The Dictatorship
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President Donald Trump has been trying to get E. Jean Carroll to return the $5 million (plus interest) that she finally received this month from the case in which a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Trump argued for clawing back the funds because he has a pending rehearing petition at the Supreme Court, where he’s again trying to convince the justices to take up his appeal in the case that resulted in that jury award.
After the justices declined to review his initial petition in June, the federal judge in New York who presided over the case ordered the funds released to Carroll earlier this month. Trump’s attempt to halt the judge’s order is pending in a federal appeals court.
But the Supreme Court just signaled that it could soon issue an order that brings a truly final resolution to the matter.
The Supreme Court docket shows that, on Thursday, the court “distributed” Trump’s rehearing petition to the justices, which is a routine step before they decide whether to grant or deny review. Though the court is on a summer recess before the next term starts in October, the justices publish order lists over the summer that mainly contain petition denials. They issued such a list earlier this week.
According to the court calendarthe next list is scheduled for release on Aug. 17, so we could see action on Trump’s rehearing petition then.
That action would most likely be a denial.
As the trial judge noted in his July 8 ruling rejecting further delay, successful Supreme Court rehearing petitions are “rare birds.” On that note, Carroll’s lawyers said thatas far as they knew, only once in the last 75 years has the court agreed to straight up reconsider its denial of a petition, and that was in the landmark case of Boumediene v. Bush about the rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees. They said more recent reconsiderations — the latest one being in 2018 — involved the justices sending cases back to lower courts for further review, rather than the justices taking up full review themselves.
“If successful petitions for rehearing are ‘rare birds,’” then Trump’s pending rehearing petition “cannot possibly get off the ground,” Carroll’s lawyers said in their opposition to Trump’s claw-back motion in the circuit court.
We may learn Aug. 17 whether the justices agree. They haven’t requested a response from Carroll and, under court rulesthey won’t grant a rehearing petition without first doing so, unless there are “extraordinary circumstances.” It’s unclear what those circumstances would be here.
In the meantime, we could hear before that from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit on Trump’s motion to force Carroll to return the funds. The long-shot nature of his Supreme Court rehearing petition is only one of her arguments against that temporary relief in the circuit court, another one being that a prior stipulation between the parties said that she gets the money upon the denial of Trump’s petition, which already happened in June, not his rehearing petition.
Whatever happens with his circuit motion and high court rehearing petition, there will still be the separate matter of his appeal in the other case Carroll won against him that resulted in an $83.3 million defamation award. Unlike the $5 million case, that one stems from Trump’s defamation of Carroll while he was president (during his first term), and he is pressing claims of presidential immunity in that appeal. One of his lawyers said he will be filing that new petition by July 28.
In the pending rehearing petition, Trump said his forthcoming petition in the $83.3 million case gives the justices a good reason to reconsider the $5 million case denial, because he said his presidential acts were wrongly used as evidence against him in the $5 million case, too. Therefore, he argued in the rehearing petition, resolution of his forthcoming $83.3 million petition will “bear on the proper disposition” of the $5 million case because of the Supreme Court’s 2024 presidential immunity rulingin Trump’s favor, which curbed the use of official presidential acts as evidence to impose liability for other conduct.
Of course, the justices knew about the forthcoming petition in the $83.3 million case when they rejected his $5 million petition in June. So it’s unclear what new information has come to light that would warrant reconsideration. But we should learn soon enough, possibly Aug. 17, whether the court will finally put an end to the litigation in the $5 million case, though that would still leave open the question of how the litigation over the much larger award will conclude. We might not know whether the justices are interested in reviewing that second case until the fall, at least. Even if they deny Trump’s rehearing petition in the first case, they would still be free to review the second one.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
Amid new allegations that China and Russia are helping Iran in its ongoing war with the United States, Donald Trump apparently decided to set the record straight — or at least try to.
In a Friday morning statement published to his social media platformthe American president said that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin separately assured him that their respective countries would not provide Iran with support.
“Therefore, two major Countries that people speak of often in terms of Iran are, in my opinion, not participating,” the Republican added.
The trouble is, Trump’s “opinion” isn’t altogether relevant. What matters is the truth, not what he considers to be the truth. And there’s a whole lot of evidence to suggest the American president’s “opinion” is wrong.
It was just five weeks ago when, as the Group of Seven summit in France was wrapping up, Trump offered some curious praise to his friend in Moscow. “I want to thank Vladimir Putin, he was very neutral,” the Republican saidreferring to the Russian president’s role in the war with Iran. “They could have made it much more difficult for us.”
About a month later, Republican Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth a straightforward question during a televised congressional hearing: “Are Russia and China helping Iran? And if so, how?”
The Pentagon chief hemmed and hawed a bit, explaining that there are details that “ought to remain classified,” before stating that China and Russia are “enabling some of the things Iran is doing” — a far cry from remaining “very neutral,” as Trump claimed.
