Federal Criminal Case Against Trump (2020 Election Case)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Special Counsel Asks Supreme Court to Decide if Trump Is Immune From Prosecution

      by

      The special counsel, Jack Smith, urged the justices to move with exceptional speed, and they quickly agreed to fast-track the first phase of the case.Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting former President Donald J. Trump on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, asked the Supreme Court on Monday to rule on Mr. Trump’s argument that he is immune from prosecution. The justices quickly agreed to fast-track the first phase of the case.Mr. Smith’s request was unusual in two ways: He asked the justices to rule before an appeals court acted, and he urged them to move with exceptional speed.“This case presents a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: whether a former president is absolutely immune from federal prosecution for crimes committed while in office or is constitutionally protected from federal prosecution when he has been impeached but not convicted before the criminal proceedings begin,” Mr. Smith wrote.On Monday evening, just hours after Mr. Smith filed papers in the Supreme Court, the justices granted his initial request: to put their consideration of whether to hear the case on a fast track. The court ordered Mr. Trump’s lawyers to file their response to the petition seeking review on an abbreviated schedule, by Dec. 20.Mr. Smith’s filings represented a vigorous plea to keep the trial on track by cutting off an avenue by which Mr. Trump could cause delays.A speedy decision by the justices is of the essence, Mr. Smith wrote, because Mr. Trump’s appeal of a trial judge’s ruling rejecting his claim of immunity suspends the criminal trial. The proceeding is scheduled to begin on March 4 in Federal District Court in Washington.Any significant delays could plunge the trial into the heart of the 2024 campaign season or push it past the election, when Mr. Trump could order the charges be dropped if he wins the presidency.“The United States recognizes that this is an extraordinary request,” Mr. Smith wrote. “This is an extraordinary case.”The trial judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, rejected Mr. Trump’s sweeping claims that he enjoyed “absolute immunity” from the election interference indictment because it was based on actions he took while in office.In her ruling two weeks ago, she condemned his attempts to “usurp the reins of government” and said there was nothing in the Constitution or American history supporting the proposition that a former president should not be bound by the federal criminal law.Mr. Trump appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He also asked Judge Chutkan to freeze the election interference case in its entirety until the appeal was resolved.In his Supreme Court brief, Mr. Smith conceded that the election case could not be decided until after the appeal of the immunity issue was resolved. On Sunday, his team filed papers to Judge Chutkan asking her to keep the March 4 trial date and saying she could still work on certain aspects of the case even as the appeal was being heard.In what appeared to be an attempt to cover all bases, Mr. Smith’s team also filed a request to the appeals court in Washington on Monday to decide the immunity question quickly. Winning the appeal of the immunity decision was only one of Mr. Trump’s goals in challenging Judge Chutkan’s ruling. All along, he and his lawyers have had an alterative strategy: to delay the trial for as long as possible.If the trial were put off until after the election and Mr. Trump were to win, he could have his attorney general simply dismiss the charges. Holding a trial after the presidential race was over would also mean that voters would not get to hear any of the evidence that prosecutors have collected about Mr. Trump’s expansive efforts to reverse the results of the last election before weighing in on whether to elect him again in 2024.Even if Mr. Trump’s lawyers are unable to postpone the trial until after the presidential race was decided, they are hoping to push it off until the heart of the campaign season in August or September.That would present Judge Chutkan with a difficult decision: Should she hold the trial at a time Mr. Trump could be out holding rallies and meeting voters and suffer what are sure to be his vociferous complaints or make the decision herself to delay the trial after the race is over?Mr. Smith urged the justices to move fast.He asked the court to use an unusual procedure to leapfrog the appeals court, “certiorari before judgment.” It has been used in cases involving national crises, like President Richard M. Nixon’s refusal to turn over tape recordings to a special prosecutor or President Harry S. Truman’s seizure of the steel industry.The procedure used to be rare. Before 2019, the court had not used it for 15 years, according to statistics compiled by Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. As of late last year, he found, the court has used it 19 times since.Among recent examples in which the court bypassed appeals courts were cases on abortion, affirmative action and student debt forgiveness.A statement from Mr. Trump’s campaign called the request by Mr. Smith a “Hail Mary” attempt to get to the Supreme Court and “bypass the appellate process.”Derek Muller, a law professor at Notre Dame, said the procedure remained unusual.“It’s always a long-shot bid for the Supreme Court to hear a case like this, without waiting for the process to play out in the lower courts,” he said. “That said, Smith is rightly concerned about a slow appeals process that may interfere with a trial date and run even closer to Election Day. It seems unlikely it will persuade the Supreme Court to intervene, but it is worth asking given the risks of delay.”Mr. Smith’s request was based on an argument that prosecutors have used several times in the election interference case: that the public itself, not just the defendant, Mr. Trump, has a fundamental right to a speedy trial.As in the Nixon tapes case, Mr. Smith wrote, “the circumstances warrant expedited proceedings,” adding: “The public importance of the issues, the imminence of the scheduled trial date and the need for a prompt and final resolution of respondent’s immunity claims counsel in favor of this court’s expedited review at this time.”Mr. Smith asked the Supreme Court to consider a question it has never addressed before: whether the Constitution confers presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.Mr. Smith acknowledged that the Supreme Court said in 1982 that former presidents enjoy some special protections, at least in civil suits — ones from private litigants seeking money — and that the Justice Department has long taken the view that sitting presidents cannot be indicted.“But those principles cannot be extended to provide the absolute shield from criminal liability that respondent, a former president, asserts,” Mr. Smith wrote. “Neither the separation of powers nor respondent’s acquittal in impeachment proceedings lifts him above the reach of federal criminal law. Like other citizens, he is accountable for criminal conduct.”Mr. Trump’s lawyers rely heavily on the 1982 decision, also involving Nixon, Nixon v. Fitzgerald. It was brought by an Air Force analyst who said he was fired in 1970 in retaliation for his criticism of cost overruns. By the time the Supreme Court acted, Nixon had been out of office for several years.By a 5-to-4 vote, the justices ruled for Nixon. “In view of the special nature of the president’s constitutional office and functions,” Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote for the majority, “we think it appropriate to recognize absolute presidential immunity from damages liability for acts within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility.”Other Supreme Court precedents seem to be of no help to Mr. Trump.In Clinton v. Jones in 1997, the court unanimously allowed a sexual harassment suit against President Bill Clinton to proceed while he was in office, discounting concerns that it would distract him from his official responsibilities. That was also a civil case.And more recently, the Supreme Court ruled by a 7-to-2 vote in Trump v. Vance in 2020 that Mr. Trump had no absolute right to block the release of his financial records in a criminal investigation.“No citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.In separate court papers filed on Monday, prosecutors working for Mr. Smith told Judge Chutkan that they intend to call expert witnesses during the election interference trial who will testify about the movement on Jan. 6 of Mr. Trump’s supporters from his incendiary speech near the White House — during which he urged them to “fight like hell” — to the Capitol.Prosecutors said they also planned to call a witness who could talk about the specific times that day when Mr. Trump’s Twitter account was in use.That could mean that the government will seek to provide the jury with the connections between Mr. Trump’s speech and his Twitter messages on Jan. 6 and the movement of the mob toward the Capitol. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Prosecutors Ask Judge to Deny Trump’s Request to Freeze Election Case

