Federal Criminal Case Against Trump (Documents Case)

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      Indicted or Barred From the Ballot: For Trump, Bad News Cements Support

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      The former president has perfected a playbook of victimhood, raising cash off each of his indictments and encouraging Republican officials to defend him, as his rivals did after the Colorado ruling.It may take weeks to find out whether the decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to declare Donald J. Trump ineligible to be on the state primary ballot will hold.But its short-term political impact was clear by the time Mr. Trump stepped off a stage on Tuesday night in Iowa, where he learned of the ruling shortly before a scheduled campaign rally began.Allies of the former president posted on social media that the ruling was an indignation, one that the U.S. Supreme Court needed to rectify.Colorado’s top court found that Mr. Trump had incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, and should be barred from the ballot under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Mr. Trump could remain on the ballot regardless — the Colorado justices put their ruling on hold as appeals are likely to proceed — but Mr. Trump’s team was hardly dwelling on that detail.Even if Mr. Trump remains on the ballot, any court having said that Mr. Trump incited an insurrection will be used against him in a general election, in ways his advisers know could be damaging. But the Republican primary is different. Officials with Mr. Trump’s rival G.O.P. campaigns privately feared that the decision would be seen as an overreach by Democrats, one that could bolster his current lead among Republicans in the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15, and in the primaries immediately after.For years, events that would thwart other politicians have at best slowed Mr. Trump’s forward motion, with the prominent exception of his loss in the 2020 election to Joseph R. Biden Jr. Throughout 2023, Mr. Trump has exploited as political fodder events that would have sunk other candidates — such as being indicted four times, on 91 felony charges — with a Republican electorate that has been told Democrats are threatening their way of life.Since March, Mr. Trump has perfected a playbook of victimhood, raising campaign funds off each indictment and encouraging Republican officials to defend him. Many — including some who are fearful of Mr. Trump’s hold on the party’s core voters — have obliged.Democrats and the comparatively few Republicans who want to see Mr. Trump stopped have described his criminal legal travails as of his own making, and tried to highlight the details of the crimes he is accused of committing. They vary widely and include charges he conspired to defraud the United States with months of election lies aimed at subverting the transfer of power as well as charges stemming from mishandling classified documents.Trump supporters in Waterloo, Iowa, on Tuesday, the day the Colorado Supreme Court barred him from that state’s primary ballot.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesBut Mr. Trump has repeatedly collapsed all those cases into what he has called a “witch hunt,” one aimed at stopping his candidacy as opposed to holding him accountable. He and his allies are already folding the Colorado ruling into that same narrative.Even people who dislike Mr. Trump intensely feared the ruling to toss him off the ballot will merely help him with a Republican electorate that will see it as interfering with an election, at a time when Mr. Trump is regularly described by Democrats as a threat to democracy.“This vindicates his insistence that this is a political conspiracy to interfere with the election,” Ty Cobb, who worked as a lawyer in the Trump White House and who has since condemned his behavior, told CNN. “That’s the way he tries to sell this,” added Mr. Cobb, who mocked that claim of a broad conspiracy but nonetheless predicted the U.S. Supreme Court might unanimously overturn the Colorado ruling.Mr. Trump’s campaign emailed out that portion of the interview.“REMOVED FROM THE BALLOT — FIGHT BACK!” was the subject line of a second fund-raising email from Mr. Trump later in the night.Mr. Trump said nothing about the ruling at his Iowa rally, as Republicans filled the void for him. His Republican opponents — the few who remain from a once-crowded field — once again were left having to walk a line around the man they’re trying to beat.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is mocked daily by Mr. Trump’s team for his footwear and who has struggled to replace the former president as the new generation of the MAGA movement, may as well have been articulating Mr. Trump’s own defense in his statement.“The Left invokes ‘democracy’ to justify its use of power, even if it means abusing judicial power to remove a candidate from the ballot based on spurious legal grounds. SCOTUS should reverse,” Mr. DeSantis wrote in a social media post.Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey whose core message has been that Mr. Trump is unfit for office, said that voters, not the courts, should decide whether he is president. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who has made significant gains in recent polling, made a similar statement.Vivek Ramaswamy, the most vocally pro-Trump of any of the candidates this cycle, said he would withdraw from the Colorado ballot unless Mr. Trump is restored.Mr. Trump’s team is confident such a restoration will happen. Privately, several of his advisers agreed with Mr. Cobb’s assessment that the U.S. Supreme Court will take up his appeal and side with him. It remains to be seen if that happens, or if the justices decide to let the ruling stand. If they do the latter, similar lawsuits would most likely be filed in other states, although a number of 14th Amendment suits have already failed elsewhere.Regardless of the eventual outcome, Mr. Trump’s team, which was surprised by the Tuesday ruling, made quick work of trying to turn it into another galvanizing moment of victimhood. Their approach echoed something Mr. Trump’s oldest mentor, the ruthless lawyer and fixer Roy M. Cohn, who battled prosecutors himself, once said.“I bring out the worst in my enemies,” Mr. Cohn once told the columnist William Safire, “and that’s how I get them to defeat themselves.” More

