House Speaker Mike Johnson accused New York City justice officials of committing “atrocities” against former President Trump in an impassioned set of remarks outside the Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday.

Johnson is the latest Trump ally to descend on the Big Apple as the ex-president stands trial for accusations he falsified business documents to cover up a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

“It’s impossible for anybody to deny, that looks at this objectively, that the judicial system in our country has been weaponized against President Trump. The system is using all the tools at its disposal right now to punish one president and provide cover for another,” Johnson said, referring to GOP-led accusations that President Biden has been shielded by his own Justice Department.

“And meanwhile…among the atrocities here, the judge’s own daughter is making millions of dollars doing online fundraising for Democrats.”

MICHAEL COHEN TESTIFIES HE SECRETLY RECORDED TRUMP IN LEAD-UP TO 2016 ELECTION

Johnson also echoed accusations that Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, is profiting off of the trial via her firm Authentic Campaigns, which has done work for top Democrats like Vice President Kamala Harris and Rep. Adam Schiff, R-Calif., according to the industry site Campaigns & Elections.

Trump himself is under a partial gag order after lobbing similar accusations.

“It’s so corrupt, it’s so corrupt and everybody knows it,” Johnson continued on Tuesday. “If [Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg] thinks the American people will believe these absurd charges, take a look at the turnout at Trump events.”

Fox News Digital reached out to Authentic Campaigns and the New York Courts system for comment, as well as a spokesperson for Bragg.

MICHAEL COHEN’S CREDIBILITY ISSUES, BRAZEN TIKTOK USAGE RAISE MEDIA EYEBROWS AHEAD OF TESTIMONY

Speaker Mike Johnson, Rep. Cory Mills, and Vivek Ramaswamy all stand behind former President Trump in the Manhattan courthouse (Getty Images)

Johnson further argued that the Manhattan trial was the latest in a series of “partisan witch hunts” against Trump, and vowed the House of Representatives would look at ways to “rein in” Special Counsel Jack Smith. Smith is investigating Trump for his alleged efforts to upend his 2020 election loss and his handling of classified documents after leaving office.

“That one is so egregious, the trial’s been indefinitely postponed,” Johnson said of the classified documents case. “I’m working with Chairman [Jim] Jordan of the House Judiciary Committee and Chairman [James] Comer of our Oversight committee on measures to rein in the abuses of Special Counsel Jack Smith.”

He said the multiple cases against Trump amount to “election interference.”

NY V TRUMP: COHEN TESTIFIES TO PAYING STORMY DANIELS FROM HIS OWN POCKET

Former President Donald Trump awaits the start of proceedings at Manhattan Criminal Court, Monday, April 22, 2024, in New York.  (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, Pool)

The Louisiana Republican is the highest-ranking federal official to show public support for Trump so far, demonstrating the commanding hold he has over the GOP, including Johnson’s own razor-thin House majority.

In addition to Johnson, former 2024 presidential candidate-turned-Trump surrogate Vivek Ramaswamy also planned to attend the ex-president’s trial on Tuesday.

Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla., also posted on X, formerly Twitter, that he was in attendance.

“Great to meet with President Trump today prior to us heading to the courtroom. I’m honored to stand with the President, as America stands with him, and I view this victimless sham indictment as political theater and interference,” Mills wrote.

Planned Parenthood of California plans to launch a multimillion-dollar campaign Tuesday to oust Republicans from several California congressional districts, the latest signal of how critical the state’s House races will be in determining which party takes control of the House of Representatives after the November election.

The effort, coordinated by an independent campaign arm of the reproductive rights organization, is a reflection of the role abortion will play in the fall, particularly among suburban women voters, in the aftermath of the 2022 Supreme Court ruling overturning federal protection for abortion rights and subsequent laws passed in several states to sharply limit access to the procedure.

California is expected to be a hotbed of spending by multiple groups on both sides of the aisle because of the number of competitive races in the state.

While Californians in 2022 voted overwhelmingly to enshrine a right to abortion and contraceptive access in the state’s Constitution in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision, leaders of Planned Parenthood and other Democratic groups argue that the election of a Republican president and the GOP taking control of the Senate and the House could result in a nationwide ban.

“The road to [reproductive] freedom runs right through California this year,” Jodi Hicks, the leader of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California VOTES, an independent expenditure committee, told The Times. “We have done what we’ve done to protect California and insure that California is a reproductive freedom state.”

But she said that despite more than two-thirds of voters supporting Proposition 1 in 2022, the state constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights, there is a “disconnect” in terms of understanding that the state’s protection of abortion rights could be eliminated by federal legislative or legal action.

