NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump angrily lashed out Wednesday, calling the nation’s legal system a “broken disgrace” after a judge ruled he must answer questions under oath next week in a defamation lawsuit lodged by a writer who says he raped her in the mid-1990s.
He also called the 2019 lawsuit by E. Jean Carroll, a longtime advice columnist for Elle magazine, “a hoax and a lie.”
The outburst late in the day came hours after U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in Manhattan rejected a request by his lawyers to delay a deposition scheduled for Oct. 19.
Kaplan is presiding over the case in which Carroll said Trump raped her in the dressing room of a Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman store in the mid-1990s. He called the lawsuit “a complete con job.”
“I don’t know this woman, have no idea who she is, other than it seems she got a picture of me many years ago, with her husband, shaking my hand on a reception line at a celebrity charity event,” Trump said.
For years, Donald Trump has incessantly railed against what he called “the Russia hoax” and denied Vladimir Putin’s attack on the United States. Yet the real Russia con was that very dismissal. And this fraud, perpetuated by Trump, his conservative minions, top Republicans, Fox, and other right-wing media, has led to Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
There are at least two ways that happened, and both originate with the Trump cult in 2016 (and onward) refusing to acknowledge Moscow’s assault on American democracy. Though numerous investigations concluded that Russia mounted a hack-and-dump operation and a covert social media campaign to sow political discord in the United States, cripple the campaign of Hillary Clinton, and help Trump win the presidency, Trump and his allies claimed at the time (and since) that no such thing had ever occurred—or they belittled its impact.
The reason was obvious: They placed political interests—electing Trump—over the national interest. Any acknowledgment of Putin’s clandestine efforts to assist Trump—and the Trump campaign had been privately informed in June 2016 that the Kremlin intended to secretly help it—could have hurt Trump during the campaign. So Trump howled there was no Russia attack, which transformed any discussion of the ongoing Russian attack into a partisan fight, thus preventing Republicans from joining the Obama administration effort to counter Putin. This provided cover for Putin, making it easier for him to get away with his assault on the United States.
Imagine how this looked to Putin. He had helped bring about a regime change in the most powerful nation of the world, installing in office an utterly inexperienced fellow who had been heaping praise on the corrupt Russian autocrat for years. What a victory! On election night 2016, an employee of Russia’s Internet Research Agency, which had been a key part of the Kremlin operation, sent a message reporting that cyber operatives there “uncorked a tiny bottle of champagne” when they found out Trump had won and “uttered almost in unison: ‘We made America great.’” At a celebration in Moscow, Dmitry Drobnitsky, a writer for pro-Kremlin outlets, exclaimed, “This is the real reset of the Western world.”
Pulling off this operation could only have emboldened Putin. Though he was hit with moderate sanctions afterward, the real economic or political cost of his skulduggery was negligible. For four years, Putin had an American president who not only didn’t challenge him, but also frayed US relations with European nations and denigrated NATO, a key strategic aim of Putin. As the first Trump impeachment illustrated, Trump even withheld military assistance from Ukraine to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden. Had Hillary Clinton been inaugurated president in 2017, would US policy have focused more on constraining Putin? Probably. Would it have succeeded in doing so and made the invasion of Ukraine less likely? That’s unknowable. But Trump and his fellow Russia hoax hoaxers afforded Putin running room that he has used to race into Ukraine.
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