A day later, MS NOW reportedas part of its live blog coverage: “Recent Iranian drone strikes targeting CIA facilities in the Persian Gulf have prompted U.S. intelligence analysts to probe whether Russia was involved in providing information to Tehran, Reuters reported. … The U.S. investigation has not led to firm answers on whether the Kremlin was involved in the recent attacks, according to the report, but the precision of the attacks has stoked further speculation over the extent of Russia’s technical support for Tehran.”
But as this week nears its end, Hegseth’s boss nevertheless decided to contradict his own defense secretary via social media, declaring that China and Russia are “not participating” in the conflict.
Under the circumstances, Trump’s version of reality is literally unbelievable. In fact, just days into the war with Iran, multiple news organizations, including MS NOW, reported that Russia had provided Iran with information that could help it strike American targets. One U.S. official told MS NOW point-blank that Russia was “providing intelligence help to Iran.”
It wasn’t long before any doubt about the accuracy of the reporting evaporated. Iranian officials publicly confirmed Russia’s “military cooperation”; U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz acknowledged Russia’s wartime “strategic partnership” with Iran; and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said matter-of-factly that Russia was “providing intelligence to Iran to better attack and kill American troops.”
The Wall Street Journal soon after advanced the broader storyreporting that Russia expanded its intelligence sharing and military cooperation with Iran, “providing satellite imagery and improved drone technology to aid Tehran’s targeting of U.S. forces in the region.”
This should have been the sort of news to send shock waves through the nation’s capital. In the middle of an ongoing and deadly hot war in the Middle East, the administration had reason to believe one U.S. adversary (Russia) was helping another U.S. adversary (Iran) facilitate attacks against us.
Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a former CIA and Pentagon official, said during a Senate hearing“If Russia is helping to kill U.S. forces, we have crossed a Rubicon. We are in another moment. We have to take decisive action on that.”
But there were no shock waves. Trump and his team chose not to care.
The initial reaction from the American president and his team to the allegations was total indifference. This was followed by news that the Republican administration agreed effectively to reward Putin’s regime by easing oil sanctions on the country.
All the while, top members of Team Trump publicly vouched for Russia’s trustworthiness and echoed Kremlin talking points.
The American president managed to make the problem worse during a Fox News interview by conceding that he believed Russia “might be” assisting Iran, but he added that Putin’s regime deserves a pass because the U.S. has assisted Ukraine.
“You know, it’s like, hey, they do it and we do it, in all fairness,” Trump said. “They do it and we do it.”
Days later, he went further, telling the Financial Timesin reference to Russia, “It’s hard to say, ‘You’re targeting us, but we’ve been helping Ukraine.’”
In other words, the incumbent American president, during a war, both echoed Putin’s talking points and excused an adversary for helping a different adversary target American troops and assets.
All the while, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared publicly that his country’s government had “irrefutable” evidence that Russia had provided intelligence to the Iranian regime during the war, but he simply couldn’t get the White House to take an interest in the proof.
A simple question appears unavoidable: As Trump launches a new effort to assure the public that Russia and China are “not participating” in the war, is he confused about recent events he ought to understand? Or does he not know what “participate” means?
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace slammed President Donald Trump’s eldest son for exploiting his father’s name for “massive profits” after new reporting from The New York Times revealed how Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital, has gone from managing a few hundred million dollars to overseeing more than $3 billion in assets in just two years.
According to the Times, since Trump Jr. joined the firm after the 2024 election, 1789 Capital’s main investment fund has reportedly generated nearly 200% in returns through the first half of 2026. Many of the companies linked to the firm have directly benefited from Trump administration policies or have been on the receiving end of large government contracts.
On Thursday’s “Deadline: White House,” Wallace said the report is just the latest example of a Trump family member using “his presidency for personal profit.” The MS NOW host noted a recent analysis from The Washington Post found that funds linked to the president’s two eldest sons, Don Jr. and Eric Trump, have generated at least $3.2 billion in direct government business since he returned to the White House.
While both Trump sons have denied any wrongdoing and say they do not use insider information from the administration to make investments, Wallace questioned the family’s newfound success.
“Were either the Trump sons successful investors before Donald Trump was president a second time?” she asked.
According to the “Deadline: White House” host, there’s one group who she said should feel the more slighted by the president’s family’s reported dealings: his own supporters.
“We can’t be more mad, though, than Trump’s own voters,” she said.
Wallace noted that as Trump and his family appear to be enriching themselves, Americans across the country are suffering under the administration’s policies, including the ongoing war against Iran and the president’s tariffs.
“How do you make people understand that he’s robbing them?” she asked. “This isn’t money that is zero-sum. They’re enriching themselves at the expense of the people who sent Donald Trump to Washington to make their lives better.”
You can watch Wallace’s full commentary in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”
- Supreme Court signals Trump’s E. Jean Carroll rehearing bid could fail soon
- Contradicting Hegseth, Trump claims Russia is ‘not participating’ in Iran
- Nicolle Wallace: Trump family is profiting while his supporters pay the price
- You asked, Joe answered
- Comer: 1 NDA produced by Leon Black to House Oversight ‘unacceptable’
- Trump imposes double-digit tariffs on countries before Friday deadline
- Loomer meets with Zelensky in Ukraine after major U-turn…
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