“The only real way to insure California is a reproductive freedom state is making sure we elect a Congress that is committed to protecting those freedoms,” Hicks said. “Every single election we have, politicians can take away those freedoms.”

Hick’s group is the latest Super PAC to announce plans to invest heavily in California’s congressional races.

“This is the state that’s going to decide control of Congress,” said Dan Schnur, a politics professor at USC, Pepperdine and UC Berkeley.

Candidates often rely on outside groups to buttress their campaigns with television ads and other voter outreach because the state is home to some of the most expensive media markets in the nation and the federal limits on donations they can receive is relatively low.

Congressional candidates can receive a maximum of $6,600 in contributions from individuals to their committees, per Federal Election Committee rules. But donors can contribute nearly $2 million to party affiliated committees and unlimited amounts to Super PACs, such as the Planned Parenthood effort, which are barred from coordinating with candidates.

The House Majority PAC, a Democratic effort; a GOP group targeting Latino voters funded by the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers; a California Donor Table effort called “Battleground California” led by minority leaders in competitive districts; and other groups have also announced plans to spend in California congressional races.

“As one of the wealthiest states in the world, California could be a beacon of progress and possibility in securing a future where every family can get the healthcare they need, where every full-time job provides a livable wage, and safe and affordable housing is provided not as a luxury but a right,” Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said in a statement. “Battleground California isn’t just about winning elections; it’s about winning a future that gives everyday people hope.”

The independent arms of the Republican and Democratic national congressional committees are also expected to be active in California, as well as the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Super PAC dedicated to electing Republicans to Congress that spent around $33 million in the state in the 2022 midterm elections.

“For back-to-back cycles, Republicans have won in California with quality candidates who fit their districts and toxic Democrat policies that have left voters fed up with rising crime and skyrocketing costs,” said Courtney Parella, a spokeswoman for CLF. “California is essential to holding and growing our House Majority, and CLF will invest enormously here.”

The Club for Growth, a free-market, limited-government group that has endorsed Scott Baugh in an open, highly competitive district in Orange County, could also weigh in.

Political committees don’t always follow through with their announced spending plans, so it remains to be seen how much the PACs will actually spend in California. But unless there is a seismic change in the nation’s politics between now and the November election, the state is expected to be pivotal in determining control of the House, where Republicans hold a razor-thin majority.

California has the largest congressional delegation in the nation, with 52 members, and because of the state’s independent redrawing of districts, 10 are rated as toss-ups, competitive or potentially vulnerable, according to the the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which has tracked House and Senate races for decades. That’s the most of any state in the nation.

Half of those districts are represented by Republicans in Congress — Reps. Young Kim of Placentia, Michelle Steel of Seal Beach, John Duarte of Modesto, David Valadao of Hanford and Mike Garcia of Santa Clarita — but were won by President Biden in the 2020 presidential election, according to the nonpartisan California Target Book, which tracks the state’s congressional and legislative races.

“It took a few cycles for the impact of the independent redistricting committee to take effect, but once it has, it has created a much larger number of competitive districts,” Schnur said.

He added that two of the issues that appear to be the most salient in this election — abortion and immigration — are at the fore in many California communities.

The eight districts Planned Parenthood is targeting — seven represented by Republicans and the tight Orange County district that is open because of Rep. Katie Porter’s unsuccessful Senate run — all voted to support Proposition 1 in 2022.

“There are a lot of pro-choice suburban women in California who wouldn’t mind seeing a wall at the border” and other aggressive efforts to crackdown on illegal immigration, Schnur said. “This election is going to be fought over which of those two issues matters more. The battle for Congress is a battle for the suburbs, and California is the ultimate suburb.”

On top of all the other challenges that pollsters have faced in the past two presidential elections, this year has an additional, potentially significant, complication: a well-known third-party candidate.

Measuring support for third-party candidates has long been a particular challenge for pollsters. But it has been decades since the country has seen a third-party candidate as prominent as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has an average of about 10 percent of the vote in national polls.

Historically, polls overstate support for third-party candidates. When it comes to Mr. Kennedy, the biggest question may be by how much.

Consider this: In a two-part experiment conducted by The New York Times and the research firm Ipsos, a seemingly subtle difference across two versions yielded significantly different results for Mr. Kennedy.

What’s more, a candidate who is not on the ballot anywhere — a Times editor picked for inclusion thanks to his generic-sounding name — received a non-negligible share of support, highlighting just how much support for third-party candidates can come down to frustration with major-party candidates and a yearning for more options.

What does this all mean? It’s tempting to interpret these results as ungenerous to both voters and to polling. But the results say something real about how preferences work, and the central conundrum when it comes to third-party candidates. (This experiment is separate from Times/Siena College polling, though it was conducted with the same standards and rigor that we apply to all of our polling.)

