Federal Criminal Case Against Trump (Documents Case)

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      New Trump Charges Highlight Long-Running Questions About Obstruction

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      The accusation that former President Donald J. Trump wanted security camera footage deleted at Mar-a-Lago added to a pattern of concerns about his attempts to stymie prosecutors.When Robert S. Mueller III, the first special counsel to investigate Donald J. Trump, concluded his investigation into the ties between Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, his report raised questions about whether Mr. Trump had obstructed his inquiry.Justice Department officials and legal experts were divided about whether there was enough evidence to show Mr. Trump broke the law, and his attorney general — chosen in part because he was skeptical of the investigation — cleared him of wrongdoing.Four years after Mr. Mueller’s report was released, Jack Smith, the second special counsel to investigate Mr. Trump, added new charges on Thursday to an indictment over his handling of classified documents, setting out evidence of a particularly blatant act of obstruction.The indictment says that just days after the Justice Department demanded security footage from Mar-a-Lago, his residence and private club in Florida, Mr. Trump told the property manager there that he wanted security camera footage deleted. If proved, it would be a clearer example of criminality than what Mr. Mueller found, according to Andrew Goldstein, the lead investigator on Mr. Mueller’s obstruction investigation.“Demanding that evidence be destroyed is the most basic form of obstruction and is easy for a jury to understand,” said Mr. Goldstein, who is now a white-collar defense lawyer at the firm Cooley.“It is more straightforwardly criminal than the obstructive acts we detailed in the Mueller report,” he said. “And if proven, it makes it easier to show that Trump had criminal intent for the rest of the conduct described in the indictment.”The accusation about Mr. Trump’s desire to have evidence destroyed adds another chapter to what observers of his career say is a long pattern of gamesmanship on his part with prosecutors, regulators and others who have the ability to impose penalties on his conduct.And it demonstrates how Mr. Trump viewed the conclusion of the Mueller investigation as a vindication of his behavior, which became increasingly emboldened — particularly in regards to the Justice Department — throughout the rest of his presidency, a pattern that appears to have continued despite having lost the protections of the office when he was defeated in the election.In his memoir of his years in the White House, John R. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser, described Mr. Trump’s approach as “obstruction as a way of life.”In the hours after the new charges became public, Mr. Trump, whose advisers have been blunt that he must win the election to overcome his legal challenges, highlighted the stakes for him of the 2024 election.He suggested in an interview with a right-wing news site that if he is elected, he will use the powers of the presidency to insulate himself from legal accountability on the documents case and the other inquiry being conducted by Mr. Smith into Mr. Trump’s efforts to retain power after his 2020 election loss.Jack Smith, the second special counsel to investigate Mr. Trump, added new charges on Thursday.Kenny Holston/The New York Times“I wouldn’t keep him,” Mr. Trump told Breitbart, the news site, in response to a question about whether he would fire Mr. Smith. “Jack Smith? Why would I keep him?”The new charges show how even in the face of Justice Department scrutiny into whether he still had classified documents in his possession, Mr. Trump has continued to try to find ways to upend its investigation.In June of last year, in the midst of its efforts to retrieve classified material Mr. Trump had taken from the White House upon leaving office, the Justice Department served a grand jury subpoena on Mr. Trump’s organization for surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago that would show how boxes of the documents had been handled, especially around a storage room where many of them had been stashed.Shortly after the Trump Organization received the subpoena, the revised indictment said, the former president called Mar-a-Lago’s property manager and head of maintenance, Carlos De Oliveira. The two men spoke for 24 minutes, prosecutors say.Two days later, Mr. De Oliveira and another defendant in the case, Mr. Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, “went to the security guard booth where surveillance video is displayed on monitors, walked with a flashlight through the tunnel where the storage room was located, and observed and pointed out surveillance cameras.”Days later, Mr. De Oliveira had a private conversation with the Mar-a-Lago employee in charge of the surveillance footage. The conversation was supposed to “remain between the two of them,” according to the charging document.Mr. De Oliveira told the employee that “‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted,” the indictment said.The employee in charge of the footage said “that he would not know how to do that, and that he did not believe that he would have the rights to do that.”But Mr. De Oliveira continued to push, asking, “What are we going to do?” (The Trump Organization ultimately turned over security footage, but, as The New York Times reported in May, investigators became suspicious about whether someone in Mr. Trump’s orbit tried to limit the amount of footage given to the government.)The indictment says that after the Justice Department demanded security footage from Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump told the property manager there that he wanted security camera footage deleted.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesThe updated indictment also demonstrates how Mr. Trump, in the aftermath of the search of Mar-a-Lago last August, turned to an issue that he obsessed about in the White House: loyalty.“Someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good,” the indictment quoted Mr. Nauta as saying about Mr. De Oliveira to another Trump employee.That employee told Mr. Nauta that Mr. De Oliveira was “loyal” and “would not do anything to affect his relationship with Mr. Trump.”Shortly after that exchange, Mr. Trump called Mr. De Oliveira and said that he would get him a lawyer, the indictment said. Legal fees for Mr. De Oliveira, Mr. Nauta and other Trump employees who have become witnesses or defendants in the documents case are being paid by a political action committee affiliated with Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump’s desire for loyalty echoed behavior that Mr. Mueller captured in his report, which laid out how Mr. Trump asked the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, for his loyalty just days after taking office. Mr. Comey continued to pursue an investigation into ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia and was fired in Mr. Trump’s fifth month in office. Mr. Mueller was appointed as special counsel in the aftermath of Mr. Comey’s dismissal.Mr. Mueller’s investigation ultimately identified nearly a dozen acts Mr. Trump took that could be seen as obstruction of justice. One of the most damning related to how Mr. Trump pressured his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, to create a fake document rebutting statements he gave to Mr. Mueller’s office. Mr. McGahn refused to go along with what Mr. Trump wanted.Another example related to Mr. Trump’s powers as president. During Mr. Mueller’s investigation, several of his allies and associates — including Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort — were indicted by the Justice Department in cases that could have produced damaging testimony about Mr. Trump and his campaign. As the prosecutions of the men went forward, Mr. Trump publicly dangled the idea of issuing pardons. In the final weeks of Mr. Trump’s presidency, he pardoned them.The former special counsel Robert S. Mueller at a hearing in 2019. Mr. Mueller’s investigation identified nearly a dozen acts Mr. Trump took that could be seen as obstruction of justice.Doug Mills/The New York Times“There are all sorts of ways to obstruct an investigation, but not every one has an equal impact,” said Brandon Van Grack, a former prosecutor on Mr. Mueller’s team. “Hiding and lying are damaging, but prosecutors can often still get at the truth. Destruction is often looked at seriously because it’s permanent. It’s permanently deleting or destroying” evidence in the case.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, assailed the investigations into the former president’s conduct, saying “the weaponized justice system along with their Democrat allies have failed at every turn because they are on the wrong side of the facts. History will judge them harshly.”Over many decades before reaching the White House, Mr. Trump engaged in gamesmanship with prosecutors, regulators and officials who had authority in aspects of the industries in which he operated. He lived in a New York City where corruption touched aspects of the political and government establishments and the real-estate construction businesses, and he came to believe that everything could be worked out through some kind of deal, associates and former employees said.He courted officials who had prosecutorial jurisdiction in New York City, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, and Robert Morgenthau, the district attorney in Manhattan. Faced with massive amounts of civil litigation, his impulse, former employees said, was to find lawyers who knew the judge.In April 2018, an aspect of the Russian investigation spun off into a separate one into Michael D. Cohen, a lawyer for the Trump Organization who also served as a fixer for Mr. Trump and knew many of his secrets. After Mr. Cohen’s hotel, apartment and office were searched by the F.B.I. that month, Mr. Trump called Mr. Cohen with a message: stay strong.He then predicted on Twitter that Mr. Cohen would never “flip” on him. Mr. Cohen eventually did provide prosecutors with information about Mr. Trump’s hush-money payments before the 2016 election to a porn star who said she had a sexual liaison with him. He later said that Mr. Trump spoke in “code” to avoid plainly communicating his desires.Mr. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, wrote in his book, “The Room Where It Happened,” that Mr. Trump repeatedly sought to interfere with law enforcement and other official actions involving foreign leaders.During an investigation into Halkbank, a state-financed institution based in Turkey that was facing an investigation by U.S. officials for a scheme to evade sanctions on Iran, Mr. Trump told the country’s leader that he would “take care of things,” Mr. Bolton wrote.In a brief interview on Friday, Mr. Bolton pointed to a specific aspect of Mr. Trump’s view of how the rules apply to him: his use of government power for his personal and political benefit while in office.He cited Mr. Trump’s efforts to solicit damaging information about the Bidens from Ukraine as he withheld military aid to that country. “It shows as president he had fundamental difficulty distinguishing himself from the government,” Mr. Bolton said. “And it’s also why he couldn’t understand why government officials weren’t personally loyal to him.” More