      by

      The special counsel Jack Smith told the judge she should keep the trial’s start date in March and continue making decisions as the former president appeals one of her rulings.Federal prosecutors on Sunday asked the judge handling former President Donald J. Trump’s trial on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election to reject his request to freeze the case in its entirety as Mr. Trump appeals her recent ruling that he is not immune from prosecution.The prosecutors told the judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, that even as the former president’s appeal of the immunity decision moved forward, she should continue working on several of the unresolved legal issues in the case and not postpone the trial’s current start date of March 4.“During the pendency of the appeal, any number of matters could arise in this case that are not involved in the appeal,” wrote Molly Gaston, a top deputy to Jack Smith, the special counsel who is overseeing Mr. Trump’s federal prosecutions. “The court should not enter an order preventing it from handling them.”“For its part,” Ms. Gaston went on, “in light of the public’s strong interest in a prompt trial, the government will seek to ensure that trial proceeds as scheduled.”The three-page filing by Ms. Gaston came just days after Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Chutkan to pause all of the dates and deadlines associated with the proceeding until the appeal of her decision denying their immunity claims is resolved.The expansive stay Mr. Trump’s lawyers have asked for would in essence stop the case in its tracks. The appeal is the centerpiece of a long-planned strategy by the former president’s legal team to postpone the trial in Federal District Court in Washington until after the 2024 election.This month, Judge Chutkan turned down Mr. Trump’s sweeping claims that he enjoyed “absolute immunity” from the election interference indictment because it was based on actions he took while he was in office.In her ruling, she condemned his attempts to “usurp the reins of government” and said there was nothing in the law, the Constitution or American history upholding the idea that a former president should not be bound by the federal penal code.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have already moved to challenge that decision in front of a federal appeals court in Washington and plan to keep appealing it all the way to the Supreme Court, if needed. But winning the argument is only one of their goals. They are also hoping to eat up time and postpone the case from going to trial for as long as they can.If the trial were to be put off until after the election and Mr. Trump were to win, he could have his attorney general simply dismiss the charges. Holding a trial after the presidential race was over would also mean that voters would never get to hear any of the evidence that prosecutors have collected about Mr. Trump’s expansive efforts to reverse the results of the last election before weighing in on whether to elect him again in 2024.Mr. Smith’s team has suggested in court papers that it knew Mr. Trump would seek to use the immunity appeal to delay the case. Last month, the prosecutors specifically asked Judge Chutkan to make her decision on the question quickly so that the appellate process could get underway.But in her filing on Sunday evening, Ms. Gaston suggested there was no reason Judge Chutkan could not make rulings on other outstanding issues in the case as the appeal went forward. Among those issues is an unresolved motion by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to have the election charges dismissed because they represent what they have described as a partisan attack against him by President Biden.While the defense and the prosecution have been sparring for months over the timing of the election interference trial, they have more recently been fighting over something else: a number of “speculative and conspiratorial” theories, as the government has called them, that Mr. Trump has indicated he may raise during the trial.On Saturday night, in a separate set of court papers, prosecutors pushed back against those theories, which could serve as the basis for one of Mr. Trump’s lines of defense at trial: suggesting, that in reassuring the public that the 2020 election was conducted fairly, the so-called deep state was in fact misleading the nation, an assertion that lacks any credible basis.In the papers filed on Saturday, Thomas P. Windom, another one of Mr. Smith’s top deputies, dismissed the notion — first brought up last month by Mr. Trump’s lawyers — that the SolarWinds computer hack engineered by Russia might have affected the results of the election.Mr. Windom also rejected as “bewildering” Mr. Trump’s claim that a statement issued by the country’s top cybersecurity official saying that the 2020 election had been safe was “part of a partisan effort to provide false assurances to the public.”Mr. Windom had little patience for yet another conspiratorial claim raised by Mr. Trump: that a cabal of politically motivated intelligence and national security officials had worked together after the election to convince him that no voting machines had been compromised and that the vote count had in fact been accurate.Calling the idea “theatrical,” Mr. Windom said prosecutors never found a shred of evidence during their long investigation that “a domestic or foreign actor flipped a single vote in a voting machine.”He also revealed how deeply the inquiry delved into the country’s national security community, noting that investigators interviewed the former director of national intelligence, the former national security adviser and his deputy, the former secretary of defense and the former leadership of the Justice Department. Asked if they were aware of any evidence of meddling in the election results, “the answer from every single official was no,” Mr. Windom’s filing said. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Appeals Court Upholds Trump Gag Order in Election Case, but Narrows Terms

