WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Donald Trump will host a bevy of potential vice presidential picks at a Republican event in Florida this weekend, giving him the chance to observe his potential running mates in action while using them as a draw to attract donors.

The Republican presidential candidate will convene a two-day retreat on Friday and Saturday in Palm Beach that is expected to attract more than 400 donors and high-profile politicians.

The event will help shore up Trump’s shaky finances, which have been drained by legal fees, and could be a way to reassure donors about the state of the campaign with Trump currently spending the bulk of his time in a Manhattan courtroom in his criminal trial over a hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

Potential VP picks expected to attend include North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, U.S. Senators Marco Rubio, Tim Scott and J.D. Vance; and U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik, according to a copy of the retreat’s program seen by Reuters.

Burgum and Scott competed against Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination before dropping out. U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson will also address the guests.

“Trump is skillfully using his VP contenders as an added bonus at these events,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican operative in Florida. “He’s using this to raise money and change the news cycle.”

Trump will face President Joe Biden, a Democrat, in the Nov. 5 general election.

Attendees will receive a briefing on the state of the race from Trump’s co-campaign managers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, and his pollster Tony Fabrizio. They will also be given a briefing on “election integrity.”

Most of the event will be held at the Four Seasons hotel in Palm Beach, with Trump hosting a fundraising lunch at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Saturday.

According to the invitation, the retreat was open only to those who have raised $25,000 for Trump or couples who have raised $100,000.

Trump is in no hurry to pick a running mate, according to advisers. He will not be formally nominated until the Republican convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in July.

Some Trump advisers believe Noem’s stock has fallen in Trump’s eyes after her revelation in her new memoir that she once shot a 14-month-old dog for being disobedient.

Trump’s Save America committee has paid out more than $59 million in legal fees since the start of 2023, siphoning resources that could be used for TV ads and other campaign-related needs.

Beyond the hush-money trial, which is expected to last deep into this month, Trump faces federal and state charges over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and a federal prosecution over his mishandling of classified documents. But it’s unclear if any of those three cases will come to trial before the election.

Biden has held a persistent edge in fundraising. His campaign reported having about $85 million in the bank at the end of March, compared with Trump’s $45 million.

Trump is also scheduled to hold a high-dollar fundraiser in New York on May 14.

(Reporting by James Oliphant and Steve Holland; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Jonathan Oatis)

Russian state-affiliated accounts have boosted their use of TikTok and are getting more engagement on the short-form video platform ahead of the U.S. presidential election, according to a study published Thursday by the nonprofit Brookings Institution.

The report states that Russia is increasingly leveraging TikTok to disseminate Kremlin messages in both English and Spanish, with state-linked accounts posting far more frequently on the platform than they did two years ago.

Such accounts are also active on other social media platforms and have a larger presence on Telegram and X than on TikTok. However, the report says user engagement — such as likes, views and shares — on their posts has been much higher on TikTok than on either Telegram or X.

“The use of TikTok highlights a growing, but still not fully realized, avenue for Russia’s state-backed information apparatus to reach new, young audiences,” reads the report, which drew data from 70 different state-affiliated accounts and was authored by Valerie Wirtschafter, a Brookings fellow in foreign policy and its artificial intelligence initiative.

The study notes that most posts do not focus on U.S. politics but other issues, like the war in Ukraine and NATO. However, those that do tend to feature more divisive topics like U.S. policy on Israel and Russia, and questions around President Joe Biden’s age, the Brookings report says.

A TikTok spokesperson said the company has removed covert influence operations in the past and eliminated accounts, including 13 networks operating from Russia.

The spokesperson said TikTok also labels state-controlled media accounts and will expand that policy in the coming weeks “to further address accounts that attempt to reach communities outside their home country on current global events and affairs.”

The Brookings report comes after Biden last month signed legislation forcing TikTok’s parent company — China-based ByteDance — to sell the platform or face a ban in the U.S. The potential ban is expected to face legal challenges.

