Trump suffers series of legal blows on taxes, Mar-a-Lago raid
Ex-president Donald Trump suffered one major legal blow Tuesday and seemed on the brink of another, as the US Supreme Court ruled that his tax returns should be turned over to a committee of the House of Representatives, while an Appeals Court seemed ready to revoke a lower court decision to appoint a special master to review the materials seized in the FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
In a brief, two-sentence order, the Supreme Court rebuffed Trump’s effort to block the House Ways and Means Committee from obtaining his income tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service. The decision was unanimous, including all three of the ultra-right justices nominated by Trump himself to the high court.
The committee first subpoenaed Trump’s tax returns in 2019, the third year of his presidency, but the legal challenges have dragged on to nearly the end of the second year of Biden’s presidency. The senior Democrat on the committee, Bill Pascrell of New Jersey, said the court case had gone on for 1,329 days, nearly as long as the American Civil War.
The delay was in large measure because it was heard at the lower-court level by a Trump-appointed federal district judge, Trevor McFadden, who conceded that court precedents were unequivocally against the then-president, then sat on the case for more than two years, until after Trump was defeated in the 2020 presidential election. His subsequent order to turn over the tax returns was then appealed to the circuit court, which upheld McFadden, and then appealed again to the Supreme Court.
Trump, who has fought a delaying action after being the first presidential candidate in half a century to refuse to release his tax returns during the campaign, voiced his rage against the Supreme Court decision, particularly against the justices he had himself appointed.
“Why would anybody be surprised that the Supreme Court has ruled against me, they always do!” Trump wrote on the right-wing social media site he established after he was kicked off Twitter, Truth Social. “The Supreme Court has lost its honor, prestige, and standing, & has become nothing more than a political body, with our Country paying the price.”
He added, “Shame on them!” and rehashed his grievances over the court refusing to hear his bogus legal challenges to his 2020 election defeat.
A second legal proceeding on Tuesday was a hearing before a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, sitting in Atlanta, Georgia, on Trump’s effort to restrict the search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida by having the documents seized reviewed by a “special master,” a retired federal judge who could withhold some or all of the documents from the FBI and the Department of Justice.
The decision to appoint a special master was highly unusual, and was made by a Trump-appointed federal district judge, Aileen Cannon, who appeared to be rewarding the president who had placed her on the bench. Raymond Dearie, the retired federal judge chosen as special master, is going through 13,000 documents seized in the raid, except for more than 100 marked as secret, which the Justice Department has withheld. He is to determine whether any of the documents involve attorney-client privilege, or are Trump’s personal property, as the ex-president claims.
The three appeals court judges asked questions that expressed skepticism over Trump’s claim that as a former president, he was entitled to different treatment than any other target of a federal investigation. The chief judge of the circuit court, William Pryor, an appointee of George W. Bush, who was randomly selected as part of the three-judge panel, remarked, “Other than the fact that this involves a former president, everything else about this is indistinguishable from any pre-indictment search warrant.”
He continued: “We’ve got to be concerned about the precedent that we would create that would allow any target of a federal criminal investigation to go into a district court and to have a district court entertain this kind of petition … and interfere with the executive branch’s ongoing investigation.”
The other two judges on the three-judge panel were Trump appointees, but they appeared to share Pryor’s reluctance to set a precedent that a former president is above the law. Judge Andrew L. Brasher asked Trump lawyer James Trusty, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, to cite “a single decision by a federal court other than this one” that had issued the type of ruling he sought. Trusty ducked the question.
Trump’s lawyers also filed a new motion with Judge Cannon seeking release of an unredacted copy of the search warrant executed by the FBI agents who visited the Mar-a-Lago estate. As the New York Times noted in its report:
“An unredacted copy would give Mr. Trump’s lawyers access to sensitive information, like the witnesses prosecutors had interviewed or other details that might shed light on the Justice Department’s inquiry. Information like that would prove useful should the lawyers seek to challenge the legality of the search or begin to craft a defense against potential criminal charges.
“Asking Judge Cannon, who sits in the Southern District of Florida, to consider unsealing the warrant affidavit would have another effect in the case: It would ensure her continued involvement in the documents inquiry even if the appeals court ultimately dismisses her special master order.”
In other words, Trump’s legal team seeks to keep the pro-Trump judge on side, even if her most important intervention, naming the special master, is thrown out by the appeals court.
Press reports cited as many as nine total court cases brought by or against Trump in which there were legal actions in the course of the past week. These range from lawsuits against him by his niece Mary and his former fixer, Michael Cohen, both dismissed; the lawsuit against him by Jean Randall, who alleges Trump sexually assaulted her, for which a court hearing has been scheduled; and the New York state prosecution over tax evasion and other financial flimflam by the Trump Organization, which moved forward despite a Trump countersuit.
