Raw Story

A New York appeals court five-judge panel appeared “skeptical” of the civil fraud verdict in the case charging Donald Trump, his company, some family members, and his Chief Financial Officer falsely overvalued and undervalued assets to obtain favorable loan rates and to pay less taxes. Judges appeared to suggest bans had a responsibility to beware.

Judge Arthur Engoron had imposed a $364 million sentence on Trump, which is approaching $500 millions with interest. Judges heard Trump’s appeal on Thursday.

The judges “seemed somewhat skeptical that the civil fraud verdict should hold,” HuffPost reports, “with one judge dubbing it an ‘disturbing’ amount and another suggesting that the ‘sophisticated parties’ Trump and Trump Organization engaged with were obligated to do their due diligence.”

Judges also appeared to suggest New York Attorney General Letitia James may have gone too far.

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“How do we draw a line, or at least put up some guardrails, to know when the AG [attorney general] is operating well within her broad — admittedly broad — sphere … and when she is going into an area that wasn’t intended for her jurisdiction?” Justice John Higgitt asked, The Hill reports.

The Washington Examiner, however, reported it “was not immediately clear where the panel might land once it reached a decision on the case. At times, the panel asked several pointed questions to James’s team of lawyers, while the judges appeared to listen more intently to the defense’s argument at other moments.”

Trump announced a press conference at Trump Tower for Thursday at 4:30 PM, although a topic was not included in the release.

As Hurricane Helene barrels closer to making landfall off of Florida’s coast, the Taylor County Sheriff’s Office offered residents ignoring evacuation orders a stark warning that stunned many: mark your bodies with a permanent marker so that you can be identified later.

Taylor County, home to 20,000 residents in northern Florida near the Big Bend region, was expected to take a direct hit from the Category 4 storm, according to NBC News. The storm was projected to make landfall Thursday night. Sheriff Wayne Padgett said the county will be “in the dead center of” the storm, the news station reported.

“If you or someone you know chose not to evacuate, PLEASE write your name, birthday and important information on your arm or leg in A PERMANENT MARKER so that you can be identified and family notified,” the Taylor County Sheriff's Office wrote in a social media statement.

The post generated more than 3,000 shares and hundreds of comments ranging from comparisons of Hurricane Katrina before it struck New Orleans in 2005, to fear for those choosing to ride out Helene.

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“It cannot be stressed enough how serious of a situation this is for Florida,” Jordan Hall, an international storm chaser for MyRadar Weather wrote on X.

“This has to be the most scariest post I’ve ever read, prayers for everybody up there,” wrote Florida resident Tyler White in a Facebook comment to the sheriff’s office.

“I felt the same way reading this. Very surreal way to put it,” another Facebook user, Jen Marie, responded.

Another user Traci Elliott chimed in: “Morbid yes but also helpful.”

Democrats are keying on three races — in New York, Florida and Maryland — that they hope can boost Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) chances of gaining a majority, according to a report.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the official campaign arm for House Democrats, is flushing cash into candidates Whitney Fox of Florida, April McClain Delaney in Maryland and John Avlon in New York, Axios reported Thursday.

Fox is running in Florida's 13th Congressional District against incumbent Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who defeated Democrat Eric Lynn in 2022 with 53 percent of the vote in the right-leaning district.

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Meanwhile, Delaney is a former Commerce Department official, lawyer and philanthropist running against Republican Neil Parrott, a former state delegate, in Maryland's 6th Congressional District. The race is expected to be the state’s most competitive congressional race this year, according to Maryland Matters. The district has a very slight Democratic lean.

And Avlon, a former CNN anchor and political commentator, is running for Congress on in New York's 1st Congressional District on Long Island against Republican incumbent Rep. Nick LaLota. That district has a slight Republican lean.

A menswear fashion expert has no time for former President Donald Trump's new line of watches.

Derek Guy, a menswear expert who has contributed to the Washington Post and Esquire, publicly shamed Trump for shilling a $100,000 watches he described as an obvious scam.

"I don't understand how anyone can do this to their supporters," Guy wrote on X. "They play you as a sucker."

Trump the same day announced the release of his Tourbillon watches on Truth Social — where he often shares political messages — in an ad campaign from "your favorite president" standing in front of a row of American flags.

"That's a lot of diamonds," Trump says. "I love gold, I love diamonds."

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The Trump Watch website only offers 147 of the Trump Victory Tourbillon then a series of Fight Fight Fight watches that retail at between $499 and $799.

