Federal Criminal Case Against Trump (Documents Case)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      How Biden’s View on Presidential War Powers Has Shifted

      by

      The president says he can direct limited military operations without lawmakers’ approval. Most G.O.P. presidential candidates, including Donald J. Trump, did not answer a survey on executive power.If he is elected to a second term, President Biden pledged that he will go to Congress to start any major war but said he believed he was empowered “to direct limited U.S. military operations abroad” without such approval when such strikes served critical American interests.“As president, I have taken great care to ensure that military actions carried out under my command comply with this constitutional framework and that my administration consults with Congress to the greatest extent possible,” he wrote in response to a New York Times survey of presidential candidates about executive power.“I will continue to rigorously apply this framework to any potential actions in the future,” he added.The reply stood in contrast to his answer in 2007, when he was also running for president and, as a senator, adopted a narrower view: “The Constitution is clear: Except in response to an attack or the imminent threat of attack, only Congress may authorize war and the use of force.”In the survey, The New York Times asked major presidential candidates to lay out their understanding of issues that can be critical to the outcome of policy fights but about which they are rarely asked: the scope and limits of a president’s power to act unilaterally or in defiance of statutes, particularly in war, secrecy and law enforcement.Mr. Biden’s answers showed how his view of executive power evolved over years in the White House — eight as Barack Obama’s vice president and now nearly three as president.Only a handful of candidates for the Republican nomination engaged in the survey, including former Vice President Mike Pence, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami before he suspended his campaign late last month.Vivek Ramaswamy, a businessman and entrepreneur, answered only about half of the 14 questions, and former President Donald J. Trump declined to participate altogether, as did Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations, among others.The Times has published in full the answers of participants, including Mr. Biden and two of his Democratic challengers, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson.Notably, Mr. Biden declined to embrace the idea of curtailing emergency powers Congress enacted that presidents can activate if they declare that there are exigent circumstances, said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former senior Justice Department lawyer in the Bush administration.Mr. Trump invoked emergency powers to spend more on a border wall than lawmakers were willing to appropriate, and the Biden administration invoked the authority for a plan to forgive more than $400 million in student debt. (The Supreme Court struck down the proposal over the summer.) There are bipartisan proposals in Congress to impose new curbs, such as by ensuring that national emergencies terminate after 30 days unless lawmakers affirm a presidential declaration.Asked whether he would sign such a bill, Mr. Biden instead made a vague remark about “working with Congress on devising sensible solutions to the challenges we face as a nation.” He added that he would use every tool at his disposal to respond to emergencies.“If Biden is not open to reform — and his answer was as noncommittal as he could be without saying he was not open to it — then it is likely dead on arrival,” Professor Goldsmith said.On the topic of pardons, every candidate who answered the survey said that a president cannot pardon himself. While in office, Mr. Trump claimed he had a legal right to do so, but that is an ambiguous and untested constitutional question. It could become important if he wins the 2024 election even as he faces criminal charges in two federal cases.Former President Donald J. Trump claimed he had the legal right to pardon himself.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIndeed, while Mr. Trump did not participate in the survey, many of its questions addressed disputed assertions of executive power he made as president, and he and his allies are openly planning to expand his authority over the machinery of government if he wins in 2024. Mr. DeSantis has also pushed an expansive view of executive powers as Florida governor.The refusal by the two men and most other G.O.P. contenders to answer questions on the powers they are seeking from voters reflects a party shift that emerged in the 2016 primary, which Mr. Trump upended by becoming the front-runner ahead of establishment candidates.Other Republican presidential hopefuls in the current primary campaign who declined to answer the questions included Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, and Will Hurd, a former representative of Texas.By contrast, most major Republican primary candidates in 2007 and 2011 were willing to answer the versions of the questions put to them those years, including the party’s eventual nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney.Four years ago, 17 Democrats vying for their party’s nomination to challenge Mr. Trump also participated in the project. Mr. Biden was among them, making his answers this cycle the third time he has participated. (His willingness to do so as an incumbent seeking re-election also stood in contrast to Mr. Obama, who declined to participate in 2011.)In 2019, Mr. Biden had already shifted to embracing the view, adopted by the executive branch under administrations of both parties, that presidents have broader constitutional authority to carry out limited attacks on other countries without congressional authorization, so long as it falls short of full-scale war.As president, both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden used force unilaterally, citing their claimed constitutional authority to use military force without congressional permission. In April 2017 and again in April 2018, Mr. Trump directed airstrikes against Syrian government forces, and Mr. Biden in June 2021 and in August 2022 directed airstrikes on Iranian-backed militia groups in Syria.Mr. Pence, who was vice president at the time of Mr. Trump’s strikes, said: “As commander in chief, the president has a constitutional duty to use his executive authority to protect the country from imminent threats. Whether a threat is imminent is a matter of judgment, and it is essential the president be a person of character, experience, and competence whose judgment the American people can trust.”To be sure, just because candidates commit to respecting a limit while on the campaign trail does not mean they will follow through once in office. But their legal policy statements can offer a way to analyze and bring attention to any departure from what they told voters.In 2019, for example, Mr. Biden said that if elected, he would order the Justice Department to review and potentially replace a legal policy memo that says sitting presidents are temporarily immune from indictment. He strongly criticized the department’s interpretation of the Constitution, which limited the special counsel investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and Mr. Trump’s attempts to impede that inquiry, Robert S. Mueller III.But Mr. Biden never followed through on that pledge. He is now protected himself by the Justice Department’s theory since a special counsel, Robert Hur, is investigating how several classified documents were in his possession when he left the vice presidency.In his survey answers this time, Mr. Biden sidestepped a question about that issue, instead offering a vague statement about Justice Department independence.“As president, I have fulfilled my campaign promise of restoring a strong and independent Department of Justice led by top-flight legal professionals dedicated to realizing the ideal that this nation was founded on of equal justice under the law,” he wrote. “This means no one is above the law — especially the president of the United States.” More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Manhattan Judge May Be Open to Moving Trump Trial Date as Cases Mount

