Federal Criminal Case Against Trump (Documents Case)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 63 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Where Is Melania Trump Now?

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

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

      by

      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

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      As Inquiries Compound, So Does the ‘Trump Tax’

      by

      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

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Fact-Checking Mike Pence on the Campaign Trail

      by

      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

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      The Moment of Truth for Our Liar in Chief

      by

      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

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Classified Documents Trial Set for May 2024

      by

      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

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Building a Legal Wall Around Donald Trump

      by

      The American legal system is on the cusp of a remarkable historical achievement. In real time and under immense pressure, it has responded to an American insurrection in a manner that is both meting out justice to the participants and establishing a series of legal precedents that will stand as enduring deterrents to a future rebellion. In an era when so many American institutions have failed, the success of our legal institutions in responding to a grave crisis should be a source of genuine hope.I’m writing this newsletter days after the Michigan attorney general announced the prosecution of 16 Republicans for falsely presenting themselves as the electors qualified to vote in the Electoral College for Donald Trump following the 2020 election. That news came the same day that the former president announced on Truth Social that he’d received a so-called target letter from Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The target letter signals that the grand jury investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is likely to indict Trump, perhaps any day now.On Monday, a day before this wave of news, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected a desperate Trump attempt to disqualify the Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis from prosecuting Trump and to quash a special grand jury report about 2020 election misconduct. Trump’s team filed their petition on July 13. The court rejected it a mere four days later. Willis can continue her work, and she’s expected to begin issuing indictments — including potentially her own Trump indictment — in August, if not sooner.Presuming another Trump indictment (or more than one) is imminent — or even if it is not — the legal response to Jan. 6 will continue. But to truly understand where we are now, it’s important to track where we’ve been. If you rewind the clock to the late evening of Jan. 6, 2021, America’s long history of a peaceful transfer of power was over, broken by a demagogue and his mob. To make matters worse, there was no straight-line path to legal accountability.Prosecuting acts of violence against police — or acts of vandalism in the Capitol — was certainly easy enough, especially since much of the violence and destruction was caught on video. But prosecuting Trump’s thugs alone was hardly enough to address the sheer scale of MAGA misconduct. What about those who helped plan and set the stage for the insurrection? What about the failed candidate who set it all in motion, Donald Trump himself?Consider the legal challenges. The stolen election narrative was promulgated by a simply staggering amount of defamation — yet defamation cases are difficult to win in a nation that strongly protects free speech. Trump’s legal campaign was conducted by unethical lawyers raising frivolous arguments — yet attorney discipline, especially stretching across multiple jurisdictions, is notoriously difficult.The list continues. Trump’s team sought to take advantage of ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act, a 19th-century statute that might be one of the most poorly written statutes in the entire federal code. In addition, Trump’s team advanced a constitutional argument called the independent state legislature doctrine that would empower legislatures to dictate or distort the outcomes of congressional and presidential elections in their states.There’s more. When we watched insurrectionists storm the Capitol, we were watching the culminating moment of a seditious conspiracy, yet prosecutions for seditious conspiracy are both rare and difficult. And finally, the entire sorry and deadly affair was instigated by an American president — and an American president had never been indicted before, much less for his role in unlawfully attempting to overturn an American election.Now, consider the response. It’s easy to look at Trump’s persistent popularity with G.O.P. voters and the unrepentant boosterism of parts of right-wing media and despair. Does anything make a difference in the fight against Trump’s lawlessness and lies? The answer is yes, and the record