Shane Goldmacher
June 21, 2022 More

The federal election interference case — one of four — is set to start just before Super Tuesday and a cascade of consequential primaries.By the time Donald J. Trump is sitting at his federal trial on charges of criminally conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, he may have already secured enough delegates to effectively clinch the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination.The former president’s trial is scheduled to start March 4, by which point five states are expected to have held nominating contests. The next day, March 5, is Super Tuesday, when 15 states, including delegate-rich California and Texas, plan to hold votes that will determine if any Trump challenger has enough political oxygen to remain a viable alternative.Primaries in Florida, Ohio and Illinois come two weeks later. Florida and Ohio will be the first winner-take-all contests, in which the top vote-getter statewide seizes all of the delegates rather than splitting them proportionally. Winner-take-all primaries have historically turbocharged the front-runner’s path to the presidential nomination. Mr. Trump’s federal trial, if it proceeds on its current timeline, won’t be close to finished by then.The collision course between the Republican Party’s calendar and Mr. Trump’s trial schedule is emblematic of one of the most unusual nominating contests in American history. It is a Trump-dominated clash that will define not only the course of the 2024 presidential primary but potentially the future direction of the party in an eventual post-Trump era.“It’s a front-runner set of rules now,” said Clayton Henson, who manages the ballot access and delegate selection process for the Trump campaign, which has been instrumental in rewriting the rules to benefit him.Mr. Trump has complained the March 4 start date of the trial amounts to “election interference” and cited Super Tuesday, but it is likely to have a greater effect on his ability to campaign for primaries in subsequent weeks. About 60 percent of the delegates will be awarded from contests after Super Tuesday.Generally, defendants are required to be present in the courtroom at their trials. After preliminary matters such as jury selection, prosecutors in Mr. Trump’s election case have estimated they will need about four to six weeks to present their case, after which defense lawyers will have an opportunity to call additional witnesses.That timeline also means it is likely that a majority of the delegates will have been awarded before a jury determines Mr. Trump’s fate.If Mr. Trump holds his dominant polling advantage throughout the primaries but then a jury transforms him into a convicted felon, any forces within the G.O.P. that would want to use that development to stop him would have one last opportunity to block his nomination — the same end-run around voters that officials tried at the party convention in 2016.That possibility would almost certainly lead to a schism between Trump loyalists and what used to be called the party’s establishment, an unpleasant reality in which defeating Mr. Trump could doom Republicans to a long cycle of electoral defeats.“Given what’s happening on the legal front, state parties need to think about what options they’re giving themselves” to allow delegates flexibility at the party’s national convention, said Bill Palatucci, a Republican National Committee member from New Jersey who advises the super PAC supporting Chris Christie and who opposes Mr. Trump.Republican state parties have until Oct. 1 to submit their formal delegate allocation rules to the national committee.“All this is happening so quickly, it’s unprecedented, and so as states formulate what their rules are going to be,” Mr. Palatucci added, “everybody’s got a whole new set of circumstances to consider.”There are no signs that the party’s leadership is contemplating using Mr. Trump’s legal troubles against him. The chairwoman of the R.N.C., Ronna McDaniel, has defended Mr. Trump in numerous media appearances and the committee has been raising money by telling online donors that the former president is the victim of a political prosecution.The chairwoman of the R.N.C., Ronna McDaniel, has defended Mr. Trump.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesOn Monday night, just hours after Judge Tanya S. Chutkan set the March trial date, one of the main organs of the Republican establishment, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, sounded the alarm.“Mr. Trump might have the G.O.P. nomination sewn up before a verdict arrives and voters learn whether he’s a convicted felon,” the Journal editors wrote. “This would certainly delight Democrats.”The renewed panic about the possibility of nominating a convicted felon recalls the 2016 effort to block Mr. Trump’s nomination after he had won a clear delegate majority in the primaries.Then, a group of Republican delegates loyal to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas tried to muster support from one-fourth of the convention’s rules committee, a body that meets in the weeks before the national convention, to throw open the nominating contest to the full roster of more than 2,000 delegates. Had they succeeded, the renegade delegates still would have needed a majority vote of all the delegates in order to seize the nomination from Mr. Trump.Now, short of a full capitulation from Mr. Trump, removing him as the nominee at the convention after he has secured enough delegates remains an