Trump names EU a global foe, raps media before Putin summit

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Trump names EU a global foe, raps media before Putin summit

2018-07-16 10:42 Last Updated At：15:34

President Donald Trump named the European Union as a top adversary of the United States and denounced the news media as the "enemy of the people" before arriving in Helsinki on Sunday on the eve of his high-stakes summit with Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Trump and his top aides were downplaying expectations for Monday's summit as Trump continued to rattle allies by lumping in the EU with Russia and China after barnstorming across Europe, causing chaos at the recent NATO summit and in a trip to the United Kingdom.

Trump spent the weekend in Scotland at his resort in Turnberry, golfing, tweeting and granting an interview to CBS News in which he named the EU, a bloc of nations that includes many of America's closest allies, at the top of his list of biggest global foes.

"I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade," Trump said, adding that "you wouldn't think of the European Union, but they're a foe."

He said that Russia is a foe "in certain respects" and that China is a foe "economically ... but that doesn't mean they are bad. It doesn't mean anything. It means that they are competitive."

Trump has been reluctant to criticize Putin over the years and has described him in recent days not as an enemy but as a competitor.

On Sunday, Trump flew to Finland, the final stop on a weeklong trip that began last Tuesday. Near Trump's hotel, police roped off a group of about 60 mostly male pro-Trump demonstrators waving American flags. Big banners said "Welcome Trump" and "God Bless D & M Trump" and a helicopter hovered overhead.

Chants of "We love Trump, We love Trump" broke out as the president's motorcade passed, and Trump waved.

Trump set expectations for the summit low, telling CBS News, "I don't expect anything. ... I go in with very low expectations." His national security adviser said they weren't looking for any "concrete deliverables."

He also said in the interview taped Saturday that he "hadn't thought" about asking Putin to extradite the dozen Russian military intelligence officers indicted this past week in Washington on charges related to the hacking of Democratic targets in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

But after being given the idea by his interviewer, Trump said, "Certainly I'll be asking about it."

The U.S. has no extradition treaty with Moscow and can't compel Russia to hand over citizens. Russia's constitution prohibits extraditing its citizens to foreign countries.

Contradicting Trump in an interview on ABC's "This Week," U.S. national security adviser John Bolton said the idea of asking Putin to turn over the 12 military intelligence officials was "pretty silly" and argued that doing so would put the U.S. president in a "weak position."

He also argued that Trump is entering the summit with a stronger hand because of the indictments.

"I think the president can put this on the table and say, 'This is a serious matter that we need to talk about,'" said Bolton, adding that asking for the indicted Russians to be turned over would have the opposite effect.

In the CBS News interview, Trump declined to discuss his goals for the summit — "I'll let you know after the meeting," he said — but said he believes such sessions are beneficial.

He cited his historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June as a "good thing," along with meetings he's had with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

"Nothing bad is going to come out of" the Helsinki meeting, he said, "and maybe some good will come out."

From aboard Air Force One, Trump complained in tweets that he wasn't getting enough credit for his meeting with Kim and railed that "Much of our news media is indeed the enemy of the people" as he headed to sit down with Putin.

Putin is regarded as creating a culture of violence and impunity that has resulted in the killing of some Russian journalists. Trump regularly criticizes American news media outlets and has called out some journalists by name.

Trump complained: "No matter how well I do at the Summit," he'll face "criticism that it wasn't good enough."

"If I was given the great city of Moscow as retribution for all of the sins and evils committed by Russia over the years, I would return to criticism that it wasn't good enough — that I should have gotten Saint Petersburg in addition!" he tweeted.

Trump also praised Putin for holding the World Cup, which finished up Sunday.

Trump and Putin have held talks several times before. Their first meeting came last July when both participated in an international summit and continued for more than two hours, well over the scheduled 30 minutes. The leaders also met last fall during a separate summit in Vietnam.

But Jon Huntsman, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, said Monday's meeting "is really the first time for both presidents to actually sit across the table and have a conversation, and I hope it's a detailed conversation about where we might be able to find some overlapping and shared interests."

Congressional Democrats and at least one Republican have called on Trump to pull out of Monday's meeting unless he is willing to make Russian election-meddling the top issue. Huntsman said the summit must go on because Russian engagement is needed to solve some international issues.

"The collective blood pressure between the United States and Russia is off-the-charts high so it's a good thing these presidents are getting together," he said during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Trump has said he will raise the issue of Russian election meddling, along with Syria, Ukraine, nuclear proliferation and other topics. Bolton described the meeting as "unstructured" and said: "We're not looking for concrete deliverables here."

Trump fined $1,000 for gag order violation in hush money case as ex-employee recounts reimbursements

2024-05-07 06:38 Last Updated At：06:40

NEW YORK (AP) — The judge in Donald Trump’s hush money trial fined him $1,000 on Monday and, in his sternest warning yet, told the former president that future gag order violations could send him to jail. The reprimand opened a revelatory day of testimony, as jurors for the first time heard the details of the financial reimbursements at the center of the case and saw payment checks bearing Trump’s signature.

The testimony from Jeffrey McConney, the former Trump Organization controller, provided a mechanical but vital recitation of how the company reimbursed payments that were allegedly meant to suppress embarrassing stories from surfacing during the 2016 presidential campaign and then logged them as legal expenses in a manner that Manhattan prosecutors say broke the law.

McConney's appearance on the witness stand came as the first criminal trial involving a former American president entered its third week of testimony. His account lacked the human drama offered Friday by longtime Trump aide Hope Hicks, but it nonetheless yielded an important building block for prosecutors trying to pull back the curtain on what they say was a corporate records cover-up of transactions designed to protect Trump's presidential bid during a pivotal stretch of the race.

