Morning Report — Trump trial heads to the jury; GOP favored to win this fall

Jurors weighing the prosecution’s evidence are now poised to deliberate whether then-presidential candidate Donald Trump hatched a criminal conspiracy in 2016 to “hoodwink the American voter” by controlling a porn star’s potentially damaging account of an alleged sexual encounter with him a decade earlier.

Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass, during a more than four-hour closing argument Tuesday, described Trump’s aims and what he called “overwhelming” evidence of illegality. In his telling, Trump and his former lawyer Michael Cohen crafted a scheme that involved business fraud to hide something from voters that was not illegal: hush money paid by Cohen to adult film star Stormy Daniels, allegedly on Trump’s behalf, but falsely disguised as a legitimate expense.

Trump’s defense lawyers went first with their closing statements Tuesday, eager once again to declare their client “innocent” and to discredit Cohen as an unreliable prosecution witness.

“He’s literally like an MVP of liars,” Trump lawyer Todd Blanche told jurors. “He lies constantly. He’s lied to Congress, he lied to prosecutors, he lied to his family, business associates.”

The jury’s decision could upend Trump’s fortunes. At the very least, it will add uniquely colorful pages to history books about the twice-impeached and Senate-acquitted 2024 Republican nominee who still faces additional criminal prosecutions in federal and state courts. Trump is a defendant in election interference and classified documents prosecutions that are unlikely to come to trial before Election Day. Whether voters are paying attention as both Trump and President Biden get low marks as White House choices is up for debate.

A hung jury in Manhattan would be a mistrial. Acquittal would be a seismic defense victory. One analyst predicted either outcome would be used like “rocket fuel” by Trump’s campaign to return to the White House as he leads Biden in most battleground state polls. If convicted, the judge could sentence Trump to probation or up to 4 years on each count in state prison, with a maximum of 20 years. But conviction would not halt Trump’s candidacy.

Outside the courthouse: Actor Robert De Niro and two former Capitol police officers who defended the building on Jan. 6, 2021, Harry Dunn and Michael Fanone, appeared Tuesday in Manhattan on behalf of the Biden campaign. Their message to the news cameras: A second Trump presidency would be dangerous.

A lawyer for writer E. Jean Carroll responded to a social media blast by Trump this week, noting “all options are on the table” for additional action against Trump after his client previously won cases against the former president. A jury in May 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. A judge in a civil defamation case in January ruled that Trump defamed Carroll after she accused him in 2019 of rape. Carroll was awarded $83.3 million in damages, a ruling Trump has appealed (CNBC).

In Florida, federal Judge Aileen Cannon on procedural grounds denied a request from special counsel Jack Smith’s team Tuesday after she said the government failed to reach out to Trump’s lawyers on a motion to limit his speech in the classified documents case after Trump claimed law enforcement had the power to assassinate him. Prosecutors could try again. She also denied a motion from Trump’s legal team seeking to censure prosecutors over the matter (The Hill).

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LEADING THE DAY

POLITICS

As the summer conventions and November elections approach, Biden is facing challenges in the polls and among key demographics in the voting coalition that helped secure his victory in 2020.

Alongside Vice President Harris, he will travel to Philadelphia today to launch a campaign coalition group to bolster support among Black voters, who have historically turned out for Democrats, but could be less supportive of Biden this year. Black voter support for Trump in national and state polls has been “surprisingly robust” (Axios and The Philadelphia Inquirer).

What difference do 12 days make? Biden has an arcane Ohio ballot problem, and the Democratic National Committee wants to fix it ASAP. The committee said it will remotely nominate Biden ahead of the party’s mid-August convention as a precaution in reaction to last week’s deadlocked Ohio state Legislature, which did not sync with an effort supported by the Republican governor to ensure the president appears on Ohio’s November ballot. Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Jaime Harrison announced Democrats plan a virtual roll call to ensure the president gets on the ballot in all 50 states — an announcement made on the same day Ohio state lawmakers returned to the Capitol for a special session to solve Biden’s ballot access issue. 

The hitch? The timing of the Democratic Party’s nominating convention does not meet a state deadline to certify the party’s presidential nominee. Ohio said Democrats needed to certify Biden by Aug. 7 to see his name on the ballot, and the DNC event for Biden in Chicago begins Aug. 19.

Politico: A pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party over Biden’s reelection prospects, even among those who previously expressed confidence about his chances against Trump.

