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Graham Platner, the oyster farmer whose populist platform took Maine by storm, dropped his Senate bid Wednesday night as controversies over his past stacked up, leaving Democrats without a nominee to take on Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) this fall.

“We’re suspending campaign operations,” Platner told his supporters in a lengthy video posted on social media Wednesday evening, at times growing emotional.

“I intend to file my paperwork to withdraw,” he added. “The process needs to assure that what comes next is reflective of the Mainers, who on June 9 turned out and showed that they are desperate for a different kind of politics.”

Platner’s decision comes after he easily won the Democratic primary last month despite a growing list of scandals, including revelations around a sexting scandal, since-deleted social media posts downplaying sexual assault and criticizing law enforcement and reports of problematic behavior with former romantic partners.

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In a blow to President Donald Trump's efforts to investigate the 2020 presidential election, a federal judge quashed a grand jury subpoena July 7 seeking information on 2020 election workers from Atlanta's Fulton County.

"The breadth of the Grand Jury Subpoena ... is staggering," targeting personal identifying information for "thousands of employees and volunteers," wrote Judge William M. Ray II, who was appointed by Trump to the federal bench in 2018.

More...A series of audits, recounts and court cases have failed to produce evidence that would support Trump's assertions that Joe Biden beat him through widespread fraud, but Trump has continued to promote his unsubstantiated claims.More...

"The breadth of the Grand Jury Subpoena ... is staggering," targeting personal identifying information for "thousands of employees and volunteers," wrote Judge William M. Ray II, who was appointed by Trump to the federal bench in 2018.

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Donald Trump’s latest attempt to delay payment of a $5.8m judgment for defaming a magazine columnist whom a jury determined he sexually abused has been emphatically rejected by a federal court judge.

In a single-sentence 4 July order, US district Judge Lewis Kaplan denied the president’s request for more time to pay the civil judgment owed to E Jean Carroll, who was awarded the damages after a New York jury concluded that Trump sexually abused her in 1996 – then defamed her after she publicly described the attack in 2019.

Trump’s move came days after the US supreme court, without explanation or reasoning, turned down his demand to review the jury’s 2023 verdict.

In a subsequent filing to Kaplan, the judge overseeing the case, Trump’s attorneys referred to how his former lead counsel, Justin Smith, had been confirmed to a federal judgeship in June on the president’s nomination. New lead counsel Josh Halpern therefore needed more time “to become completely familiar with the facts and procedural circumstances”, Trump’s attorneys contended.

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Maine Senate Democratic candidate Graham Platner on Monday said his campaign is “taking the time to reflect on the best path forward,” just minutes after Politico published a story in which a woman who previously dated the oyster farmer alleged he had sexually assaulted her.

“I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious and false allegations against me. Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically false,” Platner said in the two-minute video posted online.

Politico earlier on Monday reported that a woman Platner previously dated, Jenny Racicot, told the news outlet that Platner had forced her to have sex with him while he was intoxicated in 2021.

Platner vehemently denied accusations of sexual assault to Politico in his video.

The Hill has not independently verified the accusations. The Platner campaign did not respond to The Hill’s request for comment regarding the Politico story.

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The Atlantic on Saturday republished a JD Vance essay that dismissed Donald Trump as “cultural heroin” exactly 10 years earlier, bringing back to the fore his evolving from a critic of the president to his vice-president.

In an editor’s note, the magazine said it was republishing the essay on the occasion of its 10th anniversary – and the US’s semiquincentennial – “so that our readers can judge for themselves how well his assessment [of Trump] … has stood the test of time”.

The original essay was published during Trump’s first victorious presidential run, when Mike Pence was his running mate and before Vance entered politics. He worked at Mithril Capital Management, Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, at the time and had just published Hillbilly Elegy, a bestselling memoir of his upbringing in the Rust belt that also served as a social commentary on the white working class.

In the essay, Vance said many Americans turned to Trump as a “pain reliever” in the midst of a social crisis in which mounting distrust in the government and economic decline were coming to a head. He invoked the phrase “cultural heroin” to describe Trump’s political appeal at the time – and said his supporters would eventually realize he was not the answer to their problems.

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President Trump reportedly called FIFA President Gianni Infantino to discuss the red card given to Team USA’s Folarin Balogun during Wednesday night’s game against Bosnia and Herzegovina, two outlets have reported on Sunday. Trump later cheered the reversal, calling it an “injustice.”

FIFA said its independent panel overturned the red card suspension for Monday’s game.

The president on July Fourth marked the nation’s 250th birthday with a late Saturday night speech that blended the championing of American achievements with partisan rhetoric. His address lasted about 30 minutes — not as long as he promised days before extreme heat and weather impacted the celebrations in Washington.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5953858-live-updates-trump-fourth-of-july-speech-aftermath/After the president warned that the “evil of communism” is among the threats he believes the country is facing, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on Sunday that “there are many Mamdanis popping up,” referring to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) in talking about democratic socialists winning recent Democratic state primaries. Democratic socialists are not communists.

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