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      More Charges Against Trump

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      A revised indictment details his unusual handling of classified documents.Donald Trump is facing more criminal charges in a federal case accusing him of mishandling classified documents.The new allegations are in a revised indictment from the special counsel’s office released last night. It added three charges: attempting to “alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence”; asking someone else to do so; and a new count under the Espionage Act.Today’s newsletter will explain the new charges and why they matter to the case.The chargesThe first two charges are connected. Prosecutors said that Trump asked the property manager of Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home, to have surveillance camera footage deleted. That video was important to the special counsel’s investigation into whether boxes of documents were moved to avoid complying with a federal subpoena.The property manager, Carlos De Oliveira, is now also charged in the case. He told a Mar-a-Lago information technology expert that “‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted,” according to the revised indictment. After the employee said he did not know how to delete the footage, or whether he had the right to do so, De Oliveira restated the request from “the boss” and asked, “What are we going to do?”The third charge, under the Espionage Act, concerns a memorable scene from the original indictment. An audio recording captured Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., showing visitors a classified document that detailed battle plans against Iran. Trump could be heard admitting to having the document and acknowledging that it was confidential.Now that at least one of the charges is linked to the Iran document, the recording could become more damning in court, by directly tying Trump’s own remarks to one of the crimes that he’s accused of.The indictment indicates that prosecutors have the document itself and details the dates that Trump possessed it, undermining his earlier claims that he never had it and was simply blustering.Trump’s campaign called the new accusations a “desperate and flailing attempt” by the Justice Department to undercut him.The bottom lineAs this newsletter has noted before, it is not unusual for federal officials to misplace or accidentally keep classified documents when they leave office. Such files were found in the homes of President Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence. What is unusual in Trump’s case is his attempts to keep the papers, even after federal officials asked him to return them.The new charges help demonstrate the exceptional nature of Trump’s actions. If the accusations are true, Trump not only tried to keep documents that he knew he was not supposed to have, but he also tried to cover up his attempts to hold onto the files by deleting video evidence.More on the indictmentSome legal experts think De Oliveira is likely to end up cooperating with prosecutors to avoid prison time. “This is a defendant who has almost no choice but to flip,” Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney, said on MSNBC.But the new charges may slow the case, currently set to go to trial next May, and could even push it past the 2024 election. “For Trump, his best defense is delay,” Kim Wehle, a University of Baltimore law professor, writes in The Bulwark.Trump’s lawyers met yesterday with the special counsel’s office, which is also investigating his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Charges in that case — which appear likely soon — would add substantially to Trump’s legal peril. (Track all the Trump investigations here.)The Times’s Charlie Savage annotated the indictment.THE LATEST NEWSExtreme WeatherLiam Warner, 5, cooling off at a playground in Manhattan.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesJuly is on track to be the hottest month globally since record-keeping began in 1850.The Northeast faces another day of oppressive heat and humidity, with the heat index reaching as high as 110 in New York.Dangerous heat is expected to settle into the Southeast by the weekend. See the forecast.The Labor Department will increase heat-safety inspections in construction and agriculture and for other vulnerable workers.PoliticsThe Senate passed bipartisan military policy legislation, setting up a clash with the House, which added conservative mandates on abortion and gender to its version of the bill.After budget troubles and staff layoffs, Ron DeSantis began a slimmed-down reboot of his presidential campaign in Iowa.Mitch McConnell’s apparent medical episode has stirred talk about who could succeed him as the Senate Republican leader.War in UkraineUkrainian soldiers fire toward Russian positions on the front line.Efrem Lukatsky/Associated PressUkraine’s offensive made small gains, but the scope of the assaults and their toll remained unclear.Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, promised free grain to several African countries after his blockade on Ukrainian exports disrupted the global food supply.EconomyThe U.S. economy grew 2.4 percent in the second quarter, more than experts expected.Economists increasingly think that the U.S. can bring down inflation without causing a recession. But they’ve been wrong about that before.Other Big StoriesThe Justice Department will investigate allegations of violence and discrimination by the police in Memphis, months after the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols.Russian oligarchs in Britain have gotten permits to spend lavishly on perks like private chefs and chauffeurs, despite ostensibly having their bank accounts frozen.Google has begun plugging A.I. language models into robots, giving them the equivalent of artificial brains.A judge ordered the release of three of the “Newburgh Four,” who were convicted in 2010 of a plot to blow up synagogues. The judge suggested that the F.B.I. invented the conspiracy.“Everybody’s punching bag”: Former classmates said the suspect in the Gilgo Beach serial killings was an outcast with a mean streak.OpinionsThe pain of losing a loved one to an overdose is crushing. But prosecuting drug dealers as murderers does more harm than good, Maia Szalavitz says.Here are columns by Thomas Friedman on Saudi-Israeli relations, Paul Krugman on Twitter’s rebrand and Michelle Goldberg on Republicans’ push to impeach Biden.MORNING READSThe annual swan census on the River Thames in Britain.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThe king’s swans: An annual bird count on the Thames found a worrisome drop.Titanium clouds: Astronomers have come across the shiniest planet ever found.“Phubbing”: Ignoring a partner in favor of your phone can breed distrust.Modern Love: Learning to hear “no,” in acting, friendship and romance.Lives Lived: Julian Barry’s scripts for a Broadway play and Hollywood movie about Lenny Bruce became definitive portraits of the comedian as a truth teller who drove himself mad in a righteous struggle against hypocrisy. Barry died at 92.WOMEN’S WORLD CUPA hip-check from a Dutch player sparked a flash of anger and the only U.S. goal in the teams’ tie.Nigeria upset Australia, the tournament’s co-host, which is in danger of failing to advance to the knockout rounds.OTHER SPORTS NEWSNew coach bluster: In an interview, Broncos coach Sean Payton said his predecessor Nathaniel Hackett’s performance last season was “one of the worst coaching jobs in the history of the N.F.L.”Home safe: Bronny James, LeBron James’s son, was discharged from the hospital after a cardiac arrest during a practice.An unbelievable day: Shohei Ohtani spent the first half of a doubleheader throwing a shutout and the second hitting two home runs. He sounds energized for the Angels’ surprise playoff push.ARTS AND IDEAS Dani PendergastTricks for a better vacation: Traveling is wonderful but can be taxing, whether you’re planning for a group or coping with delays. The Times’s Travel desk has tips for managing. One expert noted that during a flight delay, it’s easier to get help if you leave the gate, where crowds gather, and find your airline’s service desk. And when traveling with a group, ease stress by having a different person take ownership of each day’s activities.More on cultureRandy Meisner, a founding member of the Eagles, died at 77.“Back to the Future: The Musical,” which opens on Broadway next week, follows a story that will be familiar to fans of the film.Jim Gaffigan, a master of family-friendly comedy, goes darker in his new stand-up special.THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …James Ransom for The New York TimesStick with Fritos in this taco salad.Upgrade your ice cube trays.Cool off with this portable fan.Save your skin — check whether it’s time to toss products.Take our news quiz.GAMESHere is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was unlovely.And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle and Sudoku.Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — GermanCorrection: A chart in yesterday’s newsletter misstated the change in gross domestic product for the first quarter of 2023. It grew 2 percent, not 2.6 percent.P.S. Simon Romero is joining The Times’s Mexico City bureau to cover migration, climate change and more.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. More

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      Where Is Melania Trump Now?

