By Aaron Miller-
A former legal adviser for one-time Donald Trump attorney Michael Cohen, has been called to testify before a New York grand jury.
Mr Costello is expected to testify on Monday afternoon in a case against the former president over hush money paid to ex-porn actress Stormy Daniels.
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Trump’s lawyers had on Monday asked a Georgia court to squash a special jury report detailing its investigation into the former U.S president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 U.S election results.
Donald Trump filed a last-ditch effort to evade the Fulton County, Georgia grand jury investigation into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in that state.
Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in 2018 over his payments to Daniels and another woman, as well as for lying to Congress. US law requires disclosing campaign contributions and limits them to $2,700 per individual.
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Prosecutors are on the verge of charging Trump in connection with hush money payments made to a pornographic actress, Stormy Daniels, who claimed she and Trump had an affair.
The former president revealed last week his belief that he would be arrested on Tuesday in relation to the Stormy Daniels affair.
Trump said on Monday that the Daniels case is based on a “discredited” testimony by Cohen, describing his former fixer as a “convicted liar, felon and jailbird”.
“ALVIN BRAGG SHOULD BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR THE CRIME OF ‘INTERFERENCE IN A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION’,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Trump also faces separate U.S. Justice Department probes into classified documents he kept after leaving the White House, as well as his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
His former personal lawyer Michael Cohen testified over two days last week before the panel in Manhattan Criminal Court, and Daniels spoke with prosecutors via Zoom.
Cohen has admitted to giving Daniels $130,000 to keep her quiet about her claims of having had sex with Trump on one occasion years before the election.
The investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is examining how the Trump Organization, classified the payment and reimbursement to Cohen as legal expenses.
The Georgia motion seeks to bar prosecutors from using any evidence or testimony derived from the grand jury’s investigation.
The report includes the jurors’ recommendations to prosecutors on possible indictments for election interference, though the details remain secret.
Trump is seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and has accused both Willis and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, also a Democrat, of targeting him for partisan reasons.
The Georgia probe began shortly after a January 2021 phone call in which Trump urged the state’s top election official, Brad Raffensperger, to find enough votes to reverse Joe Biden’s victory, asserting falsely that the results had bee compromised by widespread fraud. Days later, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, trying to prevent the certification of Biden’s national victory.
The letter follows Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s announcement over the weekend that he would instruct committees to look into the expected prosecution of former President Donald Trump.
It demands all documents and communications between New York state and federal law enforcement on the case against Trump since the start of 2017. It also demands that Bragg sit for an interview, and that Bragg’s office provide information about any funds it receives from the federal government.
At Willis’s request, a special grand jury was convened last year to aid in her investigation. While the grand jury did not have the authority to produce indictments, it could issue subpoenas and heard testimony from 75 witnesses, including top Trump allies such as U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham and lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Trump did not appear as a witness.
In Monday’s motion, Trump’s lawyers mounted several arguments, including asserting that the statute permitting such special purpose grand juries is unconstitutional and that grand jurors who spoke with media outlets violated the law.
“The whole world has watched the process of the SPGJ unfold and what they have witnessed was a process that was confusing, flawed and, at-times, blatantly unconstitutional,” they wrote, using an acronym for the jury.
The investigation has also examined a scheme involving a slate of fake electors that falsely asserted Trump had won Georgia in an effort to award the state’s electoral votes to him, rather than Biden.
Willis’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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