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      Trump Trial Set for March 4 in Federal Election Case

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      Judge Tanya S. Chutkan rejected efforts by the former president’s legal team to postpone the trial until 2026.A federal judge on Monday set a trial date of March 4 in the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, rebuffing Mr. Trump’s proposal to push it off until 2026.The decision by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan to start the trial in March amounted to an early victory for prosecutors, who had asked for Jan. 2. But it potentially brought the proceeding into conflict with the three other trials that Mr. Trump is facing, underscoring the extraordinary complexities of his legal situation and the intersection of the prosecutions with his campaign to return to the White House.The district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., has proposed taking Mr. Trump to trial on charges of tampering with the election in that state on March 4 as well. Another case, in Manhattan, in which Mr. Trump has been accused of more than 30 felonies connected to hush-money payments to a porn actress in the run-up to the 2016 election, has been scheduled to go to trial on March 25.And if the trial in Washington lasts more than 11 weeks, it could bump up against Mr. Trump’s other federal trial, on charges of illegally retaining classified documents after he left office and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them. That trial is scheduled to begin in Florida in late May.The March 4 date set by Judge Chutkan for the federal election case at a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington is the day before Super Tuesday, when 15 states are scheduled to hold Republican primaries or caucuses.Judge Chutkan said that while she understood Mr. Trump had both other trial dates scheduled next year and, at the same time, was running for the country’s highest office, she was not going to let the intersection of his legal troubles and his political campaign get in the way of setting a date.“Mr. Trump, like any defendant, will have to make the trial date work regardless of his schedule,” Judge Chutkan said, adding that “there is a societal interest to a speedy trial.”Mr. Trump has now been indicted by grand juries four times in four places — Washington, New York, Atlanta and Florida — and prosecutors have been jockeying for position. All of them are trying to find time for their trials not only in relation to one another, but also against the backdrop of Mr. Trump’s crowded calendar as the candidate leading the field for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination.While Judge Chutkan noted that she had spoken to the judge in the Manhattan case, it remained unclear how the judges, prosecutors and defense teams would address the problem of scheduling four criminal trials next year as Mr. Trump is campaigning.Hammering home the complexities, Judge Chutkan’s decision came the same day that Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff and a co-defendant in the Georgia indictment, testified in his bid to move his case to federal court, a step that could slow down at least some of the proceedings there.Before a federal judge in Atlanta, Mr. Meadows argued that his actions in the indictment fell within the scope of his duties as chief of staff, even while saying often that he could not recall details of events in late 2020 and early 2021. He is one of several defendants trying to move the case; any ruling on the issue could apply to all 19 defendants.After Judge Chutkan’s decision in Washington, Mr. Trump said in a social media post that he would appeal, though it was not clear what grounds he would be able to cite, given that scheduling decisions are not generally subject to challenges to higher courts before a conviction is returned.The former president has made no secret in conversations with his aides that he would like to solve his uniquely complicated legal woes by winning the election. If either of his two federal trials is delayed until after the race and Mr. Trump prevails, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general dismiss the matters altogether.In remarks from the bench, Judge Chutkan, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, dismissed arguments made by Mr. Trump’s lawyers that they needed until April 2026 to prepare for the trial given the voluminous amount of discovery they will have to sort through. That extended period, the judge said, was “far beyond what is necessary” to prepare even for a trial of this magnitude.As part of the hearing on Monday, John F. Lauro, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, previewed some of his defense case, identifying several motions that he and his colleague, Todd Blanche, planned to file on Mr. Trump’s behalf.Mr. Lauro said he could file a motion as soon as next week arguing that Mr. Trump was immune to the charges, given that the indictment against him covers a period when he served as the nation’s commander in chief.Mr. Lauro also said he was considering attacking the charges with a so-called selective prosecution motion. That motion, he said, would argue that Mr. Trump’s election interference indictment — brought by a special counsel appointed by the Biden administration — had been filed at least in part as retaliation for the federal investigation of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, which began in earnest during the Trump administration.Moreover, Mr. Lauro told Judge Chutkan that he was planning to challenge each of the three conspiracy counts in the indictment brought against Mr. Trump early this month by the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith. Those counts accuse Mr. Trump of plotting to defraud the United States, to disrupt the certification of the election at a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, and to deprive people of the right to have their vote counted.“In our view, this is a political prosecution,” Mr. Lauro said.Still, the issues surrounding the schedule of the trial took center stage at the 90-minute hearing, which Mr. Smith attended.Prosecutors working for Mr. Smith have said in court papers that the government could take four to six weeks to present its case to the judge, with Mr. Trump’s lawyers estimating a roughly similar amount of time.That timetable would push the trial well past the March 25 date that Justice Juan M. Merchan has set for the Manhattan trial and could edge close to or even beyond the May 20 date set for Mr. Trump’s federal trial in Florida.Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, signaled recently that he would be open to seeing the trial date for the Manhattan case moved, provided Justice Merchan agreed.Lucian Chalfen, a spokesman for the New York court system, said in a statement: “Justice Merchan and Judge Chutkan spoke last Thursday regarding their respective upcoming trials. At this time, there is nothing further to impart regarding the People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump.”A spokeswoman for Mr. Bragg declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga.In the federal election case, Mr. Trump’s lawyers began complaining two weeks ago about the amount of evidence they would have to wade through as part of the discovery process when they first made their request to postpone the trial until April 2026 in court papers submitted to Judge Chutkan.Mr. Lauro echoed that position in court on Monday. He took a sometimes aggressive tone in declaring that his client deserved a fair trial “no different than any American.”