      by

      The decision largely left in place an order limiting what the former president can say about his upcoming federal trial but allowed him more leeway to criticize Jack Smith, the special counsel.A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the gag order imposed two months ago on former President Donald J. Trump in the criminal case accusing him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, but narrowed its terms to allow him to keep attacking one of his main targets: Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing his federal prosecutions.The fight over the gag order has pitted the First Amendment rights of a presidential candidate against fears that his vitriolic language could spur his supporters to violence against participants in the case. While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed that a gag order was justified, its adjustments gave Mr. Trump broader latitude to lash out at some of the people he has been targeting for months.In its ruling, a three-judge panel sought to strike a cautious balance between what it called “two foundational constitutional values”: the integrity of the judicial system and Mr. Trump’s right to speak his mind.To that end, the panel kept in place the gag order’s original measures restricting Mr. Trump from attacking any members of Mr. Smith’s staff or the court staff involved in the case. It also preserved provisions that allowed Mr. Trump to portray the prosecution as a political vendetta and to directly criticize the Biden administration and the Justice Department.And in one respect, the court expanded the restrictions, adding a measure barring Mr. Trump from commenting on the relatives of lawyers or court staff members involved in the case if the remarks were intended to interfere with how the trial participants were doing their jobs.“We do not allow such an order lightly,” Judge Patricia A. Millett wrote for the panel. “Mr. Trump is a former president and current candidate for the presidency, and there is a strong public interest in what he has to say. But Mr. Trump is also an indicted criminal defendant, and he must stand trial in a courtroom under the same procedures that govern all other criminal defendants. That is what the rule of law means.”But the court cut back on the gag order in two important ways. In addition to freeing Mr. Trump to go after Mr. Smith, the public face of the prosecution, it relaxed a flat restriction against targeting witnesses — allowing Mr. Trump to criticize them if his remarks were not connected to their roles in the case.After the trial judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, first imposed the gag order on Mr. Trump in Federal District Court in Washington in October, Mr. Trump appealed seeking to get it overturned entirely as unconstitutional. As it hinted it might do at oral arguments last month, the appellate panel instead kept a version in place, but modified some of its terms.The modifications to the order mean that Mr. Trump can now return to using some of his favorite social media epithets and refer to Mr. Smith, as he has numerous times, as a “thug” or as “deranged.” The alterations also mean that Mr. Trump can lash out in a limited way against those of his political adversaries who also may be witnesses in the election interference trial, including former Vice President Mike Pence and former Attorney General William P. Barr.Asked for comment, the Trump campaign issued a statement saying the appeals court had struck down “a huge part of Judge Chutkan’s extraordinarily overbroad gag order.” Mr. Trump’s lawyers have promised to challenge the gag order all the way to the Supreme Court.The appeals court’s ruling rejected many of Mr. Trump’s legal team’s arguments for lifting the gag order entirely, including that his remarks are all constitutionally protected as political speech, that he could not be held responsible for his listeners’ responses to his speech, and that the court could not proactively gag him before any harm was shown to have occurred.“Many of former President Trump’s public statements attacking witnesses, trial participants, and court staff pose a danger to the integrity of these criminal proceedings,” Judge Millett wrote. “That danger is magnified by the predictable torrent of threats of retribution and violence that the district court found follows when Mr. Trump speaks out forcefully against individuals in connection with this case and the 2020 election aftermath on which the indictment focuses.”But the original order, she said, “sweeps in more protected speech than is necessary,” so the First Amendment required a narrower tailoring of the restriction.Judge Millett and her two colleagues on the panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia — Judges Cornelia Pillard and Brad Garcia — were appointed by Democratic presidents. Judge Chutkan was also put on the bench by a Democrat.While gag orders are not uncommon in criminal prosecutions, the order imposed in the election interference case has resulted in a momentous clash. Mr. Smith’s prosecutors have sought to protect themselves and their witnesses from Mr. Trump’s “near-daily” social media barrages, while the former president has argued that the government has tried to censor his “core political speech” as he mounts another bid for the White House.Mr. Trump has often blurred the lines between his criminal cases and his presidential campaign, using court appearances to deliver political talking points and employing public remarks to assail his prosecutions as a form of persecution.Complicating matters, several of his political adversaries, including Mr. Pence, are likely to be witnesses against him when the election subversion case goes to trial as early as March.The decision by the appeals court means that the two gag orders placed on Mr. Trump — one in the federal election case and the other in his civil fraud case in Manhattan — have now been reinstated after judges had temporarily paused them.Late last month, a state appeals court in New York put back in place a gag order barring Mr. Trump from attacking the court staff in his civil trial. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Kenneth Chesebro Is a Key Witness as ‘Fake Electors’ Face Charges

