum just turned one year old. Read that again: ONE YEAR OLD. It began in May of 2023 just to try something different, still in its infancy....>

This is, of course, another lie.

<....The IT department promptly, unfairly reversed engineered my personal forum (as are other features of my account that no longer function) so that the public cannot see it readily like they do other personal forums. Just one of many ongoing CG attacks on my paid account that I have no say in....>

<The election stakes are as stark as they're simple: Law and order to ensure freedom versus lawlessness and disorder without freedom. That message screams aloud from the pages of TIME Magazine’s most recent cover story, “How far would Trump go?” It’s based on interviews with Trump and others close to him, including a full transcript and fact-check.

The most chilling example of what is at stake this fall is the devastation of women’s right to privacy and reproductive freedom. Trump “would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans.” A scenario that gruesomely echoes The Handmaid's Tale.

Doubt he means it? He’s already bragged about his role in overturning Roe v. Wade. Now he’s endorsing the next governmental invasion of women’s bodies.

It’s not only abortion rights he’s after. All the individual freedoms our Constitution guarantees are at risk if we hand power to someone intent on being a dictator “on Day One.” As the eminent historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat tweeted Tuesday, “Trump has been conditioning Americans for years to desire authoritarian rule with him as dictator.”

She pointed to Trump’s response to Time's question about whether he understood “why so many Americans see all this talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished freedoms?” He disagreed, insisting quite the opposite: “I think a lot of people like it.”

Constant repetition that the abnormal is normal: That’s how authoritarians pave the path to dictatorial rule. The unending recital of once-aberrant ideas dissolves resistance to the elimination of norms and conditions the populace to the relaxation of constraints on the leader.

Consider just four stunning samples from TIME’s interview with Trump:

First, there’s Trump’s promise to “deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit.” The federal “Posse Comitatus statute,” adopted 150 years ago, “remove[s] the military from regular civil law enforcement.”

A legislated exception to that law allowed the steps taken in 1957 and 1963 by Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Jack Kennedy — they invoked the Insurrection Act and federalized the National Guard to keep rebellious Southern governors and police from obstructing the established rights of black students to an equal education.

Perversely, during the insurrection on January 6, Trump sat on his hands after inciting the mob. In any case, he’s not talking about insurrection when he discusses “going into the cities.” He’s talking about using the military “as he sees fit,” legally or not. That would spell doom for our First Amendment rights to assemble peaceably in protest against his policies.

Second, he vowed “to carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country. . . [and is] willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military to that end.” Never mind that, as Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote, “the Fifth Amendment entitles [noncitizens] to due process of law in deportation proceedings.” Never mind that the Supreme Court has repudiated its World War II decision blessing detention camps for Japanese Americans.

Third, Trump said he is “weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have . . . been convicted.” Forget the beatings by flagpole of bear-sprayed police. Forget the terrorism and the desecration of the halls and offices of the Capitol, the mob chorus screaming, “Hang Mike Pence.” Such mass pardons would open the floodgates to future political violence by Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and any paramilitary group that supports Trump.....>

<....Fourth and perhaps most ominous of all, Trump refused to rule out violence if he loses the 2024 election. “If we don't win, . . . it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.” Fairness, no doubt, “as he sees fit.” If Trump loses, prepare for January 6 deja vu with Proud Boys “stand[ing] by.”

Three guardrails stop most human beings from committing terrible evils: A sense of right and wrong, the threat of being stopped, and fear of punishment. None exist for Trump.

As to the first, only someone comatose for the last nine years would fail to see that Trump’s guiding lights are money, power and self-interest, not a moral code.

Regarding the second, he plans to stock another Trump administration with yes-men and strip civil service protections from government employees who aren’t loyal to him and ready to betray their constitutional oath.

And as to the third, the Supreme Court majority gives every indication of being “in the tank for Trump,” and he told TIME that he would “fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone.” The guardrails will be down, the car will be going 110 mph on the mountain curve, and it will be veering straight over the constitutional cliff.