      by

      The judge, Juan M. Merchan, said in a letter that while he was not yet ready to discuss potential changes to the March 25, 2024, trial date, he would be willing to have the conversation in February.The judge presiding over the criminal case against Donald J. Trump in Manhattan signaled that he could be open to changing the date of the trial — now set for March 2024 — in light of the handful of other potential trials the former president now faces.But in a letter sent to Mr. Trump’s lawyers, the judge, Juan M. Merchan, said he would wait until February to have that discussion, given Mr. Trump’s “rapidly evolving trial schedule.”In March, the Manhattan district attorney’s office brought charges against Mr. Trump stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star. The trial was soon scheduled for next March. But in the months that followed, Mr. Trump was indicted three more times. The cases, taken together, have created a legal logjam that coincides with the former president’s third run for the White House.In his letter to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche, Justice Merchan wrote that he did not believe it would be fruitful to discuss a potential change this month, “in light of the many recent developments involving Mr. Trump.”Justice Merchan said that such a conversation would be more productive in February, when prosecutors and defense lawyers are scheduled to meet for a decision on motions.“We will have a much better sense at that time whether there are any actual conflicts and if so, what the best adjourn date might be for trial,” the judge wrote in the letter, which was dated Sept. 1, 2023, but only recently became public.The letter provides a look behind the scenes at the complications that have ensued after Mr. Trump was charged with felonies by three different prosecutors in four different states. He is scheduled to be put on trial four times next year, though many experts believe that only one or two of the trials will actually take place, given the complexity of the scheduling and the fact that Mr. Trump is again running for president.The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, has said that he would not insist on being the first to try Mr. Trump, though he added that scheduling decisions ultimately fell to Justice Merchan.The judge’s letter was a response to Mr. Blanche, who on Aug. 30 asked for a status conference at which to discuss the trial date. Because Justice Merchan declined the request, lawyers will be expected to keep to the schedule the court already set, and the pretrial process will remain on track, regardless of whether the trial itself takes place as scheduled.Justice Merchan has also spoken to Tanya S. Chutkan, the federal judge presiding over the case in which Mr. Trump is charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, and that is scheduled to go to trial on March 4, 2024. It is not clear what they discussed, but prosecutors have said that in that case, the government could take between four and six weeks to present its case to the judge.Mr. Trump’s other federal trial is scheduled for May 20, 2024 — in that case, Mr. Trump is charged with illegally retaining dozens of classified documents. His fourth trial — in Georgia, and also related to his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election — has yet to be scheduled.Kate Christobek More

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      The Trump Trial Date Is a Big Mistake

