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Trump trial to continue with third day of testimony by witness David Pecker
Former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker is expected to continue testifying Thursday in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial, his third day on the stand.
Court is set to reconvene at 9:30 a.m. to resume proceedings and will overlap with another significant legal development for the former president. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments over whether Trump should be immune from federal prosecution in the case brought by special counsel Jack Smith. The judge overseeing the trial denied Trump’s request to attend the arguments in the capital.
In his testimony on Tuesday, the most recent day of the trial, Pecker described his efforts to use the National Enquirer to bury negative stories about Trump and attack his rivals during the 2016 presidential campaign. Pecker was the chief executive of the Enquirer’s parent company, a role he held until 2020.
Pecker testified that he agreed to be Trump’s “eyes and ears” in 2015 and alert Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, to damaging stories that might hurt the campaign. Cohen is now an ardent critic of Trump, and is expected to be prosecutors’ key witness against him.
Jane Rosenberg
Pecker described a tactic called “catch and kill” that he used to buy the rights to stories about Trump, without publishing them, effectively keeping them hidden.
His testimony is expected to continue through much, if not all, of the day’s proceedings Thursday.
Prosecutors allege a $130,000 “hush money” payment Cohen made to the adult film star Stormy Daniels in the days before the election was tied to the “catch and kill” scheme. Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records related to reimbursements to Cohen. He has accused Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg of pursuing the case for political gain.
Judge Juan Merchan may also rule Thursday on a motion by prosecutors seeking to hold Trump in contempt for a series of social media and campaign posts they say violated a gag order in the case.
The order limits what Trump can say publicly about many of those involved in the case, including witnesses like Cohen and Daniels.
Merchan held a contentious hearing on the motion Tuesday. Prosecutors have asked him to impose a $1,000 fine for each post and order Trump to take them down.
“His attacks on witnesses clearly violate the order, willfully and flagrantly. The court should now hold him in contempt for each of the 10 posts,” prosecutor Chris Conroy said. “No one is off limits to the defendant. He can attack and seek to intimidate anyone he wants to in service to himself.”
Todd Blanche, an attorney for Trump, argued that his client was responding to political attacks in his posts, and did not believe he was violating the order when reposting or quoting others. The judge seemed unpersuaded, but did not make a ruling immediately.
“Mr. Blanche, you’re losing all credibility. I have to tell you that right now. You’re losing all credibility with the court,” Merchan said at one point.
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Sen. Thom Tillis says “the scope” of Helene damage in North Carolina “is more like Katrina”
As recovery missions and repairs continue in North Carolina more than a week after Hurricane Helene carved a path of devastation through the western part of the state, the state’s Republican Sen. Thom Tillis called for more resources to bolster the relief effort and likened the damage to Hurricane Katrina’s mark on Louisiana in 2005.
“This is unlike anything that we’ve seen in this state,” Tillis told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on Sunday morning. “We need increased attention. We need to continue to increase the surge of federal resources.”
Hurricane Helene ripped through the Southeast U.S. after making landfall in Florida on Sept. 26 as a powerful Category 4 storm. Helene brought heavy rain and catastrophic flooding to communities across multiple states, including Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, with North Carolina bearing the brunt of the destruction. Officials previously said hundreds of roads in western North Carolina were washed out and inaccessible after the storm, hampering rescue operations, and several highways were blocked by mudslides.
Tillis said Sunday that most roads in the region likely remained closed due to flooding and debris. Water, electricity and other essential services still have not been fully restored.
“The scope of this storm is more like Katrina,” he said. “It may look like a flood to the outside observer, but again, this is a landmass roughly the size of the state of Massachusetts, with damage distributed throughout. We have to get maximum resources on the ground immediately to finish rescue operations.”
Hurricane Katrina left more than 1,000 people dead after it slammed into Louisiana’s Gulf Coast in August 2005, flooding neighborhoods and destroying infrastructure in and around New Orleans as well as in parts of the surrounding region. It was the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland U.S. in the last 50 years, and the costliest storm on record.
The death toll from Hurricane Helene is at least 229, CBS News has confirmed, with at least 116 of those deaths reported in North Carolina alone. Officials have said they expect the death toll to continue to rise as recovery efforts were ongoing, and a spokesperson for the police department in Asheville told CBS News Friday their officers were “actively working 75 cases of missing persons.”
On Saturday, the U.S. Department of Transportation released $100 million in emergency funds for North Carolina to rebuild the roads and bridges damaged by the hurricane.
“We are providing this initial round of funding so there’s no delay getting roads repaired and reopened, and re-establishing critical routes,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “The Biden-Harris administration will be with North Carolina every step of the way, and today’s emergency funding to help get transportation networks back up and running safely will be followed by additional federal resources.”
President Biden previously announced that the federal government would cover “100%” of costs for debris removal and emergency protective measures in North Carolina for six months.
With North Carolina leaders working with a number of relief agencies to deal with the aftermath of the storm, Tillis urged federal officials to ramp up the resources being funneled into the state’s hardest-hit areas. The senator also addressed a surge in conspiracy theories and misinformation about the Biden Administration’s disaster response, which have been fueled by Republican political figures like former President Donald Trump.
Trump falsely claimed that Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent in the November presidential election, were diverting funds from Federal Emergency Management Agency that would support the relief effort in North Carolina toward initiatives for immigrants. He also said baselessly that the administration and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, were withholding funds because many communities that were hit hardest are predominantly Republican. Elon Musk has shared false claims about FEMA, too.
“Many of these observations are not even from people on the ground,” Tillis said of those claims. “I believe that we have to stay focused on rescue operations, recovery operations, clearing operations, and we don’t need any of these distractions on the ground. It’s at the expense of the hard-working first responders and people that are just trying to recover their lives.”
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