By Andrew Goudsward

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Donald Trump cited U.S. President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents after leaving the vice presidency as he seeks to have criminal charges related to his own retention of sensitive records tossed out, court filings showed on Thursday.

Trump, the former president and the Republican challenger to Democrat Biden in the Nov. 5 election, argued that the decision not to charge Biden and other senior U.S. officials who mishandled classified information shows he is being selectively targeted by prosecutors.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the case and who was nominated by Trump, will rule on Trump’s challenge. Cannon, who has been receptive to some of Trump’s defense arguments, has questioned prosecutors at prior court hearings about why former presidents and vice presidents found to be in possession of potentially classified documents were not charged.

Trump faces a high legal bar in showing that he was selectively targeted and such challenges are rarely successful, but the argument aligns with Trump’s campaign message that he is a victim of political persecution.

“American history is chock full of public examples involving alleged mishandling of classified information and documents, which did not result in the type of politically motivated charges that the Special Counsel’s Office has brought against President Trump and his codefendants,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in a court filing.

The arguments came in a document filed under seal in February and made public with some redactions on Thursday.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to charges accusing him of illegally retaining information related to U.S. national security at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after he left the presidency in 2021 and obstructing government efforts to retrieve the documents.

Trump, the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges, has been indicted in four separate cases and is on trial in New York state court over allegations that he falsified records to pay hush money to a porn star ahead of the 2016 election.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the documents prosecution, argued in a previous court filing that Trump’s alleged obstruction — including instructing aides to move boxes containing classified documents and attempting to convince his lawyer to lie to investigators – differentiate Trump’s case from Biden’s.

Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated classified documents found at Biden’s home and former offices, noted Biden’s cooperation with his probe and cited “material distinctions” with Trump’s case in a report published in February. Hur declined to bring criminal charges against Biden, but found some evidence that Biden willfully held onto sensitive material after he left the vice presidency in 2017.

Cannon previously rejected two of Trump’s other attempts to dismiss the charges.

(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Leslie Adler)

By James Oliphant

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Donald Trump said he may not accept the 2024 election results in Wisconsin, a key battleground state in his matchup with President Joe Biden, leaving open the possibility of post-election turmoil.

In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Wednesday, Trump said that if he doesn’t believe the result in November’s election was legitimate, “you have to fight for the right of the country.”

Trump added, “If everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results.”

The Republican presidential candidate’s comments came on the heels of an interview this week with Time magazine in which Trump did not rule out the possibility of political violence around the election, saying “it depends on the fairness” of the process.

In the Journal Sentinel interview, Trump reiterated his baseless claim that he won Wisconsin — a Midwestern state he lost to Biden, a Democrat, by about 21,000 votes in 2020 — and that the election was tainted by fraud. Trump’s campaign unsuccessfully sought to disqualify almost 240,000 ballots cast for Biden.

Trump won Wisconsin over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, and his rematch this year with Biden is expected to be tight. He held campaign rallies on Wednesday in Wisconsin and Michigan, another battleground state.

Trump said in the newspaper interview he won’t hesitate to raise doubts about the election if he’s convinced something is amiss with the results.

“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” Trump said. “But no, I expect an honest election and we expect to win maybe very big.”

(Reporting by James Oliphant; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Jonathan Oatis)

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Thursday rejected calls from student protesters to change his approach to the war in Gaza while insisting that “order must prevail” as college campuses across the country face a wave of violence, outrage and fear.

“Dissent is essential for democracy,” Biden said at the White House. “But dissent must never lead to disorder.”

The Democratic president broke days of silence on the protests with his remarks, which followed mounting criticism from Republicans who have tried to turn scenes of unrest into a campaign cudgel. By focusing on a law-and-order message while defending the right to free speech, Biden is grasping for a middle ground on an intensely divisive issue in the middle of his reelection campaign.

