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U.S. judge rules Trump cannot stop rape accuser's lawsuit from proceeding

Wed, September 15, 2021, 4:42 PM

By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Wednesday said former President Donald Trump cannot delay a lawsuit accusing him of defaming former Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll after she claimed he raped her in the mid-1990s.

In a one-sentence order, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan refused to put the case on hold while Trump appeals an earlier ruling he made.

The order could let Carroll obtain documents and other materials from Trump during the appeal. Her lawyers have said they also want a DNA sample from the former president.

Kaplan's denial was without prejudice, meaning Trump can renew his request. Trump can also ask the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan for a stay.

Lawyers for Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Carroll sued Trump in November 2019 after he denied having raped her in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in midtown Manhattan.

In response to: The Biden administration admitted on Tuesday that the Taliban had captured a significant amount of U.S. military equipment originally supplied to Afghan security forces during the militants’ blitzkrieg on Kabul in recent weeks — and the U.S. doesn’t know exactly how much American gear they’ve lost to terrorist hands.

“We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone but certainly, a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban,” White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said during a press conference. “??Obviously, we don’t have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport.”
*snip*
While Sullivan did not specify what a “fair amount” of defense materials entailed, he had previously blamed the members of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) for laying down their arms before the Taliban onslaught, stating that the U.S.’s $86 billion in funding over the last two decades[ “could not give them the will and ultimately they decided that they would not fight for Kabul.”

At the moment, there’s still a lot that senior U.S. officials don’t know about American weapons falling into the hands of the Taliban. But based on past reporting from U.S. government watchdogs, the militant group may have inherited a broad arsenal of American weapons from the hands of fleeing Afghan security forces.

According to a 2017 Government Accountability Office report, the U.S. military transferred roughly 75,898 vehicles, 599,690 weapons systems, and 208 aircraft to the ANDSF between fiscal years 2003 and 2016. And according to a recent Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction analysis, the last few years have seen the Defense Department send the ANDSF more than 7,000 machine guns, more than 4,700 Humvees, and more than 20,000 grenades. This is to say nothing of the communications, explosive ordnance disposal, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) equipment transferred to the ANDSF over the course of two decades as detailed in the GAO report. According to the Intercept, the Taliban have even seized U.S. military biometrics devices “that could aid in the identification of Afghans who assisted coalition forces.”