      by

      Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of the plan to deploy people claiming to be Trump electors in states won by President Biden, is cooperating with inquiries in Michigan, Arizona and Nevada.Twenty-four of the so-called fake Trump electors now face criminal charges in three different states, and one of the legal architects of the plan to deploy them, Kenneth Chesebro, has emerged as a witness in all of the cases.Mr. Chesebro, a Harvard-trained lawyer, helped develop the plan to have Republicans in battleground states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020 present themselves as Trump electors. The scheme was part of an effort to have Congress block or delay certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory on Jan. 6, 2021.Earlier this week, a Nevada grand jury indicted six former Trump electors, including top leaders of the state’s Republican Party, on charges of forging and submitting fraudulent documents.In August, a grand jury in Atlanta returned an indictment against former president Donald J. Trump and 18 allies, including three who were fake electors in Georgia. And in July, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel brought charges against all 16 Republicans who acted as Trump electors in her state. (In October, she dropped charges against one of them, James Renner, in exchange for his cooperation.)Interest in Mr. Chesebro intensified after he pleaded guilty in October to a single felony charge of conspiracy in Georgia and was sentenced to five years’ probation. He had originally been charged with seven felonies, including one charge under the state racketeering law.“Everything happened after the plea in Georgia,” said Manny Arora, one of Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers in Georgia. “Everyone wants to talk about the memos and who he communicated with.”The lawyer was referring to memos written by Mr. Chesebro after the 2020 election that outlined what he himself called “a bold, controversial strategy” that was likely to be rejected by the Supreme Court. Since his plea agreement in Georgia, Mr. Arora said, Mr. Chesebro was interviewed in Detroit by Ms. Nessel’s office, and he was also listed as a witness this week in the Nevada indictment.Asked if Mr. Chesebro had agreements in place to avoid prosecution in the various jurisdictions, another one of his lawyers, Robert Langford, said “that would be a prudent criminal defense, that’s typically what you do,” adding that he did not “want to comment on anything happening in any of the states.”Mr. Chesebro is also expected in Arizona next week, where the state’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, has been conducting her own inquiry into the electors plot for several months, people with knowledge of that inquiry said. (Mr. Chesebro’s Michigan and Arizona appearances were reported earlier by CNN and The Washington Post.)Mr. Chesebro worked for Vice President Al Gore during the presidential election recount battle of 2000 but later came to back Mr. Trump. He and another lawyer, John Eastman, are seen as the key legal architects of the plan to use bogus electors in swing states lost by Mr. Trump, a development that left some of his old colleagues scratching their heads.“When the world turned and Donald Trump became president, I stopped hearing from him,” Lawrence Tribe, who was Mr. Gore’s chief legal counsel and a Chesebro mentor, recently said.Mr. Chesebro’s lawyers continue to generally defend his conduct, saying he was simply an attorney offering legal advice during the 2020 election. But Mr. Arora said that the legal team in Georgia decided to take a plea agreement because the document that was signed by the fake electors in Georgia did not include language explaining that what they were signing was a contingency plan, pending litigation.“They didn’t do that in Georgia,” he explained. “Because he was involved in it and that language wasn’t in there, we decided to plead to that count. It wasn’t because the whole thing was fraudulent or that this was a scam.”The three state electors investigations have taken very different approaches.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., brought a broad racketeering case that includes Mr. Trump and top aides like Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff. Ms. Willis reached cooperation agreements with most of the fake electors before charges were brought.The Michigan and Nevada cases center on the electors themselves, rather than those who aided their actions, though Ms. Nessel has said that her inquiry remains open.Underlying claims of widespread election fraud that propelled the alleged fake electors scheme have never been substantiated. New legal filings this week from Jack Smith, the special counsel in the Justice Department who has charged Mr. Trump in his own federal election inquiry, underscore the illegitimacy of Mr. Trump’s chronic claims of election fraud, highlighting that as far back as 2012 he was making baseless contentions about President Barack Obama’s defeat of Mitt Romney.Mr. Trump made similar statements after his 2016 loss in the Iowa caucus, when he claimed that Senator Ted Cruz “didn’t win Iowa, he illegally stole it,” and after he lost the popular vote in the general election to Hillary Clinton, which he said he won “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Trump on Trial: The Looming Legal and Political Collision