extreme long shot. A surrender by Mr. Trump seems highly unlikely given that advisers have said he views getting re-elected — and taking command of the pardon power plus control over the Justice Department — as his best insurance policy. Despite Mr. Trump’s claims, however, it is not clear that a president can pardon himself, so he might be on safer legal ground if some other Republican secured the nomination, became president and then pardoned him.The Trump campaign is taking no chances on a contested convention. His team is far more experienced and professional than it was in 2016, when Mr. Cruz’s forces organized state party conventions in Louisiana, Colorado and elsewhere to elect Cruz loyalists as convention rules committee delegates. Mr. Trump has a tighter grip on the party’s grass-roots supporters than he did in 2016, and his aides — including Mr. Henson, Brian Jack, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita — have been working for months behind the scenes to ensure he will have loyal delegates in state parties across the country, according to people with direct knowledge of their efforts.Mr. Trump’s team also has a stronger hold on state parties themselves, after three advisers — Bill Stepien, Justin Clark and Nick Trainer — worked to consolidate support within them ahead of the 2020 election to stave off primary challenges to Mr. Trump. Many of those changes, which favor Mr. Trump, remain in place.Mr. Trump himself has gotten involved deep in the weeds of convention politics. He has awarded endorsements not just for state party bosses but for leaders of the two largest county Republican parties in Nevada — the sort of local officials who will have significant influence in choosing which grass-roots leaders will represent their states as convention delegates next July in Milwaukee.This loyalty has already delivered results for Mr. Trump’s campaign. This month, the Nevada Republican Party quietly announced it would not share political data or coordinate with super PACs — a blow to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has outsourced much of his campaign’s political operation to the super PAC Never Back Down. Never Back Down is led by Jeff Roe, the architect of Mr. Cruz’s 2016 campaign.Mr. LaCivita said in a statement that “no degree of trickery or gamesmanship” and “no amount of editorials in The Wall Street Journal” would stop Mr. Trump’s nomination at the convention.“There’s been much more attention to detail and focus on those small things,” he added, “that if not attended to early on can lead to big headaches.”Mr. Trump’s aides, like, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, center, have been working for months behind the scenes to ensure he will have loyal delegates in state parties across the country.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesThe mere possibility of a chaotic contested national political convention — a dream of political observers who have known nothing but scripted, made-for-television quadrennial gatherings since 1980 — may inspire well-funded Trump rivals to remain in the race just in case delegates decide it would be foolhardy to anoint a convicted felon as their party’s standard-bearer for the general election.Mr. Trump has vowed to appeal the March 4 trial date in the election case. That is not legally permitted: Generally, grievances over issues like whether a defense team had adequate time to prepare must wait to be taken up on appeal after any guilty verdict.Still, it is possible that his legal team will ask an appeals court or the Supreme Court to intervene before the trial using a long-shot method known as a petition for a writ of mandamus. Higher courts tend to be reluctant to grant such requests to disrupt the normal judicial process and have set a very high bar that must be met before they will consider doing so.Even if a jury acquits Mr. Trump in the federal election case — or one or more holdout jurors produce a mistrial — there are three other cases that could potentially lead to him being a convicted criminal by the time of the convention.He is facing bookkeeping fraud charges in New York, where a trial is set to begin March 25, although it is now might be pushed back. He is set to go on trial in Florida in May on federal charges related to his hoarding of sensitive national-security documents after leaving office. And he has been charged in another 2020 election case in Georgia, for which a trial date has not yet been set.Ben Ginsberg, who for decades was among the Republican Party’s top election lawyers before breaking with the party over Mr. Trump in 2020, said no amount of delegate machinations would be likely to stop a Trump nomination should he win enough early nominating contests.“If he wins Iowa and New Hampshire,” Mr. Ginsberg said, “I think it’s all over anyway.” More

