From 2h ago
A federal grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election will hear testimony from an aide who was with the former president for much of the day on 6 January 2021, according to multiple reports.
William Russell, a former White House aide who now works for Trump’s presidential campaign, is scheduled to testify before he grand jury convened by special counsel Jack Smith, both CNN and NBC reported.
Russell, who has previously testified before the grand jury, served in the Trump White House as a special assistant to the president and deputy director of advance, before moving to Florida to work as an aid to Trump after he left office.
Multiple former senior Trump White House officials have testified before the grand jury in the special counsel’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection. Among those who have testified are Trump’s son-in-law and former White House senior adviser, Jared Kushner, and former top Trump aide, Hope Hicks.
In April, Mike Pence testified for seven hours behind closed doors, meaning the details of what he told the prosecutors in the case remain uncertain.
House speaker Kevin McCarthy has denied he privately promised former president Donald Trump that he would get legislation passed that would erase Trump’s two impeachments.
According to a Politico report, Trump was outraged at McCarthy for withholding his endorsement of his presidential run in the 2024 election. In an interview last month, McCarthy expressed doubt that Trump was the “strongest” candidate to defeat Joe Biden and win back the White House next year.
“He needs to endorse me – today!” Trump is said to have fumed to his staff on his way to a campaign event in New Hampshire. McCarthy called Trump to apologize after the interview, claiming he misspoke, sources told CNN at the time.
In return for delaying that endorsement, according to Politico, McCarthy pledged that he would get the House to vote to expunge” both impeachments against the former president. The outlet said McCarthy had promised to do so before Congress leaves for an August recess. Recess begins in less than two weeks.
In 2019, a Democrat-controlled House voted to impeach Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress after he asked Ukraine to investigate his presidential election rival, Joe Biden, and his son on unsubstantiated corruption accusations.
The House impeached Trump for a second time in 2021 for his actions ahead of the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters. The Senate acquitted him both times, thanks to the votes of Republicans. McCarthy voted against impeaching Trump both times.
“There’s no deal,” McCarthy told a reporter in the Capitol on Thursday, Reuters reported.
The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, accused Democrats of trying to “destroy” the supreme court and said the ethics bill “is an assault on the court itself”.
Congress should stay out of the court’s business, Graham said.
Opening the committee meeting, Senate judiciary chair Dick Durbin said the legislation would be a “crucial first step” in restoring confidence in the court.
Graham vowed, in response, that “all of us are going to vote no”. From NBC’s Sahil Kapur:
Here’s a rundown of the ethical controversies supreme court justices have been involved in.
Real estate transactions
Clarence Thomas’s friend Harlan Crow, the Texas Republican billionaire mega-donor, bought three properties that the conservative justice and his family owned, including Thomas’s childhood home in Savannah, Georgia, where Thomas’s mother still lives. Crow made significant renovations, cleared blight and let Thomas’s mother live there rent-free. The cost was more than $100,000 but was not disclosed.
Justice Neil Gorsuch sold a 40-acre property he co-owned in rural Colorado after he became a justice, Politico reported. Brian Duffy, the chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, which has had more than 20 cases before the supreme court, bought the property in 2017. Gorsuch disclosed the sale and reportedly made between $250,000 and $500,000, but he left blank the buyer’s identity.
School support
Crow paid thousands of dollars in private school tuition for two boarding schools that Thomas’s great-nephew attended, ProPublica reported. The transaction was not disclosed.
An investigation by the Associated Press revealed how colleges and universities attract supreme court justices to campuses as a way to generate donations for institutions, raising ethical concerns around a court that, unlike other government agencies, does not have a formal code of conduct. The visits have resulted in all-expenses-paid teaching opportunities and book sales.
Money to partners
The Republican activist Leonard Leo paid Thomas’s wife, Ginni, $25,000 for polling services in January 2012, telling the Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway to make “no mention of Ginni”, the Washington Post reported. It’s unclear whether that is a direct ethical concern for Clarence Thomas but it may constitute a conflict of interest.
Ginni, who also attended the January 6 attack at the Capitol, reportedly exchanged text messages with the then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, encouraging him to support then president Donald Trump’s false election fraud claims aimed at subverting the results of his 2020 electoral defeat. The Judicial Education Project, a law firm tied to Leo, filed a brief to the supreme court in the landmark case that eventually gutted the Voting Rights Act not long after the payment was made.
Roberts’ wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, ran a legal recruiting firm that raised ethical concerns since she made millions of dollars in commissions from placing lawyers at firms, some of which appeared before the court. The New York Times obtained a letter from a former colleague of Roberts to the US justice department and Congress inquiring about the connection.