“For a federal prosecutor to suggest that we could go to trial in four months is not only absurd, it’s a violation of the oath of justice,” Mr. Lauro said, adding, “We cannot do this in the time frame the government has outlined.”In their own court papers, prosecutors had pushed back against Mr. Lauro’s protests about burdensome discovery, noting that much of the material was publicly available or known to Mr. Trump, having come from his 2020 presidential campaign or from political action committees associated with it.Molly Gaston, one of the prosecutors in the case, added a few new details to the portrait of the discovery evidence on Monday, noting that even though the total number of pages had reached about 12.8 million, the defense could go through it electronically with keyword searches.Ms. Gaston also said the government had created a file of about 300 key documents that served to annotate the 45-page indictment prosecutors filed against Mr. Trump early this month.“It is essentially a road map to our case,” she said.One of Ms. Gaston’s colleagues, Thomas P. Windom, told Judge Chutkan that the discovery evidence would include “a limited amount” of classified information, including about five to 10 sensitive documents, totaling fewer than 100 pages, and a 125-page transcript of an interview with a witness during which classified issues were discussed.Mr. Windom asserted, however, that prosecutors did not expect to introduce any of the classified material during the trial.In seeking to persuade Judge Chuktan to move quickly to trial, Ms. Gaston reminded her that Mr. Trump had repeatedly attacked the “integrity of the court and the citizens of D.C.” on social media in ways that could affect the case’s jury pool.At a hearing last month, Judge Chutkan warned Mr. Trump that she would not tolerate him using social media posts to intimidate witnesses or taint potential jurors. Within days of that admonition, Mr. Trump tested Judge Chutkan’s resolve by making more dubious posts.During the hearing on Monday, Judge Chutkan sought to calm Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Mr. Lauro, cautioning him twice to turn down the “temperature” when he was speaking.At one point, she appeared upset by the way that Mr. Lauro in his filings about the trial schedule had cited Powell v. Alabama, a landmark 1932 Supreme Court decision that reversed the convictions of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young Black men who were falsely accused of raping a white woman.Judge Chutkan pointed out that Mr. Trump would face trial in seven months after he was indicted, compared with only one week in the Alabama case.The two cases, she added, were “profoundly different” at their core.Jonah E. Bromwich More

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      Hearings in Two Trump Jan. 6 Cases Set for Monday

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      Proceedings before federal judges in Washington and Atlanta could begin to address some of the many complexities and scheduling challenges in the cases against the former president.By the end of Monday, another piece could be put in place in the complicated jigsaw puzzle of the four criminal cases facing former President Donald J. Trump: A date could be chosen for Mr. Trump’s federal trial on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election.At a hearing on Monday morning in Federal District Court in Washington, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan was considering widely differing proposals for the date of the trial, and could select one.In dueling court papers filed this month, the government and Mr. Trump’s lawyers each proposed ambitious schedules for the trial, with prosecutors asking for the case to be put before a jury as early as Jan. 2 and the defense requesting that it be put off for more than two years, until April 2026. As Judge Chutkan considered the arguments, another legal proceeding related to Mr. Trump was set to play out on Monday in federal court in Atlanta, underscoring the complexity of bringing the charges against him to trial.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., recently proposed starting a trial in her case against Mr. Trump, on charges of tampering with the 2020 election in that state, in March. But that date remains somewhat uncertain not only because of the jockeying among prosecutors over the timing of the different cases, but also because some of Mr. Trump’s 18 co-defendants in the case have asked for the trial to start as early as this fall while others want to slow things down.At the same time Judge Chutkan took the bench in Washington, a federal judge in Atlanta was scheduled to hold a hearing to determine if one of those co-defendants in the Georgia case, Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s final White House chief of staff, can remove his charges from the state judicial system and have them heard in federal court.Mr. Meadows has argued that he is immune to the state charges because all of the acts underlying the accusations against him were performed as part of his official duties as a federal official. But prosecutors working for Ms. Willis have countered that the charges relate to Mr. Meadows’s political activities during a re-election campaign, which fall outside of his formal government responsibilities.Mr. Meadows was on the line in January 2021, when Mr. Trump placed a call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, asking him to “find” enough votes for Mr. Trump to win the election there. Prosecutors issued a subpoena last week to have Mr. Raffensperger, among others, testify at the hearing in Atlanta.In most legal proceedings, the selection of a trial date is a largely mundane matter, depending on the number of defendants, the amount of evidence, and the schedules of the judge, prosecutors and defense lawyers.But the timetables for Mr. Trump’s four trials have taken on outsize importance. That is not only because there are so many of them, each one needing a slot, but also because they are unfolding against Mr. Trump’s crowded calendar as the candidate leading the field for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination.As a further complication, Mr. Trump has made no secret in private conversations with his aides of his desire to solve his jumble of legal problems by winning the election. If either of the two federal trials he is confronting is delayed until after the race and Mr. Trump prevails, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general simply dismiss the matters altogether.At Monday’s hearing in Washington on the federal election charges, Judge Chutkan has said she also intends to discuss a schedule for handling the small amount of classified material that may emerge as evidence in the case. If she ultimately agrees to the government’s request to start the trial in January, it would be the first of Mr. Trump’s four cases to be tested in a courtroom.Prosecutors from the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, brought the case early this month, filing an indictment against Mr. Trump in Washington after months of intense investigation. The indictment charges the former president with three overlapping conspiracies to defraud the United States, to obstruct the certification of the election during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, and to deprive people of the right to have their votes counted.Another one of Mr. Trump’s trials, in which he has been charged with 34 felonies connected to hush money payments to a porn star in the run-up to the 2016 election, is set to start in March in a state court in Manhattan. Another, in which he stands accused of illegally retaining dozens of classified documents after leaving office, is set to go before a jury in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., near the end of May. More