      by

      I intended to write a normal horse-race column this week, about what we can glean from the polling that came out after the first Republican debate. The emphasis was going to be on the resilience of Ron DeSantis, the success of Nikki Haley, the modest perils for Donald Trump in not showing up for these affairs — and then the larger problem of how DeSantis or Haley or anyone else might unite the anti-Trump vote instead of just repeating the fragmentation of 2016.But is anything we could learn from one Republican debate more significant than the news that the most important legal case against Trump, his federal trial for alleged election-related crimes, will begin the day before Super Tuesday? Probably not. So let’s save DeSantis and Haley for another day and talk about the significance of a front-runner’s trial running through the heart of a primary campaign.From any theory of the law’s relationship to democratic deliberation, this seems like an extremely suboptimal convergence. If you take the judicial process seriously — as an exercise in fact finding and adversarial argument, with the presumption of innocence at the outset yielding to a legitimate verdict at the end — then clearly under ideal circumstances the trial of a major presidential contender would be completed before voters begin passing judgments of their own. Under less optimal circumstances, a verdict would be rendered before most of the votes are cast, instilling confidence that a majority of the electorate shared the same knowledge about the law’s decision.To its credit, that’s what the prosecution asked for: a January start date, with the trial potentially wrapping up around the end of the first phase of the campaign. But instead we’re headed for a world where the trial and the campaign are fully intertwined, with each primary associated with a different snapshot of the case’s progress — some votes cast pretrial, some after the opening statements, some with the prosecution’s arguments as a backdrop and some following the defense’s rebuttal.This means in turn that an underlying problem for these trials as an attempted vindication of the rule of the law — the fact that everyone watching can see that the law’s decisions are provisional and the final arbiter of Trump’s fate is the voting public — will be highlighted over and over again throughout the judicial process itself. The Republican primary electorate will be a kind of shadow jury, offering its reactions in real time, constantly raising or lowering the odds that the defendant can reverse a guilty verdict by the simple expedient of becoming the next president of the United States.The shrugging response from many liberals is that there’s simply no alternative here, that Trump committed so many potential crimes that the pileup of cases requires at least one, and possibly several, to go to trial during the primary campaign.But only one of the four prosecutions, the classified documents case, involves alleged crimes committed close to the 2024 election. In every other instance there’s been a winding, multiyear road to prosecution that could have been plausibly expedited so that Trump faced a jury by 2023.The pileup isn’t deliberate; New York and Georgia prosecutors didn’t get together with Merrick Garland and Jack Smith and plan things to end this way, and some of the federal delay arguably reflected a reluctance to pursue a case. But there is still a recurring pattern with these anti-Trump, anti-populist efforts, which so often seem to converge on stratagems and choices that further undermine confidence in officially neutral institutions.These choices are often defended with the suggestion that any criticism is just a bad-faith attempt to let Trump or his voters off the hook. So in that vein it should be stressed, not for the first time in this column, that Trump’s voters are responsible for his continued popularity, that he might well be headed to renomination without the pileup of prosecutions and that prosecutors aren’t forcing G.O.P. voters to do anything they don’t seem inclined to do already.But the pileup still seems like a boon to his renomination effort. Yes, there’s always “the possibility that Mr. Trump collapses under the weight of his legal challenges,” as my colleague Nate Cohn puts it. But we have months of polling in the shadow of these prosecutions, and it strongly suggests that along with the core Trump bloc (30 percent to 40 percent of the Republican electorate, let’s say) that will vote for him no matter what, there’s another bloc that’s open to alternatives but rallies to him when he’s perceived to be liberalism’s major target, in much the same spirit that liberals and feminists once rallied to an accused sexual predator named Bill Clinton when he was the target of the religious right.To beat Trump in the primary, any challenger would need part of that bloc to resist the rallying impulse and swing their way instead. So timing Trump’s prosecution but not the final outcome of the trial to some of the most important primaries seems more likely to cement his nomination than to finally make his poll numbers collapse.A conviction might be a different matter. There may be Republican voters who regard these prosecutions as theater designed to keep Trump from the nomination and therefore expect the legal cases to fall apart when his lawyers make their defense. A Reuters/Ipsos poll a few weeks ago found that 45 percent of the G.O.P. electorate said they wouldn’t vote for Trump if he was convicted of a felony, compared with 35 percent (that Trumpian core again) who said they would and that more than half said they wouldn’t support him in the fall campaign if he was imprisoned.I do not believe the latter number, but at the very least the poll suggests that there is still enough faith in the legal system for an actual conviction to have a different effect on the Republican primary than the prosecutions have thus far.But on the current timeline, a conviction before the primary is decided is exactly what we aren’t going to get.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

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Hearings in Two Trump Jan. 6 Cases Set for Monday

      by

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

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Raising a Hand for Donald Trump, the Man in the Mug Shot

