Judge to hold hearing in Trump classified documents case: Live updates

Republican California assemblymember Vince Fong, who received the backing of former president Donald Trump, won the special election on Tuesday to replace former House speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Fong, who is close to McCarthy and got his support, beat Tulare County sheriff Mike Boudreaux to serve the remainder of the former speaker’s term in the House, which ends in early January.

The newly-elected member said in a statement that he’ll focus on border security, supporting small businesses and investing in water storage important to agriculture in the area.

Gustaf Kilander has more.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) headquarters in Washington DC was placed on lockdown on Wednesday after a suspicious substance was found.

Two vials of blood were sent to the headquarters, US Capitol Police (USCP) told The Independent.

“At approximately 7.45am, the USCP responded to the 300 block of First Street, SE, for the report of a suspicious package,” a spokesperson said.

“The package was just cleared by our Hazardous Incident Response Division. It contained two vials of blood,” the spokesperson said shortly after 10am ET.

“The source of the package and its contents will be further investigated.”

Gustaf Kilander has this report.

The late-night hosts have, of course, been having a field day with the Republican presidental candidate’s latest Nazi-related controversy (honestly America, that is a sentence no one should ever have to write).

Here’s Amelia Neath and James Liddell with the latest from Colbert.

The Republican presidential candidate started the month owing his lawyers a seven-figure sum as the ex-president burns through thousands of dollars per day to cover his burgeoning legal fees.

Founded and controlled by Trump, the Save America PAC has been his primary fundraising and political spending wing since he left the White House.

The PAC, composed of wealthy pro-Trump donors, has absorbed most of the cost from his legal troubles, as he faces 88 felony counts including 34 from his hush money trial alone.

The dishonesty of Trump’s claim that the Feds were specifically authorised to shoot him during its classified documents raid on Mar-a-Lago two years ago is just jaw-dropping.

The agents involved, furthermore, knew he would not be at home at the time anyway, hence choosing the moment they did.

But as undeterred by inconvenient truths as ever, he assures his supporters “I nearly escaped death” as he begs for their loose change, a matter of weeks after his own lawyers argued in front of the US Supreme Court that he, as president, should be entitled to order the assassination of a political rival.

And look who’s taking credit for it all!

Here’s James Liddell on the ever-preposterous Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The Democratic National Committee has launched a campaign to target the “desperate race to the bottom” to become Trump’s running mate.

The DNC’s “Trump’s MAGA Veepstakes” will highlight the Republican vice presidential hopefuls’ anti-abortion views, election lies, and support for gutting healthcare and Social Security.

“Like any narcissist, Donald Trump will choose a VP in his image: an extreme, anti-choice MAGA election denier who wants to rip away Americans’ freedoms and sell out working families to help their special interest donors,” DNC communications director Rosemary Boeglin said in a statement shared with The Independent.

“Trump has floated dozens of names, and while he trots them around like sad show ponies on the campaign trail, it doesn’t really matter who’s in his good graces one day and who’s shooting their dog the next.

“Trump’s VP contenders have all already shown they pass his extreme, MAGA litmus test.”

Here’s more from Alex Woodward.

The prosecutor who brought charges against Trump in Georgia sailed to victory in her Democratic primary re-election race on Tuesday night – and celebrated with a signature glass of Grey Goose vodka.

Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, had been the favorite in the race against her opponent Christian Wise Smith, who she also defeated in 2020.

In a landslide victory, she took more than 80 per cent of all Democratic votes.

Now, she will face off against Republican candidate Courtney Kramer during the general election in November.

In her victory speech, Willis thanked supporters saying: “They want a district attorney that believes everyone deserves to be safe and everyone is entitled to some dignity.”

Alex Woodward and Ariana Baio have been covering Trump’s hush money trial for The Independent every single day since Judge Merchan first gavelled proceedings open on Monday 15 April.

For the past month, they’ve endured long lines and all kinds of weather to bring you live coverage and analysis from inside the courthouse.

As the trial finally draws to a close, you can find them on Reddit from 12pm ET taking your questions on all aspects of the last five weeks.

From the blockbuster testimony of Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen to Trump sleeping at the bench, ask them anything!

Ex-New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani has pleaded not guilty to election interference charges in Arizona after being served court papers at his 80th birthday party.

Giuliani, former personal attorney to Donald Trump, faces nine felony charges for his alleged role in a 2020 presidential election interference plot.

The former mayor has been charged alongside 17 others in the scheme.

He appeared virtually at his arraignment on Tuesday in Phoenix, Arizona, where he was required to post a $10,000 bond. His trial will begin in October.

Katie Hawkinson has the details.

Judge Aileen Cannon, presiding over Trump’s classified documents case in Florida, will hold her first hearing with prosecutors and defense lawyers on Wednesday since indefinitely postponing the trial earlier this month.

Judge Cannon will hear arguments regarding Trump’s request to dismiss the indictment brought against him by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith on the basis that it fails to clearly articulate a crime and instead amounts to “a personal and political attack against President Trump” with a “litany of uncharged grievances both for public and media consumption”.

Prosecutors on Smith’s team will argue against that request.

The case had been set for trial on 20 May but Judge Cannon cited numerous issues she has yet to resolve as the basis for cancelling it, with no further indication as to when it may be ready to start.

Trump himself is not expected to be present for the hearing, which will begin at 10am ET in Fort Pierce, but the motion filed by his lawyers is just one of several they have submitted seeking to dismiss the case, some of which have already been denied.

Also scheduled for Wednesday are arguments by a Trump co-defendant, his valet Walt Nauta, to dismiss the charges against him.

The arguments come one day after a newly-unsealed motion revealed that defense lawyers are seeking to exclude evidence from the boxes of records that FBI agents seized during a search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach in August 2022.

The defense lawyers asserted in the motion that the raid was unconstitutional and “illegal” and the FBI affidavit filed in justification of it was tainted by misrepresentations.

Smith’s team rejected each of those accusations and defended the investigative approach as “measured” and “graduated”.

It said the search warrant was obtained after investigators collected surveillance footage showing what it said was a concerted effort to conceal the boxes of classified documents inside the property.

“The warrant was supported by a detailed affidavit that established probable cause and did not omit any material information,” prosecutors wrote.

“And the warrant provided ample guidance to the FBI agents who conducted the search. Trump identifies no plausible basis to suppress the fruits of that search.”

The defence motion was filed in February but was made public on Tuesday, along with hundreds of pages of documents from the investigation that were filed to the case docket in Florida.

Those include a previously-sealed opinion last year from the then-chief judge of the federal court in Washington, which said that Trump’s lawyers, months after the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, had turned over four additional documents with classification markings that were found in Trump’s bedroom.

The March 2023 opinion from US district judge Beryl Howell directed a former lead lawyer for Trump in the case to abide by a grand jury subpoena and to turn over materials to investigators, rejecting defence arguments that their cooperation was prohibited by attorney-client privilege and concluding that prosecutors had made a “prima facie” showing that Trump had committed a crime.

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee for 2024, has pleaded not guilty and denied any wrongdoing.