Luxury trips
For more than two decades, Thomas accepted millions of dollars’ worth of luxury trips on private planes and “superyachts”, and vacations from his friend Crow without reporting them on financial disclosure forms, ProPublica reported. Crow has said that he did not attempt to influence Thomas politically or legally nor did he discuss pending supreme court cases. Thomas said he was told he was not required to disclose the trips. Notably, a company linked to Crow was involved in at least one case before the US supreme court, Bloomberg reported. Thomas did not recuse himself from the case.
Justice Samuel Alito reportedly took a private jet to an all-expenses-covered fishing trip to Alaska, paid for by the hedge fund billionaire and conservative mega-donor Paul Singer. NPR reports that Singer has been involved in 10 appeals to the supreme court. In an unprecedented move, Alito defended himself in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, declaring he did not have to recuse himself and followed what he “understood to be standard practice”.
The Senate judiciary committee is expected to vote today on a bill that would require the supreme court to adopt a code of ethics.
Senate Democrats have called for a measure to establish a code of conduct for the supreme court justices similar to those that other government agencies must follow.
The bill, unlikely to pass in a divided Congress, would demand the court create a code within 180 days and establish rules on recusals related to potential conflicts of interest and disclosure of gifts and travel.
The panel vote comes after months of scrutiny on the court over ethical controversies supreme court justices have been involved in.
Senate judiciary committee chair, Dick Durbin, said this week:
Just about every week now, we learn something new and deeply troubling about the justices serving on the supreme court, the highest court in the land in the United States, and their conduct outside the courtroom.
Let me tell you, if I or any member of the Senate failed to report an all-expense paid luxury getaway or if we used our government staff to help sell books we wrote, we’d be in big trouble.
The bill would need at least nine GOP votes to pass, and Republicans appear united against it, arguing that the legislation would undermine the separation of powers and “destroy” the court.
Twice impeached and now twice arrested and indicted. Donald Trump faces serious charges in New York and Florida over a hush-money scheme during the 2016 election and his alleged mishandling of classified documents.
And more criminal charges could be on the way for Trump in Georgia and Washington DC. Here is where each case against Trump stands:
Classified documents case in Florida
Status: Trump pleaded not guilty; trial scheduled for August
Charges: 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information under the Espionage Act, conspiracy to obstruct justice and false statements and representations, among others
Hush-money case in New York
Status: Trump pleaded not guilty; trial forthcoming
Charges: 34 felony charges of falsifying business records
January 6 case in Washington
Status: Subpoenas issued by grand jury
Potential charges against Trump: Obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the government and incitement of an insurrection
2020 election meddling case in Georgia
Status: Grand jury report finished; charging decisions expected this summer
Potential charges against Trump: Election code violations
E Jean Carroll lawsuits in New York
Status: First lawsuit going to trial; second lawsuit on appeal
Allegations against Trump: Defamation and sexual abuse
Read the full story here.
Donald Trump has said he has until midnight tonight to testify before the federal grand jury deciding whether to indict him over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Targets of criminal investigations rarely speak to grand juries, as they are usually advised by their attorneys to not take up invitations to meet with the grand jury because any statements provided in that setting could be used to help build a case against them in the event that they’re charged.
Trump has not exercised that right in the two other criminal cases in which he’s been charged, Politico’s Kyle Cheney writes.
Recent witnesses who have appeared before the grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election were reportedly asked about the former president’s state of mind surrounding the January 6 insurrection.
Federal prosecutors asked multiple former senior Trump White House officials to speak to Trump’s mindset in the days and weeks after losing the 2020 election, leading up to 6 January, according to a New York Times report.
Witnesses including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, were asked if he had privately acknowledged that he had lost the election, it said. Kushner is understood to have said that it was his impression that Trump truly believed the election was stolen.
The line of questioning suggested prosecutors were trying to determine if Trump acted with corrupt intent as he sought to remain in power, the paper said.
A federal grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election will hear testimony from an aide who was with the former president for much of the day on 6 January 2021, according to multiple reports.
William Russell, a former White House aide who now works for Trump’s presidential campaign, is scheduled to testify before he grand jury convened by special counsel Jack Smith, both CNN and NBC reported.
Russell, who has previously testified before the grand jury, served in the Trump White House as a special assistant to the president and deputy director of advance, before moving to Florida to work as an aid to Trump after he left office.
Multiple former senior Trump White House officials have testified before the grand jury in the special counsel’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection. Among those who have testified are Trump’s son-in-law and former White House senior adviser, Jared Kushner, and former top Trump aide, Hope Hicks.
In April, Mike Pence testified for seven hours behind closed doors, meaning the details of what he told the prosecutors in the case remain uncertain.
What the potential charges means for Trump is unclear.
Prosecutors have been examining various instances of Trump pressuring officials like his former vice-president Mike Pence, but Trump’s efforts to obstruct the transfer of power could also be construed as conspiring to defraud voters more generally.