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      Trump’s Legal Jeopardy Hasn’t Hurt His G.O.P. Support, Times/Siena Poll Finds

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      Donald J. Trump continues to march to the 2024 Republican presidential nomination with a commanding lead over his primary rivals, even as a strong majority of voters nationwide believe he has committed serious federal crimes, including a growing faction of Republicans, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College.The results show the remarkable degree to which Republican voters are willing to look past Mr. Trump’s legal jeopardy — the former president has been indicted four times in 2023 and faces 91 felony counts — and line up behind his potential return to power.Overall, 58 percent of voters nationwide believe Mr. Trump committed serious federal crimes, according to the survey, including 66 percent of independent voters.Yet Mr. Trump continues to clobber his closest Republican competitors in the primary by more than 50 percentage points, pulling in the support of 64 percent of Republican primary voters nationwide. Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, is now in a distant second place, with 11 percent, followed by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has fallen to third, with 9 percent.The poll was conducted before a court ruling on Tuesday injected more legal uncertainty into the 2024 presidential race. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump is disqualified from holding office again because he engaged in insurrection leading up to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, a decision the former president plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. More

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      Why Judges in the Trump Jan. 6 Trial Need a Rocket Docket

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      If Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for president in 2024, it’s now clear he will likely still have criminal indictments hanging over his head on Election Day. It’s possible that his criminal liability for the events leading up to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol will remain unresolved.If that happens, voters will go to the polls without knowing whether one of the candidates in the current election is criminally responsible for trying to overturn the last one and subvert the will of the voters.Having an election under such circumstances is unthinkable. As Richard Nixon might have put it, voters have a right to know whether their candidate is a crook. It can be avoided, but it’s going to require the judiciary to take some extraordinary steps. And whether it happens will be decided by a relative handful of federal jurists — including a number appointed by Mr. Trump himself.Of the four criminal cases pending against Mr. Trump, the federal election interference prosecution in Washington currently has the best chance of going to trial before the 2024 presidential vote. The trial date is set for March 4. The Federal District Court judge overseeing the case, Tanya Chutkan, has been doing an admirable job of keeping it on track. But legal developments that are out of her hands now threaten to derail that schedule: Expected pretrial appeals could push the trial date past the November election.Mr. Trump has moved to dismiss the case on various grounds, including claims of presidential immunity and violation of the double jeopardy clause. For most pretrial motions, if the motion is denied, the defendant must wait to raise the issue again on appeal following conviction, if there is one.But these two motions fall into a narrow category of claims that usually entitle a defendant to an interlocutory appeal — in this case, an appeal before trial. Because these are claims of a constitutional right not to be tried at all, a post-conviction appeal is not an adequate remedy. By that time, the right has already been lost. A defendant is allowed to appeal such claims before the government may put him on trial.If, as expected, Judge Chutkan denies these motions, Mr. Trump will have a right to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. (I expect the appeals will focus primarily on the immunity claim; the double jeopardy argument seems frivolous.) If he loses before a three-judge panel there, he can ask the full court to review that decision. If that fails, he can ask the Supreme Court to review the case. While all that goes on, the trial cannot proceed.In a typical case, an appeals process like this could easily take a year or more. In the first prosecution of Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, appeals over his claims of constitutional immunity under the speech or debate clause delayed the trial for about 18 months, even with the Supreme Court declining to take the case.In the Trump case, delays like that would push the trial well past November. If Mr. Trump wins the election, he would be able to shut down the two federal prosecutions and could probably have the state prosecutions at least postponed while he is in office.This appears to be the primary defense strategy in Mr. Trump’s criminal cases: delay as much as possible to put off any trials until after next November, when Mr. Trump hopes to be in a position to put an end to his legal problems.Having an