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      The former first lady has mostly retreated from public view — and steered clear of the campaign trail — while her husband fights to return to the White House and faces increasing legal peril.Since leaving the White House, Melania Trump’s world has gotten smaller.Just how she likes it.Cloistered behind the gates of her three homes, she sticks to a small circle — her son, her elderly parents and a handful of old friends. She visits her hairdressers, consults with Hervé Pierre, her longtime stylist, and sometimes meets her husband for Friday night dinner at their clubs. But her most ardent pursuit is a personal campaign: helping her son, Barron, 17, with his college search.What she has not done, despite invitations from her husband, is appear on the campaign trail. Nor has she been at his side for any of his court appearances.These are the days of Melania Trump, former first lady, current campaign spouse and wife to one of the most divisive figures in American public life. Unlike her predecessors, there are no plans for a speaking tour, a book or a major expansion of her charitable efforts, most of which, people close to the Trumps say, are not fully visible to the public. In her post-presidential life, Mrs. Trump wants what she could not get in the White House: a sense of privacy.Those efforts to retreat from public life have been complicated by her husband, who has turned her once again into a candidate’s spouse. As Donald J. Trump faces a possible third indictment, she has remained steadfastly silent about his increasing legal peril.While she supports his presidential bid, Mrs. Trump has not appeared on the trail since Mr. Trump announced his campaign in November and did not utter a public word about his effort until May, when she endorsed him in an interview with Fox News Digital.“He has my support, and we look forward to restoring hope for the future and leading America with love and strength,” she said.Her absence is a striking difference from the start of the first Trump campaign, when Mrs. Trump, wearing a white strapless dress, descended the golden escalator in front of her husband at his campaign kickoff at Trump Tower.Mrs. Trump remains in touch and friendly with a small group of people from her time in the White House, including the designer Rachel Roy and Hilary Geary Ross, the prominent Palm Beach networker and wife of Wilbur L. Ross, the president’s former commerce secretary. She remains especially close with her parents, who have an apartment at Trump Tower in Manhattan and have been spotted at Trump events at Mar-a-Lago, the Trumps’ private club and residence.“From her point of view and her friends’ point of view, she’s been through a lot and she’s come out a strong independent woman,” said R. Couri Hay, a publicist, who was an acquaintance of Mrs. Trump’s in New York before she headed to Washington. “She’s learned how to close the door and close the shutters and remain private. We don’t see a lot, we don’t hear a lot.”Mrs. Trump declined an interview request. This account is based on a dozen interviews with associates, campaign aides and friends, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the private details of her life.People close to the family say Mrs. Trump’s lack of public support should not be confused with disapproval or indifference. She remains defensive of her husband, sharing his belief that their family has been unfairly attacked. Deeply distrustful of the mainstream media, she is an avid reader of the Daily Mail online, tracking Mr. Trump’s coverage in the conservative British tabloid.Mrs. Trump is particularly skeptical of the case by E. Jean Carroll, who won $5 million in damages in a trial accusing Mr. Trump of sexual abuse in the 1990s and defamation after he left the White House, according to two people familiar with her remarks. When Mrs. Trump saw coverage of her husband’s deposition in the case, she was livid at his legal team for failing to do more to raise objections. She has also privately questioned why Ms. Carroll could not recall the precise date of the alleged assault.Still, Mrs. Trump believes that despite the legal peril, Mr. Trump could return to the White House next year. In private, she has expressed curiosity about Casey DeSantis, the wife of Mr. Trump’s chief rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Ms. DeSantis is a close adviser to her husband and a regular presence at his events, and she has begun to campaign for him on her own. In one of her rare interviews, Mrs. Trump mused to Fox News about having a second chance at being first lady, saying she would “prioritize the well-being and development of children” if she reprised the role.Mrs. Trump has privately expressed curiosity about Casey DeSantis, who has spent time campaigning with her husband, Ron DeSantis.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesBut she has not yet prioritized campaigning. Although she has expressed willingness to do events for her husband next year, she has so far refused his requests to join him on the stump.“I don’t think it’s going to be anything like what we’ve seen with Casey DeSantis,” said Stephanie Grisham, a former Trump aide who quit on Jan. 6. “She’s not going to be throwing on jeans and walking in parades.”Kellyanne Conway, a longtime Trump adviser who is also close with Mrs. Trump, said the former first lady was “all in” on her husband’s candidacy and remained his “most trusted and most transparent adviser.” Both Trumps, she said, have privately discussed “priorities” for a second term.“I know few people as comfortable in their skin as Melania Trump,” said Ms. Conway, who is not working for the campaign. “She knows who she is and keeps her priorities in check. Melania keeps them guessing, and they keep guessing wrong.”That air of mystery extends to the gated communities of her husband’s clubs. In Palm Beach, Mrs. Trump is not a part of the social circuit, said Lore Smith, a longtime Palm Beach real estate agent who is a frequent visitor to the club.Unlike her modern predecessors, who attended barre or spinning classes, Mrs. Trump isn’t seen at the fitness center and isn’t known to have a trainer, according to other club regulars and former aides. She has long been a fan of days spent at the spa, but she is almost never spotted outside at the pool at either Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster, Mr. Trump’s golf resort in New Jersey. Occasionally, she makes brief appearances at charity functions at Mar-a-Lago with her husband.“They very much keep to themselves behind the confines of Mar-a-Lago,” Ms. Smith said.Mrs. Trump isn’t part of the social scene at Mar-a-Lago, her husband’s private club. She is said to prefer New York. Saul Martinez for The New York TimesMrs. Trump remains closely involved with Barron’s education. He is enrolled in a private school in West Palm Beach and is beginning to look at colleges in New York.Mrs. Trump is said to prefer the city to Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster. She has been spotted going to her hairdresser and entering and exiting Trump Tower, which she does through a special side entrance and a private elevator.Outside the family residences, Mrs. Trump’s public schedule has been limited. She has done a handful of events, including collecting $500,000 in fees last year from the Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative group that supports L.G.B.T. rights, and Fix California, an elections organization founded by Richard Grenell, a former senior Trump administration official. Mr. Grenell declined to comment on her appearance at the events.In February 2022, Mrs. Trump started “Fostering the Future,” a scholarship program for foster children aging out of the system. A person familiar with the program, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, would not offer details or disclose how many scholarships have been awarded, saying only that it was “more than two.” No charity with the name Fostering the Future or Be Best is registered in Florida or New York.Michael Weitzman, the first recipient of one of the scholarships, said he received the funding for four years at Oral Roberts University through a mentor, who knew a friend involved with the Trumps. “He asked if going to college was still a dream of mine,” said Mr. Weitzman, who spent his childhood living in 12 foster homes. “He said that he might know somebody really rich who might want to pay for me to go.”He did not fill out any kind of application but a day after the mentor floated the idea, he received an email from Mrs. Trump’s public relations team asking if he would participate in a Fox News interview with the former first lady, her first since leaving the White House. The scholarship was announced during the May 2022 interview, with Mr. Weitzman participating over Zoom. Mr. Weitzman, 26, said he had not had any interactions with Mrs. Trump since.”I haven’t met her in person. I wondered often if I would and would love to,” he said. “I’m beyond grateful. There’s no reason that anybody should have done this for me.”Mrs. Trump’s aides declined to discuss the details of her campaign plans, her charitable and business ventures and her views on her husband’s legal issues. Mr. Trump’s campaign declined to comment.Mrs. Trump and Barron Trump attended Mr. Trump’s campaign kickoff in November. Since then, Mrs. Trump has said little about her husband’s campaign for the White House. Andrew Harnik/Associated PressIn many ways, Mrs. Trump’s post-White House life is an extension of her style as first lady.From the start of her husband’s term, when she didn’t immediately move into the White House, Mrs. Trump often vacillated between two extremes: embracing her role or bucking all expectations associated with it.One of her most memorable moments was made through a fashion statement. While returning from a visit to a Texas border town to meet detained migrant children, she wore a jacket emblazoned with the phrase, “I really don’t care. Do U?”Much of her White House experience was marked by what people close to her described as disappointment and betrayal from friends, aides and even members of the Trump family. At times, her relationships with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, were strained, according to former aides. Since then, her former press secretary, Ms. Grisham, and a former aide and friend, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, have written tell-all books depicting her as icy and disengaged from the role.Those experiences pushed Mrs. Trump to retreat even further from the public, say people familiar with the family.Ms. Trump is “the most obviously unknowable first lady,” an author of a book on the subject said. “There’s something radical about it.”Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut that privacy may be hard to maintain under the scrutiny of a contested presidential primary and legal investigations.Last week, Chris Christie criticized both Trumps for a $155,000 payment to Mrs. Trump from a super PAC aligned with her husband’s campaign. A representative for the super PAC said that Mrs. Trump was hired in 2021 for “design consulting,” including choosing tableware, arranging settings and picking floral arrangements.“There’s grifting and then there’s Trump grifting,” Mr. Christie, the former New Jersey governor and most outspoken Trump critic in the 2024 Republican primary field, wrote on Twitter. “Undisputed champs.”Most of her public profile, conducted largely through her social media accounts, is focused on selling a variety of digital trading cards. Her NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, include digital drawings of her eyes, a broad-brimmed hat worn during a state visit, White House Christmas ornaments and a blue rose intended to commemorate National Foster Care Month.The majority of her tweets and Instagram posts directly promote the NFTs or a business called USA Memorabilia, which sells them. A day after Mr. Trump announced on his social media website Truth Social that he had received a target letter in the federal investigation into his efforts to thwart the transfer of power in 2020, Mrs. Trump’s only public comment was an announcement of a new “Man on the Moon” NFT collection.A portion of her proceeds is donated, though her aides would not provide details about the amount given or specify the charity.While first ladies often capitalize on the attendant fame, Mrs. Trump’s moneymaking venture is different from those of her predecessors, said Kate Andersen Brower, the author of “First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s Modern First Ladies.”Michelle Obama was reportedly paid more than $60 million in a joint book deal with her husband, as well as commanding hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches and signing a lucrative production deal with Netflix. Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton also sold their memoirs for millions. Their memoirs and paid speeches required the former first ladies to share some details about themselves, their views and their lives in the White House.By simply selling images, Mrs. Trump reveals nothing.That’s exactly how she likes it, Ms. Brower said.“She’s the most obviously unknowable first lady,” she said of Mrs. Trump’s public persona. “There’s something radical about it. First ladies are expected to want to please people and I’m not sure she really cares.”Maggie Haberman More

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      Do You Know a Politically Motived Prosecution When You See One?

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      As the criminal indictments of Donald Trump continue to pile up like boxes in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, the former president’s defenders have settled on a response: They don’t claim their man is innocent of the scores of federal and state charges against him — a tough case to make under the circumstances. Instead they accuse the Biden administration and Democratic prosecutors of politicizing law enforcement and cooking up an insurance policy to protect President Biden, who trails Mr. Trump in some polls about a very possible 2024 rematch.“So what do they do now?” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy asked last week, after Mr. Trump announced that he had received a second target letter from the special counsel Jack Smith, this time over his role in the Jan. 6 attack. “Weaponize government to go after their No. 1 opponent.”Gov. Ron DeSantis, one of the few plausible Republican nominees besides Mr. Trump, warned that the government is “criminalizing political differences.”It’s not only about Mr. Trump; griping about politicized law enforcement has become a cottage industry on the right these days. No sooner did Republicans take back the House of Representatives than they formed a Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which meets regularly to air grievances and grill witnesses about their supposed anti-conservative animus, including Christopher Wray, the (Trump-nominated) F.B.I. director.If you’re feeling bewildered by all the claims and counterclaims of politicization, you’re not alone. Take the F.B.I.’s probe of ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign, which is still being hashed out in the halls of Congress seven years later: In February, Democratic lawmakers demanded an investigation of the investigators who investigated the investigators who were previously investigated for their investigation of a transnational plot to interfere in a presidential election. Got that?But even if the charge of politicized justice is levied by a bad-faith buffoon like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chairman of the weaponization subcommittee, it is a profoundly important one. There is no simple way to separate politics completely from law enforcement. The Justice Department will always be led by a political appointee, and most state and local prosecutors are elected. If Americans are going to have faith in the fairness of their justice system, every effort must be taken to assure the public that political motives are not infecting prosecutors’ charging decisions. That means extremely clear rules for investigators and prosecutors and eternal vigilance for the rest of us.At the same time, politically powerful people must be held to the same rules as everyone else, even if they happen to be of a different party from those investigating them. So how to distinguish an investigation or prosecution based solely on the facts from one motivated improperly by politics?Sometimes the investigators make it easy by just coming out and admitting that it’s really political. Mr. McCarthy did that in 2015, when he bragged on Fox News that the House Benghazi hearings had knocked a seemingly “unbeatable” Hillary Clinton down in the polls. More recently, James Comer of Kentucky, who heads the House committee that is relentlessly investigating Hunter Biden, made a similar argument about the effect of the committee’s work on President Biden’s political fortunes. (Mr. Comer tried to walk back his comment a day later.)More often, though, it takes some work to determine whether an investigation or prosecution is on the level.The key thing to remember is that even if the subject is a politically powerful person or the outcome of a trial could have a political impact, that doesn’t necessarily mean the action itself is political. To assume otherwise is to “immunize all high-ranking powerful political people from ever being held accountable for the wrongful things they do,” said Kristy Parker, a lawyer with the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “And if you do that, you subvert the idea that this is a rule-of-law society where everybody is subject to equal justice, and at the same time you remove from the public the ability to impose any accountability for misconduct, which enables it to happen again.”In May, Protect Democracy published a very useful report, co-written by Ms. Parker, laying out several factors that help the public assess whether a prosecution is political.First, what is the case about? Is there straightforward evidence of criminal behavior by a politician? Have people who are not powerful politicians been prosecuted in the past for similar behavior?Second, what are top law-enforcement officials saying? Is the president respecting due process, or is he demanding investigations or prosecutions of specific people? Is he keeping his distance from the case, or is he publicly attacking prosecutors, judges and jurors? Is the attorney general staying quiet, or is he offering public opinions on the guilt of the accused?Third, is the Justice Department following its internal procedures and guidelines for walling off political interference? Most of these guidelines arose in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, during which President Richard Nixon ordered the department to go after his political enemies and later obstructed the