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      Prosecutors Criticize Trump’s Request for 2026 Trial Date in Jan. 6 Case

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      Defense lawyers had said they needed years to wade through 11 million pages of evidence, but the Justice Department, which is seeking to go to trial in January, said they were exaggerating the burden.Federal prosecutors pushed back on Monday against former President Donald J. Trump’s request to postpone his election interference trial in Washington until well into 2026, asserting that his main reason for the delay — the amount of evidence his lawyers have to sort through — was vastly overstated.Mr. Trump’s lawyers, in an extremely aggressive move last week, asked Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, to put the trial off until at least April 2026. That schedule would call for a jury to be seated nearly a year and a half after the 2024 election and almost three years after the charges against Mr. Trump were originally filed.The lawyers said they needed so much time because the amount of discovery evidence they expect to receive from the government was enormous — as much as 8.5 terabytes of materials, they told Judge Chutkan, totaling over 11.5 million pages.As part of their filing to the judge, the lawyers included a graph that purported to show how a stack of 11.5 million pages would result in a “tower of paper stretching nearly 5,000 feet into the sky.” That, the lawyers pointed out, was “taller than the Washington Monument, stacked on top of itself eight times, with nearly a million pages to spare.”Responding to these claims in court papers on Monday, Molly Gaston, one of the prosecutors in the case, told Judge Chutkan that Mr. Trump’s characterization of the discovery evidence “overstates the amount of new and nonduplicative” material his lawyers will get and “exaggerates the challenge of reviewing it effectively.”Ms. Gaston said that Mr. Trump should already be familiar with much of the materials, noting that about three million pages came from unnamed “entities associated with” him. Hundreds of thousands of other pages, she added, have been publicly available for some time — among them, “the defendant’s tweets, Truth Social posts, campaign statements and court papers involving challenges to the 2020 election by the defendant or his allies.”Ms. Gaston also said that about one million pages of discovery came from the House select committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. That trove of evidence included hundreds of transcripts of interviews or depositions, a majority of which, she asserted, “are already public in redacted form.”Moreover, Ms. Gaston said, the government turned over a large trove of materials — including more than three million pages of documents from the Secret Service — that “should not require substantial time or attention from the defense team.”All of the material, she added, was given to Mr. Trump’s lawyers in a way that the defense could review quickly and easily “through targeted keyword searches and electronic sorting.”Mr. Trump’s proposed trial date, Ms. Gaston wrote, “rests on the faulty assertion that it is necessary for a lawyer to conduct a page-by-page review of discovery for a defendant to receive a fair trial.”“But the defendant can, should and apparently will adopt the benefits of electronic review to reduce the volume of material needed to be searched and manually reviewed,” she said.Mr. Trump has made no secret in private conversations with his aides that he is looking to win the next election as a way to try to solve his array of legal problems. To that end, he has often sought to slow down prosecutors in all four of the criminal cases he is facing.Indeed, if the former president, and the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, can push his two federal trials — in Washington and Florida — until after the election and prevail, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general dismiss the matter altogether.Mr. Trump will not be able to pardon himself if he is ultimately convicted in Manhattan, where he faces state charges related to hush money payments to a porn star before the 2016 election. That is also true in Fulton County, Ga., where he stands accused with 18 co-defendants of tampering with the results of the election in that state.Prosecutors in the office of the Justice Department’s special counsel, Jack Smith, filed their own election interference case against Mr. Trump this month in Federal District Court in Washington. That indictment accused Mr. Trump and six unidentified co-conspirators of three overlapping plots to defraud the United States, to disrupt the final certification of the election and to deprive people of their rights to have their votes counted.Mr. Smith’s team has asked Judge Chutkan to set their case for trial in January. If that schedule holds — which is not a certainty — the federal election interference case would be the first to go before a jury.Judge Chutkan is expected to consider — and perhaps issue a ruling — on the question of a trial date when the two sides meet for a hearing in her courtroom on Aug. 28.The Manhattan case is set to go to trial in late March while Mr. Trump’s other federal case — one in which he stands accused of illegally retaining dozens of classified documents after leaving office — is scheduled to go to trial in Fort Pierce, Fla., in May.Last week, Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., said she hoped to take Mr. Trump to trial in her case as early as March 4. More

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      Trump’s Lawyers Seek April 2026 Start to Jan. 6 Trial

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      The lawyers said the extraordinary delay was needed given the historic nature of the case and the volume of discovery materials they will have to sort through in the coming months.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump asked a judge on Thursday to reject the government’s proposal to take Mr. Trump to trial in early January on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election and to instead push back the proceeding until April 2026 — nearly a year and a half after the 2024 election.The lawyers said the extraordinary delay was needed because of the historic nature of the case and the extraordinary volume of discovery evidence they will have to sort through — as much as 8.5 terabytes of materials, totaling over 11.5 million pages, they wrote in a filing to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the case.In a bit of legal showmanship, Gregory M. Singer, the lawyer who wrote the brief, included a graph that showed how 11.5 million pages of documents stacked atop one another would result in a “tower of paper stretching nearly 5,000 feet into the sky.”That, Mr. Singer pointed out, was “taller than the Washington Monument, stacked on top of itself eight times, with nearly a million pages to spare.”