      by

      One by one, some with a little hesitation, six hands went up on the debate stage Wednesday night when the eight Republican candidates answered whether they would support Donald Trump for president if he were a convicted criminal. Hand-raising is a juvenile and reductive exercise in any political debate, but it’s worth unpacking this moment, which provides clarity into the damage that Mr. Trump has inflicted on his own party.Six people who themselves want to lead their country think it would be fine to have a convicted felon as the nation’s chief executive. Six candidates apparently would not be bothered to see Mr. Trump stand on the Capitol steps in 2025 and swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, no matter if he had been convicted by a jury of violating that same Constitution by (take your choice) conspiracy to obstruct justice, lying to the U.S. government, racketeering and conspiracy to commit forgery, or conspiracy to defraud the United States. (The Fox News hosts, trying to race through the evening’s brief Trump section so they could move on to more important questions about invading Mexico, didn’t dwell on which charges qualified for a hand-raise. So any of them would do.)There was never any question that Vivek Ramaswamy’s hand would shoot up first. But even Nikki Haley, though she generally tried to position herself as a reasonable alternative to Mr. Ramaswamy’s earsplitting drivel, raised her hand. So did Ron DeSantis, after peeking around to see what the other kids were doing. And Mike Pence’s decision to join this group, while proudly boasting of his constitutional bona fides for simply doing his job on Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrated the cognitive dissonance at the heart of his candidacy.Only Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson demonstrated some respect for the rule of law by opposing the election of a criminal. Mr. Hutchinson said Mr. Trump was “morally disqualified” from being president because of what happened on Jan. 6, and made the interesting argument that he may also be legally disqualified under the 14th Amendment for inciting an insurrection. Mr. Christie said the country had to stop “normalizing” Mr. Trump’s conduct, which he said was beneath the office of president. Though he was accused by Mr. Ramaswamy of the base crime of trying to become an MSNBC contributor, Mr. Christie managed to say something that sounded somewhat forthright: “I am not going to bow to anyone when we have a president of the United States who disrespects the Constitution.” For this Mr. Christie and Mr. Hutchinson were both roundly booed.It’s important to understand the implications of what those six candidates were saying, particularly after watching Mr. Trump turn himself in on Thursday at the Fulton County Jail to be booked on the racketeering charge and 12 other counts of breaking Georgia law. Only Mr. Ramaswamy was willing to utter the words, amid his talk about shutting down the F.B.I. and instantly pardoning Mr. Trump, saying Mr. Trump was charged with “politicized indictments” and calling the justice system “corrupt.”“We cannot set a precedent where the party in power uses police force to indict its political opponents,” he said. “It is wrong. We have to end the weaponization of justice in this country.”This is the argument that Mr. Trump has been making for months, of course, but when more than three-fourths of the main players in the Republican field supports it, it essentially means that a major political party has given up on the nation’s criminal justice system. The party thinks indictments are weapons and prosecutors are purely political agents. The rule of law hardly has a perfect record in this country and its inequities are many, but when a political party says that the criminal justice system has become politicized, and that the indictments of three prosecutors in separate jurisdictions are meaningless, it begins to dissolve the country’s bedrock.Mr. Pence said he wished that issues surrounding the 2020 election had not risen to criminal proceedings, but they did, because two prosecutors chose to do their jobs faithfully, just as the former vice president did on Jan. 6. He piously told the audience that his oath of office in 2017 was made not just to the American people, but “to my heavenly father.” But any religious moralizing about that oath was debased when he said he was willing to support as president a man whose mug shot was taken Thursday at a squalid jail in Atlanta, who was fingerprinted and had his body dimensions listed and released on bond like one of the shoplifters and car burglars who were also processed in the jail the same day.Apparently Thursday’s proceedings were a meaningless farce to Mr. Pence, Ms. Haley and the other four. But most Americans still have enough respect for the legal system that they don’t consider being booked a particularly frivolous or rebellious act. The charges against Mr. Trump are not for civil disobedience or crimes of conscience; they accuse him of grave felonies committed entirely for the corrupt purpose of holding onto power.Being booked and mug-shotted for these kinds of crimes represents degradation to most people, despite the presumption of innocence that still applies at the trial level. How does a parent explain to a child why a man in a mug shot might be the nation’s next leader? That should be a very difficult conversation, unless you happen to be a Republican candidate for president.Source photographs by Erik S Lesser/EPA, via Shutterstock and Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, via Associated Press.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

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      How Mark Meadows Pursued a High-Wire Legal Strategy in Trump Inquiries