investigation into his own behavior. Until recently, the guidelines were observed by presidents and attorneys general of both parties.Finally, how have other institutions responded? Did judges and juries follow proper procedure in the case, and did they agree that the defendant was guilty? Did an agency’s inspector general find any wrongdoing by investigators or prosecutors?None of these factors are decisive by themselves. An investigation might take a novel legal approach; an honest case may still lose in court. But considering them together makes it easier to identify when law enforcement has been weaponized for political ends.To see how it works in practice, let’s take a closer look at two recent examples: first, the federal investigations into Mr. Trump’s withholding of classified documents and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and, second, the investigation by John Durham into the F.B.I.’s Russia probe.In the first example, the Justice Department and the F.B.I., under Attorney General Merrick Garland, waited more than a year to pursue an investigation of Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack with any urgency — largely out of the fear that they would be seen as politically motivated.With a punctiliousness that has exasperated many liberals, Mr. Garland has kept his mouth shut about Mr. Smith’s prosecutions, except to say that the department would pursue anyone responsible for the Jan. 6 attack. Mr. Garland almost never mentions Mr. Trump by name. And Mr. Smith has been silent outside of the news conference he held last month to announce the charges in the documents case.In that case, Mr. Smith presented a tower of evidence that Mr. Trump violated multiple federal laws. There are also many examples of nonpowerful people — say, Reality Winner — who were prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to years in prison for leaking a single classified document. Mr. Trump kept dozens. Even a federal judge who was earlier accused of being too accommodating to Mr. Trump has effectively signaled the documents case is legitimate, setting a trial date for May and refusing the Trump team’s demand to delay it until after the 2024 election.In the Jan. 6 case, the government has already won convictions against hundreds of people for their roles in the Capitol attack, many involving some of the same laws identified in Mr. Smith’s latest target letter to Mr. Trump.“Prosecutors will hear all sorts of allegations that it’s all political, that it will damage the republic for all of history,” Ms. Parker, who previously worked as a federal prosecutor, told me. “But they have to charge through that if what they’ve got is a case that on the facts and law would be brought against anybody else.”President Biden’s behavior has been more of a mixed bag. He and his advisers are keen to advertise his disciplined silence about Mr. Trump’s legal travails. “I have never once — not one single time — suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do,” he said in June. Yet he has commented publicly and inappropriately on both investigations over the years.It’s impossible to justify these remarks, but it is possible to consider them in light of the other factors above and to decide that Mr. Smith’s investigations are not infected with a political motive.Contrast that with the investigation by John Durham, the federal prosecutor appointed by Mr. Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr in 2019 to investigate the origins of the F.B.I.’s Trump-Russia probe.Even before it began, the Durham investigation was suffused with clear political bias. Mr. Trump had repeatedly attacked the F.B.I. over its handling of the Russia probe and called for an investigation, breaching the traditional separation between the White House and the Justice Department. Mr. Barr had also spoken publicly in ways that seemed to prejudge the outcome of any investigation and inserted himself into an investigation focused on absolving Mr. Trump of wrongdoing.Not every investigation or prosecution will offer such clear-cut evidence of the presence or absence of political motivations. But as with everything relating to Mr. Trump, one generally doesn’t have to look far to find his pursuit of vengeance; he has taken to describing himself as the “retribution” of his followers. If he wins, he has promised to obliterate the Justice Department’s independence from the presidency and “go after” Mr. Biden and “the entire Biden crime family.”For the moment, at least, Mr. Trump is not the prosecutor but the prosecuted. And there should be no fear of pursuing the cases against him — especially those pertaining to his attempts to overturn his loss in 2020 — wherever they lead.“If we can’t bring those kinds of cases just because the person is politically powerful, how do we say we have a democracy?” asked Ms. Parker. “Because in that case we have people who are above the law, and they are so far above the law that they can destroy the central feature of democracy, which is elections, in which the people choose their leaders.”Source photograph by pepifoto, via Getty Images.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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      As Inquiries Compound, So Does the ‘Trump Tax’

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      For all their complexity, the Trump-related prosecutions have not significantly constrained the ability of prosecutors to carry out their regular duties, officials have said.Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing criminal investigations into former President Donald J. Trump, employs 40 to 60 career prosecutors, paralegals and support staff, augmented by a rotating cast of F.B.I. agents and technical specialists, according to people familiar with the situation.In his first four months on the job, starting in November, Mr. Smith’s investigation incurred expenses of $9.2 million. That included $1.9 million to pay the U.S. Marshals Service to protect Mr. Smith, his family and other investigators who have faced threats after the former president and his allies singled them out on social media.At this rate, the special counsel is on track to spend about $25 million a year.The main driver of all these efforts and their concurrent expenses is Mr. Trump’s own behavior — his unwillingness to accept the results of an election as every one of his predecessors has done, his refusal to heed his own lawyers’ advice and a grand jury’s order to return government documents and his lashing out at prosecutors in personal terms.Even the $25 million figure only begins to capture the full scale of the resources dedicated by federal, state and local officials to address Mr. Trump’s behavior before, during and after his presidency. While no comprehensive statistics are available, Justice Department officials have long said that the effort alone to prosecute the members of the pro-Trump mob who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is the largest investigation in its history. That line of inquiry is only one of many criminal and civil efforts being brought to hold Mr. Trump and his allies to account.At the peak of the Justice Department’s efforts to hunt down and charge the Jan. 6 rioters, many U.S. attorney’s offices and all 56 F.B.I. field offices had officials pursuing leads. Jason Andrew for The New York TimesAs the department and prosecutors in New York and Georgia move forward, the scope of their work, in terms of quantifiable costs, is gradually becoming clear.These efforts, taken as a whole, do not appear to be siphoning resources that would otherwise be used to combat crime or undertake other investigations. But the agencies are paying what one official called a “Trump tax” — forcing leaders to expend disproportionate time and energy on the former president, and defending themselves against his unfounded claims that they are persecuting him at the expense of public safety.In a political environment growing more polarized as the 2024 presidential race takes shape, Republicans have made the scale of the federal investigation of Mr. Trump and his associates an issue in itself. Earlier this month, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee grilled the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, on the scale of the investigations, and suggested they might block the reauthorization of a warrantless surveillance program used to investigate several people suspected of involvement in the Jan. 6 breach or oppose funding for the bureau’s new headquarters.“What Jack Smith is doing is actually pretty cheap considering the momentous nature of the charges,” said Timothy J. Heaphy, former U.S. attorney who served as lead investigator for the House committee that investigated the Capitol assault.The “greater cost” is likely to be the damage inflicted by relentless attacks on the department, which could be “incalculable,” he added.At the peak of the Justice Department’s efforts to hunt down and charge the Jan. 6 rioters, many U.S. attorney’s offices and all 56 F.B.I. field offices had officials pursuing leads. At one point, more than 600 agents and support personnel from the bureau were assigned to the riot cases, officials said.In Fulton County, Ga., the district attorney, Fani T. Willis, a Democrat, has spent about two years conducting a wide-ranging investigation into election interference. The office has assigned about 10 of its 370 employees to the elections case, including prosecutors, investigators and legal assistants, according to officials.The authorities in Michigan and Arizona are scrutinizing Republicans who sought to pass themselves off as Electoral College electors in states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020.For all their complexity and historical importance, the Trump-related prosecutions have not significantly constrained the ability of prosecutors to carry out their regular duties or forced them to abandon other types of cases, officials in all of those jurisdictions have repeatedly said.A vast majority of Mr. Smith’s staff members were already assigned to Trump cases before Mr. Smith was appointed.