Trump caught on tape pressuring Wayne County officials not to certify election: Live

Rudy Giuliani has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy days after he was ordered to pay more than $148m to a mother-daughter pair of election workers he defamed in the volatile aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, underscoring the downfall of a man once hailed as “America’s Mayor”.

His filing in New York comes one day after the federal judge overseeing his defamation case ordered him to “immediately” pay the women, pointing to his history as an “uncooperative litigant” and concerns that he will try to “conceal his assets” during any appeals.

Last week, an eight-member jury unanimously agreed that Trump’s former attorney owes Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss $16.2m and $16.99m respectively in compensatory damages, an additional $20m each for intentional infliction of emotional distress, and a further $75m in punitive damages.

Judge Howell had already found Giuliani liable for defamation in a damning pretrial ruling earlier this year. A four-day trial in Washington, DC, sought to determine how much he owed.

Moss, who was a clerical worker in a county election office, and Freeman, her mother, who had taken a temporary job to help count ballots, were subject to relentless abuse, threats and racist attacks in the wake of the 2020 election.

Alex Woodward has the latest.

Good morning! If you’re just joining us, there’s been a fresh scandal in Trumpworld.

It appears that the Republican presidential front-runner personally pressured two GOP officials in Michigan not to certify the state’s 2020 election results, according to a new report.

The then-president told the officials, both members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, in a 17 November 2020 phone call that they would look “terrible” if they carried out their duty.

According to The Detroit News, which obtained audio of the call, Mr Trump went on to tell the pair: “We’ve got to fight for our country.”

Trump also reportedly told the officials, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, that his team would “take care” of them and insisted: “We can’t let these people take our country away from us.”

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, a Michigan native, was also on the call and reportedly told the officials: “If you can go home tonight, do not sign it… We will get you attorneys.”

“We’ll take care of that,” Trump added.

Graeme Massie has the full story.

Mr Biden compared Mr Trump to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in September 2020. Shortly before he would go on to beat him in the election that November, Mr Biden told MSNBC that Mr Trump was “sort of like Goebbels”.

“You say the lie long enough, keep repeating it, repeating it, repeating it, it becomes common knowledge,” Mr Biden said, reacting to Mr Trump trying to make his opponent out to be a socialist.

“I think people see very clearly the difference between me and Donald Trump,” Mr Biden said. “Trump is clearing protests in front of the White House that are peaceful with the military. This guy is more Castro than Churchill.”

Mr Biden also compared Texas Senator Ted Cruz to Goebbels after the 2020 election after the senator pushed Mr Trump’s lies about the election being stolen.

The then-president-elect remembered Goebbels’ exaggeration of civilian deaths during the firebombing of Dresden in the Second World War, which ran in newspapers across the globe. Goebbels argued that the bigger the lie and the more it was repeated, the likelier it was that it would come to be believed.

Mr Biden noted that both Mr Cruz and Mr Trump pushed the notion that there was something wrong with the election in the face of a complete lack of evidence to back up their claims.

“They’re part of the big lie,” Mr Biden said at the time. “When we were told that, you know, Goebbels and the great lie … when Dresden was bombed, firebombed, there were 250 people that were killed. [Or] was it 2,500 people that were killed? And Goebbels said no, 25,000, or 250,000 were killed. And our papers printed that. Our papers printed it. It’s a big lie.”

Around 25,000 civilians were killed in the firebombing of Dresden in early 1945, months before the surrender of Nazi Germany. Goebbels, known for his lies, claimed that 200,000 died.

Mr Biden was asked if Mr Cruz or Missouri Sen Josh Hawley, who also took part in the delaying of the certification of the results, should resign, Mr Biden said: “They should be just flat beaten the next time they run.”

Mr Biden said at the time that if Mr Trump was “the only one saying it, that’s one thing. But the acolytes that follow him, like Cruz and others, they’re as responsible as he is”.

“There are decent people out there who actually believe these lies because they’ve heard it again and again.”

“The American public has a real good, clear look at who they are,” he told the press at the time. “They’re part of the big lie. The big lie.”

At a fundraiser in San Franciso in November, Mr Biden slammed Mr Trump’s comments in New Hampshire, where he said he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections”.

“There’s a lot of reasons to be against Donald Trump, but damn he shouldn’t be president,” Mr Biden said.

“In just the last few days, Trump has said, if he returns office, he’s gonna go after all those who oppose him and wipe out what he called the ‘vermin’, quote, ‘the vermin in America’ – a specific phrase with a specific meaning,” Mr Biden said.

“It echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany in the ’30s,” Mr Biden said. “And it isn’t even the first time. Trump also recently talked about, quote, ‘the blood of America is being poisoned’ – ‘the blood of America is being poisoned.’ Again, echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany.”

Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement at the time that “on a weekend when most Americans were honoring our nation’s heroes, Donald Trump parroted the autocratic language of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini — two dictators many US veterans gave their lives fighting”.

The White House and Mr Biden appear to be using the image of Hitler, the most reviled figure in modern history, to go on the offensive against the former president in an effort to remind voters and the coalition that brought him to power in 2020 of why they ousted Mr Trump in the first place.

The president likes to quote his dad when criticising his predecessor: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.”

Mr Biden is telling voters that even if they don’t like him, take a good look at who he’s up against. The Biden campaign appears to want voters to believe that they must re-elect the president, or witness the rise of fascism in America.

Mr Biden’s focus on the fate of global democracy was clear after he entered the White House as he hosted a “Summit for Democracy” within a year of becoming president “to renew democracy at home and confront autocracies abroad”.

But the threats Mr Biden saw in 2020 haven’t gone away. If anything, they have worsened. Mr Putin is more confident than ever that he can outlast the Western world after the less-than-stellar start of his invasion of Ukraine, and Mr Xi recently became the first Chinese leader to begin a third term atop the Chinese Communist Party since the death of Mao.

At home, Mr Trump is going further than ever, bringing his admiration for dictators and strongmen into public view, using the criticism of left-of-centre leaders to whip up his base and attempting to paint himself as borderline messianic, saying again and again that he’s being targeted because he’s standing up for the ordinary American.

Mr Biden has even said that he’s unsure he would run again if he wasn’t facing Mr Trump, whose GOP nomination is seen by most observers as a foregone conclusion.

After the Colorado Supreme Court booted Mr Trump from the state’s ballot this week for his part in the Capitol riot, Mr Biden was asked on Wednesday if Mr Trump is an insurrectionist.

“It’s self-evident. You saw it all. Now whether the 14th Amendment applies, I’ll let the court make that decision. But he certainly supported an insurrection. There’s no question about it. None. Zero,” Mr Biden said.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary, the recently ousted Law and Justice Party in Poland, ex-President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, and most importantly Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China, are all examples of leaders who have based their leadership on the idea that we are in a new age of strongmen.

Many of them Mr Biden will have known personally from his time as vice president and senator atop the Foreign Relations Committee.

Mr Biden has made clear that the cataclysm that led to his decision to run in 2020 was the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 after which Mr Trump said there were “very fine” people on both sides – both among the counter-protesters and among the violent white supremacists carrying tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us”.

The tipster contacted the FBI a day after the 2021 riot to report that his former high school peer, 43-year-old Martin James Cudo of Lakeville, had participated in the riot, according to court documents viewed by The Independent.

Mr Cudo was subsequently arrested and charged with knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building without lawful entry, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building and in a Capitol building and parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building.

The day after the Capitol riots, the FBI received the tip from the former classmate with a selfie Mr Cudo took inside the Capitol building that he posted on social media, the complaint said.

The FBI later received more information from another person who said he was Mr Cudo’s employer, who also identified him in photographs from the day of the riots.

Mr Cudo was interviewed by the FBI a week after the riots, the document said, after he was identified in the tip-offs and he confessed that he was at the riots and only “realised the trouble he may be in” when he returned to his hotel after the insurrection.

Mr Trump “agrees that the question whether a former President of the United States enjoys absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for a conspiracy to overturn an election, and thereby prevent the lawful winner from taking office, is an issue of great constitutional moment,” prosecutors with Mr Smith’s office wrote in the filing.

But the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination for president is “incorrect” to believe that the nation’s highest court “should wait” to weigh in, they wrote.

“This court’s immediate review of that question is the only way to achieve its timely and definitive resolution,” they added. “The public interest in a prompt resolution of this case favors an immediate, definitive decision by this court. The charges here are of the utmost gravity. This case involves – for the first time in our nation’s history – criminal charges against a former president based on his actions while in office.”

And “not just any actions,” they added.

Those two major constitutional questions before the nation’s highest court – where three of the nine justices were appointed by the former president – arrive in the middle of the 2024 race for the presidency, and could have resounding impacts beyond Mr Trump’s campaign.

His campaign also pledged to go to the Supreme Court following a Colorado ruling that bars him from appearing on 2024 ballots under the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, which prohibits candidates who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding public office.

Those questions underscore the massive role that courtrooms have played in Mr Trump’s brutal campaign for the White House in 2024, a campaign that frames the 91 criminal charges, fraud lawsuits and sexual abuse and defamation claims against him as evidence of a conspiracy to keep him away from the presidency. Mr Trump has promised vengeance against his political enemies if he wins another White House term.