On Saturday night at the White House Correspondents’ dinner in DC, President Joe Biden paused the joking and put it on the line with his audience of political journalists:

I’m . . . asking you to rise up to the seriousness of the moment; move past the horse race numbers and . . . the distractions . . . and focus on what’s actually at stake. [The stakes] couldn’t be higher.

Hats off to Time and outlets like it that take to heart the unique gravity of this moment.>

1.c4 e5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Nf3 Nc6 4.d3 h6 5.g3 g6 6.Bg2 Bg7 7.O-O O-O 8.Rb1 a5 9.a3 d6 10.b4 axb4 11.axb4 Be6 12.b5 Ne7 13.Bb2 Qd7 14.Qb3 c5 15.bxc6 bxc6 16.Ra1 Rab8 17.Qc2 Qc7 18.Na4 c5 19.Nd2 Nc6 20.Bxc6 Qxc6 21.e4 Bh3 22.Rfb1 Ng4 23.Nc3 f5 24.Nd5 Qd7 25.Bc3 Rxb1+ 26.Rxb1 f4 27.gxf4 exf4 28.Bxg7 Ne3 29.Nxe3 fxe3 30.f3 Qxg7 31.Nf1 Rxf3 32.Qe2 Qf6 33.Nxe3 Qg5+ 34.Ng2 Qxg2+ 35.Qxg2 Bxg2 36.Kxg2 Rxd3 37.Rb7 Rd4 38.Rd7 Rxe4 39.Rxd6 Kf7 40.Rc6 Rxc4 0-1>

1.e4 e5 2.d4 exd4 3.Nf3 Bb4+ 4.c3 dxc3 5.bxc3 Bc5 6.Bc4 d6 7.Bg5 Ne7 8.O-O Nbc6 9.Nbd2 O-O 10.Nb3 Bb6 11.a4 a5 12.Nbd4 Bg4 13.Qb3 h6 14.Bh4 Qd7 15.h3 Bxf3 16.Nxf3 Ng6 17.Bg3 Rae8 18.Rfe1 Nce5 19.Nxe5 Nxe5 20.Bd5 Nd3 21.Re2 Nc5 22.Qc2 Kh8 23.Bc4 f5 24.exf5 Rxe2 25.Bxe2 Qxf5 26.Qxf5 Rxf5 27.Bf3 d5 28.Re1 Nxa4 29.Re8+ Kh7 30.c4 c6 31.cxd5 cxd5 32.Bg4 Rf6 33.Re7 Bd4 34.Rxb7 Nc3 35.Bh4 Rf8 36.Kf1 a4 37.Rb2 0-1>

Better a 'dishonest sun' than <ursus banalus> about.

<[Event "57th New England Open"] [Site "Framingham Mass"]
[Date "1997.09.01"]
[Round "5"]
[White "Foygel, Igor"]
[Black "Winer, Steven"]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "D80"]
[WhiteElo "2484"]
[BlackElo "2233"]

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 d5 4.e3 Bg7 5.b4 O-O 6.Nf3 b6 7.Qb3 c5 8.cxd5 cxb4 9.Qxb4 Nxd5 10.Nxd5 Qxd5 11.Bc4 Qd8 12.O-O Nc6 13.Qa3 Bb7 14.Bd2 Rc8 15.Rac1 e6 16.Rfd1 a6 17.Bxa6 Ra8 18.Qxf8+ Bxf8 19.Bxb7 Na5 20.Bxa8 Qxa8 21.Bxa5 bxa5 22.Ne5 Bd6 23.Nc6 Qa6 24.d5 e5 25.a4 Kg7 26.Rb1 Qc4 27.Nxa5 Qxa4 28.Nb7 Qd7 29.Nxd6 Qxd6 30.Rbc1 h5 31.Rc6 Qd7 32.d6 h4 33.h3 g5 34.Rc7 Qa4 35.Rcc1 Qd7 36.Rc4 Kg6 37.Kh2 f5 38.e4 f4 39.f3 g4 40.hxg4 h3 41.gxh3 Qd8 42.Rc2 Qh4 43.Rg2 1-0>