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesIn Manhattan, where Mr. Trump is facing 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with his alleged attempts to suppress reports of an affair with a pornographic actress, the number of assistant district attorneys assigned to the case is in the single digits, according to officials.That has not stopped Mr. Trump from accusing the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, a Democrat, of diverting resources that might have gone to fight street crime. In fact, the division responsible for bringing the case was the financial crimes unit, and the office has about 500 other prosecutors who have no part in the investigation.“Rather than stopping the unprecedented crime wave taking over New York City, he’s doing Joe Biden’s dirty work, ignoring the murders and burglaries and assaults he should be focused on,” Mr. Trump wrote on the day in March that he was indicted. “This is how Bragg spends his time!”Mr. Trump pursued a similar line of attack against the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who sued the former president and his family business and accused them of fraud. (Local prosecutors, not the state, are responsible for bringing charges against most violent criminals.)The Justice Department, which includes the F.B.I. and the U.S. Marshals, is a sprawling organization with an annual budget of around $40 billion, and it has more than enough staff to absorb the diversion of key prosecutors, including the chief of its counterintelligence division, Jay Bratt, to the special counsel’s investigations, officials said.A vast majority of Mr. Smith’s staff members were already assigned to those cases before he was appointed, simply moving their offices across town to work under him. Department officials have emphasized that about half of the special counsel’s expenses would have been paid out, in the form of staff salaries, had the department never investigated Mr. Trump.That is not to say the department has not been under enormous pressure in the aftermath of the 2020 election and attack on the Capitol.Justice Department officials have long said that just the effort to prosecute the members of the pro-Trump mob that assaulted the Capitol, is the largest investigation in its history.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesThe U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, which has brought more than 1,000 cases against Jan. 6 rioters, initially struggled to manage the mountain of evidence, including thousands of hours of video, tens of thousands of tips from private citizens and hundreds of thousands of pages of investigative documents. But the office created an internal information management system, at a cost of millions of dollars, to organize one of the largest collections of discovery evidence ever gathered by federal investigators.Prosecutors from U.S. attorney’s offices across the country have been called in to assist their colleagues in Washington. Federal defenders’ offices in other cities have also pitched in, helping the overwhelmed Washington office to represent defendants charged in connection with Jan. 6.“If you combine the Trump investigation with the Jan. 6 prosecutions, you can say it really has had an impact on the internal machinations of the department,” said Anthony D. Coley, who served as the chief spokesman for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland until earlier this year. “It didn’t impede the department’s capacity to conduct its business, but you definitely had a situation where prosecutors were rushed in from around the country to help out.”While the Washington field office of the F.B.I. is in charge of the investigation of the Capitol attack, defendants have been arrested in all 50 states. Putting together those cases and taking suspects into custody has required the help of countless agents in field offices across the country.The bureau has not publicly disclosed the number of agents specifically assigned to the investigations into Mr. Trump, but people familiar with the situation have said the number is substantial but comparatively much smaller. They include agents who oversaw the search of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate and worked on various aspects of the Jan. 6 case; and bureau lawyers who often play a critical, under-the-radar role in investigations.A substantial percentage of those working on both cases are F.B.I. agents. In a letter to House Republicans in June, Carlos Uriarte, the department’s legislative affairs director, disclosed that Mr. Smith employed around 26 special agents, with additional agents being brought on from “time to time” for specific tasks related to the investigations.In terms of expense, Mr. Smith’s work greatly exceeds that of the other special counsel appointed by Mr. Garland, Robert K. Hur, who is investigating President Biden’s handling of classified documents after he left the vice presidency. Mr. Hur has spent about $1.2 million from his appointment in January through March, on pace for $5.6 million in annual expenditures.An analysis of salary data in the report suggests Mr. Hur is operating with a considerably smaller staff than Mr. Smith, perhaps 10 to 20 people, some newly hired, others transferred from the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago, which initiated the investigation.For now, the two cases do not appear to be comparable in scope or seriousness. Unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden returned all the government documents in his possession shortly after finding them, and Mr. Hur’s staff is not tasked with any other lines of inquiry.A more apt comparison is to the nearly two-year investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller into the 2016 Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, which resulted in a decision not to indict Mr. Trump.The semiannual reports filed by Mr. Mueller’s office are roughly in line, if somewhat less, than Mr. Smith’s first report, tallying about $8.5 million in expenses.Jonah E. Bromwich More

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      Fact-Checking Mike Pence on the Campaign Trail

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      The former vice president has made misleading claims about abortion, fiscal policy and military spending.Since beginning his long-shot presidential campaign in June, former Vice President Mike Pence has struggled to gain traction among Republican primary voters.Mr. Pence has consistently polled in the single digits behind the two leading contenders: his onetime running mate, former President Donald J. Trump, and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. The former vice president has broken with them most starkly on their approaches to Social Security and Medicare. He has also carved out clear positions supporting a 15-week national abortion ban and wholeheartedly backing American involvement in the war in Ukraine.Mr. Pence has made some inaccurate claims along the way. Here’s a fact check of some of his recent remarks on the campaign trail.AbortionWhat Mr. Pence Said“I did, this week, call on every other candidate for the Republican nomination to support a minimum standard of a 15-week ban on abortion at the national level that would align American law with most of the countries in Europe that literally ban abortion after 12 to 15 weeks. Our laws at the national level today are more aligned with North Korea, China and Iran than with other Western countries in Europe.”— in a June interview on Fox News SundayThis is misleading. Mr. Pence’s comparison is overly simplistic and glosses over how abortion laws in Europe work in practice. It is also worth noting that many European countries are moving toward relaxing abortion restrictions, not imposing additional ones, as The Upshot has reported.Of some four dozen countries in Europe, almost all have legalized elective abortion before 10 to 15 weeks of pregnancy. All of these countries allow abortions after the gestational limit if the mother’s life is in danger and about half do so for cases involving sexual violence — two exceptions that Mr. Pence has said he also supports. But many also allow for broader exceptions, like the socioeconomic circumstances or mental health of the mother, which Mr. Pence’s proposal does not include.In Britain, for example, an abortion must be approved by two doctors, but those requests are generally granted up to 24 weeks. In Denmark and Germany, exceptions for gestational limits of 12 weeks are made for mental and physical health as well as living conditions.At least three countries also have more permissive gestational cutoffs than Mr. Pence’s proposal: Iceland at 22 weeks, the Netherlands at 24 weeks and Sweden at 18 weeks.In contrast, China allows elective abortions without specifying gestational limits in its national laws, according to the World Health Organization. China also has said in recent years that it will aim to reduce the number of “medically unnecessary” abortions, and at least one province has prohibited abortions after 14 weeks.North Korea’s laws on abortion are unclear. In 2015, the authorities issued a directive barring doctors from performing abortions, according to the World Health Organization, but “there are no documents after 2015” on the legality of the procedure.In the United States, after the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion last summer, the legal status of abortion varies widely from state to state. In some, the procedure is banned with no exceptions, and in others it is enshrined as a right with no gestational limits. A spokesman for Mr. Pence cited nine such states as exceptionally nonrestrictive.Fiscal policyWhat Mr. Pence Said“Well, first off, look, Joe Biden’s policy on our national debt is insolvency. And, sadly, my former running mate’s policy is identical to Joe Biden’s. Both of them say they’re not even going to talk about common sense and compassionate reforms to entitlements to spare future generations of a mountain range of debt.”