He largely sidestepped protesters’ demands, which have included ending U.S. support for Israeli military operations. Asked after his remarks whether the demonstrations would prompt him to consider changing course, Biden responded with a simple “no.”

Biden said that he did not want the National Guard to be deployed to campuses. Some Republicans have called for sending in troops, an idea with a fraught history. Four students were shot and killed at Kent State University by members of the Ohio National Guard during protests over the Vietnam War in 1970.

Tensions on college campuses have been building for days as demonstrators refuse to remove encampments and administrators turn to police to clear them by force, leading to clashes that have seized widespread attention.

Biden said he rejected efforts to use the situation to “score political points,” calling the situation a “moment for clarity.”

“There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos,” Biden said shortly before leaving the White House for a trip to North Carolina. “People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

Biden will make his own visit to a college campus on May 19 when he’s scheduled to deliver the commencement address at Morehouse University in Atlanta.

His last previous public comment on the demonstrations came more than a week ago, when he condemned “antisemitic protests” and “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

The White House, which has been peppered with questions by reporters, had gone only slightly further than the president. On Wednesday, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that Biden was “monitoring the situation closely” and that some demonstrations had stepped over a line that separated free speech from unlawful behavior.

“Forcibly taking over a building,” such as what happened at Columbia University in New York, “is not peaceful,” she said. “It’s just not.”

Biden’s latest remarks weren’t well received in some corners of the Democratic Party.

“We need to prevent lawlessness in society. We need to have protections against hate speech,” said a social media post from Patrick Gaspard, president of the Center for American Progress and a former White House political director under President Barack Obama. “But we need to be able to hold space for active dissent and activism that is discomforting without blanket accusations of hate and violence against all activists.”

But Biden’s team has expressed confidence that his stance appeals to the widest array of voters. It also echoes his approach to nationwide unrest after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer four years ago, a politically volatile situation in the middle of his campaign against then-President Donald Trump.

“I want to make it absolutely clear rioting is not protesting, looting is not protesting,” Biden said then in remarks that his team turned into an advertisement. “It’s lawlessness, plain and simple, and those that do it should be prosecuted.”

Biden has never been much for protests of any kind. His career in elected office began as a county official when he was only 28 years old, and he’s always espoused the political importance of compromise.

As college campuses convulsed with anger over the Vietnam War in 1968, Biden was in law school at Syracuse University.

“I’m not big on flak jackets and tie-dyed shirts,” he said years later. “You know, that’s not me.″

Despite the White House criticism of violent college protests and Biden’s refusal to heed demands to cut off U.S. support for Israel, Republicans blame Democrats for the disorder and have used it as a backdrop for press conferences.

“We need the president of the United States to speak to the issue and say this is wrong,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said on Tuesday. “What’s happening on college campuses right now is wrong.”

Johnson visited Columbia University with other members of his caucus last week. House Republicans sparred verbally with protesters while speaking to the media at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.

Trump, who is running for another term as president, also criticized Biden in an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News.

“Biden has to do something,” he said. “Biden is supposed to be the voice of our country, and it’s certainly not much of a voice. It’s a voice that nobody’s heard.”

He repeated his criticisms on Wednesday during a campaign event in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

“The radical extremists and far-left agitators are terrorizing college campuses, as you possibly noticed,” Trump said. “And Biden’s nowhere to be found. He hasn’t said anything.”

Kate Berner, who served as deputy communications director for Biden’s campaign in 2020, said Republicans already had tried the same tactic during protests over Floyd’s murder.

“People rejected that,” she said. “They saw that it was just fearmongering. They saw that it wasn’t based in reality.”

Apart from condemning antisemitism, the White House has been reluctant to directly engage on the issue.

Jean-Pierre repeatedly deflected questions during a briefing on Monday.

Asked whether protesters should be disciplined by their schools, she said “universities and colleges make their own decisions” and “we’re not going to weigh in from here.”

Pressed on whether police should be called in, she said “that’s up to the colleges and universities.”

