A few hours before the Amy Coney Barrett superspreader event in the Rose Garden, thousands of people descended on the National Mall for a prayer march with Franklin Graham and Pence, both of whom also attended the White House confab.
A source tells me he came to DC last week to pay his respects to RBG. He stayed at a hotel near the convention center, packed with people who weren’t wearing masks. He complained to management. He even got into an argument in the gym with another guest who refused to wear a mask.
My source then found out why the hotel was so packed: the maskless people were in town to attend the prayer march.
Has anyone who attended the prayer march tested positive for COVID-19? And if so, how close did they get to the thousands of others at that march, including Mike Pence and Franklin Graham, who immediately went to the White House superspreader event afterwards?
If you thought pictures of the Rose Garden event were bad, look at pictures from the march.
Everybody in these pictures identifies as pro-life.
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The story Daniels has told about this encounter has evolved since 2018, insofar as her interpretation of the events and her own agency at the time of the encounter has evolved. But it did not suddenly change today in the courtroom, contrary to what the defense seems to think.
Some things to know about the prosecution’s next witness, Hope Hicks: her relationship with the Trump family began in 2012 when she began doing PR for Ivanka from an outside firm. She joined the Trump Org. By the winter of 2014, when Donald Trump was preparing to run for the GOP nom, she was part of a tiny circle of his trusted advisers.
For most of the 2016 campaign, the staff was the Island of Misfit Toys. Hardly anyone had traditional political experience. At least half the staffers were possibly literally, clinically insane. Her general competence and normal-ness and likability made her an outlier.
She was good at managing the principal. She was good under pressure. And she maintained good relationships with the mainstream press. She entered the WH as a senior adviser and kept a small office within earshot of the Oval. Close enough that Trump would just yell out for her.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders has not yet responded to a request for comment about David Pecker’s testimony that she was involved, in her capacity as a White House official, in the hush money cover up, but Stephanie Grisham confirms that Sanders initiated discussions about the story “all the time.”
Grisham was working for the First Lady. According to Grisham, Sarah Huckabee Sanders (now the governor of Arkansas) and Hope Hicks (an expected witness for the prosecution) contacted her to ask, “What did I know, what did Melania know, what were we going to do.”
Grisham adds, “I would ask them what they knew and they would always tell me they knew absolutely nothing.”
Hello from Manhattan criminal court where Donald Trump’s hush money trial officially starts this morning
It is another freezing day inside this courthouse
Donald Trump just arrived, railed against Letitia James, and then walked into the courtroom. He’s now hunched over in his seat whispering to his attorneys.
As Trump looks on in the courtroom, his lawyer is reading tweets from a prospective juror in which she called him “a racist, sexist narcissist” and “anathema to everything” she had been taught by her faith and that, among other things, he has no sense of right and wrong.
The prospective juror is now reading her own tweet aloud and she remarks, “Oof, that sounds bad!” lol
The prospective juror is asked to turn to the second page of her social media posts. She sighs dramatically and says, “Aghh, gosh.”