<It’s hard to think of a famous Supreme Court plaintiff with whom former President Donald Trump has <less> in common than Lee Yick, a Chinese immigrant who was convicted of operating an unlicensed laundry in late-19th-century San Francisco. Yick sued, arguing that San Francisco’s pattern of denying permits to virtually every Chinese applicant while granting them to virtually every white applicant violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court’s 1886 decision in his case, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, still stands today. It says that the application of a race-neutral law, such as San Francisco’s laundry-permitting scheme, can be so obviously discriminatory that it demonstrates an intentional (and actionable) violation of the Constitution.

Donald Trump is no Lee Yick. And yet, in a motion filed Thursday in Florida, his lawyers argue that Yick’s case provides a precedent for throwing out the charges in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents prosecution. They say federal prosecutors are engaged in unconstitutional “selective prosecution” of Trump. There are two different, but equally fatal, problems with Trump’s argument. First, for better or worse, the Supreme Court has made selective prosecution claims notoriously difficult to prove. Second, Trump is just about the worst possible person to bring a selective prosecution claim — since so much of his allegedly unlawful conduct in the Mar-a-Lago case is unprecedented.

A claim for selective prosecution is, in essence, a claim that the government chose to prosecute a defendant for the exact same conduct for which it chose not to prosecute a different individual. The claim includes the argument that there was no good reason (and, indeed, a nefarious one, like race or political views) for treating the two cases differently. The argument is not that the defendant is innocent; it’s that the government’s misconduct in singling out the defendant ought to be punished — by barring the prosecution of even a guilty defendant.

Perhaps because the stakes are so high, the Supreme Court in recent decades has made selective prosecution claims much more difficult to prove. Under a series of cases in the late 1990s, for instance, the justices regularly held that to establish a selective prosecution claim, the burden is on the defendant to identify materially similar cases that the government did not prosecute. And even then the selective prosecution claim would fail if the government had a good reason for not having brought the other case: Say, a suspect in that case cooperated with law enforcement or there were evidentiary issues....>

<....Only if the defendant could prove that the government had deliberately and intentionally singled him out from other similarly situated suspects without any good reason would such a claim succeed. This is why, for instance, it is exceedingly difficult to prove racial profiling claims. To establish that a police officer only gives speeding tickets to Black motorists, for example, a plaintiff would have to provide evidence of the officer not pulling over other non-Black motorists engaged in the same behavior. The plaintiff would have to prove a negative.

Applying that high standard to the Mar-a-Lago case is quick work. In the abstract, Trump’s lawyers are absolutely correct that there have been lots of previous cases in which senior government (and former government) officials have mishandled classified national security information and either weren’t charged or were charged with lesser offenses than Trump has been charged with in the Mar-a-Lago indictment. But the Supreme Court requires more than that. Trump would need to produce examples of government officials who, when specifically asked to return classified information wrongfully in their possession, not only lied about having that information but took steps to obstruct the government’s attempt to recover that information. That’s what the indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case alleges Trump did. It’s the government’s burden to prove those allegations at trial, but in a selective prosecution claim, it’s Trump’s burden to show that similar misconduct by others hasn’t been similarly prosecuted.

In this regard, Trump’s uniqueness hurts him, for try as his brief might, it doesn’t identify any other cases with similar claims about affirmative misrepresentations concerning the suspect’s retention of classified information. Because there aren’t any. Indeed, the reason Trump’s selective prosecution claim should fail is because of how much worse the conduct alleged in the Mar-a-Lago case is than that of the other officials his brief invokes as the relevant exemplars. In the court of public opinion, where facts don’t matter all that much, Trump and his supporters can wave their hands and make the cases look similar. But in a court of law, that’s not enough — and shouldn’t be enough.