Guy argued this was a blatant attempt to exploit the halo effect, a marketing tactic that creates a false assumption of quality in lower cost items through association to similar high-price ones.

"This crappy $100k watch is a halo product to sell even crappier $500 and $800 non-Swiss steel and gold-plated watches with a cheap automatic movement," Guy wrote.

"The goal here is just to make money, not treat people with respect and offer them something of genuine value."

Guy — who has made a reputation explaining complicated men's fashion in straightforward terms while gently critiquing high profile male fashionistas — changed his tone when it came to discussing Trump.

"Buy watches from established watch brands or independent watchmakers who care more about watches than money," Guy told his followers. "This sort of behavior is genuinely disgusting."

The X (formerly Twitter) account of journalist Ken Klippenstein was suspended Thursday after he shared details of a dossier about Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) that Iran allegedly hacked.

"Here's the dossier the media refused to publish," Klippenstein wrote in a post on X soon before his account was suspended.

The former Intercept reporter also linked to an article on his website explaining why he published the so-called dossier.

"It reportedly comes from an alleged Iranian government hack of the Trump campaign, and since June, the news media has been sitting on it (and other documents), declining to publish in fear of finding itself at odds with the government's campaign against 'foreign malign influence,'" Klippenstein wrote. "I disagree. The dossier has been offered to me and I've decided to publish it because it's of keen public interest in an election season."

According to Klippenstein, the dossier consisted of a "271-page research paper the Trump campaign prepared to vet now vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance."

ALSO READ: 'Kind of crazy': Vance's Ohio neighbors can't help but notice his Secret Service detail

"As far as I can tell, it hasn't been altered, but even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable," he added. "If the document had been hacked by some 'anonymous' like hacker group, the news media would be all over it. I'm just not a believer of the news media as an arm of the government, doing its work combatting foreign influence. Nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know."

X CEO Elon Musk has previously likened the alleged suppression of stories about Hunter Biden's laptop to election interference.

A growing number of Republicans are doing cruel things to children's dogs then bragging about it in a new trend with ties to the former president, a new political analysis contends.

Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation president, joined the elite crew this week when his former New Mexico State University colleagues said he'd boasted of killing his 16-year-old neighbor's dog Loca with a shovel — a story the Project 2025 architect now denies.

"Killing a teenage neighbor’s pet out of irritation and then telling co-workers about it might seem like a whole new level of bizarre," wrote Heather Souvaine Horn for the New Republic. "In some ways, that denial is the most unusual part of this whole story."

Horn argues a mounting number of Republicans not only torment children's animals — but express pride after the fact.

Most notably among the crew is South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who boasted in her book that she shot her family's 14-month-old puppy without apparently warning her 7-year-old daughter Kennedy what was about to happen.

"Where's Cricket?" Kennedy reportedly asked when she came home from school.

There's also Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) who accidentally strapped his five sons' Irish Setter Seamus on top of the family station wagon for a 12-hour road trip in 1983.

On Thursday, Horn argued the three Republicans were merely building on a long history of Republicans expecting praise for hurting animals that began with vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who liked to shoot wolves.

"[Palin's] support for aerial wolf gunning—a practice deliberately designed to give hunters the advantage and thin out wolf numbers—was denounced by animal lovers but lauded by her supporters, who loved her “frontier femme” identity politics," wrote Horn.

But the tradition only reached a national level when it was picked up by the family Trump, Zorn argued.

"In 2011, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump traveled to Zimbabwe with a safari firm that Zimbabwean conservationists later said was not registered in the country," reported Horn. "They killed an elephant and leopard, among other animals, posing with the dead bodies."

A subsequent ProPublica report found Trump Jr. had shot an endangered argali sheep and received a retroactive permit to do so.

In the White House, the Trump administration reversed bans on importing lion trophies into the U.S., re-legalized killing wolf pups and using bait to kill bears in Alaska, Horn reports.

Trump famously was the first president in more than a century not to bring a dog to the White House — his late wife Ivana once explained her ex was "not a dog fan."

"It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that willingness to kill animals would become a kind of right-wing purity test," Horn concluded.

"So maybe Kevin Roberts bragged at work about killing his kid neighbor’s dog with a shovel, or maybe he didn’t. At this point in the history of American conservatism, he’s going to have a tough time convincing people to give him the benefit of the doubt."