      by

      The former president’s trial in one of his four criminal cases is scheduled for early March, putting his legal drama and the race for the White House on an unprecedented trajectory.In the next few months, as the weather warms in Washington, something remarkable could happen in the city’s federal courthouse: Donald J. Trump could become the first former president in U.S. history to sit through a trial as a criminal defendant.The trial, based on charges that Mr. Trump conspired to overturn the 2020 election, is scheduled to start in early March. And while the date could change, it is likely that a jury will sit in judgment of Mr. Trump before the 2024 election — perhaps even before the Republican Party meets in Milwaukee in July for its nominating convention.Mr. Trump is the front-runner for the Republican nomination and is facing 91 felony charges in four separate cases. Putting him on trial either before the convention or during the general election would potentially lead to a series of events that have never been seen before in the annals of American law and politics.It would almost certainly fuse Mr. Trump’s role as a criminal defendant with his role as a presidential candidate. It would transform the steps of the federal courthouse into a site for daily impromptu campaign rallies. And it would place the legal case and the race for the White House on a direct collision course, each one increasingly capable of shaping the other.Throughout it all, Mr. Trump would almost certainly seek to turn the ordinarily sober courtroom proceedings into fodder he could use to influence public opinion and gain any advantage he can in a presidential race unlike any other.“There is no useful precedent for this — legally, politically — in any dimension that you want to analyze it,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former United States attorney and F.B.I. official. “The turbulence is particularly dangerous because if Mr. Trump is convicted, he has set the stage for a large portion of the population to reject the jury’s verdict. As part of that, it is also his call to arms, and so there are other dangers that attend to his rhetoric.”The expectations of how a Trump trial would unfold before the election are based on interviews with people close to the former president. Already, Mr. Trump has sought to capitalize on the New York attorney general’s fraud case against him and his company. In that case, now underway in a Manhattan courtroom, Mr. Trump has shown up when he didn’t have to and has addressed reporters repeatedly. At the Washington trial, there will surely be enormous security, not only because of Mr. Trump’s status as a former president, but also because the event could become a flashpoint for conflict. There has been no violence during Mr. Trump’s various arraignments, when law enforcement officials had feared the worst.Still, there are some variables at play that could push the trial in Washington until after the election.Mr. Trump’s lawyers are planning to appeal a decision last week by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is presiding over the election case, to deny his sweeping claims that he enjoys absolute immunity from the indictment because it covers actions he took while he was president. That appeal, on a question that has never been fully tested, could end up in front of the Supreme Court, further delaying the case even if prosecutors ultimately win the argument on the merits.But despite such time-buying tactics, Mr. Trump’s legal team is cautiously preparing for a trial in the late spring or early summer. While the other three cases in which Mr. Trump is facing charges are much likelier to be pushed off until after Election Day, the former president’s team believes Judge Chutkan is intent on keeping the proceeding she is overseeing moving ahead.Mr. Trump has already turned his legal travails into a campaign message that doubles as a lucrative online fund-raising tool. But his attempts to reap political benefit from his prosecutions and to use his legal proceedings as a platform for his talking points about victimhood and grievance are likely to only intensify if he is actually on trial, in the nation’s capital, in the middle of the 2024 presidential cycle.Merchandise alluding to Mr. Trump’s criminal cases at a campaign event in Waterloo, Iowa, in October.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThere is no evidence that President Biden has meddled in any of the Trump prosecutions. Still, people close to Mr. Trump are planning to exploit the situation by falsely claiming to voters that Mr. Biden is a “socialist” leader directly seeking to imprison his political rival. One of those people, who was not authorized to speak publicly, suggested that this message could resonate especially powerfully with Hispanic voters, some of whom have family members who have suffered under dictatorial regimes in Latin America.When he is in Judge Chutkan’s courtroom, Mr. Trump is likely to be fairly well-behaved, constrained by his lawyers and by the federal rules of criminal procedure. He is unlikely to say much at all under Judge Chutkan’s supervision. And his silence inside the courtroom may feel all the quieter given the noise he is likely to make outside it in front of the television cameras that will surely await him every day.Even now, Mr. Trump has been engaging in a fusillade of daily attacks not only against the election case in Washington but also against his three other criminal cases — as well as his civil fraud trial in Manhattan.He has tried to blur all four cases together in the public’s mind as one giant “witch hunt,” yoking them to previous investigations into him. He has assailed the judges, prosecutors and witnesses involved in the cases, leveraging moments when gag orders against him have been temporarily lifted. He has also mounted a sustained publicity blitz, comparing himself to Nelson Mandela while portraying the indictments against him as retaliatory strikes by his political opponents, including Mr. Biden.This sort of spin and vitriol is only likely to increase when crowds of reporters await Mr. Trump’s exit from Judge Chutkan’s court each day.Mr. Trump’s allies expect he will hold news conferences outside the courthouse, seeking to maximize media coverage and hoping to have cameras capture his daily motorcade departures, likely to the airport to fly back to New York so he can sleep in his own bed.The trial and the enormous publicity that surrounds it could also offer Mr. Trump an unmatched opportunity to communicate to the American public without anyone providing an effective rebuttal.The gag order in Washington does not preclude Mr. Trump from attacking the trial in general, and federal prosecutors are barred by their code of ethics from speaking about a case that is in process. That means the former president, who has no compunction about lying, is likely to be the only person directly involved in the proceeding talking about it daily on television and social media.“The reality of the ethical laws as they pertain to prosecutors is that Trump is going to continue to have a pathway to rail against the indictment and trial for all the reasons that he’s done in the past and will do in the future, essentially unfiltered and unlimited — the prosecutors won’t,” said Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the former Manhattan district attorney whose office spent years investigating Mr. Trump’s finances and business dealings.“There’s a significant imbalance in the ability of prosecutors to comment in real time about the evidence and the case.”A coalition of news organizations has asked Judge Chutkan to televise the proceedings and Mr. Trump has joined in the request. But that is unlikely to happen given that federal rules prohibit news cameras from broadcasting from the courtroom. Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, have opposed the request, saying that the former president would turn the proceeding into a “media event” with a “carnival atmosphere.”Mr. Smith’s team is unlikely to react at all to Mr. Trump’s provocations — at least in public — instead focusing its energies on winning the case inside the courtroom, said Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor and law professor at Duke University.“There have always been circuslike cases and this could be the most circuslike case of them all,” Mr. Buell said. “But the strategy of the prosecutors in these cases is to not get distracted.”Mr. Buell suggested that the special counsel’s office might request special protections for members of the jury who will be under scrutiny in a way rarely seen in other criminal matters. He said prosecutors might ask for the jurors to be anonymous or to have federal marshals drive them to and from the courthouse every day.The selection of the jurors will be of paramount importance, with Mr. Trump’s best hopes of avoiding a conviction likely resting on a hung jury, according to former prosecutors and defense lawyers. Given the demographics of Washington, D.C., the jury pool is likely to be racially diverse, but it is unclear how politically diverse it will be.Should he be convicted, it is unclear how quickly Mr. Trump would be sentenced. He will most likely file appeals. And the details of any sentence — when he would be punished and whether he would be sent to prison or ordered to serve home confinement — would all carry enormous significance and are likely to be litigated intensely.Even though Mr. Trump will try to shape public narratives about the trial, wall-to-wall coverage about it may not be entirely to his benefit.The trial is expected to feature a parade of witnesses, including many of his own lawyers and advisers who will testify under oath that he had been told in no uncertain terms that he lost the 2020 election. It is also likely to focus heavily on the role he played in stirring up the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.But even if Mr. Trump dominates the discussion about the trial on the airwaves, the slow and steady accumulation of evidence presented in the courtroom could serve as a counterbalance.“At trial, the prosecutors will present witnesses,” Mr. Vance said. “It becomes more balanced, and more powerful, when the trial is ongoing.” More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Seeks Freeze of Election Case as He Appeals Immunity Ruling

