Investigation into alleged Trump victim E. Jean Carroll

News blog about US politics

She accused Trump – now she is under investigation

The US Department of Justice is taking action against an alleged Trump victim. The Iran war has seriously depleted the US weapons arsenal. All developments in the news blog.

The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the former magazine columnist who accused President Donald Trump of sexual assault, according to CNN.

The investigation is focused on whether Carroll committed perjury in statements related to her two civil lawsuits against the president. In the first lawsuit, she accuses Trump of sexually abusing her in a New York department store in the mid-1990s. The second concerns defamation: Trump not only repeatedly denied the accusation in 2019, but also declared that Carroll was not his “type” and claimed that she made up the story to boost sales of her book.

The public prosecutor’s office is relying on an affidavit from 82-year-old Carroll from 2022. According to this, she had received no external financial support for her lawsuit. It was later revealed that billionaire Reid Hoffman had paid some of the legal fees and expenses.

California wants to impose a 100 percent tax on payments from a fund set up by the Trump administration for victims of alleged political persecution. The governor of the US state, Gavin Newsom, announced this on Wednesday. “We will seek to tax everyone from California who receives money from this fund at 100 percent,” Newsom said. “This is an action the state of California can take, and we look forward to taking it.” The governor’s press office described the $1.776 billion fund as a “slush fund.”

According to a study, the US will need at least three years to replace the weapons systems most heavily used in Iran. This applies to both Tomahawk cruise missiles and Patriot and THAAD interceptor systems, according to an analysis published on Wednesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington.

Standard SM-3 and SM-6 missiles used by the Navy could be procured new in around two years, the CSIS analysis continued. They were not used so intensively. The study goes on to say that there is no military risk for the USA in the Iran war due to the emptied stocks. However, this “created a window of vulnerability for a possible conflict in the Western Pacific” – in plain language: for a possible war against China.