In short: Much of what influences third-party candidate support isn’t just a straightforward desire to see that person become president. This poses a challenge for pollsters no matter what they do: Simply by listing third-party candidates, a poll might overstate their support. If a poll doesn’t list them, however, it can’t capture their support at all.

This year, to combat that concern, many reputable pollsters ask both versions of the question: one that poses a simple head-to-head contest between major-party candidates, and one that includes third-party candidates who may be on the ballot.

And which question gets asked first is where the difference comes in.

Question order matters

Here is the longer question asked by Times/Ipsos that includes the full field:

It contains a total of six options: the major-party candidates, the three established third-party candidates who have achieved ballot access in at least one swing state, and our wild card, William Davis, at No. 6.

And this is the shorter question that includes just President Biden vs. Donald J. Trump:

Our experiment worked like this: All respondents were shown both the long and short questions, but half were shown the full list first, and the other half were first shown the two-way race.

Among those who saw the long list first, Mr. Kennedy garnered 7 percent of the vote.

But among those respondents who encountered the head-to-head contest before seeing the full list, Mr. Kennedy’s support shot up six percentage points to 13 percent.

Why the increase, if the questions are the same? There are many factors that can explain this, but it is at least partly related to a phenomenon that pollsters call expressive responding. This is when people might use a survey response to show their frustration or express a particular feeling that’s not exactly what is being asked.

In this case, many respondents seem to be using the second question to convey frustration with the choices for president in the first question, whether or not their answers reflect their full views. When respondents have already been given a chance to express their support for one of the two major-party candidates, they seem to be more likely to register a protest of that first choice with their response to the fuller ballot. Some of the respondents given the longer list first are also probably expressing their frustration with the major-party candidates, but our results help demonstrate that effect is magnified when the longest list of candidates is asked second.

[You can find the full results of the poll, including the exact questions that were asked and how the poll was conducted, here.]

That might also explain why Mr. Davis, the Times editor who has no aspirations for higher office, won the support of about 1.5 percent of respondents, putting him on par with an actual Libertarian Party candidate. His support was only slightly lower among respondents who saw the third-party candidates first — evidence that voter frustration, though less pronounced under that scenario, still exists.

What’s more, Mr. Davis gets 4 percent among voters who feel unfavorably toward Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump.

The effects of this phenomenon show up when looking across many high-quality polls. Among 11 recent national polls, those that listed third-party candidates as the second question generally saw higher support for those candidates when compared with the polls that showed third-party candidates as the first question. (In the latest Times/Siena battleground polls released Monday, Mr. Kennedy was listed in the first question and received 10 percent support across the six states.)

An experiment like this can help us get a rough sense of how much support for Mr. Kennedy, and other third-party candidates, might come from voters expressing their frustration. But it also puts into perspective just how much his support can vary across polls and how hard it is to judge his real support.

It also illustrates some of the limitations surveys face. Pollsters can rely only on what voters tell us, and even voters themselves might not have fully thought through some of these questions.

Are voters consciously telling us they plan to vote for Mr. Kennedy, knowing that in the end they might support one of the two major-party candidates? Probably not. But they might be considering their options at a time when these decisions feel fairly abstract.

Is Kennedy a unique case?

History shows that third-party candidates often poll best in the spring and summer before an election — when everything feels fairly hypothetical — but lose steam as the election nears. Looking back at some of the strongest modern third-party candidates like Ross Perot or John Anderson, they often follow a similar path: strong support early in the race that slowly recedes by Election Day.

There’s at least one reason to believe Mr. Kennedy’s support may last longer: his name. In the Times/Siena battleground polls, we asked his supporters why they planned to vote for him. While most listed distaste for the alternatives as their motivation, for a handful — about 7 percent — his family is exactly why they are supporting him, even as many of his relatives have disavowed his candidacy. As one respondent put it: “Because he is a Kennedy.”

But current conditions are also ripe to have inflated third-party support. The two major-party candidates are deeply unpopular, providing an outlet for the type of expressive responding that pollsters worry about. And in our latest Times/Siena swing state polls, support for Mr. Kennedy appeared weak. Only about 30 percent of his supporters said they definitely planned to vote for him, compared with nearly 80 percent of Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden’s supporters who said they definitely planned to vote for their candidate.

So perhaps Mr. Davis, the Times editor, should not consider giving up his job and hitting the campaign trail anytime soon. But poll consumers should consider that even the best polls are imperfect, and it’s important to understand potential sources of error.

This year, Mr. Kennedy’s support is likely a big one.