Trump trial live updates: Stormy Daniels to return to witness stand for cross-examination on hush money testimony

The defendant spent his day off from court yesterday hosting an event at Mar-a-Lago for people who bought his ludicrous superhero NFTs, rather than hitting the campaign trail, despite having previously complained bitterly about being cooped up in Judge Merchan’s chilly courtroom when he ‘d rather be staging rallies.

For more on Daniels, here are Kelly Rissman and Alex Woodward‘s recap of the key takeaways from Tuesday’s testimony.

Trump’s New York hush money trial will resume at Manhattan Criminal Court on Thursday following Wednesday’s recess, with porn star Stormy Daniels expected to return to the witness stand to face more cross-examination from the defendant’s lawyers.

Daniels appeared on Tuesday to regale jurors with her account of how she met Trump, the infamous sexual encounter she says they had in July 2006 and the events leading up to the 2016 presidential election.

One of the lighter moments came when she revealed she had never wanted to meet Trump for dinner on the now-infamous light in question, only for a friend to convince her.

“It’ll make a great story,” she said, according to Daniels.

“What could possibly go wrong?”

Here’s Alex Woodward‘s report from court on Tuesday as we gear up for more.

Elsewhere on Trump’s platform, he’s been urging the veteran conservative media tycoon to sack Paul Ryan from Fox’s board and praising the odious MTG in a post that arrived too late to influence the vote it discusses!

Interestingly, he also does not rule out toppling House speaker Mike Johnson “at some point”, just not right now.

Katie Hawkinson and Eric Garcia have this report on the Georgia congresswoman’s failure to remove him yesterday.

No wonder he sleeps in court.

Trump was up late on social media last night to attack Joe Biden after the president said the United States will not supply Israel with weapons for use in a ground offensive that endangers the Palestinian civilians who have taken shelter in the border city of Rafah.

“Crooked Joe is taking the side of these terrorists, just like he has sided with the Radical Mobs taking over our college campuses, because his donors are funding them,” Trump rages, smelling an opportunity, before once again baselessly insisting the war in Gaza would never have happened if he had remained president.

Here’s Andrew Feinberg with the full story on the president’s comments.

In a decision filed on Tuesday, US district judge Aileen M Cannon vacated a planned May 20 trial date, writing that a host of issues around evidence, discovery, and the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) still needed to be decided before the high-profile profile trial could begin.

Judge Cannon, a former federal prosecutor who was nominated to the bench by Trump in 2020, argued in his decision that extending the pre-trial process through the end of July would “outweigh the best interest of the public and Defendants in a speedy trial. ”

You may not have noticed it given the game-over nature of the Republican and Democratic presidential primaries, but people are still voting in the primary race in states across the nation, even though the nominations are all but certainly in the bag for Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Yesterday, it was Indiana’s turn and it was good news for both candidates who broke home with victories across every district in the state.

HOWEVER… Even though she dropped out of the GOP primary race in early March, former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley still got 22 per cent of the Republican vote, denying Mr Trump the total victory he doubtless wanted.

While some of those Haley voters will begrudgingly grit their teeth and vote for Trump in November out of party loyalty, the Biden campaign is doing its best to lure Trumps over to the Democrats, if only for this election. Given the narrow margins of victory in key swing states in 2020 this group could potentially swing the election to Biden if the trend is repeated elsewhere either with a vote for the Democrat ticket or by staying home.

Just this week in the key battleground state of Georgia, Republican former lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan wrote an op-ed expressing his intention to vote for Biden and encouraged other members of the party to join him to thwart a possible Trump victory in 2024.

He wrote in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Unlike Trump, I’ve belonged to the GOP my entire life,” he wrote. “This November, I am voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass.”

Here’s Amelia Neath reporting on Mr Duncan’s decision:

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is privately considering a plan to deploy American assassination squads to Mexico to take out drug cartel leaders if he is re-elected in November, according to a report.

Three sources familiar with the former president’s proposal told Rolling Stone that he has insisted that the American military has “tougher killers than they do” and is mulling a similar plot to that carried out when US forces killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi back in 2019.

The deployment would be covered, the outlet reported, and would not rely on the Mexican government’s consent.

Kelly Rissman have the story:

“People are really vicious, and no place are they more vicious than in their relationships with the opposite sex,” Donald Trump wrote in his 1997 book Trump: The Art of the Comeback.

Based on his own personal, professional and private life, the former president may never have said a truer word.