Asked on Thursday why Biden chose to speak on the matter after police had arrested protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles and at universities in New York City, Jean-Pierre stressed instead the importance of any protests being nonviolent.

“We’ve been very consistent here,” she said. “Americans have the right to peacefully protest as long as it’s within the law and violence is not protected.”

___

Associated Press writer Adriana Gomez Licon in Miami and AP writer Colleen Long and White House Correspondent Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden has called Japan and India “xenophobic” countries that do not welcome immigrants, lumping the two with adversaries China and Russia as he tried to explain their economic circumstances and contrasted the four with the U.S. on immigration.

The remarks, at a campaign fundraising event Wednesday evening, came just three weeks after the White House hosted Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida for a lavish official visit, during which the two leaders celebrated what Biden called an “unbreakable alliance,” particularly on global security matters.

The White House welcomed Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi for a state visit last summer.

Japan is a critical U.S. ally. And India, one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, is a vital partner in the Indo-Pacific despite differences on human rights.

At a hotel fundraiser where the donor audience was largely Asian American, Biden said the upcoming U.S. election was about “freedom, America and democracy” and that the nation’s economy was thriving “because of you and many others.”

“Why? Because we welcome immigrants,” Biden said. “Look, think about it. Why is China stalling so badly economically? Why is Japan having trouble? Why is Russia? Why is India? Because they’re xenophobic. They don’t want immigrants.”

The president added: “Immigrants are what makes us strong. Not a joke. That’s not hyperbole, because we have an influx of workers who want to be here and want to contribute.”

There was no immediate reaction from either the Japanese or Indian governments. White House national security spokesman John Kirby said Biden was making a broader point about the U.S. posture on immigration.

“Our allies and partners know well in tangible ways how President Biden values them, their friendship, their cooperation and the capabilities that they bring across the spectrum on a range of issues, not just security related,” Kirby said Thursday morning when asked about Biden’s “xenophobic” remarks. “They understand how much he completely and utterly values the idea of alliances and partnerships.”

Biden’s comments came at the start of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and he was introduced at the fundraiser by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., one of two senators of Asian American descent. She is a national co-chair for his reelection campaign.

Japan has acknowledged issues with its shrinking population, and the number of babies born in the country in 2023 fell for the eighth straight year, according to data released in February. Kishida has called the low birth rate in Japan “the biggest crisis Japan faces” and the country has long been known for a more closed-door stance on immigration, although Kishida’s government has, in recent years, shifted its policies to make it easier for foreign workers to come to Japan.

Meanwhile, India’s population has swelled to become the world’s largest, with the United Nations saying it was on track to reach 1.425 billion. Its population also skews younger. Earlier this year, India enacted a new citizenship law that fast-tracks naturalization for Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians who fled to India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. But it excludes Muslims, who are a majority in all three nations. It’s the first time that India has set religious criteria for citizenship.

—

Associated Press chief political reporter Steve Peoples and Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani contributed to this report.

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Under mounting political pressure, U.S. President Joe Biden broke his silence on campus unrest over the war in Gaza on Thursday, saying Americans have the right to demonstrate but not to unleash violence.

“There is a right to protest, but not a right to cause chaos,” Biden said in remarks at the White House.

With television images of campus unrest that have swept the country in recent days playing out on news networks, Biden has faced criticism of his handling of the situation. He had been leaving it largely up to his spokespersons to comment.

The Democratic president, seeking re-election in November, has walked a careful line of denouncing antisemitism while supporting young Americans’ right to protest and trying to limit longer-term political damage. 

Biden said both sides had a point, that peaceful dissent was critical to a democracy but that violence would not be tolerated.

“Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancelling of classes and graduations -none of this is a peaceful protest,” he said.

Biden said the United States was not an authoritarian nation that silences critics but that “order must prevail.”

“Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or denying the rights of others so students can’t finish the semester and college education,” he said.