is impressive. Let’s go through it.The pro-Trump media ecosphere that repeated and amplified his election lies has paid a price. Fox News agreed to a stunning $787 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, and multiple defamation cases continue against multiple right-wing media outlets.Trump’s lawyers and his lawyer allies have paid a price. Last month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the bulk of a sanctions award against Sidney Powell and a Mos Eisley cantina’s worth of Trump-allied lawyers. A New York State appellate court temporarily suspended Rudy Giuliani’s law license in 2021, and earlier this month a Washington, D.C., bar panel recommended that he be disbarred. Jenna Ellis, one of Guiliani’s partners in dangerous dishonesty and frivolous legal arguments, admitted to making multiple misrepresentations in a public censure from the Colorado Bar Association. John Eastman, the former dean of Chapman University’s law school and the author of an infamous legal memo that suggested Mike Pence could overturn the election, is facing his own bar trial in California.Congress has responded to the Jan. 6 crisis, passing bipartisan Electoral Count Act reforms that would make a repeat performance of the congressional attempt to overturn the election far more difficult.The Supreme Court has responded, deciding Moore v. Harper, which gutted the independent state legislature doctrine and guaranteed that partisan state legislatures are still subject to review by the courts.The criminal justice system has responded, securing hundreds of criminal convictions of Jan. 6 rioters, including seditious conspiracy convictions for multiple members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. And the criminal justice system is still responding, progressing steadily up the command and control chain, with Trump himself apparently the ultimate target.In roughly 30 months — light speed in legal time — the American legal system has built the case law necessary to combat and deter American insurrection. Bar associations are setting precedents. Courts are setting precedents. And these precedents are holding in the face of appeals and legal challenges.Do you wonder why the 2022 election was relatively routine and uneventful, even though the Republicans fielded a host of conspiracy-theorist candidates? Do you wonder why right-wing media was relatively tame after a series of tough G.O.P. losses, especially compared to the deranged hysterics in 2020? Yes, it matters that Trump was not a candidate, but it also matters that the right’s most lawless members have been prosecuted, sued and sanctioned.The consequences for Jan. 6 and the Stop the Steal movement are not exclusively legal. The midterm elections also represented a profound setback for the extreme MAGA right. According to an NBC News report, election-denying candidates “overwhelmingly lost” their races in swing states. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the relentless legal efforts also had a political payoff.And to be clear, this accountability has not come exclusively through the left — though the Biden administration and the Garland Justice Department deserve immense credit for their responses to Trump’s insurrection, which have been firm without overreaching. Multiple Republicans joined with Democrats to pass Electoral Count Act reform. Both conservative and liberal justices rejected the independent state legislature doctrine. Conservative and liberal judges, including multiple Trump appointees, likewise rejected Trump’s election challenges. Republican governors and other Republican elected officials in Arizona and Georgia withstood immense pressure from within their own party to uphold Joe Biden’s election win.American legal institutions have passed the Jan. 6 test so far, but the tests aren’t over. Trump is already attempting to substantially delay the trial on his federal indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case, and if a second federal indictment arrives soon, he’ll almost certainly attempt to delay it as well. Trump does not want to face a jury, and if he delays his trials long enough, he can run for president free of any felony convictions. And what if he wins?Simply put, the American people can override the rule of law. If they elect Trump in spite of his indictments, they will empower him to end his own federal criminal prosecutions and render state prosecutions a practical impossibility. They will empower him to pardon his allies. The American voters will break through the legal firewall that preserves our democracy from insurrection and rebellion.We can’t ask for too much from any legal system. A code of laws is ultimately no substitute for moral norms. Our constitutional republic cannot last indefinitely in the face of misinformation, conspiracy and violence. It can remove the worst actors from positions of power and influence. But it cannot ultimately save us from ourselves. American legal institutions have responded to a historical crisis, but all its victories could still be temporary. Our nation can choose the law, or it can choose Trump. It cannot choose both. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Trump’s Trial Dates Collide With His 2024 Campaign Calendar