      by

      In an effort to delay the former president’s federal trial on charges of trying to overturn the election, his lawyers asked for a pause while they challenge the ruling that he is not immune from prosecution.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump asked a federal judge on Wednesday to put the proceedings on hold in the case charging him with seeking to overturn the 2020 election as they appeal her recent ruling that he is not immune from prosecution.The request to freeze the case as the appeal goes forward was part of a long-planned strategy to delay any trial on the election interference charges from starting on schedule, in March.Mr. Trump’s legal team is hoping that a protracted appeal of the immunity issue, potentially to the Supreme Court, could result in the trial being pushed off until after the 2024 election is decided. Barring that, his lawyers hope to postpone the trial at least until after the Republican Party holds its nominating convention in Milwaukee in July.The way in which appealing the judge’s ruling has become entangled with Mr. Trump’s political calendar is typical of the way he has handled all four of the criminal cases he is facing as he mounts his third bid for the White House. He and his aides have made no secret that they believe his best shot at disposing of the four indictments against him is to be re-elected.While Mr. Trump has sought to slow down all of his cases, he has pursued the strategy most vigorously in the election case in Federal District Court in Washington, if only because it is likely to be the first to go before a jury.In an 11-page filing, Todd Blanche, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, told Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, that such a pause was “mandatory and automatic” now that Mr. Trump had served formal notice that he intends to challenge her ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.Mr. Blanche argued that Judge Chutkan no longer had control of the case and that jurisdiction over it had shifted to the appeals court. The expansive stay he requested would in essence stop the case in its tracks, pausing all of the deadlines that Judge Chutkan had already set for matters like pretrial motions, disclosures about defense trial strategies and jury selection.The appeal and the attempt to pause the case were triggered by a decision by Judge Chutkan late last week rejecting Mr. Trump’s sweeping claims that he could not be prosecuted on the election interference charges because they were based on actions he took while he was in the White House.In a ruling laying out a limited vision of presidential power, Judge Chutkan said that there was nothing in the law, the Constitution or American history suggesting the holder of the nation’s highest office was not bound by the federal penal code.“Defendant’s four-year service as commander in chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens,” she wrote.Most motions to dismiss an indictment cannot be challenged until after a defendant is convicted. But Mr. Trump was permitted to appeal Judge Chutkan’s decision on immunity because it hinged on the fundamental question of whether the charges should have been brought in the first place.“The Constitution protects presidents in their work to make sure laws are followed, especially as it relates to elections,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said in a statement. “As made clear in our appeal today, President Trump has absolute immunity from prosecution and litigation for carrying out his sworn and solemn duties as president.”Mr. Trump’s attempts to delay the election case will now depend on how quickly the appeals court decides to hear his challenge. The court’s next steps will be to lay out a schedule for written briefs to be filed and set a time for oral arguments.Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, have made it clear in court papers that they were expecting Mr. Trump to mount an appeal on the immunity issue even before Judge Chutkan ruled against him. To keep things moving forward, they could ask the appeals court to decide the case on an expedited basis — but even that could take several weeks.If Mr. Trump loses his first bid to challenge the immunity ruling before a three-judge panel of the appeals court, he could try again in front of the entire court. His lawyers plan to continue their appeals all the way to the Supreme Court if they can, hoping that even if they lose, their efforts will eat up time.If Mr. Trump succeeds in pushing the trial until after the election and wins the race, he could have his attorney general simply toss the charges. But even if he manages only to delay the trial until the summer, it would still put Judge Chutkan in a tough position.She would then have to decide whether to hold the proceeding during the heart of the campaign season. Such a move would no doubt prompt furious outbursts from Mr. Trump, who would be obligated to be in the courtroom every day, not campaigning.Or she could defer to the political calendar and decide it was too fraught to put a presidential candidate on trial with the election looming. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Trump’s Defense to Charge That He’s Anti-Democratic? Accuse Biden of It