— in the Fox News Sunday interviewThis is exaggerated. Asked about his calls to overhaul Social Security and Medicare, Mr. Pence criticized Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Biden’s approaches to the social programs as irresponsible. While both have said they would not cut benefits, only Mr. Biden has proposed tax increases to shore up both programs. But equating that position to one of accepting total insolvency is overstated.Currently, Social Security and Medicare both face financial shortfalls. The fund that pays for Social Security retirement benefits is projected to be depleted by 2033, and the fund that pays hospitals for Medicare patients will be exhausted in 2031. At those points, the funds will be able to pay for only 77 percent of retirement benefits and 89 percent of scheduled fees to hospitals.During the 2020 campaign, Mr. Biden proposed increasing taxes on high-income earners to pay for additional Social Security benefits. The extra funding would reduce the program’s financial shortfall, though the revenue would not close the gap entirely. While his latest presidential budget, released in March, does not mention that proposal, it does include a plan to extend the solvency of Medicare by 25 years by imposing higher taxes on the wealthy.Mr. Trump’s position on social safety net programs is a bit harder to pin down. In January 2020, he said he would be willing to consider cuts to the social safety nets “at some point” — though he quickly tried to walk back his comments and vowed to protect Social Security. His last presidential budget proposal, in February 2020, did not cut benefits to either program, but sought Medicare savings through a dozen tweaks like reducing payments to providers and reducing the cost of prescription drugs.More recently, Mr. Trump vowed in a speech in March at the Conservative Political Action Conference that “we are never going back” to proposals to raise the Social Security retirement age or cut Medicare benefits. But Mr. Trump has not yet outlined his stance on either program in more detail or addressed their solvency issues in this campaign cycle.The Pence campaign argued that neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Biden has a current plan for Social Security, and that Mr. Biden’s plan for Medicare just delays the financial shortfall.Mr. Pence has made misleading claims about abortion, fiscal policy and military spending.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesClassified documentsWhat Mr. Pence Said“I mean, when I informed the Department of Justice that we had classified materials potentially in our home, they were at my home. The F.B.I. was on my front doorstep the next day. And what we found out was that, when Joe Biden apparently alerted the Department of Justice, 80 days later, they showed up at his office.”— in a CNN town hall in JuneThis is exaggerated. Upon the discovery of classified documents in their personal residences, Mr. Pence and Mr. Biden both cooperated with government inquiries. Mr. Pence has a point that the Justice Department’s responses to the discoveries were not identical, but he is overstating the differences.In Mr. Biden’s case, the searches occurred a few weeks — not three months — after the discovery of classified documents. In Mr. Pence’s case, the search occurred about three weeks later.On Nov. 2, lawyers for Mr. Biden discovered classified documents at the offices of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a think tank in Washington. On the same day, according to Biden administration officials, the lawyers alerted the National Archives and Records Administration, which is responsible for securing such documents. The next day, the National Archives retrieved the documents and referred the matter to the Justice Department. The F.B.I. searched the think tank in mid-November.On Dec. 20, Mr. Biden’s aides discovered a second set of classified documents at his home in Wilmington, Del. The same day, they alerted the U.S. attorney leading the investigation about the discovery. A month later, on Jan. 20, the F.B.I. searched the residence and seized additional documents. And on Feb. 1, the F.B.I. searched Mr. Biden’s vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Del., but did not find additional classified documents.The discovery of classified documents in Mr. Biden’s possession prompted aides for Mr. Pence to search his home in Indiana out of caution. They found about a dozen documents with classified markings on Jan. 16 and alerted the National Archives to the discovery in a letter dated Jan. 18. The Justice Department, rather than the records agency, then retrieved the documents from Mr. Pence’s home on Jan. 19. Nearly a month later, on Feb. 10, the F.B.I. searched Mr. Pence’s home and found one additional document.The Pence campaign argued that the Justice Department, in directly requesting the documents from Mr. Pence, bypassed the standard procedures, which did not occur in Mr. Biden’s case.Unlike the Biden and Trump cases, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland did not appoint a special counsel to investigate Mr. Pence’s handling of classified materials. The Justice Department has also declined to prosecute Mr. Pence while the inquiry into Mr. Biden remains ongoing.Funding for the militaryWhat Mr. Pence Said“Since Joe Biden took office, he’s been working to cut military spending.”— at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa in JulyThis is false. Mr. Biden’s annual budgets have generally asked for more funding for the military, and actual spending has increased each year.Mr. Biden’s first budget, released in 2021, proposed $715 billion for the Pentagon, essentially keeping funding level. That was a 1.6 percent increase from the previous year and a 0.4 percent decrease when adjusted for inflation. In December of that year, he signed into law a $770 billion defense package.After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Mr. Biden’s proposals and congressional appropriators amped up military spending even more.The budget he released in 2022 requested $773 billion in military spending, a nearly 10 percent increase from the previous year. He eventually signed into law an $858 billion spending policy bill.And Mr. Biden’s latest budget, released in March, asked for $842 billion for the military, a 3.2 percent increase from the previous year, and $886 billion total for national defense. That legislation is currently going through the appropriations process in Congress. The Pence campaign argued that this amounted to a cut, as the rate of inflation outstrips the rate of increase.At the Iowa event, Mr. Pence cited Mr. Biden’s debt ceiling deal with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as an example of a proposed 1 percent cut to the military. Under that deal, military spending is set at the president’s proposed amount of $886 billion and would rise to $895 billion in 2025. But all spending, for both the military and domestic programs, would be subject to a 1 percent cut if Congress does not pass annual spending bills by January.We welcome suggestions and tips from readers on what to fact-check on email and Twitter. More

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      The Moment of Truth for Our Liar in Chief

