Trump Took Private Flight with Project 2025 Leader (August 7, 2024)
politicalwire.com

... "Donald Trump has repeatedly denied knowing about the Project 2025 policy blueprint or the people behind it," the Washington Post reports.

"But in April 2022, Trump shared a 45-minute private flight with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, according to people familiar with the trip, plane-tracking data and a photograph from on board the plane, which has not been previously reported. They flew together to a Heritage conference where Trump delivered a keynote address that gestured to Heritage's forthcoming policy proposals."

Said Trump: "They're going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do." ...

Jury finds rally organizers liable for the violence that broke out in Charlottesville (November 23, 2021)
www.npr.org

... A jury in Virginia has found a group of white nationalists who organized the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., liable of engaging in a conspiracy ahead of the violent demonstration, awarding the plaintiffs who brought the case more than $25 million in damages on Tuesday. ...

Richard Spencer, Jason Kessler and Christopher Cantwell, as well as other white supremacists and neo-Nazis, were ordered to pay the nine plaintiffs in the civil trial millions of dollars in compensatory and punitive damages for physical and emotional injuries. ...

Over the course of the two-day rally in August 2017, neo-Nazi James Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer, 32, and injuring dozens of others. Four of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit say they were hit in the car attack, while others say they continue to suffer from deep psychological distress from the incident.

Almost half of the damages awarded by the jury was against Fields, who is now serving a life sentence for murder. ...

5 Exonerated in Central Park Jogger Case Agree to Settle Suit for $40 Million (2014)
www.nytimes.com

... The five men whose convictions in the brutal 1989 beating and rape of a female jogger in Central Park were later overturned have agreed to a settlement of about $40 million from New York City to resolve a bitterly fought civil rights lawsuit over their arrests and imprisonment in the sensational crime. ...

Speaking of the Central Park 5 ...

Exonerated 'Central Park 5' member Yusef Salaam wins New York City Council seat (2023)
www.pbs.org

... Exonerated "Central Park Five" member Yusef Salaam won a seat Tuesday on the New York City Council, marking a stunning reversal of fortune for a political newcomer who was wrongly imprisoned as a teenager in the infamous rape case.

Salaam, a Democrat, will represent a central Harlem district on the City Council, having run unopposed for the seat in one of many local elections happening across New York state on Tuesday. He won his primary election in a landslide.

The victory comes more than two decades after DNA evidence was used to overturn the convictions of Salaam and four other Black and Latino men in the 1989 rape and beating of a white jogger in Central Park. Salaam was imprisoned for almost seven years. ...

And this...

Trump confronted by Central Park Five' member he called to be executed in debate spin room
www.yahoo.com

... You can bet Donald Trump wasn't prepared for this particular showdown.

On the sidelines of his first and possibly only debate against Kamala Harris in Philadelphia, the former president on Tuesday found himself face-to-face with none other than Yusef Salaam.

Salaam is a member of the "Central Park Five" -- a group of Black and Hispanic youths Trump once called to be executed for a crime they were later they later exonerated of.

The confrontation unfolded in the wake of Trump's debate against Harris on Tuesday night, when the former president made a surprise appearance in the spin room at the Pennsylvania Convention Center -- a room where his and Harris's assembled surrogates were making the case for why their respective candidates were the rightful victor of the debate.

Likely expecting to be fielding another question from a reporter, Trump instead found himself facing Salaam, now an elected member of New York City's council, who had joined the scrum of reporters surrounding the former president. Salaam, a Democrat, was one of the many Harris campaign allies marked for interviews with press after the debate.

As the former president turned towards Salaam, he was asked by several reporters including NBC's Peter Alexander whether he would apologize or say anything at all to Salaam. ...