“Even assuming we could begin reviewing the documents today, we would need to proceed at a pace of 99,762 pages per day to finish the government’s initial production by its proposed date for jury selection,” Mr. Singer wrote. “That is the entirety of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.”Mr. Trump’s aggressive request to postpone the trial in Federal District Court in Washington — a strategy he has pursued in all of the criminal cases he is facing — followed an equally ambitious proposal made last week by prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, to get the case in front of a jury by the first week of 2024.Now that Mr. Trump has been indicted four times in four separate cases — most recently, on Monday in Fulton County, Ga. — prosecutors have started jockeying with one another to determine when the trials will be held. Complicating matters, Mr. Trump’s campaign schedule is set to pick up significantly this winter and spring with a series of primary elections just as he will be obliged to be in various courthouses in various cities as a criminal defendant.The judge in the other federal case that Mr. Trump is facing — one in which he stands accused of illegally holding on to dozens of classified documents after he left office — has slated the matter to go to trial on May 20 in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla.On Wednesday, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, proposed starting the sprawling trial of Mr. Trump and 18 others on charges of tampering with Georgia’s state election on March 4.And that was only three weeks before the March 25 start date for Mr. Trump’s fourth trial — one that will take place in Manhattan on charges related to hush money payments made to a porn star in the weeks before the 2016 election.If the prosecutors all get their way — and there is no assurance they will — Mr. Trump could be on trial more or less nonstop, with a few weeks’ hiatus here and there, from early January through perhaps mid-June at a time when his campaign advisers will surely want him out on the trail holding rallies and meeting with voters.Some of the former president’s advisers have made no secret of the fact that he is looking to win the next election as a way to try to solve his legal problems. If Mr. Trump, who is the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, can push the federal trials until after the election and prevail, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general simply dismiss the matter altogether.To that end, his lawyers have sought various ways to slow prosecutors in their race to get to trial and have tried to delay the proceedings where they can.Last month, for example, they asked the judge in the documents case, Aileen M. Cannon, to postpone that trial indefinitely, arguing that it should not begin until all “substantive motions” in the case had been presented and decided. At a subsequent hearing, they told Judge Cannon that she should push back the trial until after the 2024 election because, among other reasons, Mr. Trump could never get a fair jury in the maelstrom of news media attention surrounding the race.The lawyers tried that gambit again on Thursday with Judge Chutkan.Mr. Singer noted in his filing that not only were the discovery materials expansive, but the case also involved several novel aspects that made it, as he put it, “terra incognita.”“No person in the history of our country has ever been charged with conspiracies related to the Electoral Count Act,” he wrote, referring to the post-Civil War era law that governs the counting of electors to the Electoral College.“No president has ever been charged with a crime for conduct committed while in office,” he continued. “No major party presidential candidate has ever been charged while in the middle of a campaign — and certainly not by a Justice Department serving his opponent.”Mr. Singer also mentioned Mr. Trump’s increasingly crowded legal calendar, noting that the government’s proposal to go to trial in January “presents numerous conflicts” with what he genially described as “other pending matters.”As an example, Mr. Singer pointed out that the judge in the Florida-based classified documents case has scheduled a pretrial hearing for Dec. 11 — the same day the special counsel’s office has proposed starting jury selection in the Washington-based election interference case.Echoing Mr. Singer’s complaints, Christopher M. Kise, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers in the Florida case, alerted Judge Cannon about the conflicting proceedings on Dec. 11 in court papers filed on Thursday night.Mr. Kise noted that he could “only speculate about the special counsel’s motive for offering dates in the newly indicted case that directly conflict with dates” in the Florida case, but seemed interested in making certain that Judge Cannon was aware of what was going on.“The special counsel’s strategy asking for a schedule in the D.C. case that culminates in a proposed trial date of Jan. 2, 2024, is not merely gamesmanship by a partisan Department of Justice,” he wrote. “It is a miscarriage of justice.” More

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      Where’s the Vicuña Outrage?

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      Three men walk into a courtroom, as August heats up.WASHINGTON — For a quiet summer Friday, there was quite a cacophony. Donald Trump crashing around. Clarence Thomas cashing in. Hunter Biden spinning out.News about these men rocked the capital. Yet there is something inevitable, even ancient, about the chaos enveloping them. Fatal flaws. Mythic obsessions. Greed. Revenge. Daddy issues. Maybe a touch of Cain and Abel.It’s all there, part of a murky cloud reaching from the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Court House to the Supreme Court to the Justice Department to the White House.On Thursday, ProPublica dropped a scalding piece about the abominable behavior of Clarence Thomas, following up on its revelations about Harlan Crow paying for Thomas’s luxury trips, his mother’s house in Georgia and private school tuition for his grandnephew. This one is headlined: “The Other Billionaires Who Have Treated the Supreme Court Justice to Luxury Travel.”In the old days, there was shame attached to selling your office. There was a single word that encapsulated such an outrage: vicuña. President Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, accepted a vicuña coat from a Boston textile manufacturer doing business with the federal government. He lost his job and scarred his reputation.Now Thomas sneers at the law by failing to disclose gifts from billionaires eager to gain influence. (The gifts also benefited his wife, Ginni Thomas, who tried to help Trump overthrow the government.)ProPublica told the ka-ching: “At least 38 destination vacations … 26 private jet flights … a dozen V.I.P. passes to professional and college sporting events … two stays at luxury resorts … and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.”Thomas is abiding by the adage that living well is the best revenge. He never got over the humiliation of the Anita Hill hearings, even though his allies smeared Hill as he lied his way to Senate confirmation. (Thanks, Joe Biden!) He came out of it feeling angry and vindictive. He got on the court, muscling past questions about his legal abilities and ethical compass by pushing the story that he was a guy who worked his way up from poverty.The justice polished that just-folks image over the years by going on R.V. vacations with his wife to escape the “meanness” of Washington. But as The Times reported last weekend, the $267,230 Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon R.V., which Thomas told friends he had scrimped and saved to afford, was actually underwritten by Anthony Welters, a friend who made a bundle in health care.Thomas is ruining the court’s image and, with the help of other uber-conservatives, he’s undoing our social constructs, causing many Americans to rebel.At a hearing Friday, the federal judge overseeing the case against Trump for conspiring to purloin Biden’s election victory made a brisk start. “The fact that he is running a political campaign has to yield to the administration of justice,” Judge Tanya Chutkan informed Trump’s lawyers. “And if that means he can’t say exactly what he wants to say in a political speech, that is just how it’s going