Republicans in the Minnesota House lost a one-seat edge in the Capitol, where tensions over party dominance have simmered for weeks.A Democrat won a special election for a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, returning partisan control of that chamber to an even split during an unusually acrimonious legislative session.The seat, in a heavily Democratic district north of St. Paul, has been at the center of a weekslong fight for power that led House Democrats to boycott the early weeks of the state’s lawmaking session.David Gottfried, the Democrat and a Minnesota native who works at a law firm, defeated Paul Wikstrom, a Republican who is an engineer and had sought the seat previously.The election leaves each party with 67 seats in the chamber, ending a brief period during which Republicans had a one-seat majority. Even with Democrats securing the additional seat, the even split means that Democrats do not hold full control of the Legislature and the Governor’s Mansion as they did the previous two years.The Minnesota Senate is also closely divided. Senators began the session with an even split, but a special election held in late January gave Democrats a one-seat majority.Tuesday’s special election came after a judge ruled late last year that the candidate who won the Minnesota House seat in November, Curtis Johnson, a Democrat, had not met residency requirements for the district. Mr. Wikstrom, an engineer, was also the Republican candidate in that race, and lost by 30 percentage points.The fight over control of the Legislature underscored the challenges that Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, came home to face after spending much of last year campaigning for vice president.The early weeks of the legislative session were chaotic. When House members were sworn in last month, Representative Lisa Demuth, a Republican, was elected as speaker, becoming the first Republican woman and the first Black person to serve in that role. A Democrat had led the chamber since 2019.In negotiations that ended the Democratic boycott, leaders from both parties agreed to jointly run legislative committees if a Democrat won the special House election, as was widely expected, leaving the House evenly split.In the past few weeks, Republicans have used their narrow majority to advance bills on contentious issues, including an initiative to bar transgender students from competing in female sports. The proposal was brought to the floor, but failed.Most pressing now for Minnesota lawmakers is passing a state budget. State officials projected last week that Minnesota may face a nearly $6 billion shortfall by 2028. Concerns about the state’s finances have deepened as the Trump administration has begun cutting grants and other federal programs. More

The verdict made Mr. Navarro the second top adviser to former President Donald J. Trump to be found guilty of contempt for defying the House committee’s investigation.Peter Navarro, a former trade adviser to President Donald J. Trump, was convicted on Thursday of two counts of criminal contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.The verdict, coming after nearly four hours of deliberation in Federal District Court in Washington, made Mr. Navarro the second top adviser of Mr. Trump’s to be found guilty in connection to the committee’s inquiry. Stephen K. Bannon, a former strategist for Mr. Trump who was convicted of the same offense last summer, faces four months in prison and remains free on appeal.Mr. Navarro, 74, stood to the side of his lawyers’ table, stroking his chin as the verdict was read aloud. Each count carries a maximum of one year in prison and a fine of up to $100,000. A hearing to determine his sentence was scheduled for January.Speaking outside the courthouse afterward, Mr. Navarro repeatedly vowed to appeal his conviction.“I am willing to go to prison to settle this issue, I’m willing to do that,” he said. “But I also know that the likelihood of me going to prison is relatively small because we are right on this issue.”The jury’s decision handed a victory to the House committee, which had sought to penalize senior members of the Trump administration who refused to cooperate with one of the chief investigations into the Capitol riot.The trial also amounted to an unusual test of congressional authority. Since the 1970s, referrals for criminal contempt of Congress have rarely resulted in the Justice Department’s bringing charges. Mr. Navarro was indicted last June on two misdemeanor counts of contempt, one for failing to appear for a deposition and another for refusing to provide documents in response to the committee’s subpoena.The rapid pace of the trial reflected, in part, the fact that the case turned on a straightforward question, whether Mr. Navarro had willfully defied lawmakers in flouting a subpoena. Even before the trial began, Judge Amit P. Mehta, who presided over the case, dealt a blow to Mr. Navarro by ruling that he could not use in court what he has publicly cast as his principal defense: that Mr. Trump personally directed him not to cooperate and that he was protected by those claims of executive privilege.Mr. Navarro, a Harvard-trained economist and a strident critic of China, devised some of the Trump administration’s most adversarial trade policies toward the country. Once the pandemic took hold, he helped coordinate the United States’s response by securing equipment like face masks and ventilators. But after the 2020 election, he became more focused on plans to keep Mr. Trump in power.Mr. Navarro was of particular interest to the committee because of his frequent television appearances in which he cast doubt on the election results and peddled specious claims of voter fraud.He also documented those assertions in a three-part report on purported election irregularities, as well as in a memoir he published after he left the White House. In the book, Mr. Navarro described a strategy he had devised with Mr. Bannon known as the Green Bay Sweep, aimed at overturning the results of the election in key swing states that had been called for Joseph R. Biden Jr.But when the committee asked Mr. Navarro to testify last February, he repeatedly insisted that Mr. Trump had ordered him not to cooperate. By asserting executive privilege, he argued, the former president had granted him immunity from Congress’s demands.The question of executive privilege prompted more than a year of legal wrangling over whether Mr. Navarro could invoke that at a time when Mr. Trump was no longer president. Judge Mehta ruled last week that Mr. Navarro could not raise executive privilege in his defense, saying that there was no compelling evidence that Mr. Trump had ever told him to ignore the committee.Asked after his verdict why he had not merely asked Mr. Trump to provide testimony that corroborated his claims, Mr. Navarro said the former president was too preoccupied with his own legal troubles.