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The 12 Days of Trump Court: A year of appearances, from unprecedented to almost routine
CBSN
'Tis the season to look back on a truly unprecedented year in America's courts, when the sight of a former president sitting before a judge went from unheard of to almost commonplace, and his ongoing campaign fused courtroom appearances into stump stops.
As Donald Trump's lawyers pointed out in a filing Saturday night, "During the 234 years from 1789 to 2023, no current or former President had ever been criminally prosecuted." That streak ended on March 30, when a New York grand jury indicted Trump, making him the first former president to be charged with crimes.
He was soon indicted in three more cases, appearing for arraignments in two (and waiving his appearance once). Then Trump attended nine days of a civil fraud trial, testifying twice. His first couple of days in court drew crowds of demonstrators, both supporting and opposing the former president. Courthouses were nearly shut down as regular business gave way to prioritizing one heavily guarded defendant.
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Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a high-stakes meeting at this year's Munich Security conference to discuss the Trump administration's efforts to end the war in Ukraine. Vance said the U.S. seeks a "durable" peace, while Zelenskyy expressed the desire for extensive discussions to prepare for any end to the conflict.
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Washington — The Trump administration on Thursday intensified its sweeping efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce, the nation's largest employer, by ordering agencies to lay off nearly all probationary employees who hadn't yet gained civil service protection - potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of workers.
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It was Labor Day weekend 2003 when Matt Scribner, a local horse farrier and trainer who also competes in long-distance horse races, was on his usual ride in a remote part of the Sierra Nevada foothills — just a few miles northeast of Auburn, California —when he noticed a freshly dug hole along the trail that piqued his curiosity.