to have to be.”This will be tough for Trump because, as David Axelrod says, “the sense that he is being tried for political reasons is the essence of his campaign.”The judge warned Trump’s lawyers, “To the extent your client wants to make statements on the internet, they have to always yield to witness security and witness safety,” adding, “I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings.”Trump was warped by a father who told him, You’re either a killer or a loser. He couldn’t tolerate losing in 2020 so he concocted a scheme to become a killer — of democracy.Trump reminds me of fairy-tale figures — like Midas or the ballerina in “The Red Shoes,” a movie drawn from a fairy tale — who crave something so badly, they follow it down a destructive path. Trump refused to let go of the spotlight. He wanted all the attention and now it’s going to crush him.Like Thomas, Trump is driven by revenge. We shouldn’t hand power to people whose main motive is doing bad stuff to other people.A few blocks from Judge Chutkan’s courthouse, Merrick Garland emerged Friday with an announcement that surprised the White House — he was elevating the Hunter Biden prosecutor to a special counsel.This ratchets up the White House family drama. Beau was the ballast for the Bidens. Now he is his father’s hero, which is bound to make the troubled Hunter feel like a zero.Joe Biden should have reined in Hunter when he began living off his dad’s positions and connections. But the president, who lost two kids and nearly lost this one, is clearly paralyzed when it comes to Hunter.With Hunter likely going on trial, and the 2024 race underway, it will be harder for the president to argue that Trump is the one with all the legal and ethical albatrosses.Hunter is staining his father’s campaign, as Thomas is smearing the Roberts court, as Trump is dragging down the G.O.P.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump, Arraigned on Election Charges, Pleads Not Guilty

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      The former president appeared in federal court in Washington after being indicted over his efforts to overturn his defeat in 2020. His first pretrial hearing was set for Aug. 28.Former President Donald J. Trump appeared in federal court in Washington on Thursday for the first time to face charges that he conspired to remain in office despite his 2020 election loss, pleading not guilty at a hearing conducted in the shadow of the Capitol, where his supporters, fueled by his lies, had rampaged to block the peaceful transfer of power.Mr. Trump was booked and fingerprinted before entering the courtroom and offering a soft-spoken “not guilty” to each of the four counts lodged against him on Tuesday by Jack Smith, the special counsel.He was allowed to leave court without paying any bail or agreeing to any travel restrictions. A first pretrial hearing was set for Aug. 28.Mr. Trump arrived in Washington in the remarkable position of being under indictment in three separate cases as he is running for president again. In addition to the election case, he faces federal charges of mishandling classified documents and accusations in New York related to hush money payments to a porn star.But even as he sped in and out of Federal District Court in about an hour and a half, he was leading his rivals for the 2024 Republican nomination by wide margins and remained defiant.Crowds gathered outside the federal courthouse where Mr. Trump appeared for his arraignment on Thursday.Jason Andrew for The New York Times“This is a very sad day for America,” Mr. Trump said at the airport in Washington before boarding his plane back to his golf club in New Jersey. “This is a persecution of a political opponent. This was never supposed to happen in America.”Holding his umbrella for him as he emerged from his SUV on the tarmac was Walt Nauta, his personal aide, who was charged alongside him in the classified-documents case.Thursday’s hearing was held inside a courthouse that has been the venue for hundreds of trials stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. His lawyers used the procedural hearing to hint at one of his central defense strategies — a request to delay a second pending federal trial for months, if not years.The arraignment took place about six weeks after he entered another not-guilty plea in a Miami courtroom after being indicted on charges of illegally retaining classified documents at his resort in Florida and obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them.Thursday’s arraignment had deeper historical resonance. It began a process in which federal prosecutors will seek to hold Mr. Trump to account for what they say was his refusal to adhere to core democratic principles, a trial that will be held little more than a mile and a half from the White House and at the foot of the Capitol complex where his supporters chanted two and a half years ago for his vice president to be hanged and tried to block Congress from certifying President Biden’s victory.The indictment charged that Mr. Trump lied repeatedly to promote false claims of fraud, sought to bend the Justice Department toward supporting those claims and oversaw a scheme to create false slates of electors pledged to him in states that Mr. Biden had won. And it described how he ultimately pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to use so-called fake electors to subvert the certification of the election at a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, that was cut short by the violence at the Capitol.Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya, who oversaw the roughly half-hour intake hearing on Thursday, ordered Mr. Trump not to communicate about the case with any witnesses except through lawyers or in the presence of lawyers. She set the first hearing before the trial judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, for Aug. 28 — the date chosen by Mr. Trump’s lawyers from among the three options she provided and the latest of them.Police officers near the federal courthouse.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesDelaying the proceedings as much as possible is widely expected to be part of Mr. Trump’s legal strategy, given that he could effectively call off federal cases against him if he wins the 2024 election.The jockeying began on Thursday. After Judge Upadhyaya gave prosecutors a week to propose a trial date, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, John F. Lauro, complained that the government had had years to investigate and that he and his colleagues were going to need time to defend their client. She directed him to bring it up with the trial judge and prosecutors to respond within five days of his filing.