      by

      The former White House chief of staff, a key witness to Donald J. Trump’s efforts to remain in power after his 2020 election loss, maneuvered to provide federal prosecutors only what he had to.This winter, after receiving a subpoena from a grand jury investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Mark Meadows commenced a delicate dance with federal prosecutors.He had no choice but to show up and, eventually, to testify. Yet Mr. Meadows — Mr. Trump’s final White House chief of staff — initially declined to answer certain questions, sticking to his former boss’s position that they were shielded by executive privilege.But when prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, challenged Mr. Trump’s executive privilege claims before a judge, Mr. Meadows pivoted. Even though he risked enraging Mr. Trump, he decided to trust Mr. Smith’s team, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Meadows quietly arranged to talk with them not only about the steps the former president took to stay in office, but also about his handling of classified documents after he left.The episode illustrated the wary steps Mr. Meadows took to navigate legal and political peril as prosecutors in Washington and Georgia closed in on Mr. Trump, seeking to avoid being charged himself while also sidestepping the career risks of being seen as cooperating with what his Republican allies had cast as partisan persecution of the former president.His high-wire legal act hit a new challenge this month. While Mr. Meadows’s strategy of targeted assistance to federal prosecutors and sphinxlike public silence largely kept him out of the 45-page election interference indictment that Mr. Smith filed against Mr. Trump in Washington, it did not help him avoid similar charges in Fulton County, Ga. Mr. Meadows was named last week as one of Mr. Trump’s co-conspirators in a sprawling racketeering indictment filed by the local district attorney in Georgia.Interviews and a review of the cases show how Mr. Meadows’s tactics reflected to some degree his tendency to avoid conflict and leave different people believing that he agreed with them. They were also dictated by his unique position in Mr. Trump’s world and the legal jeopardy this presented.Mr. Meadows was Mr. Trump’s top aide in his chaotic last months in the White House and a firsthand witness not only to the president’s sprawling efforts to overturn the 2020 election, but also to some early strands of what evolved into an inquiry into Mr. Trump’s mishandling of classified documents.Mr. Meadows was there, at times, when Mr. Trump listened to entreaties from outside allies that he use the apparatus of the government to seize voting machines and re-run the election. And he was on the phone when Mr. Trump tried to pressure Georgia’s secretary of state to find him sufficient votes to win that state.He was also there on Jan. 6, 2021, as Mr. Trump sat in a small room off the Oval Office, watching television as a mob of his supporters tried to thwart the peaceful transfer of power.The House committee investigating the Capitol riot showed clips of Mr. Trump and Mr. Meadows during a hearing last year.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Meadows, who declined to comment for this article, has refused to discuss his involvement in any of the criminal cases. The full extent of what he shared with federal prosecutors remains closely held, as are the terms under which he spoke to them. But his approach to dealing with them could not have been more different from Mr. Trump’s.Where the former president repeatedly ranted about witch hunts and the weaponization of the justice system, Mr. Meadows went quiet, staying off TV and refusing to call his former boss. Mr. Trump lashed out at the investigators on his tail, attacking them at every turn, but Mr. Meadows sought to build relationships when and where he could.All of this has made Mr. Meadows a figure of intense speculation and anxiety in the former president’s inner circle. The feverish conjecturing among Mr. Trump’s allies was reignited this weekend, when ABC News revealed some of the first details of what Mr. Meadows told federal prosecutors.ABC reported that Mr. Meadows — like other senior Trump officials, including Mike Pence, the former vice president — had undercut Mr. Trump’s claim that he had a “standing order” to automatically declassify any documents that were taken out of the Oval Office. Those included ones that ended up at his private clubs in Florida and New Jersey.Mr. Meadows’s discussions with investigators did not surprise some on the Trump team. For months, Mr. Trump, his advisers and his allies had been deeply suspicious of Mr. Meadows. But having recently received discovery material from Mr. Smith’s team — evidence the prosecutors gathered during the inquiry — the Trump team now has visibility into what Mr. Meadows told investigators, according to people familiar with the matter.“This witch hunt is nothing more than a desperate attempt to interfere in the 2024 election as President Trump dominates the polls and is the only person who will take back the White House,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump.Mr. Meadows’s lawyer, George J. Terwilliger III, declined to comment on the facts laid out in the ABC story.The plan by Mr. Meadows to be quietly cooperative with prosecutors without agreeing to a formal deal was hardly a novel strategy. It is what many subjects of investigations do when they are facing exposure to serious criminal charges. But in this case, the stakes are especially high for both Mr. Meadows and Mr. Trump.Mr. Meadows’s goal was to give investigators the information they requested when he believed he was legally obliged to provide it. But he also used the law to push back when he considered the requests to be inappropriate or potentially dangerous to his own interests, the person familiar with his legal game plan said.The strategy began playing out almost two years ago, when Mr. Meadows agreed to provide some documents to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack but fought its attempt to take his deposition.Mr. Meadows’s goal was to give investigators the information they requested when he believed he was legally obliged to provide it. Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn one instance, when Mr. Meadows was subpoenaed by the House committee for documents and testimony, he provided them with an explosive trove of text messages from the period leading up to Jan. 6. The messages showed Mr. Meadows communicating with everyone from Fox News hosts to Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. They were embarrassing to both him and Mr. Trump.But Mr. Terwilliger determined that since the messages were not related to Mr. Meadows’s communications with the president, they were not protected by executive privilege.The texts were an invaluable resource to the committee staff and provided investigators with a road map to the players and actions taken as they were beginning their work. The decision to provide them to the House panel infuriated Mr. Trump’s team. But they also bought breathing space for Mr. Meadows.Mr. Terwilliger took a different position on Mr. Meadows testifying to the committee. At first, he told the panel’s staff that they could not legally compel Mr. Meadows to do so and that even if they did manage to get him on the record, he would assert executive privilege over anything related to his dealings with Mr. Trump. The negotiations over the interview broke down when the committee subpoenaed Mr. Meadows’s phone records without first informing him.There was, however, another reason Mr. Terwilliger was concerned about having Mr. Meadows tell his story to the House committee, according to the person familiar with Mr. Meadows’s legal plan.Even in early 2022, the person said, Mr. Terwilliger suspected that Mr. Meadows would be called upon to tell the Justice Department what he knew about Jan. 6 and the weeks leading up to it. And he did not want Mr. Meadows to already be on the record in what he viewed as a politicized investigation. If Mr. Meadows was going to tell his story, the person said, Mr. Terwilliger wanted him to do so for the first time to investigators from the Justice Department.It was then that the panel recommended Mr. Meadows be charged with contempt of Congress, a position that the full House ultimately agreed with. The Justice Department, however, citing the “individual facts and circumstances” of his case, declined to press charges.While department officials never fully explained their reasons for not going after Mr. Meadows, the move was in contrast to the way they handled similar cases involving two other former Trump aides, Stephen K. Bannon and Peter Navarro. Both were charged by the department with contempt of Congress after they refused to deal with the committee altogether.Mr. Meadows took a similar course when he was subpoenaed this winter by the federal grand jury in Washington investigating Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. The former president had maintained that his aides should not testify to any matters covered by executive privilege.When Mr. Meadows first appeared before the grand jury, he gave only limited testimony, declining to answer any questions he believed were protected by executive privilege, which shields some communications between the president and members of his administration.But he was obliged to open up to prosecutors after they asked the chief judge in Washington at the time, Beryl A. Howell, to rule on the question of executive privilege in an effort to compel his full account.By that point, the person familiar with the legal strategy said, Mr. Meadows — unlike Mr. Trump — had come to the conclusion that the top prosecutors in the special counsel’s office were engaged in a good-faith effort to collect and analyze the facts of the case. Trusting in the process, the person said, Mr. Meadows would seek to position himself as a neutral witness — one who was neither pro- nor anti-Trump.“George believes witnesses are not owned by anybody,” said a second person who has worked closely with Mr. Terwilliger. “They’re not there for a person; they’re not there against any person; they’re not on one person’s side. They’re there to tell the truth.”Typically, when people have such conversations with prosecutors, they receive limited immunity that prevents their own words from being used against them in a future prosecution. But investigators can use the information they provide to pursue charges against others.Ultimately, Judge Howell issued an order forcing Mr. Meadows to go back to the grand jury. He answered questions for a second time, giving an unvarnished, privilege-free account.The federal indictment against Mr. Trump contains a mix of accounts about Mr. Meadows’s behavior, some favorable to him. He is mentioned as enabling the false elector scheme to move forward by emailing campaign staff members to say, “We just need to have someone coordinating the electors for states.”But federal prosecutors also noted in the indictment that Mr. Meadows, after observing Georgia’s signature verification process, told the former president that election officials were “conducting themselves in an exemplary fashion.” He also pushed for Mr. Trump to tell rioters to leave the Capitol on Jan. 6.By contrast, Mr. Meadows fought efforts to compel him to testify in the separate case in Georgia examining Mr. Trump’s attempts to remain in office after his election loss. He also invoked his right to avoid self-incrimination when he eventually appeared before the grand jury.The indictment that resulted from the Georgia investigation lays much blame at Mr. Meadows’s feet. It portrays him as acting as a willing accomplice in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, meeting with state-level officials, soliciting phone numbers for Mr. Trump and ordering up memos for strategies to keep him in power.Mr. Meadows quietly arranged to talk with Jack Smith’s team about the former president.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesProsecutors in Georgia also accused Mr. Meadows of a felony over his role in an infamous phone call on Jan. 2, 2021, in which Mr. Trump pushed the Georgia secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes.”In a sign that he views the federal venue as more favorable terrain, Mr. Meadows has asked for the Georgia charges against him to move to federal court. In court papers filed last week, Mr. Terwilliger said he intended to challenge the case by arguing that Mr. Meadows was immune to prosecution on state charges for any actions he undertook as part of his federal job as White House chief of staff.Mr. Meadows, who now lives in South Carolina, remains an influential back-room figure in conservative circles in Washington. He is a senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute, where he is paid about $560,000 annually, according to the organization’s most recent financial report.In July 2021, a few weeks after the House voted to create the Jan. 6 committee, the political action committee aligned with Mr. Trump, Save America, donated $1 million to the institute. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Pence Undercuts Trump’s Defense in Classified Documents Case