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      WASHINGTON — A man is running to run the government he tried to overthrow while he was running it, even as he is running to stay ahead of the law.That sounds loony, except in the topsy-turvy world of Donald Trump, where it has a grotesque logic.The question now is: Has Trump finally run out of time, thanks to Jack Smith, who runs marathons as an Ironman triathlete? Are those ever-loving walls really closing in this time?Or is Smith Muellering it?We were expecting an epic clash when Robert Mueller was appointed in 2017 as a special counsel to head the investigation into ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia and his potential obstruction of justice. It was the flamboyant flimflam man vs. the buttoned-down, buttoned-up boy scout.Mueller, who had been a decorated Marine in Vietnam, was such a straight arrow that he never even deviated to wear a blue shirt when he ran the F.B.I.Amid the Trump administration chaos, Mueller ran a disciplined, airtight operation as special counsel, assembling a dream team of legal talent. But regarding obstruction of justice, the final report was flaccid, waffling, legalistic.Now, Mr. Smith goes to Washington. (That classic movie remembers a time when politicians got ashamed when they were caught doing wrong. How quaint.)This special counsel is another straight arrow trying to deal with a slippery switchblade: In a masterpiece of projection, Trump has been denouncing Smith as a “deranged prosecutor” and “a nasty, horrible human being.” Trump has been zigzagging his whole life and now, unbelievably, he’s trying to zigzag back into the White House, seemingly intent on burning down the federal government and exacting revenge on virtually everyone.So it will be interesting to see what the top lawyer with the severe expression makes of the bombastic dissembler. Smith seems like a no-nonsense dude who works at his desk through lunch from Subway while Trump is, of course, all nonsense, all the time.Smith has a herculean task before him. He must present a persuasive narrative that Trump and his henchmen and women (yes, you, Ginni Thomas) were determined to pull off a coup.His letter telling Trump he’s a target of the Jan. 6 investigation reportedly does not mention sedition or insurrection, which leaves people wondering exactly what Trump will be charged with.Of all the legal troubles Trump faces, this is the case that makes us breathe, “Finally,” as Susan Glasser put it in The New Yorker. It is, as she wrote, the heart of the matter.The Times reported that the letter referred to three criminal statutes: conspiracy to defraud the government; obstruction of an official proceeding; and — in a surprise move — a section of the U.S. code that makes it a crime to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Initially, the story explained, that last statute was a tool to pursue the Ku Klux Klan and others who engaged in terrorism after the Civil War; more recently it has been used to prosecute cases of voting fraud conspiracies.On an Iowa radio show on Tuesday, Trump warned it would be “very dangerous” if Smith jailed him, since his supporters have “much more passion than they had in 2020.”A May trial date has already been set in Smith’s case against Trump for retaining classified documents — despite Trump’s effort to punt it past the election. And Smith should have an ironclad case on Trump defrauding America because defrauding is what he has been doing since the cradle — lying, cheating and lining his pockets, making suckers of nearly everyone while wriggling out of trouble.Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest Republican challenger, defended Trump on Russell Brand’s podcast Friday, dismissing the idea that there was an overt effort to upend the 2020 election.“The idea that this was a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States is not true,” DeSantis said, “and it’s something that the media had spun up just to try to basically get as much mileage out of it and use it for partisan and political aims.”DeSantis seems almost as delusional as Trump when he denies what we saw before our eyes in the weeks after the election.Just ask the Georgia officials who were pressured by Trump to “find 11,780 votes” or the police officers who were injured on Jan. 6. Remember the fake electors in Michigan and Georgia, among other places, and the relentless pressure on Mike Pence to invalidate the election results?Trump ultimately might not be charged with staging an insurrection or sedition. And that would be a shame. For the first time, a president who lost an election nakedly attempted to hold onto power and override the votes of millions of Americans.If that isn’t sedition, it’s hard to figure what is.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 Classified Documents Trial Set for May 2024

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      Judge Aileen M. Cannon rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s request to delay the trial until after the election but pushed the start date past the Justice Department’s request to begin in December.The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s prosecution on charges of illegally retaining dozens of classified documents set a trial date on Friday for May 2024, taking a middle position between the government’s request to go to trial in December and Mr. Trump’s desire to push the proceeding until after the 2024 election.In her order, Judge Aileen M. Cannon said the trial was to be held in her home courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., a coastal city two-and-a-half hours north of Miami that will draw its jury pool from several counties that Mr. Trump won handily in his two previous presidential campaigns.Judge Cannon also laid out a calendar of hearings, throughout the remainder of this year and into next year, including those concerning the handling of the classified material at the heart of the case.The scheduling order came after a contentious hearing on Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce where prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, and lawyers for Mr. Trump sparred over when to hold the trial.The timing of the proceeding is more important in this case than in most criminal matters because Mr. Trump is now the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination and his legal obligations to be in court will intersect with his campaign schedule.The date Judge Cannon chose to start the trial — May 20, 2024 — falls after the bulk of the primary race contests. But it is less than two months before the start of the Republican National Convention in July and the formal start of the general election season.Mr. Trump’s advisers have been blunt that winning the presidency is how he hopes to beat the legal charges he is facing, and he has adopted a strategy of the delaying the trial, which is expected to take several weeks, for as long as possible.The Justice Department declined to comment on Judge Cannon’s decision. But it did not come as a surprise to prosecutors, who set their initial, aggressive timetable expecting that she would select a date, probably sometime in the first half of 2024, and reject the Trump legal team’s request to push it past the election, according to a person familiar with the situation.It is not clear whether the May 2024 date will hold. As part of her order, Judge Cannon designated Mr. Trump’s case as “complex,” a move that could allow for additional delays.In a 38-count indictment filed last month by Mr. Smith’s office, the former president was charged with illegally holding on to a trove of 31 documents containing sensitive national security information in violation of the Espionage Act. He was also accused of conspiring with one of his personal aides, Walt Nauta, to obstruct the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim the documents.Setting the schedule for Mr. Trump’s trial was the first significant decision in the case for Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2020. She was randomly assigned to the case in June and faced enormous scrutiny after having made some rulings last year in a related matter that were favorable to Mr. Trump and that were ultimately overturned in a stinging reversal by a federal appeals court.But in her scheduling order on Friday, she split the difference between the two sides, giving neither the government nor the defense what they had wanted.She rejected Mr. Trump’s requests to delay the trial until after the election or to put off setting any schedule at all for the moment, saying that some basic amount of case management was required. But she also noted that the government’s proposal to seat a jury in December was “atypically accelerated and inconsistent with ensuring a fair trial.”Judge Cannon listed a number of reasons the case needed time to move toward trial.The amount of discovery evidence that Mr. Trump’s lawyers will have to sort through was “voluminous,” she wrote. It included more than 1 million pages of unclassified material, at least nine months of surveillance camera footage and more than 1,500 pages of classified documents. There was also additional discovery material from electronic devices seized by the government during its investigation.All of that, Judge Cannon wrote, was on top of what is expected to be a constellation of complex pretrial motions filed by Mr. Trump’s legal team.During the hearing on Tuesday, lawyers for Mr. Trump said they might file motions arguing that Mr. Trump was allowed to remove documents from the White House under the Presidential Records Act and attacking the special counsel’s authority to bring charges in the first place.They also noted that they would probably question the classification status of certain documents central to the case and challenge the validity of the grand jury process in Washington and Miami that led to the indictment.“The court will be faced with extensive pretrial motion practice on a diverse number of legal and factual issues,” Judge Cannon wrote.Mr. Trump is also under indictment in Manhattan on charges stemming from hush-money payments to a porn star before the 2016 election. That case is scheduled to go to trial in March 2024.He was also informed this week that he could be indicted on federal charges related to his efforts to remain in office after his defeat in the 2020 election, and the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., is completing an investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss in Georgia.Maggie Haberman More