Like claims about the unfairness of pretrial detention or the severity of the sentences in the Jan. 6 cases, there is a familiar — and perverse — irony at the bottom of Trump’s selective prosecution argument. Maybe we ought to discuss limiting the circumstances, in general, in which pretrial defendants can be detained. Maybe we ought to discuss reforms to all federal criminal sentences. Maybe we ought to discuss making it easier for defendants to establish selective prosecution claims. But as the selective prosecution claim in the Mar-a-Lago case makes clear, Trump isn’t the poster child for these reforms; he’s the anti-poster-child. Indeed, he’s in the position he’s in entirely because his behavior went so far beyond the limits of that of any of his predecessors.

That wasn’t true of Lee Yick, and that why [sic] Trump’s arguments that he’s just like Lee Yick are doomed to fail.>

<An off-hand remark—or a terribly misconstrued one—by a federal prosecutor at a private meeting with a defense attorney in Donald Trump’s classified documents case is once again rearing its ugly head, posing yet another speed bump in the former president’s already severely delayed trial.

U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon has already earned a reputation for making bizarre rulings that always favor the man who appointed her to the bench, pushing back a trial that could have started long ago.

Now comes another opportunity for Cannon to potentially side against Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith—this time over a wild story about potential prosecutorial misconduct by a key member of his team.

Last week, Smith filed court papers formally addressing the allegation that DOJ counterintelligence chief Jay Bratt made a veiled threat against defense lawyer Stanley Woodward when he started representing Navy veteran Waltine Nauta, a longtime Trump aide known as his Diet Coke valet.

The meeting now in question took place Aug. 24, 2022, nearly a full year before the Trump assistant was indicted for slyly moving boxes of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago in what prosecutors allege to have been an attempted coverup to protect his boss.

To hear Trump’s side tell it, Bratt casually noted that Woodward was being considered for a judge position in local District of Columbia courts—and wouldn’t want to screw that up by playing hardball, keeping his client quiet, and frustrating the federal investigation into Trump.

“Mr. Bratt attempted to coerce Mr. Nauta's compliance with the investigation by dangling potential favorability on Mr. Woodward's potential judicial nomination,” Woodward and another one of Nauta’s lawyers wrote on Friday. “Put differently, Mr. Woodward was presented with two options: Our way or the hard way.”

Option Two was a supposed “campaign of intimidation and harassment” that followed when Woodward wouldn’t help the feds flip his client. The lawyers for Trump’s assistant are now trying to leverage that and get the case dismissed, citing “vindictive prosecution”—a stark enough accusation that has federal prosecutors in damage control mode.

The same day Nauta’s defense lawyers made their legal filing, Smith’s team felt compelled to address “false accusations that cannot go unanswered.” In their version, Bratt couldn’t have possibly said such a thing, particularly since the counterintel chief didn’t even know Woodward was up for a judgeship. They claim that all Bratt did was incorrectly note what he mistakenly thought was Woodward’s service on D.C.’s local judicial nominating commission—only to be corrected by Woodward.

Prosecutors are trying to get Cannon to reflect on the way this accusation only popped up nine months after the meeting—shortly after investigators sent Trump and Nauta “target letters” putting them on notice that a potential indictment was coming. The strategy could make clear that it was only when the former president and his assistant felt like they were in hot water that they made up an excuse to cry foul.

Prosecutors stress that the entire story seems like a stretch.

“This accusation was never leveled before June 2023, and is implausible to say the least. It rests on a tortured theory that a 30-year veteran federal prosecutor, with three other federal prosecutors watching, attempted to extort a defense attorney he had just met by threatening to contact the White House, in violation of department policy, in order to discourage the president from advancing a long-dormant nomination to the superior court bench, unless the attorney promised to secure the cooperation of a client who had just retained him,” the prosecutors wrote. “Simply put, the accusation is false.”