Biden, asked whether state governors should call in National Guard troops to restore order if necessary, replied “no.”

In response to a reporter’s question, Biden said the campus protests had not forced him to reconsider his policies in the Middle East.

Student protesters are calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and demanding schools divest from companies that support Israel’s government.

(Reporting by Steve Holland and Katharine Jackson; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — President Joe Biden detoured to Charlotte on Thursday to meet the families of law enforcement officers shot to death on the job, just a week after he sat down with the grieving relatives of two cops killed in upstate New York.

Biden was headed to a speech in Wilmington, North Carolina, and added on the visit to see the families, as well as officers officers wounded in the shooting.

The meeting lasted about two hours and took place with little fanfare behind closed doors, as the White House wanted Biden to be seen as respecting the privacy of grieving families and avoiding the appearance of using their grief for political purposes.

The president took a short motorcade across the airport to the North Carolina Air National Guard base to meet the group, which included elected officials. The location was an alternative to traveling into the city and was chosen as the least taxing one for local law enforcement officers who are still reeling from the deaths but who would have a hand in securing the president’s trip.

Once again, Biden was seeking to be an empathetic leader for a community reeling from gun violence, while also calling for stricter rules around firearms and more money for law enforcement on the front lines.

Four officers were killed this week in North Carolina, when a wanted man opened fire on a joint agency task force that had come to arrest him on a warrant for possession of a firearm as an ex-felon, and fleeing to elude capture. They were: Sam Poloche and William Elliott of the North Carolina Department of Adult Corrections; Charlotte-Mecklenburg Officer Joshua Eyer; and Deputy U.S. Marshal Thomas Weeks.

Four other officers were wounded in the gunfire; the suspect was killed. An AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, a 40-caliber handgun and ammunition were found at the scene.

An AR-15 is among the weapons most often used in mass shootings, and it’s the type of gun Biden is talking about when he says the U.S. should ban “ assault weapons.” Congress passed the most comprehensive gun control legislation in decades in 2022, after a horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. But it didn’t go far enough, Biden often says.

And as he campaigns for the 2024 election, Biden has made curbing gun violence a major campaign platform, elusive to Democrats even during the Obama era, as he fends off attacks from Republican challenger Donald Trump that he is soft on crime and anti-police.

Biden said this week in a statement after the North Carolina killings that the U.S. must “do more to protect our law enforcement officers. That means funding them — so they have the resources they need to do their jobs and keep us safe.”

The violence came just about two weeks after another fatal shooting of law enforcement officers in Syracuse, New York; Lieutenant Michael Hoosock and Officer Michael Jensen were killed while looking for a driver who fled a traffic stop. After his speech, Biden met relatives of both of the officers’ families.

Biden had already been scheduled to come to Syracuse to celebrate Micron Technology’s plans to build a campus of computer chip factories, but the local police union said officers were still coming to terms with the deaths and weren’t happy with the president’s trip and had hoped he would delay.

On Thursday, Biden will also travel on to Wilmington, where he’s announcing his administration is providing states an additional $3 billion to replace lead pipes across the country, building on $5.8 billion for water infrastructure projects around the country announced in February.

Money for the pipe replacement comes from one of the administration’s key legislative victories, the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law that Biden signed in 2021. The infrastructure law includes over $50 billion to upgrade America’s water infrastructure.

The new round of funding will help pay for projects nationwide as Biden seeks to replace all lead pipes in the country.

EPA estimates that North Carolina has 370,000 lead pipes, and $76 million will go to replace them statewide. Biden also will meet with faculty and students at a Wilmington school that replaced a water fountain with high levels of lead with money from the law.

___

Associated Press writers Zeke Miller, Matthew Daly and Josh Boak contributed to this story.

By Andrew Hay

(Reuters) -At Columbia University, tensions between the administration and students protesting over Israel’s war in Gaza have reached the point that scores of New York City police marched onto campus to clear an encampment and arrest demonstrators who had commandeered a classroom building.