THE GOP IS FAVORED to narrowly win a trifecta in the race for the White House and both houses of Congress in a newly released Decision Desk HQ/The Hill forecast model. The model currently gives Trump a 58 percent chance of winning the presidency, showing him with slight leads in most of the key swing states. It more comfortably favors the GOP in Congress, giving the party a 79 percent chance of winning the Senate and a 64 percent chance of holding onto a majority in the House. But The Hill’s Jared Gans reports that with the election still more than five months away, the percentages will change as new data comes out and Election Day approaches.

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ZOOM IN

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

PROTECT THE ART, STOP THE ARTIFICIAL: A Senate bipartisan bill to protect Hollywood artists from artificial intelligence may be introduced next month, following an April hearing about the NO FAKES Act. Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property Chair Chris Coons (D-Del.) is a lead sponsor, along with Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.).The measure, still being developed, aims to stop individuals or companies from using AI to produce an unauthorized digital replica of artists’ likenesses or voices (Yahoo News).

SAFETY?: OpenAI said Tuesday it has started to train a new flagship artificial intelligence model that would succeed the GPT-4 technology that drives its popular online chatbot, ChatGPT. The company also announced it’s establishing a new safety committee, after several employee departures and complaints that it has not been devoting promised resources to ensuring the long-term safety of its AI work (The New York Times and Axios).

AI COMPETITION: Tesla and X owner Elon Musk’s AI firm (xAI) is valued at $24 billion after the startup received an additional $6 billion from Silicon Valley investors and a Saudi prince. The funding sets the project up as a potential rival to OpenAI (CNN).

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CONGRESS

REPUBLICANS ARE GETTING READY to fast-track the extension of the Trump tax cuts through Congress if they win big in November. The Hill’s Tobias Burns reports House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) gave a pep talk to his conference this week about the expedited legislative procedure that has been used to pass big laws like the Inflation Reduction Act and the 2017 tax law in which the Trump tax cuts were enacted.

SNAP: A partisan fight over food aid is posing a major challenge in Congress as lawmakers try to craft a mammoth farm bill ahead of an early fall deadline. Congress has just four months to finish work on the bill, write The Hill’s Aris Folley and Saul Elbein, but both sides are digging in their heels over changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as the food stamps program, creating a key hurdle for negotiators. 

The New York Times: The chairs of two Senate committees overseeing health policy are looking into the practices of a data analytics firm that works with big insurers to cut payments to medical providers.

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ELSEWHERE

INTERNATIONAL

BIDEN IS NOT ALTERING his policy toward Israel following a deadly strike in Gaza that resulted in the death of more than 45 people, the White House said Tuesday, suggesting the incident had not yet crossed a red line that would force changes in American support. But weeks into Israel’s offensive in Rafah, humanitarian organizations on the ground said the White House is refusing to acknowledge what it doesn’t want to see.

“The ‘limited’ offensive does not change much in terms of the reality on the ground … there is panic and fear everywhere,” Suze van Meegen, head of operations in Gaza for the Norwegian Refugee Council, said in a Thursday statement. Nearly a million people have fled Rafah in the last 10 days, either from zones Israel has ordered evacuated or in anticipation of what may lie ahead (The Washington Post and CNN).

Meanwhile, despite mounting international condemnation, Israeli forces pushed deeper into Rafah Tuesday, with tanks reaching the city center for the first time (NBC News).

The U.S. is facing mounting pressure from NATO and key European allies to lift restrictions to allow Ukraine to use the full force of U.S. weapons to strike military targets inside Russia (The Washington Post).

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THE CLOSER

And finally … 🪲 The buzzing, molting, crawling invasion has begun. We have two broods of cicadas to thank — Brood XIX and Brood XIII — which have swarmed a large area of the eastern U.S. It’s very hard to take stock of the number of insects involved, experts said, but they estimate the so-called cicada-geddon numbers in the hundreds of trillions.

Of course, what’s one to do with an influx of bugs? Rakes and leaf blowers aside, some are finding more creative ways of dealing with the critters: eating them. The insects contain a high amount of protein, fiber and minerals.

“Anything you can make with shrimp you can make with cicadas,” said Nicole Pruess, invertebrate keeper at the Sophia M. Sachs Butterfly House in Missouri. “We fried them up with butter, garlic, white wine, lemon juice and a little bit of fresh parsley. I thought it was going to be crunchy, but it was actually very tender and savory.”

If munching on bugs is a culinary step too far, don’t fret. The internet is teeming with cicada-inspired cocktail recipes, which may borrow their color from cicadas, but are reliably insect-free.

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