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During an appearance on MSNBC on Saturday morning, former federal prosecutor Paul Butler bluntly stated that the moment Donald Trump steps into a Manhattan courtroom on Monday, it will commence the "worst day of his life" as he faces 34 felony counts that could lead to four years in jail.

Speaking with fill-in host Charles Coleman Jr., Bultler explained that for the first time in his life, the former president's actions have led to a moment in life where he faces very real consequences that could impact his freedom.

Speaking with the host, he stated, "On Monday, something historical will happen. It will be the first day in Donald Trump's life that he is beginning to be brought to judgment in a criminal case for his own alleged corruption."

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"As you noted, his lawyers have filed nine different motions to delay the trial with Judge Juan Merchan. They're trying to get around the law that they can't appeal until after the trial, that is what the Article 78 motion was about," he explained. " And the reason for that, Charles, is that Trump's defense is delay. But when he is actually brought to judgment, when his cases are heard on the merits, he loses all the time."

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"[New York write] E. Jean Carroll beat himE. Jean Carroll beat him, [New York Attorney General] Letitia James beat him in the civil fraud trial. [Manhattan DA] Alvin Bragg beat him in the criminal conviction of the Trump organization. The New York attorney general took down his fake university and his fake charity," he listed off for the host. "So, Monday, April 15th, 2024, will be the worst day of Trump's public life because it is the first time he is personally being brought to judgment in a criminal court."

Watch below or at the link.

MSNBC 04 13 2024 10 03 54 youtu.be

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, a slew of far-right websites popped up and cashed in on content propping up then-candidate Donald Trump. And those sites continued to rake in millions of dollars during Trump's time in the White House. But since 2020, the right-wing media cash spigot has effectively slowed to a trickle.

A new report in the Atlantic found that since the 2020 election cycle, the most prominent pro-Trump websites have seen their once robust traffic dry up. Writer Paul Farhi analyzed data from media analysis website The Righting, which focuses on conservative publishers, and reported that of the 10 most popular right-wing websites, traffic was down by an average of roughly 40%.

"The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing," Farhi wrote. "Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent."

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"FoxNews.com, by far the most popular conservative-news site, has fared better, losing 'only' 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with four years ago," he added.

According to Farhi's research, the primary reason for the precipitous drop in clicks for far-right websites is ultimately due to Facebook. Conservative publishers were for years dependent on Facebook engagement as a primary source of traffic. The social media platform's algorithm (the complex code that determines what content shows up in a user's feed) had predominantly favored outrage, as content that provokes a negative reaction is more likely to get a user to click, like, comment or share a post.

In 2020, Vox reported that the Facebook algorithm was overwhelmingly favorable to conservatives, with far-right pundits like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino bringing in tens of millions of clicks per month from Facebook engagement. Progressive media analysis group Media Matter for America found that anti-transgender content in particular generated a disproportionate amount of clicks for conservative websites. New York Times columnist Kevin Roose found that "conservative pages were beating out liberals’ [pages] in making it into the day’s top 10 Facebook posts with links in the United States, based on engagement, like the number of reactions, comments, and shares the posts receive."

Amid a wave of criticism from Congress and international bodies over Facebook being exploited by bad actors to influence elections, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to the algorithm in 2018 aimed at promoting content from friends and family over news publishers. He further tweaked it in 2021 to further deprioritize content from publishers, which has, over time, resulted in far fewer clicks for the conservative publishers that used to dominate the platform.

"All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites," Farhi wrote. "The changes have affected everyone involved in digital media, including some liberal-leaning sites—such as Slate (which saw a 42 percent traffic drop), the Daily Beast (41 percent), and Vox (62 percent, after losing its two most prominent writers)—but the impact appears to have been the worst, on average, for conservative media."

According to Farhi, conservatives are now retreating from websites depending on clicks to other forms of media entirely, like podcasts, Substack newsletters, YouTube channels and videos on the far-right broadcasting platform Rumble.

"There’s a lot of choice," said The Righting owner Howard Polskin. "Even if [the big] sites went out of business tomorrow, there are a lot of voices still out there."

Click here to read Farhi's Atlantic article in full.

The value of former President Donald Trump's eponymous media company hit a new low Friday, causing the market on Trump Media jokes to skyrocket.