      by

      The Republican front-runner is facing a growing tangle of criminal and civil trials that will overlap with next year’s presidential primaries.As former President Donald J. Trump campaigns for the White House while multiple criminal prosecutions against him play out, at least one thing is clear: Under the laws of physics, he cannot be in two places at once.Generally, criminal defendants must be present in the courtroom during their trials. Not only will that force Mr. Trump to step away from the campaign trail, possibly for weeks at a time, but the judges overseeing his trials must also jostle for position in sequencing dates. The collision course is raising extraordinary — and unprecedented — questions about the logistical, legal and political challenges of various trials unfolding against the backdrop of a presidential campaign.“The courts will have to decide how to balance the public interest in having expeditious trials against Trump’s interest and the public interest in his being able to campaign so that the democratic process works,” said Bruce Green, a Fordham University professor and former prosecutor. “That’s a type of complexity that courts have never had to deal with before.”More broadly, the complications make plain another reality: Mr. Trump’s troubles are entangling the campaign with the courts to a degree the nation has never experienced before and raising tensions around the ideal of keeping the justice system separate from politics.Mr. Trump and his allies have signaled that they intend to try to turn his overlapping legal woes into a referendum on the criminal justice system, by seeking to cast it as a politically weaponized tool of Democrats.Already, Mr. Trump is facing a state trial on civil fraud accusations in New York in October. Another trial on whether he defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll is set to open on Jan. 15 — the same day as the Iowa caucuses. On Jan. 29, a trial begins in yet another lawsuit, this one accusing Mr. Trump, his company and three of his children of using the family name to entice vulnerable people to invest in sham business opportunities.Because those cases are civil, Mr. Trump could choose not to attend the trials, just as he shunned an earlier lawsuit by Ms. Carroll, in which a jury found him liable for sexual abuse.But he will not have that option in a criminal case on charges in New York that he falsified business records as part of covering up a sex scandal shortly before the 2016 election. The opening date for that trial, which will most likely last several weeks, is in late March, about three weeks after Super Tuesday, when over a dozen states vote on March 5.Jack Smith, the special counsel leading two federal investigations into Mr. Trump, has asked the judge overseeing the indictment in the criminal inquiry into Mr. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive documents to set a trial date for late 2023.But on Tuesday — the same day Mr. Trump disclosed that federal prosecutors may charge him in the investigation into the events that culminated in the Capitol riot — his defense lawyers argued to Judge Aileen M. Cannon that she ought to put off any trial in the documents case until after the 2024 election. The intense publicity of the campaign calendar, they said, would impair his rights.Mr. Trump has long pursued a strategy of delay in legal matters, seeking to run out the clock. If he can push his federal trial — or trials, if he is ultimately indicted in the Jan. 6 inquiry — beyond the 2024 election, it is possible that he or another Republican would win the presidency and order the Justice Department to drop the cases.A president lacks the authority to quash state cases, but even if Mr. Trump were to be convicted, any inevitable appeals would most likely still be pending by Inauguration Day in 2025. If he is back in office by then, the Justice Department could also raise constitutional challenges to try to defer any additional legal proceedings, like a prison sentence, while he is the sitting president.In making the case for delaying the trial until after the election, Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers contended on Tuesday that Mr. Trump was effectively squaring off in court against his 2024 rival, President Biden.“We don’t know what’s going to happen in the primaries, of course, but right now, he’s the leading candidate,” said Todd Blanche, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers. “And if all things go as we expect, the person he is running against — his administration is prosecuting him.”But David Harbach, a prosector on Mr. Smith’s team, said Mr. Trump was “no different from any other busy important person who has been indicted.” He called the claim of political influence “flat-out false,” seemingly more intended for “the court of public opinion” than a court of law.“The attorney general appointed the special counsel to remove this investigation from political influence, and there has been none — none,” he said.Judge Cannon, who has not yet made a decision about the eventual trial date, indicated that in considering delay, she believed the focus should be not on the campaign but on legal issues, like the volume and complexity of classified evidence.Setting a trial date for the documents case is the first and most basic logistical issue. But the possibility of indictments from two inquiries into Mr. Trump’s attempts to stay in power after the 2020 election, the federal investigation led by Mr. Smith and a state investigation overseen by Fani T. Willis, a district attorney in Georgia who has signaled that charges could come in August, may soon bump up against that.There is no overriding authority that acts as an air traffic controller when multiple judges are deciding dates that could conflict. Nor are there rules that give federal or state cases precedence or that say that any case that was charged first should go to trial first.Brandon L. Van Grack, a former prosecutor who worked on the Russia investigation led by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, pointed to that inquiry as an example. Prosecutors brought charges against Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in two jurisdictions, first in the District of Columbia and then in the Eastern District of Virginia, but the trials took place in reverse order.“There was sensitivity to hearing dates, and it was incumbent on counsel to educate both judges on the scheduling and conflicts, but there wasn’t a rule that said the District of Columbia matter was charged first and therefore went to trial first,” he said. “It’s judicial discretion.”As an informal practice, Mr. Green said that judges overseeing potentially conflicting matters sometimes call each other and work out a calendar. No procedural rule authorizes such conversations, he said, but it is considered appropriate.Looming over Mr. Trump’s legal peril is an unwritten Justice Department norm known as the 60-day rule. As a primary or general election nears, prosecutors should not take overt actions that could improperly influence voting.It is not clear, however, how that principle applies to matters that are already public and so less likely to alter a candidate’s image. Notably, Raymond Hulser, a veteran prosecutor who has been consulted for years about how to apply the 60-day rule, is a member of Mr. Smith’s team.Further complicating matters, Mr. Trump has hired some of the same defense lawyers to handle multiple investigations against him, leaving them stretched for time.Christopher Kise, another lawyer for Mr. Trump, cited the former president’s crowded legal calendar at the hearing on Tuesday. Not only did Mr. Kise indicate that he would need to prepare for the fraud-related trials in October and January, but he also pointed to Mr. Blanche’s role in the criminal trial in March involving falsified business records in New York.“So these are the same lawyers dealing with the same client trying to prepare for the same sort of exercises, and so I think that’s highly relevant,” Mr. Kise said.Several legal experts said that while people have a Sixth Amendment right to choose their legal representation, it is not absolute. They noted that judges could tell defendants that, if their chosen lawyers are too busy to take on additional matters in a timely manner, they must hire others.Such an order would give Mr. Trump something more to complain about to an appeals court, said Professor Green, who added, “I think it’s probably a losing argument.”Alan Feuer More