The vast array of legal cases suggests two things: the vast range of Trump’s own criminal activities over many decades; and the effort by his opponents within the ruling elite to tie up his current political efforts—he announced his candidacy for president in 2024 last week—in legal knots, largely of his own making
Trump Dined at Mar-a-Lago with White Nationalist, Holocaust Denier Nick Fuentes Alongside Kanye West
Kanye West released screenshots of text messages and a video after his dinner Tuesday night at Mar-a-Lago with former President Donald Trump that suggest in addition to dining with the rapper this week, the former president met with an openly white nationalist and Holocaust denier named Nick Fuentes.
In the video discussing the dinner the day after, West claims: “Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes.”
In a separate tweet, West released screenshots of text messages purportedly between himself, Fuentes, Milo Yiannopoulos, and an unidentified person whose name is blurred out.
In this screenshot, the person identified as Fuentes specifically says he spoke to Trump. The unidentified person first surmises and blames former Trump aide and current GETTR CEO Jason Miller for leaking the sighting of Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago in conjunction with West’s meeting with Trump. After the person identified as Yiannopoulos responds saying Trump’s 2024 presidential announcement speech was written by Miller, the unidentified person asks the person identified as Fuentes if he told Trump during dinner that Miller did not like Fuentes.
Fuentes responds: “Yes. I told him that Jason Miller had me banned on Gettr.”
West replies to that: “I told Nick to tell the former president that Nick hated his speech.”
In addition to these developments, two people who say they were at the dinner on Tuesday evening–Yiannopoulos and onetime Trump aide Karen Giorno–have publicly stated that Fuentes was in fact at the dinner with West and Trump.
“Nick attended the dinner and sat across from the president. I sat to the president’s right and Ye to his left,” Giorno said in a statement to podcaster Tim Poole’s website Timcast. “The president was by himself for dinner but invited Ye to meet some people on the patio.”
Cassandra Fairbanks, the author of the article on Timcast that quotes Giorno–who is now working for West’s 2024 campaign after having worked for Trump in 2016–and Yiannopoulos adds in a later sentence citing Yiannopoulos on record confirming the presence of Fuentes at the dinner with Trump: “Though Trump allegedly flew off the handle at Ye, he was ‘dazzled’ by Fuentes, Yiannopoulos told Timcast.”
Trump’s campaign has not responded on record with a statement about this yet. Breitbart News has repeatedly asked the Trump campaign for comment on this matter multiple times over the course of more than 24 hours.
Daily Beast was first with a story reporting Fuentes’s presence at Mar-a-Lago, but, citing an anonymous source, said Fuentes did not dine with Trump. That report is now contradicted by Kanye’s video, the purported text messages Kanye has since released, and the on-record statements from two purported attendees.
These latest revelations turn what could have been a minor story into a major national narrative, where the GOP frontrunner for president in 2024 — the former president and as of now the only formal GOP candidate for the office in the next election — seems to have met with an open white nationalist, antisemite, and Holocaust denier in Fuentes. Fuentes’ now-shut-down YouTube page is shot-through with racist and antisemetic rants that date as far back as 2014.
Fuentes said his existence is “absolutely” harmed by Jewish people. In 2019, a clip emerged of Fuentes denying the Holocaust. Fuentes has called Donald Trump disavowing white supremacy “totally wrong and a big mistake.” Fuentes was also at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017.
He also said Jim Crow laws, segregated water fountains, and schools were all “better for” white and black people.
Trump also meeting with West less than a month after his antisemitic comments — from threatening to go “death con [sic] 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” to claiming that the “Jewish people have owned the black voice” — caused a media firestorm is also newsworthy for multiple reasons. First, Trump’s views on West’s antisemitic comments can’t go unknown. Secondly, West says he is also running for president in 2024 — he also says in the above video he asked Trump to be his vice presidential candidate — so why Trump would meet with a possible rival, however serious or unserious that person’s candidacy is, raises questions as well. West hiring Giorno, who was a critical part of Trump’s 2016 operation in Florida, is a sign he aims to be seen as a serious candidate for the White House.
The fact that Fuentes and West campaign surrogate Yiannopoulos visited Mar-a-Lago alongside West on Tuesday was first reported in the Daily Beast.
Before the Trump-West Mar-a-Lago meeting, social media was abuzz with an 8-second clip showing West and Fuentes walking together through a Miami airport.
Trump sitting down with West comes a week after the former president announced his latest White House bid and some six weeks after the Grammy-winner lost at least a dozen endorsement deals and a large chunk of his personal wealth in response to his antisermatic remarks. Last month, West refused to walk back or apologize for his antisemitic comments, and instead doubled down, reading, from a spreadsheet, a list of names of top Jewish executives of major media and entertainment corporations from Disney to USA Today.
Indeed, Kanye West tweeted Tuesday “First time at Mar-a-Lago. Can’t believe I kept President Trump waiting. What you guys think his response was when I asked him to be my running mate in 2024?
Jerome Hudson is Breitbart News Entertainment Editor and author of the book 50 Things They Don’t Want You to Know About Trump. Order your copy today. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter, instagram, and Parlor @jeromeehudson
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