A tumultuous opening on the stock exchange saw Trump Media reach a high of $79.38 on March 26 then plunge nearly 50 percent to $40.59 as of Friday, according to stock market prices and reports.

"The selloff has erased nearly $2 billion from the value of former President Donald Trump’s stake in the company this week," according to CNN.

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The news spread quickly across social media where followers of Trump's presidential campaign and courtroom battles shared their condolences for the former president's myriad money concerns, which include mounting legal fees and dwindling campaign coffers.

"Another great day for Trump Media investors," quipped Ron Filipkowski. "It was $74.74 last week. Winning!"

"By the time Trump is able to sell his stock," Jay Black said, "he’s gonna owe money on this turkey."

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@SundaeDivine shared a chart of Trump Media's falling stock prices and added her own caption: "All the way to the right you'll see a rarely glimpsed dead-cat bounce in the stock price."

X user @MonitorFake referenced Trump's own violent rhetoric condemning U.S. immigrants to describe Friday's financial events.

"This gives new meaning to 'making a killing,'" they wrote. "Donald Trump's stock is a bloodbath."

And @jasonllevin reminded his followers of previous Trump ventures that include Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, Trump Casinos, and Trump Steaks.

"The stock is another great example of Donald Trump's Businesses," he wrote. "He runs everything into the Ground!"

"You would almost make more literally flushing your money down the toilet," Art Vanderly joked.

Another creative X user transposed Trump's historic escalator ride onto the Trump Media's downward trending market chart.

"Winning at life," @AtheistPoet quipped Friday.

In a letter sent to House Oversight Chair James Comer and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, the CIA refuted their claim that the agency intervened into their investigation of Hunter Biden by blocking IRS and DOJ investigators from interviewing a witness related to the probe.

“Without confirming or denying the existence of any associations or communications, CIA did not prevent or seek to prevent IRS or DOJ from conducting any such interview. The allegation is false,” CIA Director of Congressional Affairs James A. Catella wrote in the letter first reported on by CNN.

But House Republicans pushed back on the CIA's denial, claiming their allegations are true.

As CNN's report points out, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, said Republicans have not presented any evidence for their allegation against the CIA.

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“This is a serious charge, but you have completely ignored my staff’s requests to be allowed to review the information that you say prompted your letter and upon which your letter is putatively and entirely based,” Raskin wrote to Comer on Friday.

Democrats must “assess whether you are ... making our Committee a party to efforts by malign foreign interests to influence American elections,” Raskin wrote, referencing Alexander Smirnov, who is an indicted FBI source.

The witness in question is Kevin Morris, who is Hunter Biden’s lawyer.

Smirnov was charged in February for lying under oath about President Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s alleged dealings with a Ukrainian energy company. Republicans platformed Smirnov's allegations multiple times where he claimed he had “extensive foreign ties” with Russian intelligence agencies.

In his letter, Raskin went on to say that it “looks like yet another episode in the Committee’s gullible campaign to amplify the vacuous claims of shadowy Trump World figures and foreign disinformation and propaganda operators.”

Former President Donald Trump has been allowed to move forward with a complaint to the court in the Manhattan hush money case, demanding the recusal of New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan.

The complaint, which spans 35 pages, lists a number of grievances that Trump has with the judge, including yet another attack on the judge's daughter, who he has repeatedly made a bogeyman in posts on social media.

"Your Honor’s daughter, Loren Merchan, has a direct financial interest in these proceedings by virtue of her ownership stake and leadership role at Authentic Campaigns, Inc. Based on public disbursements data, Authentic, which services exclusively Democrat [sic] clients, is the #21 ranked vendor in the country in connection with the 2024 election," wrote Trump's attorneys. "President Trump is now the presumptive Republican nominee and leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election."

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The complaint went on that Trump's "success in the primaries, which followed the Court’s ruling on the previous recusal motion, has cemented his status as a political target of Authentic, Ms. Merchan, and their clients."

Trump's attorneys also listed a number of other arguments, including that some Democratic candidates that worked with that vendor have issued fundraising solicitations that mention Trump's indictment, and the fact that Judge Merchan gave a media interview in which he said he wanted "to make sure that I’ve done everything I could to be prepared and to make sure that we dispense justice."

This comes after a lengthy process in which Trump and several of his co-defendants in the Georgia election racketeering case filed similar challenges, based on Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' romantic relationship with special counsel Nathan Wade. Following a fraught ethics hearing, Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee determined that Willis could remain on the case as long as Wade resigned, which he promptly did.