“Mr. Trump is entitled to a fair and just trial,” Mr. Lauro said after Justice Department prosecutors requested invocation of a provision that could result in a start date within 90 days.Mr. Trump’s defense team has signaled that it intends to employ a variety of arguments to fight the charges.They include asserting that Mr. Trump had a First Amendment right to promote his view that the 2020 election was marred by fraud, and making a case that Mr. Trump sincerely believed his claims that he had been robbed of victory, an argument intended to make it more difficult for prosecutors to establish that he intended to violate the law.The defense team has also suggested that it will argue that Mr. Trump was relying on advice from lawyers when he sought to block certification of Mr. Biden’s victory, and that it could seek to move the trial out of Washington — a Democratic stronghold — to a more politically friendly setting.The wrangling over the timetable underscored the logistical and political complexities facing Mr. Trump and his team as they juggle three criminal proceedings and a presidential campaign.To give a sense of the crowded calendar his legal team will face, some of its members are scheduled to be in Fort Pierce, Fla., for a hearing in the classified-documents case on Aug. 25, and then to turn around and be in Washington on Aug. 28. Mr. Trump does not need to be in the courtroom for the pretrial hearings.Judge Upadhyaya arrived for the hearing 14 minutes late — creating long periods of awkward silence and pen-twiddling as Mr. Trump and his team sat across from equally antsy prosecutors.While the lawyers sparred, most eyes in the courtroom were on the second face-to-face encounter between the former president and Mr. Smith, who has filed charges that could put the 77-year-old Mr. Trump in a federal prison for the rest of his life. This time, unlike in Miami, the two men were positioned in such a way that they could be visible to each other.Jack Smith, the special counsel, announced the indictment of Mr. Trump in Washington on Tuesday.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Smith entered the courtroom — normally used by the district’s chief judge, James E. Boasberg — about 15 minutes before the scheduled 4 p.m. start, with his lead prosecutor in the case, Thomas P. Windom, and positioned himself in a chair behind his team, with his back against the rail dividing participants from the gallery.Mr. Trump walked in very slowly in his signature long red tie and long blue suit coat, surveying the room and mouthing a greeting to no one in particular. He glanced briefly in the direction of Mr. Smith — whom he has called “deranged” — but he did not seem to make eye contact.Mr. Trump spoke in respectful tones when questioned by Judge Upadhyaya, the magistrate judge who presided over the proceeding.Yet if he had seemed chastened and ill at ease in Florida, he was more his defiant self on Thursday.When she asked his name, he replied, “Donald J. Trump” and then added “John!”When she asked his age, he raised his voice a notch and intoned, “Seven-seven!”At the end of the proceeding, Judge Upadhyaya thanked Mr. Trump, who said, “Thank you, your honor.” On the “all rise” command, he stood up. One of his lawyers put his arm on Mr. Trump’s back and guided him away from the table and out the courtroom door.Mr. Smith, known for his implacable demeanor, remained still for most of the hearing. But after Mr. Trump’s entourage exited, he appeared to let his guard down, smiling broadly as he shook hands with F.B.I. agents who had been working on the case.But the gravity of the case weighed heavily on participants and observers alike.At least three of the district court judges who have presided over trials of the Trump supporters charged for their roles in the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 filed into the back row of the visitors’ gallery to observe. One was Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who had criticized what she called Mr. Trump’s “irresponsible and knowingly false claims that the election was stolen” in imposing a harsh sentence on a rioter who had bludgeoned a Capitol Police officer into unconsciousness.Outside the courthouse, security was heavy, with officers on foot and on horseback and barricades erected on the sidewalk. The crowd, made up of Mr. Trump’s critics and his supporters, clogged the area outside the courthouse, with some carrying pro-Trump signs and others shouting anti-Trump slogans, including “Lock him up!”The former president arrived in Washington by motorcade in the remarkable position of being under indictment in three separate cases.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMaggie Haberman More

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      Fact-Checking Trump Defenders’ Claims After Indictment in Election Case

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      Former President Donald Trump’s supporters have made inaccurate claims about the judge presiding over his case and misleadingly compared his conduct to that of other politicians.Allies of former President Donald J. Trump have rushed to his defense since he was charged on Tuesday in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.They inaccurately attacked the judge assigned to oversee the trial, baselessly speculated that the timing of the accusations was intended to obscure misconduct by the Bidens and misleadingly compared his conduct to that of Democratic politicians.Here’s a fact check.What Was Said“Judge Chutkan was appointed to the D.C. District Court by Barack Obama, and she has a reputation for being far left, even by D.C. District Court standards. Judge Chutkan, for example, has set aside numerous federal death-penalty cases, and she is the only federal judge in Washington, D.C., who has sentenced Jan. 6 defendants to sentences longer than the government requested.”— Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, in a podcast on WednesdayThis is exaggerated. Mr. Cruz is correct that Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, the trial judge overseeing Mr. Trump’s prosecution in the case, was appointed by President Barack Obama. While she has gained a reputation for handing down tough sentences to people convicted of crimes in the Jan. 6 riot, she is not the only federal judge who has exceeded prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations.Of the more than 1,000 people who have been charged for their activities on Jan. 6, 2021, about 561 people have received a sentence, including 335 in jail and another 119 in home detention, as of July 6, according to the Justice Department. Judges have largely issued sentences shorter than what prosecutors sought and what federal sentencing guidelines recommend, data compiled by NPR and The Washington Post shows.Senator Ted Cruz described Judge Tanya S. Chutkan’s appointment as “highly problematic,” but in the Federal District Court in Washington, cases are randomly assigned.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesJudge Chutkan ordered longer penalties in at least four cases, according to NPR, and appears to have done so more frequently than her peers. But other judges in Federal District Court in Washington have also imposed harsher sentences.Those include Judge Royce C. Lamberth, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, who sentenced a man to 60 days in prison while the government had asked for 14 days. He sentenced another to 51 months, rather than 46 months, and another to 60 days, rather than 30.Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, sentenced another defendant to 30 days, twice as long as the government recommendation. Judge Reggie B. Walton, nominated by President George W. Bush, sentenced a defendant to 50 days compared with the recommended 30 days. And Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, appointed by President Bill Clinton, sentenced a man to 60 days rather than 45 days.Moreover, Mr. Cruz described Judge Chutkan’s appointment as “highly problematic” given her political leanings. But it is worth noting that in the Federal District Court in Washington, cases are randomly assigned — similar to how Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee, was randomly assigned to preside over the case involving Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after he left office.What Was Said“All of these indictments have been called into question because they come right after massive evidence is released about the Biden family. On June 7, the F.B.I. released documents alleging that the Bidens took in $10 million in bribes from Burisma. The very next day, Jack Smith indicted Trump over the classified documents kept at Mar-a-Lago. And then you go to July 26. That’s when Hunter Biden’s plea deal fell apart after the D.O.J. tried giving him blanket immunity from any future prosecutions. The very next day, Jack Smith added more charges to the Mar-a-Lago case. And now, just one day after Devon Archer gave explosive testimony about Joe Biden’s involvement in Hunter Biden’s business deals, Smith indicts Trump for Jan. 6.”