It was the second time in as many weeks that the administration has called on police to control the protests. Students have been suspended, and threatened with expulsion. Police are now stationed around-the-clock on campus.

Nearly three thousand miles away at the University of California, Berkeley, the scene has been far different. Student demonstrations have so far taken place without arrests or disruption of campus operations.

The contrast in how protests have played out at the two prestigious institutions – both with long histories of student activism – illustrates the range of factors at play in how school administrations, students and the police navigate what can quickly turn into a full-blown crisis.

South of Berkeley at UCLA, part of the same university system, police on Thursday morning flattened a pro-Palestinian camp, a day after it was attacked by pro-Israel counter protesters. Authorities at the Los Angeles school d had declared the encampment an unlawful assembly.

Also in Los Angeles, police in riot gear last week swarmed the private University of Southern California campus arresting dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters.

Similar crackdowns have occurred at colleges across the country, from Arizona State to Virginia Tech and Ohio State to Yale. Police have arrested more than 1,000 students to date.

Still, some universities – including Berkeley, Northwestern and Brown – have managed to avoid confrontations between the police and students.

Education experts say these cases offer lessons in keeping tensions from boiling over, a key one being a university’s experience with balancing student activism against pressure from donors, interest groups and politicians.

Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ has allowed students to maintain a protest space on campus since they began erecting tents April 22 on the steps of Sproul Hall, where Martin Luther King gave a 1967 civil rights speech. Dan Mogulof, a spokesman for the university, said that remained the case Wednesday, in the hours after UCLA and Columbia called in police.

“UC Berkeley has long experience with nonviolent political protest,” Mogulof said, adding that the school was responding to demonstrations in line with University of California policy.

That guidance tells administrators to avoid police involvement unless it’s absolutely necessary and the physical safety of students, faculty and staff is threatened. That policy is rare, with most universities having some kind of regulation that prohibits permanent encampments or outlaws overnight student activities on campus.

The University of California system has seen in the past where police involvement can lead.

In a 2011 Berkeley protest during the Occupy movement against economic inequalities, campus police clubbed and jabbed students with batons. Then-Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau later apologized, and the UC system shifted to the policy of restraint Berkeley spokesman Mogulof described.

Amid current protests, administrators across the country are seeking to ease tensions with talk. In Illinois, Northwestern University reached a deal with protesters to remove tents and sound systems in return for a new advisory committee on investments, a key policy for students who object to their school’s financial ties to companies that back Israel’s government.

Protesters at Brown University in Rhode Island also agreed to take down their encampment in return for a vote by the college’s corporation on whether to divest funds from companies tied to Israel’s military attacks on Gaza.

Still, some deals have failed to resolve tensions. While Portland State University in Oregon agreed to pause donations from Boeing, a company that makes attack helicopters used in Gaza, students there have nonetheless occupied the library, scrawling messages like “END GENOCIDE NOW” on windows.

Other factors at play as institutions navigate balancing free speech and campus security include how students react to daily developments in the Middle East as well as those at other campuses in the United States.

Columbia has often proven to be a beacon for protest movements at other universities. President Minouche Shafik has said the campus has become “intolerable,” citing factors ranging from antisemitic language to loud protests going into the night.

“One group’s rights to express their views cannot come at the expense of another group’s right to speak, teach, and learn,” Shafik said in a Monday statement.

Adversaries of pro-Palestinian protesters accuse them of antisemitism, a claim Columbia student protesters and their faculty advocates strongly deny.

Free-speech attorney Zach Greenberg said no matter how hateful or offensive the speech on campuses, it was not a justification for police crackdowns.

“It’s always better to counter the speech you dislike with more speech,” said Greenberg, a program leader at the college campus rights advocacy group FIRE.