The other two statutes, meanwhile, suggest a core part of the case against Trump is focused on the so-called fake electors scheme and the former president’s efforts to use the fake slates in a conspiracy to stop the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win on 6 January 2021.
The target letter did not cite any seditious conspiracy, incitement of insurrection or deprivation of rights under color of law – other areas for which legal experts have suggested Trump could have legal risk.
Last year, the House select committee that investigated the Capitol attack concluded that Trump committed multiple crimes in an attempt to reverse his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruction of an official proceeding.
The committee issued symbolic criminal referrals to the justice department, although at that point the justice department had since stepped up its criminal investigation with the addition of new prosecutors in spring 2022 before they were folded into the special counsel’s office.
House investigators also concluded that there was evidence for prosecutors to charge Trump with conspiracy to defraud and obstruction of an official proceeding. They also issued referrals for incitement of insurrection, which was not listed in the target letter.
Should prosecutors charge Trump in the federal January 6 investigation, the case could go to trial much more quickly than the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case – before the 2024 election – because pre-trial proceedings would not be delayed by rules governing national security materials.
Federal prosecutors investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results have evidence to charge the former president with three crimes, including section 241 of the US legal code that makes it unlawful to conspire to violate civil rights, two people familiar with the matter said.
The potential charges detailed in a target letter sent to Trump by prosecutors from the office of special counsel Jack Smith, who also charged Trump with retaining classified documents last month, was the clearest signal of an imminent indictment.
Prosecutors appear to have evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States based on the target letter, two statutes that the House select committee examining the January 6 Capitol attack issued criminal referrals for last year.
The target letter to Trump identified a previously unconsidered third charge, the sources said. That is section 241 of title 18 of the US code, which makes it unlawful to conspire to threaten or intimidate a person in the “free exercise” of any right or privilege under the “Constitution or laws of the United States”.
The statute, enacted to protect the civil rights of Black voters targeted by white supremacy groups after the US civil war, is unusual because it is typically used by prosecutors in law enforcement misconduct and hate crime prosecutions, though its use has expanded in recent years.
Donald Trump has until Thursday midnight to respond to special counsel Jack Smith and tell his office whether he will appear before a grand jury in the justice department’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
A letter sent to Trump by prosecutors from Smith’s office on Sunday identified the former president as a “target” in the probe into the January 6 insurrection, Trump posted to his Truth Social website on Tuesday. He wrote:
Deranged Jack Smith, the prosecutor with Joe Biden’s DOJ, sent a letter … stating that I am a TARGET of the January 6th Grand Jury investigation, and giving me a very short 4 days to report to the Grand Jury, which almost always means an Arrest and an Indictment.
People who receive target letters from federal authorities are usually advised by their attorneys to not take up invitations to meet with the grand jury because any statements provided in that setting could be used to help build a case against them in the event that they’re charged.
Good morning, US politics blog readers. The former president, Donald Trump, has quietly added a criminal defense attorney to his legal team as he faces a potential indictment in the justice department’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection.
Attorney John Lauro, who has also represented Trump attorneys Christina Bobb and Alina Habba, is joining Trump’s legal team alongside Todd Blanche, according to sources, CNN reported late on Wednesday.
Lauro will be solely focused on special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s efforts to remain in office following his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden, including the deadly 6 January 2021 riot in which his supporters overran the Capitol building in Washington DC.
Federal prosecutors have evidence to charge the former president with three crimes, including section 241 of the US legal code that makes it unlawful to conspire to violate civil rights, the Guardian reported last night, citing two people familiar with the matter.
Trump faces being charged with obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States, two statutes that the House select committee examining the January 6 Capitol attack issued criminal referrals for last year.
The target letter also identified a previously unconsidered third charge, the sources said. That is section 241 of title 18 of the US code, which makes it unlawful to conspire to threaten or intimidate a person in the “free exercise” of any right or privilege under the “Constitution or laws of the United States”.
The potential charges detailed in a target letter sent to Trump by prosecutors from Smith’s office, who also charged Trump with retaining classified documents last month, was the clearest signal of an imminent indictment.
Here’s what else we’re watching today:
9am ET: Joe Biden will get his daily intelligence briefing.
9am ET: The House will hold a hearing on online censorship. Democratic presidential hopeful, Robert F Kennedy, is expected to testify.
10am ET: The Senate will meet to resume consideration of an EPA nomination and the NDAA.
10.20am ET: Biden will leave for Joint Base Andrews, where he will fly to Philadelphia.
10.45am ET: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will hold his weekly news conference.
1pm ET: Biden will speak about “Bidenomics”. He will depart Philadelphia to return to the White House in the afternoon.
Source: Elections - theguardian.com