      by

      The former vice president said he knew of no broad order by Donald Trump that would have declassified documents the former president took with him when he left the White House.Former Vice President Mike Pence said on Sunday that he knew of no widespread declassification of documents by President Donald J. Trump when they were in the White House together, refuting one of the former president’s main defenses against charges of endangering national security.Mr. Trump, who has been indicted on 40 felony counts and accused of taking war plans and other secret documents with him when he left office and refusing to return many of them, has long insisted that he had issued a “standing order” to declassify papers and that any he brought home were automatically declassified.But his vice president became the latest former Trump administration official to say that he had heard of no such edict. “I was never made aware of any broad-based effort to declassify documents,” Mr. Pence said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.“There is a process that the White House goes through to declassify materials,” Mr. Pence added. “I’m aware of that occurring on several cases over the course of our four years. But I don’t have any knowledge of any broad-based directive from the president. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t occur; it’s just not something that I ever heard about.”Mr. Pence’s recollections square with those of other former White House officials. Mark Meadows, who was Mr. Trump’s last White House chief of staff, told investigators working for the special counsel Jack Smith that he did not recall the former president issuing such an order or even discussing it, ABC News reported on Sunday, citing unnamed sources.Eighteen former administration officials, including at least two of Mr. Meadows’s predecessors as chief of staff, John F. Kelly and Mick Mulvaney, previously told CNN that they knew of no such order either. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have not included the claim of such a declassification order in court papers, where they would be liable for making false assertions.Instead, Mr. Trump has made the claim only in public appearances, where there is no legal penalty for not telling the truth. Shortly after an F.B.I. search of his home at Mar-a-Lago in Florida last August turned up a trove of classified documents that he had taken and failed to return after being subpoenaed, Mr. Trump posted on social media that “it was all declassified.”That evening, he issued a statement read on Fox News saying that he “had a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified.”During a subsequent interview with Sean Hannity on Fox, Mr. Trump said he did not need to follow any process to declassify documents. “You’re the president of the United States — you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified, even by thinking about it,” he said then.Referring to the documents found at Mar-a-Lago, he said, “In other words, when I left the White House, they were declassified.”Mr. Trump has maintained that assertion for months. During a CNN town hall in May, he said, “They become automatically declassified when I took them.”But the indictment filed by Mr. Smith in Federal District Court in Florida includes evidence that Mr. Trump was aware that the documents were not declassified. During a recorded July 2021 meeting with two people interviewing him on behalf of Mr. Meadows for the former aide’s memoir, Mr. Trump referred to attack plans against Iran and on the tape sounded as if he were holding it up to show them.“See, as president, I could have declassified it,” he told them. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”ABC News reported that it had reviewed an early draft of Mr. Meadows’s resulting memoir that described Mr. Trump having a classified war plan “on the couch” at his office in Bedminster, N.J., but that the reference was deleted by Mr. Meadows because it would be “problematic.”George Terwilliger, Mr. Meadows’s lawyer, declined to comment on ABC’s account.Mr. Pence, who is trailing in his campaign against Mr. Trump for the Republican presidential nomination next year, has been cautious about criticizing his former running mate, who has been indicted in four separate state and federal cases.But with the first Republican debate looming this week, Mr. Pence has been more willing lately to deride Mr. Trump’s reliance on “crackpot lawyers” in trying to overturn the 2020 election and for asking his vice president “to put him over the Constitution” by invalidating Electoral College votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.Asked on ABC on Sunday whether the president’s chief of staff would have known about any broad declassification order had it existed, Mr. Pence said, “I would expect so.”But he added: “But, look, President Trump is entitled to a presumption of innocence. He’s entitled to his day in court. And I’m just not going to comment on the latest leak or the latest reporting coming out of that process.”Jonathan Swan More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      How Many of Trump’s Trials Will Happen Before the Election?