“At no point did Bratt respond with anything that could be considered a threat or a suggestion of a quid pro quo,” they added. “It did not happen.”

This issue is yet another potential roadblock in a case full of them. It’s been several months since attorneys on both sides asked the judge to set a trial date, yet Cannon has refused to put something on the calendar. And the previous start date of May 20 is impossible, given that Trump is currently set to be stuck in a Manhattan courtroom until the end of the month.

If the substance sounds familiar, it may be because House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) last year launched “an inquiry into alleged prosecutorial abuses,” one of his many forays into Trump’s legal cases.....>

<....The Trump-allied congressman has repeatedly tried to run interference on the criminal prosecutions of the former president, albeit with little to show for it. Jordan’s attempts to derail the Manhattan District Attorney’s case—by trying to embarrass DA Alvin Bragg Jr. and intimidating a former prosecutor who wrote a tell-all memoir about the investigation—went nowhere, as the trial is now underway. And Jordan got torn to shreds when he tried to elbow his way into Fulton County DA Fani Willis’ investigation in Georgia.

The congressman’s misadventures haven’t worked. And it’s unclear whether Jordan’s team has received any of the documents or communications they demanded from the special counsel’s office over the August 2022 meeting. (Jordan’s team did not respond to a request for information.)

However, Cannon could very well take up the banner herself, now that she’s in a position to halt the case while she considers whether or not this accusation by Nauta’s lawyer is worth exploring. The stakes are higher than they might seem.

“If the prosecutor actually did that, that is very bad for the case. It could turn the prosecutor into a witness for the defense later in the case. And it could support a dismissal if it impacted the representation he got from his defense lawyer. That’s a huge problem,” said Catherine Ross, a professor emeritus at George Washington University Law School.

She noted that this accusation—albeit dubious—is far more serious than the one that just interrupted the case against Trump in Georgia. Earlier this year, Trump’s many election interference conspiracy co-defendants banded together to decry Willis’ romantic relationship with her lead prosecutor, an effort that temporarily detoured the case, earned the DA a scathing rebuke from the judge, and knocked the prosecutor off the team.

While the fling was a show of poor judgment by the DA, it does not appear to have affected the substance of the prosecution itself.

By contrast, Ross said, “this is much more serious and much more directly involved with the prosecutor in the case.”

But that doesn’t mean it needs to take a long time to resolve. Legal scholars told The Daily Beast that judges don’t often field accusations of this particular brand of legal misbehavior—and certainly not in a case of this magnitude—but there’s a tried and true method for getting through it. A judge can hold a brief evidentiary hearing, almost like a mini-trial, and demand to see actual evidence that this occurred. If there is none, the case can move on.

But Cannon is no ordinary federal judge.

Legal observers have been aghast watching her bend over backwards to accommodate the politician who put her on the bench during his closing months at the White House. Trump’s lawyers were caught judge-shopping, and the months since have shown they did so with good reason. From the start, Cannon entertained a civil challenge to the FBI search at Trump’s oceanside Mar-a-Lago mansion in South Florida and actually stopped federal agents from reviewing the classified evidence they’d seized—one that had to be quashed by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals....>

<....This relatively inexperienced judge’s penchant for siding with the MAGA cause has only gotten clearer over time. She created the specter of a supposed concern for Trump’s privacy, a gross distortion of the facts that only came out due to a court screwup. Then, once the indictment came down, Trump and his co-defendants scored when the “random” judge-selection system gave her the case—only to have her severely delay the trial.

Her fitness to remain on the case was called into question last year when she tried to use her authority to probe Smith’s use of a grand jury in Washington, D.C.—far outside her district in South Florida.

In recent weeks, Cannon has sent even more signals of her sympathy to Trump.

In March, Cannon only temporarily shelved Trump’s arguments that the nation’s national security laws are “too vague” to be used against him for keeping classified records at Mar-a-Lago. Days later, she tried to corner prosecutors toying with the idea of a devastating ultimatum: eventually forcing them to choose between letting jurors see the top secret records in question or give Trump a free pass.

