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New York Judge Fines Trump $10,000 For Benign Campaign Comment

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Manhattan Judge Arthur Engoron fined former President Donald Trump on Wednesday for a second time for allegedly violating one of the gag orders restricting the 2024 GOP front-runner’s speech.

The judge presiding over Trump’s New York fraud trial — brought by state Attorney General Letitia James, who campaigned on prosecuting Trump — fined him $10,000 for a comment made outside the courtroom about “a person who’s very partisan sitting alongside” Engoron.

According to The New York Times, the judge forced Trump to take the stand to explain the remark. “Mr. Trump said that his comments had referred not to the clerk, whom he had previously attacked, but to his former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, a witness,” the Times reported.

The judge ultimately handed down the $10,000 fine just days after the former president was slapped with a $5,000 fine for a post on social media about Engoron’s law clerk, Allison Greenfield.

The gag order in the case was implemented on Oct. 3, shortly before the federal judge in Trump’s trial related to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, issued a similar decree. On Oct. 16, Judge Tanya Chutkan effectively barred the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination from speaking publicly about the case with little more than a year until Election Day.

[READ: Judge Bars Trump From Campaigning Against His Top Political Opponent]

“This is not about whether I like the language Mr. Trump uses,” Chutkan said. “This is about language that presents a danger to

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Report: 647K Noncitizens Convicted Or Suspected Of Homicide, Other Crimes Are Not In ICE Custody

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More than 647,000 illegal immigrants convicted or suspected of sexual assault, homicide, and other heinous crimes are roaming free in the United States, federal immigration authorities confirmed on Wednesday.

The revelation came in a letter sent to Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Deputy Director and Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director Patrick Lechleitner. The data disclosed by the agency showed that as of July 2024, there are 425,431 noncitizens convicted of criminal offenses, many of them serious, and 222,141 noncitizens with pending criminal charges who are currently not in ICE custody.

According to Fox News, “Those include 62,231 convicted of assault, 14,301 convicted of burglary, 56,533 with drug convictions and 13,099 convicted of homicide,” as well as “[a]n additional 2,521 [with] kidnapping convictions and 15,811 [with] sexual assault convictions.”

Those with pending charges are facing allegations of similar offenses.

In his communique to Gonzales, Lechleitner contended that the Department of Homeland Security “removed or returned more than 893,600 individuals” from the United States from “mid-May 2023 through the end of July 2024” and that the “majority of all individuals encountered at the Southwest Border over the past three years have been removed, returned, or expelled.”

The acting agency head also took an apparent swipe at Democrat-run “sanctuary cities,” writing that “‘sanctuary’ policies can end up shielding dangerous criminals, who often victimize those same communities.”

As noted by Fox News, the Biden-Harris administration has released many illegal aliens “who came to the

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NY Judges Scrutinize ‘Troubling’ $450 Million Penalty In Trump Fraud Case: ‘No One Lost Any Money’

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Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron ordered in February former President Donald Trump to pay an approximate $450 million penalty in a civil fraud case in which there were no victims. Now, a New York appellate court is raising questions regarding the “troubling” penalty and Attorney General Letitia James’ justification for bringing the case in the first place.

James accused Trump of inflating his personal wealth to get better loan terms. Trump, for example, valued his Mar-a-Lago estate at between $427 million and $612 million, Forbes reported. Engoron, however, cited a one-off local Palm Beach County appraiser who valued the property as low as $18 million. Some experts have reportedly valued the sprawling property in the hundreds of millions.

As my colleague Mark Hemingway explained earlier this year, “Trump took out loans over several years, as real estate moguls are wont to do. For him to get approved for those loans, the banks did their own due diligence about Trump’s finances and ability to pay back the loans and decided to give them to him. Trump paid back the loans, and everyone made money.”

Enogoron ultimately ordered Trump to pay $354 million plus an additional $100 million in interest. Trump posted a $175 million bond in April and appealed the ruling.

[READ NEXT: Judge Engoron’s Inflation Of Trump’s ‘Ill-Gotten Gains’ Is The Real Financial Fraud]

Trump’s team argued on Thursday before the New York Appellate Division, First Judicial Department that the case was a “clear-cut violation of the statute

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Washington Post’s Incurious Philip Bump Says The Media Should Just Give Kamala The ‘Benefit Of The Doubt’

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Because the national news media can’t be bothered to actually scrutinize Kamala Harris’ campaign — they’re trying to help her win, after all — they instead choose to scrutinize anyone else who tries.

That’s why rather than sincerely look into Kamala’s relatively new biographical claim that she once slung Happy Meals working at a McDonald’s, The Washington Post’s most willfully obtuse writer, Philip Bump, decided that this week his energy was best spent belittling anyone who questions it — most notably, Kamala’s opponent, Donald Trump.

“Since Trump has been saying that the McDonald’s story isn’t true,” Bump wrote Thursday, “a lot of his supporters are saying it too, rushing to prove that Harris was being dishonest about her McDonald’s employment with the same intellectual rigor that they applied to uncovering voter fraud and pet eating.”

To the extent that Bump had any interest at all in the unsubstantiated “french fries and ice cream” tale Kamala relays to make herself seem humble and relatable, it was to prove that he couldn’t prove whether it’s true even if he wanted to. “Over the course of this week,” he wrote, “I spent some time looking into the story myself — not because I doubted Harris’s claim (since there’s no real reason to doubt it) but because I was curious if it was provable.”

This is what the national media do anytime a Republican or right-leaning news publication raises a legitimate issue that might be politically harmful to voters of the Democrat Party. They dismiss the controversy

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