— Maria Bartiromo, anchor on Fox Business Network, on WednesdayThis lacks evidence. Mr. Trump and many of his supporters have suggested that the timing of developments in investigations into his conduct runs suspiciously parallel to investigations into the conduct of Hunter Biden and is meant as a distraction.But there is no proof that Mr. Smith, the special counsel overseeing the cases, has deliberately synced his inquiries into Mr. Trump with investigations into the Bidens, one of which is handled by federal prosecutors and others by House Republicans.Attorney General Merrick B. Garland appointed Mr. Smith as special counsel in November to investigate Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol as well as the former president’s retention of classified documents. After Republicans won the House that same month, lawmakers in the party said they would begin to investigate the Bidens. (The Justice Department separately began an inquiry into Hunter Biden’s taxes and business dealings in 2018.)Over the next few months, the inquiries barreled along, with some developments inevitably occurring almost in tandem. In some cases, Mr. Smith has little control over the developments or when they are publicly revealed.The first overlap Ms. Bartiromo cited centered on an F.B.I. document from June 2020 that contained an unsubstantiated allegation of bribery against President Biden and his son, and on charges filed against Mr. Trump over his handling of classified documents.Jack Smith was appointed in November 2022 to investigate Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 riot.Doug Mills/The New York TimesRepresentative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the House oversight committee, issued a subpoena in May for the document. The F.B.I. allowed Mr. Comer and the committee’s top Democrat access to a redacted version on June 5. That same day, Mr. Comer said he would initiate contempt-of-Congress hearings against the F.B.I. director on June 8, as the agency was still resisting giving all members access to the document.Two days later, on June 7, Mr. Comer announced that the F.B.I. had relented and that he would cancel the contempt proceedings. Members of the committee viewed the document on the morning of June 8, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, held a news conference that afternoon describing the document.That night, Mr. Trump himself, not the Justice Department, announced that he had been charged over his mishandling of classified documents, overtaking any headlines about the Bidens. The department declined to comment, and the indictment was unsealed a day later, on June 9.In the second overlap, on July 26, a federal judge put on hold a proposed plea deal between Hunter Biden and the Justice Department over tax and gun charges. Ms. Bartiromo is correct that a grand jury issued new charges against Mr. Trump in the documents case on July 27.The timing of the latest developments in Ms. Bartiromo’s third example, too, was not entirely in Mr. Smith’s hands.Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer was first subpoenaed on June 12 to testify before the committee on June 16. Mr. Comer told The Washington Examiner that Mr. Archer rescheduled his appearance three times before his lawyer confirmed on July 30 that he would appear the next day. Mr. Archer then spoke to the House oversight committee in nearly five hours of closed-door testimony on July 31. Republicans and Democrats on the committee gave conflicting accounts of what Mr. Archer said.Mr. Trump announced on July 18 that federal prosecutors had informed him he was a target of their investigation into his efforts to stay in office, suggesting that he would soon be indicted. Mr. Trump’s lawyers met with officials in the office of Mr. Smith on July 27. A magistrate judge ordered the indictment unsealed at 5:30 p.m. on Aug. 1.What Was Said“All of the people who claim that the 2016 election wasn’t legitimate, all of the people who claimed in 2004, with a formal objection in the Congress, that that election wasn’t legitimate, and in fact, objected to the point where they said that the voting machines in Ohio were tampered with and that President Bush was selected, not elected — and not to mention former presidents of the United States and secretary of states, Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter and a whole slew of House Democrats who repeatedly led the nation to believe — lied to the nation, that they said Russia selected Donald Trump as president, that the election was completely illegitimate — all of that was allowed to pass, but yet, once again, we see a criminalization when it comes to Donald Trump.”— Representative Michael Waltz, Republican of Florida, on CNN on WednesdayThis is misleading. Mr. Trump’s supporters have long argued that Democrats, too, have objected to election results and pushed allegations of voting malfeasance. None of the objections cited, though, have been paired with concerted efforts to overturn election results, as was the case for Mr. Trump.Democratic lawmakers objected to counting a state’s electors after the elections of recent Republican presidents in 2001, 2005 and 2017. In 2001 and 2017, objecting House members were unable to find a senator to sign on to their objections, as is required, and were overruled by the vice president. In 2005, two Democrats objected to counting Ohio’s electoral votes. The two chambers then convened debate and rejected the objections.In each case, the losing candidate had already conceded, did not try to overturn election results and did not try to persuade the vice president to halt proceedings as Mr. Trump is accused of doing in 2020.Mrs. Clinton has said repeatedly that Russian interference was partly to blame for her defeat in the 2016 presidential election. But she is not accused of trying to overthrow the results of the election. Prosecutors have not detailed any involvement on her part in a multifaceted effort to stay in power, including by organizing slates of false electors or pressuring officials to overturn voting results.What Was Said“Indicting political opponent candidates during a presidential election is what happens in banana republics and Third World countries.”— Representative Andy Harris, Republican of Maryland, in a Twitter post on TuesdayThis is exaggerated. Mr. Trump is the first former U.S. president to be indicted on criminal charges, but he is not the only presidential candidate to face charges in the United States and certainly not in the world.Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, was indicted in August 2014 and accused of abusing his power. Mr. Perry, who ran for president in 2012, had hinted that he would run again and set up a political action committee the same month he was indicted. He officially announced his presidential bid in 2015 but dropped out before a court dismissed the charges against him in 2016.Eugene V. Debs, the socialist leader, ran for president behind bars in 1920 after he was indicted on a charge of sedition for opposing American involvement in World War I. He was sentenced in 1918 to 10 years in prison.It is also not unheard-of for political leaders in advanced economies and democracies to face charges while campaigning for office. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was indicted in 2019 on charges of fraud and bribery. After losing power, he returned to his post in November 2022 while still facing charges. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi faced numerous charges and scandals over tax fraud and prostitution while he served as prime minister in the 2000s.And in Taiwan, prosecutors said in 2006 that they had enough evidence to bring corruption charges against the president at the time, Chen Shui-bian. Mr. Chen remained his party’s chairman through parliamentary elections in 2008 as the investigation loomed over him, and he was arrested and charged that November. More