At the center of the testimony, and the case itself, is a $130,000 payment from Trump attorney and personal fixer Michael Cohen to porn actor Stormy Daniels to stifle her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier.

The 34 felony counts of falsifying business records accuse Trump of labeling the money paid to Cohen in his company’s records as legal fees. Prosecutors contend that by paying him income and giving him extra to account for taxes, the Trump executives were able to conceal the reimbursement.

McConney and another witness testified that the reimbursement checks were drawn from Trump's personal account. Yet even as jurors witnessed the checks and other documentary evidence, prosecutors did not elicit testimony Monday showing that Trump himself dictated that the payments would be logged as legal expenses, a designation that prosecutors contend was intentionally deceptive.

McConney acknowledged during cross-examination that Trump never asked him to log the reimbursements as legal expenses or discussed the matter with him at all. And another witness, Deborah Tarasoff, a Trump Organization accounts payable supervisor, said under questioning that she did not get permission to cut the checks in question from Trump himself.

“You never had any reason to believe that President Trump was hiding anything or anything like that?” Trump attorney Todd Blanche asked.

”Correct,” Tarasoff replied.

The testimony followed a stern warning from Judge Juan M. Merchan that additional violations of a gag order barring Trump from inflammatory out-of-court comments about witnesses, jurors and others closely connected to the case could result in jail time.

The $1,000 fine imposed Monday marks the second time since the trial began last month that Trump has been sanctioned for violating the gag order. He was fined $9,000 last week, $1,000 for each of nine violations.

“It appears that the $1,000 fines are not serving as a deterrent. Therefore going forward, this court will have to consider a jail sanction,” Merchan said before jurors were brought into the courtroom. Trump’s statements, the judge added, “threaten to interfere with the fair administration of justice and constitute a direct attack on the rule of law. I cannot allow that to continue.”

Trump sat forward in his seat, glowering at the judge as he handed down the ruling. When the judge finished speaking, Trump shook his head twice and crossed his arms.

Yet even as Merchan warned of jail time in his most pointed and direct admonition, he also made clear his reservations about a step that he described as a “last resort.”

“The last thing I want to do is put you in jail,” Merchan said. “You are the former president of the United States and possibly the next president as well. There are many reasons why incarceration is truly a last resort for me. To take that step would be disruptive to these proceedings.”

The latest violation stems from an April 22 interview with television channel Real America’s Voice in which Trump criticized the speed at which the jury was picked and claimed, without evidence, that it was stacked with Democrats.

Once testimony resumed, McConney recounted conversations with longtime Trump Organization finance chief Allen Weisselberg in January 2017 about reimbursing Cohen for a $130,000 payment intended to buy Daniels' silence over her account of a sexual encounter at a 2006 celebrity golf outing in Lake Tahoe, California.

Weisselberg "said we had to get some money to Michael, we had to reimburse Michael. He tossed a pad toward me, and I started taking notes on what he said,” McConney testified. “That’s how I found out about it.”

“He kind of threw the pad at me and said, ‘Take this down,’” said McConney, who worked for Trump’s company for about 36 years, retiring last year after he was granted immunity to testify for the prosecution at the Trump Organization’s New York criminal tax fraud trial.

A bank statement displayed in court showed Cohen paying $130,000 to Keith Davidson, Daniels' lawyer, on Oct. 27, 2016, out of an account for an entity Cohen created for the purpose.

Weisselberg’s handwritten notes spell out a plan to pay Cohen $420,000, which included a base reimbursement that was then doubled to reflect anticipated taxes as well as a $60,000 bonus and an expense that prosecutors have described as a technology contract.

McConney’s own notes, taken on the notepad he said Weisselberg threw at him, were also shown in court. After calculations that laid out that Cohen would get $35,000 a month for 12 months, McConney wrote: “wire monthly from DJT.”

Asked what that meant, McConney said: “That was out of the president’s personal bank account.”

Trump is accused of falsifying business records by labeling the money paid to Cohen in his company’s records as legal fees. Prosecutors contend that by paying him income and giving him extra to account for taxes, the Trump executives were able to conceal the reimbursement.

McConney testified that he had instructed an accounting department employee to record the reimbursements to Cohen as a legal expense.

But McConney acknowledged under cross-examination that Trump never directed him to log Cohen’s payments as legal expenses, nor did Weisselberg relay to him that Trump wanted them logged that way.

“Allen never told me that,” McConney testified. In fact, McConney said he never spoke to Trump about the reimbursement issue at all. Defense lawyer Emil Bove also suggested to McConney that the “legal expenses” label was not duplicitous because Cohen was in fact a lawyer.

“OK,” McConney responded, prompting laughter throughout the courtroom. “Sure. Yes.”

After paying the first two checks to Cohen through a trust, the remainder of the checks, beginning in April 2017, were paid from Trump’s personal account, McConney testified.

With Trump, the only signatory to that account, now in the White House, the change in funding source necessitated “a whole new process for us,” McConney added.

Tarasoff, the other witness who testified Monday, said that once Trump became president, payments from his personal account had to first be delivered, via FedEx, to his new residence in Washington.

“We would send them to the White House for him to sign,” she said.

The checks would then return with Trump’s sharpie signature. “I’d pull them apart, mail out the check and file the backup,” she said, meaning putting the invoice into the Trump Organization’s filing system.

Prosecutors are continuing to build toward their star witness, Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money payments. He is expected to undergo a bruising cross-examination from defense attorneys seeking to undermine his credibility with jurors.

Tucker reported from Washington.