Summary
Here’s a recap of today’s developments:
Donald Trump’s criminal trial for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results will take place on 4 March 2024, the federal judge presiding over the case in Washington ruled, marking a sharp repudiation of the former president who had sought to delay the case for years.
The schedule set by US district court judge Tanya Chutkan means Trump’s first trial defending himself against prosecutors and the special counsel Jack Smith will be the election subversion case – and it will come during the height of the 2024 Republican primary season.
Trump vowed to appeal Judge Chutkan’s decision to start the proceedings on 4 March of next year. “Today a biased, Trump Hating Judge gave me only a two month extension, just what our corrupt government wanted, SUPER TUESDAY. I will APPEAL!” he wrote on Truth Social.
Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff under Donald Trump, testified for nearly three hours in a hearing to move his Georgia election interference case from state to federal court on Monday.
Former Trump campaign lawyer Ray Smith, one of the 19 defendants charged in Georgia as part of the sweeping indictment in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, has waived his arraignment and entered a plea of not guilty, according to a court filing.
The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, has announced $1m for heightened security at a historically Black college, a day after he was booed at a memorial gathering for victims of a deadly racist shooting in his state. DeSantis’s funding measure comes as he faces criticism for limiting Black history education in Florida, a move that many have condemned as racist.
More than three-quarters of respondents in a new US poll said Joe Biden would be too old to be effective if re-elected president next year. But as many people in the survey said the 80-year-old Biden was “old” and “confused”, so a similar number saw his 77-year-old likely challenger, Donald Trump, as “corrupt” and “dishonest”.
Eminem sent a cease and desist letter to Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy asking him to stop using his music on the campaign trail.
In a letter obtained by the Daily Mail, music licenser BMI notified Ramaswamy’s campaign that Marshall Mathers, AKA Eminem, “objecting to the Vivek Ramaswamy campaign’s use of Eminem’s musical compositions (the “Eminem Works”) and requesting that BMI remove all Eminem Works from the Agreement.”
The letter, dated 23 August, went on to say that the rapper’s “works are excluded from the Agreement effective immediately”.
BMI will consider any performance of the Eminem Works by the Vivek 2024 campaign from this date forward to be a material breach of the Agreement for which BMI reserves all rights and remedies with respect thereto.
The letter comes after Ramaswamy rapped some of Eminem’s song “Lose Yourself” at the Iowa State Fair. In an interview with the New York Times, the biotech entrepreneur discussed his love of Eminem and said he used to perform under “Da Vek the Rapper” as an undergrad at Harvard University.
2024 GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy raps Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” at the Iowa State Fair. pic.twitter.com/xUxlxUf3TY
— The Recount (@therecount) August 12, 2023