Then last month, Smith felt compelled to track the unhinged origin of Trump’s defense that the government records at Mar-a-lago were “personal,” connecting the dots from a right-wing legal advocate all the way to the judge who actually considered it. Days later, Cannon deftly dodged Smith’s plan to start down a path that could get her booted from the case.

That’s why Ross doubts Cannon will handle this well.

“She can use this to delay,” Ross cautioned. “She can make a decision, wait for them to appeal it, she can say she needs a prolonged inquiry and put off the hearing for two months–which is her style. She doesn’t render decisions quickly. She could give them six weeks to have them submit affidavits she might want to see. She has a lot of discretion in how to respond to this.”>

<Former Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Michael Steele said Saturday morning that Donald Trump is "afraid of losing" this year's election as he reacted to comments made by the former president in a recent Time magazine article.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential election, told Time that he may not be willing to accept the results of November's general election if he loses to Democratic President Joe Biden.

While campaigning in Wisconsin on Wednesday, Trump said of the results of the 2024 election in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "If everything's honest, I'll gladly accept the results. I don't change on that. If it's not, you have to fight for the right of the country."

He added: "But if everything's honest, which we anticipate it will be—a lot of changes have been made over the last few years—but if everything's honest, I will absolutely accept the results."

These comments prompted Steele, a co-host of MSNBC's The Weekend, to doubt the former president's motives in questioning the integrity of U.S. elections.

"The idea that you think, that of all of the elections we've had in the history of this country, that your election is the least honest and the most corrupt, it just shows the fallacy of what the man is laying out there," Steele said.

He added: "Donald Trump is afraid of losing because it strikes at the core of the thing that is most important to him, and that is his ego. And he doesn't want to do the work to actually win. He wants to goad and cajole and bully people into believing something about our system because he is too weak of a man to actually go out and campaign like any other normal candidate who would go out and campaign."

When reached via email on Saturday afternoon, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told Newsweek in response to Steele's comments, "Never Trumpers suffer from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that they would be OK with the potential for dishonest elections and threats to Democracy."

During his interview with the Journal Sentinel, the former president claimed that he won Wisconsin in 2020, despite there being no evidence of this. Biden beat Trump in Wisconsin by over 20,000 votes.

"If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin," Trump said. "It also showed I won the election in other locations."

Steele, chair of the RNC from 2009 to 2011, addressed the MSNBC panel and camera as he remarked Saturday about the former president.

"That is your truth, Donald Trump," he said. "And what you are trying to do is game the system, as he did in 2016 and 2020, to say that, 'If I don't win, the system is corrupt.' No, Donald Trump, if you don't win it's because more people voted against you than for you and our electoral system confirms that."

When asked earlier this week by Newsweek how Trump will determine if the 2024 election is honest given that he continues to claim that Biden's 2020 election win was stolen due to widespread voter fraud despite there being no evidence of such a claim, Cheung asked over email: "So is your argument that people should accept dishonest elections?"

When probed further, Cheung simply wrote: "Dishonest elections are bad."

Meanwhile, voters believe that Trump and Biden are running almost equally good 2024 campaigns, according to a new poll.

A Redfield & Wilton Strategies survey of 1,500 eligible voters, conducted exclusively for Newsweek, found that 37 percent think Trump is currently running the best campaign, compared to 36 percent who think Biden is.

The results arrive despite Trump currently having his campaign schedule severely hindered as he must appear in court most weekdays in New York as part of his criminal hush money trial.

Trump became the first former president in U.S. history to stand trial in a criminal case last month. Following an investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office, Trump was indicted in March 2023 on 34 charges of allegedly falsifying business records relating to hush money payments that were made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign. Daniels alleges she had an affair with Trump in 2006, which he has denied. The former president has pleaded not guilty to all charges and said the case against him is politically motivated.