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      Swift Ruling in Jan. 6 Case Tests Trump's Tactic of Delay

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      The former president has leveraged the slow judicial process in the past to thwart congressional oversight, but the Jan. 6 case may be different.WASHINGTON — On the surface, a judge’s ruling on Tuesday night that Congress can obtain Trump White House files related to the Jan. 6 riot seemed to echo another high-profile ruling in November 2019. In the earlier matter, a judge said a former White House counsel must testify about then-President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia investigation.In both cases, Democratic-controlled House oversight committees issued subpoenas, Mr. Trump sought to stonewall those efforts by invoking constitutional secrecy powers, and Obama-appointed Federal District Court judges — to liberal cheers — ruled against him. Each ruling even made the same catchy declaration: “presidents are not kings.”But there was a big difference: The White House counsel case two years ago had chewed up three and a half months by the time Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a 120-page opinion to end its first stage. Just 23 days elapsed between Mr. Trump’s filing of the Jan. 6 papers lawsuit and Judge Tanya Chutkan’s ruling against him.The case, which raises novel issues about the scope of executive privilege when asserted by a former president, is not over: Mr. Trump is asking an appeals court to overturn Judge Chutkan’s ruling and, in the interim, to block the National Archives from giving Congress the first set of files on Friday. The litigation appears destined to reach the Supreme Court, which Mr. Trump reshaped with three appointments.But if the rapid pace set by Judge Chutkan continues, it would mark a significant change from how lawsuits over congressional subpoenas went during the Trump era.The slow pace of such litigation worked to the clear advantage of Mr. Trump, who vowed to defy “all” congressional oversight subpoenas after Democrats took the House in the 2018 midterm. He frequently lost in court, but only after delays that ran out the clock on any chance that such efforts would uncover information before the 2020 election.So alongside the substantive issues about executive privilege, one key question now is whether Mr. Trump can again tie the matter up in the courts long enough that even a Supreme Court ruling against him would come too late for the special committee in the House that is seeking the Trump White House documents for its investigation into the Jan. 6 riot.Specifically, the Jan. 6 committee has demanded detailed records about Mr. Trump’s every movement and meeting on the day of the assault, when Mr. Trump led a “Stop the Steal” rally and his supporters then sacked the Capitol in an attempt to block Congress from certifying Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory.The chairman of the committee, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, has said he wants to wrap up by “early spring.” In that case, the committee would need access to the files it has subpoenaed by late winter for that information to be part of any report.Legally, the committee could continue working through the rest of 2022. If Republicans retake the House in the midterm election, the inquiry would very likely end.What happens next in the Jan. 6 White House files case may turn on the inclinations of whichever three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit are randomly assigned to the panel that will hear Mr. Trump’s appeal.Of the court’s 11 full-time judges, seven are Democratic appointees — including Judge Jackson, whom Mr. Biden elevated earlier this year — and four are Republican appointees, including three named by Mr. Trump. The circuit also has five “senior status” judges who are semiretired but sometimes get assigned to panels; four of those five are Republican appointees.If the D.C. Circuit declines, as Judge Chutkan did, to issue a preliminary injunction, Mr. Trump will presumably immediately appeal to the Supreme Court via its so-called shadow docket, by which the justices can swiftly decide emergency matters without full briefs and arguments.If a stay is granted at either level, the question would shift to whether the D.C. Circuit panel echoes Judge Chutkan’s decision to move quickly in light of the circumstances, or throttles back to the slower pace it tended to follow on such cases when Mr. Trump was president.Notably, in another Trump-era case, involving access to financial papers held by his accounting firm, Mazars USA, the Federal District Court judge assigned to that matter, Amit Mehta, was sensitive to the timing implications and took less than a month after the case was filed in April 2019 to hand down his opinion that Congress could get the records.But a D.C. Circuit panel took about five more months before reaching that same result — a nominal win for Congress — in October 2019. Mr. Trump then appealed to the Supreme Court, which waited until July 2020 to send the case back down to Judge Mehta to start the litigation over again using different standards.Separately, House Democrats have introduced legislation in response to the Trump presidency that would, among many other things, speed up lawsuits to enforce congressional subpoenas for executive branch information. Two people familiar with the matter said House Democratic leaders have indicated they plan to hold a floor vote on that bill before the end of 2021, though no date has been set; its prospects in the Senate are unclear.A related important difference in secrecy disputes between the Trump era and the Jan. 6 White House papers case is that when Mr. Trump was president, his administration controlled the executive branch files Congress wanted to see.Today, President Biden has refused to join Mr. Trump in invoking executive privilege, instead instructing the National Archives to give Congress the files unless a court orders otherwise. As a result, when it comes to government files, the default has flipped from secrecy to disclosure.During the phase of the lawsuit before Judge Chutkan, she signaled that she was averse to judicial delay. During arguments last week, she rejected a suggestion by a lawyer for Mr. Trump that she examine each document before deciding whether executive privilege applied.Representative Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the Jan. 6 committee, has said he wants the investigation to wrap up by “early spring.”Al Drago for The New York Times“I don’t see any language in the statute or any case that convinces me that where a previous president disagrees with the incumbent’s assertion of privilege, that the court is required to get involved and do a document-by-document review,” she said, adding:“Wouldn’t that always mean that the process of turning over these records, where the incumbent has no objection, would slow to a snail’s pace? And wouldn’t that be an intrusion by this branch into the executive and legislative branch functions?”Understand the Claim of Executive Privilege in the Jan. 6. InquiryCard 1 of 8A key issue yet untested. More