      by

      Indicted over a plot to overturn an election and campaigning on promises to shatter democratic norms in a second term, Donald Trump wants voters to see Joe Biden as the bigger threat.Former President Donald J. Trump, who has been indicted by federal prosecutors for conspiracy to defraud the United States in connection with a plot to overturn the 2020 election, repeatedly claimed to supporters in Iowa on Saturday that it was President Biden who posed a severe threat to American democracy.While Mr. Trump shattered democratic norms throughout his presidency and has faced voter concerns that he would do so again in a second term, the former president in his speech repeatedly accused Mr. Biden of corrupting politics and waging a repressive “all-out war” on America.”Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy,” he said. “Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy.”Mr. Trump has made similar attacks on Mr. Biden a staple of his speeches in Iowa and elsewhere. He frequently accuses the president broadly of corruption and of weaponizing the Justice Department to influence the 2024 election.But in his second of two Iowa speeches on Saturday, held at a community college gym in Cedar Rapids, Mr. Trump sharpened that line of attack, suggesting a more concerted effort by his campaign to defend against accusations that Mr. Trump has an anti-democratic bent — by going on offense.Polls have shown that significant percentages of voters in both parties are concerned about threats to democracy. During the midterm elections, candidates who embraced Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him were defeated, even in races in which voters did not rank “democracy” as a top concern.Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign has frequently attacked Mr. Trump along those lines. In recent weeks, Biden aides and allies have called attention to news reports about plans being made by Mr. Trump and his allies that would undermine central elements of American democracy, governing and the rule of law.Mr. Trump and his campaign have sought to dismiss such concerns as a concoction to scare voters. But on Saturday, they tried to turn the Biden campaign’s arguments back against the president.At the Cedar Rapids event, aides and volunteers left placards with bold black-and-white lettering reading “Biden attacks democracy” on the seats and bleachers. At the start of Mr. Trump’s speech, that message was broadcast on a screen above the stage.Mr. Trump has a history of accusing his opponents of behavior that he himself is guilty of, the political equivalent of a “No, you are” playground retort. In a 2016 debate, when Hillary Clinton accused Mr. Trump of being a Russian puppet, Mr. Trump fired back with “You’re the puppet,” a comment he never explained.Mr. Trump’s accusations against Mr. Biden, which he referenced repeatedly throughout his speech, veered toward the conspiratorial. He claimed the president and his allies were seeking to control Americans’ speech, their behavior on social media and their purchases of cars and dishwashers.Without evidence, he accused Mr. Biden of being behind a nationwide effort to get Mr. Trump removed from the ballot in several states. And, as he has before, he claimed, again without evidence, that Mr. Biden was the mastermind behind the four criminal cases against him.Here, too, Mr. Trump conjured a nefarious-sounding presidential conspiracy, one with dark ramifications for ordinary Americans, not just for the former president being prosecuted. Mr. Biden and his allies “think they can do whatever they want,” Mr. Trump said — “break any law, tell any lie, ruin any life, trash any norm, and get away with anything they want. Anything they want.”Democrats suggested that the former president was projecting again.“Donald Trump’s America in 2025 is one where the government is his personal weapon to lock up his political enemies,” Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign, said in a statement. “You don’t have to take our word for it — Trump has admitted it himself.”Even as he was insisting that Mr. Biden threatens democracy, Mr. Trump underscored his most antidemocratic campaign themes.Having said that he would use the Justice Department to “go after” the Biden family, on Saturday, he swore that he would “investigate every Marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist-in-reverse enforcement of the law.”Mr. Trump has frequently decried the cases brought him against by Black prosecutors in New York and Atlanta as racist. (He does not apply that charge to the white special counsel in his two federal criminal cases, who he instead calls “deranged.”)Yet Mr. Trump himself has a history of racist statements.At an earlier event on Saturday, where he sought to undermine confidence in election integrity well before the 2024 election, he urged supporters in Ankeny, a predominantly white suburb of Des Moines, to take a closer look at election results next year in Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta, three cities with large Black populations in swing states that he lost in 2020.“You should go into some of these places, and we’ve got to watch those votes when they come in,” Mr. Trump said. “When they’re being, you know, shoved around in wheelbarrows and dumped on the floor and everyone’s saying, ‘What’s going on?’“We’re like a third-world nation,” he added.Mr. Trump’s speeches on Saturday reflected how sharply he is focused on the general election rather than the Republican primary contest, in which he holds a commanding lead.With just over six weeks until the Iowa caucus, Mr. Trump dismissed his Republican rivals, mocking them for polling well behind him and denouncing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as disloyal for deciding to run against him.He also attacked Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, for endorsing Mr. DeSantis and suggested her popularity had tumbled after she had spurned Mr. Trump.“You know, with your governor we had an issue,” Mr. Trump said, prompting a chorus of boos.Ann Hinga Klein More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Seeks to Use Trial to Challenge Findings That 2020 Election Was Fair

