E. Jean Carroll wants to use defamation win money on ‘something Trump hates’: Latest

Erik Larson of Bloomberg News has calculated that the E Jean Carroll and New York fraud civil cases brought against Donald Trump have the potential to wipe out as much as 76 per cent of his liquid assets, or 15 per cent of his alleged total wealth.

The former president is estimated to be worth approximately $10bn, with around $600m of that in liquid assets. In the Carroll case, a jury has ordered him to pay her $83.3m in compensation and punitive damages, while in the fraud case against the Trump Organization, prosecutors have asked for a disgorgement of $370m and for him to be barred from conducting business in New York State — Mr Trump has already been found liable of fraud.

The president of far-right media outlet One America News Network allegedly sent a Donald Trump-linked lawyer a spreadsheet that claimed to contain passwords belonging to employees of a voting technology company that is now suing the network for defamation.

In the volatile aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, OAN president Charles Herring appeared to send the document to Trump-connected attorney and election conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who promoted baseless claims about the electoral process and voting machine companies on-air while pursuing spurious legal efforts to reverse Mr Trump’s loss.

OAN executives “may have engaged in criminal activities” by violating state and federal data privacy laws, according to lawyers from voting technology company Smartmatic, which is suing the network, Fox News, Ms Powell and other Trump allies for billions of dollars in damages for promoting bogus claims that the company’s software flipped votes to rig President Joe Biden’s victory.

Alex Woodward has the story:

A former IRS contractor who stole and leaked the tax records of former president Donald Trump and thousands of other wealthy individuals has been sentenced to five years in prison.

Charles Littlejohn pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorised disclosure of income tax returns in October 2023.

He leaked the information to two news outlets and deleted the documents from an IRS-assigned laptop issued to him as an external consultant working with the government agency. He then took steps to cover his tracks.

Accessing the data undetected involved navigating loopholes in the system and then downloading records to an Apple iPod before uploading them to a private website that he later deleted.

This is a developing story…

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts shared some thoughts about how Donald Trump is trying to scuttle a bipartisan immigration deal for his own political gain.

“This is a man who puts himself first and puts the United States of America way behind that,” she told CNN’s Kate Bolduan.

The Democrat lawmaker also had some sharp words for the Republican Party as a whole, accusing its members of putting the former president ahead even of the billionaires and millionaires she says the party traditionally puts ahead of the American people.

“Who do Republicans put first? For a long time, they just put the millionaires and billionaires first. But now it’s Donald Trump first. And then the millionaires and billionaires and then the rest of the country.”

Here’s a reminder of our top story from this morning.

Ha! Well, at least that’s a new one.

In case you missed this, the legendary West Coast rapper has explained his extraordinary about-turn in attitude on the subject of the former president, whom he once considered a clown and “shot” in a 2017 music video.

Jacob Stolworthy has more.

“He is a real ‘STIFF’ who is selling the Automobile Industry right into the big, powerful, hands of China,” Mr Trump added about Mr Fain. “Fifty-five per cent of the industry has already left the US, and the rest will soon be following if I am not elected President.”

For Indy Voices, David Lister writes:

“Johnny Marr, once guitarist and co-songwriter with 1980s band The Smiths, has blown a gasket. He is furious that Donald Trump is using a Smiths song “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” as his campaign music. Marr does not want his song associated with a man who is politically on the right. And Trump is even further to the right than Marr’s former bandmate Morrissey….

“But I believe that rock stars are quite wrong to be irked when their music is used by politicians they disapprove of. It’s not just that it can be interpreted as virtue signalling, it’s something much more important: limiting their music to one side of the political spectrum diminishes it – and them – somewhat.

Great music is art – and art, once it is “out there”, belongs to everybody. Like a play or a novel or a painting, it belongs to everyone to make their own interpretations, to use and to love.”

You can read his thoughts in full below.