“You may have noticed that he’s fighting four different indictments in three different jurisdictions thousands of miles away, OK?” he said. “We chose not to go there.”In closing arguments on Thursday, prosecutors and defense lawyers dueled over whether Mr. Navarro’s refusal to cooperate with the committee amounted to a willful defiance of Congress, or a simple misunderstanding.“The defendant, Peter Navarro, made a choice,” said Elizabeth Aloi, a prosecutor. “He didn’t want to comply and produce documents, and he didn’t want to testify, so he didn’t.”Detailing the House committee’s correspondence with Mr. Navarro, Ms. Aloi said that even after the panel asked Mr. Navarro to explain any opposition he had to giving sworn testimony, he continued to stonewall.“The defendant chose allegiance to President Trump over compliance with the subpoena,” she said. “That is contempt. That is a crime.”Stanley Woodward Jr., a lawyer for Mr. Navarro, countered that the government had not successfully shown that Mr. Navarro’s failure to comply was anything other than “inadvertence, accident or mistake.” Mr. Woodward presented next to no evidence in Mr. Navarro’s defense and instead sought to poke holes in the government’s case that Mr. Navarro had deliberately disregarded the committee.“Where was Dr. Navarro on March 2, 2022?” Mr. Woodward asked, referring to the date that Mr. Navarro was instructed to appear before the panel.“We don’t know,” he said. “Why didn’t the government present evidence to you about where Dr. Navarro was or what he was doing?”Prosecutors also emphasized the role that Mr. Navarro’s falsehoods may have played in drawing scores of rioters to Washington to disrupt Congress’s certification of the results.That caused Mr. Woodward to bristle, telling the jury that the government was relying on emotional descriptions to tarnish Mr. Navarro’s image, rather than proving he ever intended to blow off lawmakers.Others in Mr. Trump’s inner circle cooperated with the panel in a more limited fashion and avoided criminal charges.Two of Mr. Trump’s advisers, Roger J. Stone Jr. and Michael T. Flynn, appeared before the committee but declined to answer most of its questions by citing their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and his deputy, Dan Scavino, each negotiated terms with the committee to provide documents but not testimony.During the trial, prosecutors emphasized that Mr. Navarro could have taken a similar tack. The panel had informed Mr. Navarro that if he sought to invoke privilege, he should do so in person, as well as list any documents he believed were protected.“Even if he believed he had an excuse, it does not matter,” Ms. Aloi told members of the jury moments before they left the courtroom to deliberate. “He had to comply with the subpoena no matter what, and assert any privileges in the way Congress set forth.” More

Erlene King sent thousands of dollars to associates and told them to distribute the funds to others who would then donate to the campaign she worked for, federal prosecutors said.The treasurer of an ill-fated 2021 campaign for Brooklyn borough president was charged Wednesday with organizing a fraudulent donation scheme in an attempt to access at least $400,000 in public matching funds.Federal prosecutors said the treasurer, Erlene King, 71, had sent thousands of dollars to associates over roughly two and a half years in an effort to skirt campaign finance rules and boost the campaign of Anthony Jones, who would go on to lose the election after receiving roughly 3 percent of the vote. Mr. Jones has not been accused of wrongdoing.Ms. King pleaded not guilty to wire fraud in federal court on Wednesday after she opted to waive her right to have the charges presented to a grand jury.A lawyer representing Ms. King, John S. Wallenstein, said that he and his client were “discussing potential resolutions” with prosecutors. If found guilty, Ms. King could face up to 20 years in prison.New York City’s public campaign financing program provides funds for campaigns that meet certain fund-raising thresholds. During the 2021 campaign for Brooklyn borough president, the Campaign Finance Board offered to pay campaigns up to $8 for every $1 raised, but only if a campaign first received donations from a minimum number of contributors and raised a total of $50,000 in eligible contributions on its own.In an effort to meet that threshold, Ms. King organized at least $25,000 in fraudulent contributions to Mr. Jones’s campaign, according to prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York. Donations that do not originate with the person whose name appears on fund-raising records are often called “straw” donations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More