      by

      Donald J. Trump is the target of four separate criminal indictments, but the prosecutions could drag on for months or even years.Three different prosecutors want to put Donald J. Trump on trial in four different cities next year, all before Memorial Day and in the midst of his presidential campaign.It will be nearly impossible to pull off.A morass of delays, court backlogs and legal skirmishes awaits, interviews with nearly two dozen current and former prosecutors, judges, legal experts and people involved in the Trump cases show. Some experts predicted that only one or two trials will take place next year; one speculated that none of the four Trump cases will start before the election.It would be virtually unheard of for any defendant to play a game of courthouse Twister like this, let alone one who is also the leading contender for the Republican nomination for the presidency. And between the extensive legal arguments that must take place before a trial can begin — not to mention that the trials themselves could last weeks or months — there are simply not enough boxes on the calendar to squeeze in all the former president’s trials.“This is something that is not normal,” said Jeffrey Bellin, a former federal prosecutor in Washington who now teaches criminal procedure at William & Mary Law School and believes that Mr. Trump might only be on trial once next year. “While each of the cases seems at this point to be strong, there’s only so much you can ask a defendant to do at one time.”Any delay would represent a victory for Mr. Trump, who denies all wrongdoing and who could exploit the timeline to undermine the cases against him. Less time sitting in a courtroom equals more time hitting the campaign trail, and his advisers have not tried to hide that Mr. Trump hopes to overcome his legal troubles by winning the presidency.If his lawyers manage to drag out the trials into 2025 or beyond — potentially during a second Trump administration — Mr. Trump could seek to pardon himself or order his Justice Department to shut down the federal cases. And although he could not control the state prosecutions in Georgia or Manhattan, the Justice Department has long held that a sitting president cannot be criminally prosecuted, which very likely applies to state cases as well.Ultimately, the judges overseeing the four cases might have to coordinate so that Mr. Trump’s lawyers can adequately prepare his defense without needlessly delaying the trials. Judges are permitted under ethics rules to confer with one another to efficiently administer the business of their courts, experts said, and they periodically do so.“The four indictments can appear to resemble four cars converging on an intersection that has no lights or stop signs — but that won’t happen,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics professor at New York University School of Law. “Well before the intersection, the judges will figure it out.”For now, Mr. Trump’s court schedule looks to be nearly as crowded as his campaign calendar, with potential trials overlapping with key dates in the Republican primary season. Claiming he is a victim of a weaponized justice system that is seeking to bar him from office, Mr. Trump may end up bringing his campaign to the courthouse steps.A federal special counsel, Jack Smith, has proposed Jan. 2 of next year (two weeks before the Iowa caucuses) as a date for Mr. Trump to stand trial in Washington on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. In a Thursday night court filing, Mr. Trump’s lawyers countered with a proposed date of April 2026.Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney who this week announced racketeering charges against Mr. Trump, accusing him of orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse Georgia’s election results, wants that trial to begin on March 4 (the day before Super Tuesday).It is possible that the election interference case brought against Mr. Trump by special counsel Jack Smith may be given scheduling priority, the experts said.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Smith’s recent case in Washington, and Ms. Willis’s in Georgia, were filed after Mr. Trump was already scheduled for two additional criminal trials next spring: in New York, on March 25, on state charges related to a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels; and in Florida, on May 20, on federal charges brought by Mr. Smith accusing Mr. Trump of mishandling classified material after leaving office.Although the New York and Florida indictments were unveiled earlier, affording them first crack at the calendar, some experts now argue that they should take a back seat to the election-related cases, in Georgia and Washington, in which the charges strike at the core of American democracy. Trial scheduling is not always a first-come, first-served operation, and deference could be given to the most serious charges.In a radio interview last month, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, said that having been the first to indict did not necessarily mean he would insist on being the first to put the former president on trial. However, he said, the judge in the case, Juan M. Merchan, ultimately controls the calendar.“We will follow the court’s lead,” Mr. Bragg said.There has not yet been any direct communication among judges or prosecutors about moving the Manhattan case, according to people with knowledge of the matter.Still, Mr. Bragg’s comments suggest that he would not oppose moving the Manhattan case, which carries a lesser potential punishment than the three others, backward in line.“My own belief is Alvin Bragg will be true to his word and remain flexible in the interests of justice,” said Norman Eisen, who worked for the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and believes that prosecutors might be able to squeeze in three Trump trials next year.And Mr. Eisen, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued that voters deserve to know whether Mr. Trump was convicted of subverting the will of the people in the previous election before they vote in the next one.“There could not be a more important question confronting the country than whether a candidate for the office of the presidency is innocent or guilty of previously abusing that office in an attempted coup,” he said.The most likely candidate to take over Mr. Bragg’s March trial date would be Mr. Smith and his election interference case. Recently, nearly a dozen Republican-appointed former judges and high-ranking federal officials submitted a brief to the judge overseeing that case, arguing that the trial should take place in January as Mr. Smith has proposed and citing a “national necessity” for a “fair and expeditious trial.”But this is the case in which Mr. Trump’s lawyers have asked for a 2026 trial date, citing the voluminous amount of material turned over by the government — 11.5 million pages of documents, for example — that the defense must now review. Mr. Trump’s lawyers estimated that to finish by the prosecution’s proposed January trial date would mean reading the equivalent of “Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection.”In that case, Mr. Smith brought a narrow set of charges against Mr. Trump in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 election, totaling four felony counts, and with no co-defendants.In contrast, Ms. Willis’s election case is a sweeping 98-page indictment of not only Mr. Trump, who faces 13 criminal counts, but also 18 co-defendants, including Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City. Already, Mr. Meadows has petitioned for his case to be moved from state to federal court, and other defendants are likely to follow suit. That process could take months and could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, probably making Ms. Willis’s proposed trial date of March 4 something of a long shot.In contrast to the relatively narrow election interference case brought by Mr. Smith in federal court, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney, has charged Mr. Trump and his associates with a multitude of felonies related to the 2020 presidential election.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe sheer size of Mr. Trump’s Georgia case, and the fact it was the last of the four cases to be brought, suggests any Georgia trial of Mr. Trump could be delayed even beyond next year.It is exceedingly rare for a criminal defendant to face so many trials in such a concentrated period of time. The once high-flying lawyer Michael Avenatti seemed to be heading for three federal trials after he was charged in Manhattan in 2019 in a scheme to extort the apparel giant Nike; and, separately, with stealing money from Ms. Daniels, a former client; and in California, with embezzling money from other clients. (He was eventually convicted in the New York trials and pleaded guilty in the California case.)E. Danya Perry, a lawyer who represented Mr. Avenatti in the Nike case, the first to go to trial, said the challenge was “sequencing the cases in a way that would be most advantageous” to her client. And because there was some overlap in the evidence, she said, the defense had to be careful not to open the door for prosecutors to introduce evidence against Mr. Avenatti from another of the cases.“You’re not just trying the case in front of that particular judge,” Ms. Perry said. “Evidence from one case could bleed into other cases.”Before any trial, Mr. Trump’s cases are also likely to become bogged down as his lawyers review and potentially argue over large amounts of documents and other case material turned over by the government. Certain judicial rulings could also lead to drawn-out pretrial appeals.In the Florida documents case, disputes over the use of classified information could delay the proceeding as well. And in the federal court in Washington, which is already contending with lengthy backlogs amid prosecutions of hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have suggested they plan to litigate complex constitutional issues, including whether some of Mr. Trump’s false claims about the election were protected by the First Amendment.Even the jury selection process could drag on for weeks or months, as courts summon huge pools of prospective jurors for questioning over whether they harbor bias in favor of or against the polarizing former president.Michael B. Mukasey, a former U.S. attorney general and longtime Manhattan federal judge, said because of the complex issues raised in all four of Mr. Trump’s cases, “I think the odds are slim to none that any of them gets to trial before the election.”And Mr. Trump’s criminal cases are not the only courtroom battles he’s waging.In October, he faces trial in a civil suit filed by Attorney General Letitia James of New York, accusing him, his company and three of his children of a “staggering” fraud in overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars. In January, Mr. Trump faces two civil trials arising from private lawsuits: one a defamation claim by the writer E. Jean Carroll and the other accusing him of enticing people into a sham business opportunity.“We fully expect both cases to go to trial in January 2024,” said Roberta A. Kaplan, the plaintiffs’ lawyer in the two private suits.Although Mr. Trump need not be in court for the civil cases, he almost certainly will have to attend the criminal trials, said Daniel C. Richman, a former Manhattan federal prosecutor and now a professor at Columbia Law School.“If you asked all the prosecutors in each case, they’d firmly and sincerely say that they want these trials to happen in the first half of 2024,” Mr. Richman said. “But wishing does not make it so.”Maggie Haberman More