Jose Pagliery

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyJurors on Tuesday got the sense that Donald Trump isn’t being prosecuted in New York for masterminding an airtight hush money deal—he’s actually on trial for faking paperwork in a bungled rush job all because of his sloppy greed and his right hand man’s desperation.The third week of the former president’s first criminal trial in New York City got underway with testimony from Keith Davidson, a Los Angeles lawyer who opened up about his sleazy world of hush money deals.“It was very frustrating that it was on again, off again... delays in funding, cancellations, disengaging from clients,” Davidson recalled.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyThe jurors haven’t even been selected yet. The trial really hasn’t even started. But as Donald Trump’s first day in criminal court wrapped up on Monday, the former president already seemed to be losing.New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan displayed little patience for, as he insisted on calling him, “Mr. Trump.” That the judge is already over the former president’s antics is abundantly clear. And as Trump’s lawyers repeatedly tried to push the bounds of the trial’s restrictions, it became increasingly evident that the judge isn’t going to extend the former president the latitude he seeks—and is accustomed to expecting—for a trial that could extend past two months.No, Trump can’t skip court to attend his historic showdown at the Supreme Court next week.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyAfter seven years, three tell-all books, two trips to the Supreme Court, and one historic indictment, Donald Trump is finally—officially—the first former American president to stand trial on criminal charges.For the next two months, Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign will hardly be anything but a courtroom sideshow, as he takes the half-hour drive from his gilded penthouse to Manhattan’s criminal courthouse four days a week and fights for his freedom.Trump said on Friday that he plans to testify in the upcoming trial, though that’s far from definitive. Trump has repeatedly projected confidence about his legal troubles publicly only to ghost in the courtroom when presented with the opportunity to testify. That was his exact game plan in the original E. Jean Carroll rape defamation case last year.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyWhen the questionably leveraged company that rescued Donald Trump with a last-minute $175 million court bond insured itself with its own parent company, it raised concerns about how the company was playing with its finances.But now, as even more details come out about that parent company—particularly that it’s based in the Cayman Islands, a notorious tax haven—the concerns are just piling up.Former industry regulators and investigators told The Daily Beast that Knight Specialty Insurance Company being financially backed by a firm based in the Cayman Islands should raise eyebrows at the New York AG’s office—particularly because companies frequently organize in the Cayman Islands not just to avoid taxes, but also to minimize visibility into its business practices, avoid more stringent U.S. regulations, and make liability harder should things go wrong.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyDonald Trump is two weeks away from asking the Supreme Court to grant him immunity from prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election, a move that former military leaders call “the single greatest threat” the country has ever seen—and one that presidential scholars separately say runs the risk of violating the most severe concerns about a dictatorship from the nation’s Founding Fathers.On Monday, 14 national security experts who once held leadership positions in the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, special forces, the White House, and even NATO joined together to warn the country’s most senior judges that the fate of the Republic lies in their hands.Former President Trump is asking the Supreme Court to give him total immunity from criminal charges, claiming that executive authority allowed him to engage in his various efforts to flip the results of the last presidential election—a stance that would dismantle the investigation led by Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyThe little-known insurance company that rescued Donald Trump by providing a last-minute $175 million bank fraud bond isn’t just unlicensed in New York; it hasn’t even been vetted by a voluntary state entity that would verify it meets minimum “eligibility standards” to prove financial stability.Perhaps even more troubling, the legal document from Knight Specialty Insurance Company doesn’t actually promise it will pay the money if the former president loses his $464 million bank fraud case on appeal. Instead, it says Trump will pay, negating the whole point of an insurance company guarantee, according to three legal and bond experts who reviewed the contract for The Daily Beast.“This is not common… the only reason this would be done is to limit the liability to the surety,” said N. Alex Hanley, an expert in how companies appeal enormous judgments.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / GettyDonald Trump’s upcoming criminal trial in New York City is set to derail his presidential campaign until June. But his legal problems could complicate his White House aspirations much longer—and much more severely—as the former president faces the very real prospect of being a convicted felon by the start of the summer, with court sentencing that could actually prevent him from attending the July GOP convention in person.Trump’s problems can be divided into stark realities and dire possibilities.What’s a stark reality is that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which is prosecuting the former president for faking business records to hide a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, will keep Trump in a courtroom four days a week from April 15 until possibly early June, constraining his ability to campaign.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/GettyRetired American generals vehemently say that no, Donald Trump cannot deploy SEAL Team 6 to kill a political rival. Gun groups howl that the United States is turning into Communist China. And a convicted Jan. 6 rioter warns that President Joe Biden could someday get sued over the death of a jogger in Georgia.These are among the 18 various groups that shared their wisdom with the Supreme Court earlier this month, filing amicus briefs on the same day that Trump told the high court why he should be able to dodge a federal prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election on false pretenses.Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election interference case against Trump has finally reached the nation’s highest judicial authority, which will determine whether the business tycoon can be put on trial. The timing of the nine justices’ eventual decision will determine if the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee is to face trial in court before Election Day in November.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Shannon Stapleton/ReutersThe judge overseeing Donald Trump’s upcoming hush money trial in New York hit the former president with a gag order on Tuesday, just one day after Trump peddled a conspiracy theory about a prosecutor—and hours after the tycoon levied attacks against the judge’s daughter.New York Supreme Court Justice Juan M. Merchan forbade Trump from speaking publicly about line prosecutors and court staff—or even their family members. He also subjected Trump to the same sorts of precautionary warnings the former president has faced from other judges in separate cases, ordering him to not even mention any prospective jurors.The snap decision was made on the heels of Trump’s anger-laden press conference yesterday at his 40 Wall Street building in downtown Manhattan, where the former president lashed out after suffering a minor loss in court when Merchan set his criminal trial—Trump’s first ever—to start on April 15.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Brendan McDermid/GettyA state appellate court swooped in to save Donald Trump on Monday, just as the clock ran out on a half-billion-dollar bond he was due to post to hold off the New York Attorney General from seizing his properties.In a curtly-worded two-page order that didn’t explain their reason for giving Trump a last-minute grace period, five judges simply said that AG Letitia James can’t yet enforce the $464 million judgment against Trump—as long as Trump can post a much lower bond of $175 million within the next 10 days.Trump recently revealed that he couldn’t find any surety company willing to be on the hook for the half billion dollars it would take to halt property seizures while the case is on appeal. But this decision vastly lowers the sum required to stop the AG for now.Read more at The Daily Beast.