Special Counsel Jack Smith in a near-midnight filing Tuesday responded to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon's request to "engage with" two possible scenarios for jury instructions in the Espionage Act case against Donald Trump even before she has set a trial date.

Legal experts say Smith had no choice but to respond as strongly as he did given that Cannon's proposed jury instructions are – they and Smith say – "“fundamentally flawed," and based on a misinterpretation of law. Some noted if the case were to go to trial under a false legal theory held by the judge, the special counsel could not appeal any possible "not guilty" verdict.

"It's unusual for [federal] prosecutors to be this aggressive with a judge & well warranted here. She left them with no other choice," observes professor of law, MSNBC and NBC News legal analyst, and former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance. "The Special Counsel cites law from the 11th Circuit's sister circuit, the Fifth, that lets them bring a writ of mandamus asking the appellate court to correct a district judge's decision to use a clearly erroneous jury instruction that could lead to acquittal."

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Vance also says Smith had to "spoon feed" Judge Cannon.

MSNBC and NBC News legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner says acquittal is Cannon's goal: "In a new court filing, Jack Smith goes directly after Judge Cannon’s lawless proposed jury instructions. And he threatens to appeal (mandamus) her. He’s right - Cannon is trying to nefariously orchestrate an acquittal for Trump."

In his filing Smith threatened he would go over Cannon's head to ask the higher court rule against her, to avoid a faulty acquittal.

"In Jack Smith’s blistering filing yesterday on Judge Cannon’s aberrant proposed jury instructions, Jack tells her she 'must' rule 'promptly' so he can weigh appellate options," writes Lawfare senior editor Roger Parloff.

"Extraordinary late night filing by Special Counsel Smith sets forth how Judge Aileen Cannon could doom the prosecution by delaying ruling on her legally flawed jury instructions until after the trial starts (when Double Jeopardy attaches) thus depriving prosecution of any ability to cure," writes former federal prosecutor Shanlon Wu.

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The Special Counsel's Office "team explicitly states that this kind of scenario is what a writ of mandamus exists to address - implicitly warning Cannon that they view her position as not only indefensibly flawed legally but saying the quiet part aloud that that they are on to the possibility that the timing of her ruling could be substantively fatal to successful prosecution of Trump - ever," he continued. "Now the question becomes whether Judge Cannon will quickly rule or delay further."

National security attorney Brad Moss says, "Jack Smith puts Cannon on notice that he has had enough with his weird game," apparently referring to Trump's legal strategy of invoking the Presidential Records Act as a defense. "The PRA angle is a question of law, not fact, and if she believes Trump’s PRA defense she should grant his motion and let Smith take this to the 11th circuit already."

"Oh," Moss adds, "and they make clear Tom Fitton [i]s the source of Trump’s ridiculous legal theories, as all the reporting made clear ages ago."

Fitton is conservative activist Tom Fitton, who is not an attorney but a right-wing pro-Trump activist, president of Judicial Watch, and reportedly a member of the far-right Council for National Policy.

Former federal prosecutor Randall Eliason, who teaches white collar crime law at The George Washington University Law School adds more insight into the Fitton connection.

"One interesting thing in this pleading is the history of how the bogus defense that these were personal records Trump was allowed to keep was invented by Judicial Watch and shared in a Tweet w/ Trump, who then adopted it even though his own people said it was wrong."

Politico's Kyle Cheney sums up Smith's filing.

"Prosecutors are emphatic: Trump's treatment of presidential/personal records is both a 'fiction' he invented belatedly (at urging of Tom Fitton) to justify keeping records he was plainly not authorized to have," Cheney writes. "And whether he designated them 'personal' is irrelevant."

MSNBC host and legal contributor Katie Phang writes, "Judge Cannon has been given fair warning over and over again by Special Counsel Jack Smith. I guess some folks have to learn the hard way."

NYU Law professor, MSNBC legal analyst, and former FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissman, suggesting a three strikes rule, says Judge Cannon could be removed from the case. He writes that if Smith's motion "gets to the 11th Circuit, it will both reverse Cannon again -- AND I think it will remove her from the case- 3 reversals is more than enough for this inexperienced judge, who gets the law wrong and always in Trump's favor."

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