      by

      The former president’s lawyers in his federal trial on charges of trying to overturn the election are asking to collect a wide range of evidence — including on unrelated issues like Hunter Biden.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump said in court papers that they planned to question the findings of several government agencies that the 2020 election was conducted fairly as part of their efforts to defend Mr. Trump against federal charges that he sought to overturn the results of the race.The lawyers also suggested in the papers that they intended to raise a host of distractions as part of their defense, indicating that they want to drag unrelated matters like Hunter Biden’s criminal prosecution and the investigation into former Vice President Mike Pence’s handling of classified documents into the election interference case.The twin filings by Mr. Trump’s lawyers late on Monday were formal requests to the prosecution to provide them with reams of additional material that they believe can help them fight the conspiracy indictment accusing Mr. Trump of seeking to subvert the lawful transfer of presidential power three years ago and stay in office despite his loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr.Criminal defendants routinely make such requests in what are known as motions to compel discovery, but many of those made in Mr. Trump’s two filings were long-shot efforts that are likely to be rejected. Ultimately, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the election interference case, will have the power to decide which, if any, of the records Mr. Trump will get.But even if his lawyers get far less than what they asked for, the scope of their requests can be read as a kind of outline of how they plan to fight the case, which is set to go to trial in March in Federal District Court in Washington.At the heart of their strategy, the court papers say, is a plan to call into question findings made by the intelligence community, the F.B.I. and other federal agencies that the election was not marred by widespread fraud.The lawyers intend to argue that government reports upholding the integrity of the election were in fact a “partisan effort to provide false assurances to the public.” By questioning the consensus that the election was secure, the lawyers are hoping to show that Mr. Trump was acting in good faith when he spread lies that the vote count had been rigged — a move that could weaken the prosecution’s attempts to prove his criminal intent.To make that argument, Mr. Trump’s legal team has asked Judge Chutkan to force the special counsel, Jack Smith, who is prosecuting the federal cases against the former president, to give it any internal government records that cut against the dominant view that the election had been conducted fairly.Those requests were only some of the 59 separate demands for records made in more than 70 pages of court papers submitted by Mr. Trump’s legal team. Looking for anything that could help them prove the race was not secure, the lawyers made additional requests for information about how federal officials assessed cyberattacks around the time of the election and about attempts by foreign governments to interfere in it.Suggesting yet another defense strategy, the lawyers also asked for any records that could help them undermine Mr. Smith’s contention that Mr. Trump was responsible for the violence that erupted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. They specifically asked Judge Chutkan to allow them access to any information about security measures implemented at the Capitol before the attack and about the presence of federal agents or informants who were on the ground during the riot.Almost from the moment the election interference indictment was handed up in August, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have tried to paint the case as a direct attempt by Mr. Biden to sabotage the man who is likely to be his chief rival in the 2024 election. They have advanced that argument not only without any evidence, but also in spite of the fact that the charges were filed by Mr. Smith, an independent prosecutor.The lawyers have specifically accused Mr. Biden of seeking to have Mr. Trump indicted in retaliation for the investigation of Hunter Biden, who was indicted in September on federal gun charges in a separate prosecution. And the discovery filings on Monday suggested that Mr. Trump’s lawyers would like nothing better than to muddy the waters of the election interference case by introducing evidence at trial about Hunter Biden.To that end, the lawyers requested any information concerning “coordination” between the Justice Department and the Biden administration or Mr. Biden’s family.In another far-fetched request, the lawyers asked for any records concerning dealings that the Justice Department had with Mr. Pence, who was investigated earlier this year after he returned to federal officials several classified documents he had kept when he left office.In their filing, Mr. Trump’s lawyers suggested without citing any evidence that Mr. Pence, who is likely to be a key government witness at the election interference trial, had “an incentive to curry favor with authorities” because of the potential charges he faced in his classified documents inquiry.Judge Chutkan will not issue a ruling on Mr. Trump’s requests until after prosecutors working for Mr. Smith respond to them next month. And her eventual decree about discovery is only one of several important decisions she will have to make in coming days.She is poised to issue an order about Mr. Trump’s claims that he enjoyed “absolute immunity” from the election charges because the indictment arose from official actions he took while in the White House. She is also expected to decide whether to allow cameras into her courtroom and televise the trial. More