Trump refuses to call Putin ‘evil’ on Fox News
Donald Trump has had his request to countersue writer E Jean Carroll in the defamation case brought against him denied by a New York federal judge.
In a scathing opinion, Judge Lewis Kaplan slammed the former president’s attempt to delay proceedings. Ms Carroll accuses Mr Trump of raping her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. After she wrote about the incident during his presidency, he called her a liar and she sued him for defamation.
In other news, the former president is outraged by YouTube’s decision to take down an interview he did earlier this week with the NELK Boys, an encounter in which he repeated false claims about the 2020 election that violate the platform’s misinformation policy.
A furious statement issued after the interview was removed wrongly claimed that the platform was violating his First Amendment rights, compared the move to the Russian government’s crackdown on information about its invasion of Ukraine, and declared that “our country is going to hell!”
Meanwhile, Mr Trump last night shied away from walking back on his praise for Russian president Vladimir Putin in an interview with Fox News late on Thursday, even as host Sean Hannity gave him multiple opportunities to do so, even leading him to call the Russian leader “evil”.
The most recent polling from The Wall Street Journal shows the former president tied with Joe Biden in a hypothetical electoral match-up.