(Reporting By Andrew Hay; editing by Donna Bryson, Diane Craft and Michael Perry)

By Jack Queen, Brendan Pierson and Andy Sullivan

NEW YORK (Reuters) -A lawyer for Donald Trump sought on Thursday to portray the hush money payment at the center of his criminal trial as extortion, questioning a lawyer involved in the deal about his cash-for-dirt negotiations with other celebrities.

Defense attorney Emil Bove’s questioning of the lawyer Keith Davidson hinted at a strategy by Trump’s legal team to undermine the credibility of prosecution witnesses in the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president.

Trump stands accused of falsifying business records to hide a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 presidential election. Trump has pleaded not guilty and denies Daniels’ assertion they had sex a decade earlier.

After Davidson testified that he arranged the $130,000 payment with Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, Bove asked about Davidson’s alleged efforts to seek cash from Hulk Hogan in exchange for a sex tape involving the former pro wrestler.

He also asked Davidson about attempts to trade embarrassing information for cash from celebrities including actor Charlie Sheen and reality TV star Tila Tequila.

“You were pretty well-versed in getting right up to the line without committing extortion, right?” Bove asked.

Davidson denied ever committing extortion.

Trump’s lawyers are likely to take a similar tack with other expected witnesses including Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, and Cohen, who has served prison time for his role in the payment scheme.

Davidson confirmed Daniels signed a non-disclosure agreement with Trump to keep quiet about a 2006 sexual encounter, but said he would not describe the payment as hush money. “It was consideration in a civil settlement agreement,” he said.

Davidson said the forceful denial he helped Daniels craft when the payment was revealed in 2018 did not amount to a lie because it referred to a “romantic sexual” relationship rather than a one-off sexual encounter.

“You have to go through it word by word, and I think if you did so, it would technically be true with an extremely fine reading,” Davidson said.

Daniels later disavowed the statement and said the signature on it was not hers.

MORE FINES?

Earlier in the day, Justice Juan Merchan signaled he might fine Trump over allegations he again violated a gag order that prohibits him from making public comments about jurors, witnesses, and families of the judge and prosecutors if those statements are meant to interfere with the case.

Merchan challenged a defense assertion that Trump did not violate the gag order when he said the Manhattan jury in the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president was picked from a heavily Democratic area.

“I’m making an argument that he didn’t,” Trump lawyer Todd Blanche told the judge.

“Well I’m not agreeing with that argument,” Merchan responded without saying whether or when he would impose a fine.

Prosecutors are asking Merchan to fine Trump $4,000 for violating the gag order four times last week. In one instance, the Republican Trump said in a TV interview that “that jury was picked so fast – 95% Democrats. The area’s mostly all Democrat.”

“By speaking about the jury at all, he places this proceeding in jeopardy,” prosecutor Christopher Conroy said.

Conroy said Trump also violated the gag order by calling Cohen a liar and former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker a “nice guy.” Pecker testified last week and Cohen is expected to be a crucial witness in the case.

Blanche said there was “no threat” in what Trump said about Pecker and said Cohen, in his social media comments, has been “inviting, and almost daring” Trump to respond to his comments about the trial.

Any penalty would follow a $9,000 fine Merchan imposed on Tuesday. Merchan said at that session that he might jail Trump if he continues to defy the gag order. Conroy said prosecutors were not yet asking for Trump to be jailed.

The gag order aims to prevent one of the world’s most prominent people from intimidating witnesses, jurors and other participants in the trial. It does not prevent Trump from criticizing prosecutors or the judge himself.

Trump claims prosecutors are working with Democratic President Joe Biden to undercut his bid to win back the White House and says Merchan faces a conflict of interest because his daughter has done work for Democratic politicians.

Trump faces three other criminal prosecutions, though it is not clear whether any of them will go to trial before the Nov. 5 presidential election. Two accuse him of trying to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden, while another accuses him of mishandling classified documents after leaving office. He has pleaded not guilty in all three cases.

(Reporting by Jack Queen and Brendan Pierson in New York and Andy Sullivan in Washington; Additional reporting by Nathan Layne; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Howard Goller)