election with Mr. Trump on the ballot and his criminal liability for Jan. 6 unresolved could spell disaster for the rule of law. It’s also completely avoidable if the courts — and in particularly, the judges who control the schedule — are willing to do what’s necessary: put the resolution of these motions on a fast track to ensure the case can go to trial as scheduled.Typically, the judicial and political calendars do not intersect. We expect judges to ignore political considerations and campaign schedules when making their decisions. But in times of political crisis, the federal judiciary cannot simply turn a blind eye. It must respond in a way that will enable the political system to address that crisis in a timely manner. This is one of those times.This is not a proposal for the courts to act in a partisan fashion. We don’t know whether Mr. Trump’s claim of immunity will be upheld. If it is rejected, we don’t know what the result of the trial will be. The outcome of the legal process is not the point. The point is that the country deserves to know that outcome before it chooses the next leader of the free world.There is precedent for this kind of judicial rapid response. During Watergate, the appeal of the order for President Nixon to turn over the subpoenaed White House tapes was resolved in only about two months — and that included arguments before and an opinion by the Supreme Court. During the 2000 presidential election, that court heard arguments in Bush v. Gore on Dec. 11 and the very next day issued its opinion shutting down the vote recount in Florida. The usually sedate appellate courts can move with dispatch when they want to.This case requires similar urgency. The initial appeals here could be easily heard and decided within a few weeks. Whether to grant a rehearing before the full Court of Appeals is discretionary, but if it does grant such a hearing, it needs to be equally speedy.After the District of Columbia Circuit rules, the losing party will seek Supreme Court review. If Mr. Trump loses the motions, my own hunch is that the Supreme Court may not take the case. In past disputes the justices have not shown much willingness to go out of their way to help Mr. Trump, and the last thing this embattled court needs right now is to wade into another controversy. But if the court does feel the need to weigh in on these novel constitutional issues, it also needs to move very swiftly.There’s no reason the entire process, including Supreme Court review, could not be completed by January. That would allow the trial date to stay on track if the motions are denied.There’s no concern about Mr. Trump being prejudiced by this relatively breakneck pace. He has vast financial and legal resources. The issues are already fully briefed before Judge Chutkan. The issues are novel — because nothing like Jan. 6 has happened before — but the questions are not extraordinarily complex; we need a rocket docket, but this is not rocket science.Some might argue that voters already have enough information about Mr. Trump’s actions and Jan. 6. But a criminal trial is different. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Mr. Trump and his allies made repeated claims of voter fraud and a “rigged” election. Those claims uniformly failed when tested in court by the adversary system, where actual evidence is required and witnesses testify under oath. In an age of disinformation and fake news, courts remain the arena where facts still matter.Some voters will not accept the verdict of a criminal trial, no matter what the outcome. But for many it could be a critical data point when casting their ballot.It’s already not possible to have the trial completed before most of the presidential primaries; Super Tuesday, with over a dozen primaries in states and territories across the country, is March 5. Mr. Trump could have the nomination sewn up by the time the trial is over. But the trial could easily be concluded before the Republican convention in July, so the delegates could decide whether they really want to nominate a felon (if that is the outcome) to lead the country.A functioning democracy requires an informed electorate. It’s hard to imagine a more important piece of information for voters to have next November than whether a candidate is criminally culpable for trying to overturn the last presidential election.Our legal system can resolve this case expeditiously while still protecting the defendant’s rights, but the judiciary will have to step up and do its part to protect democracy.Randall. D. Eliason is the former chief of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and teaches white-collar criminal law at George Washington University Law School. He blogs at Sidebarsblog.com.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Judge Puts Off Decision on Whether to Delay Trump Documents Trial

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      Judge Aileen M. Cannon said she would meet with prosecutors and defense lawyers in March to settle on a schedule for the former president’s trial in federal court in Florida.A federal judge on Friday put off until at least March the fraught and consequential decision of whether to delay the start of former President Donald J. Trump’s trial on charges of illegally holding on to a trove of highly classified national security secrets after he left office.But acknowledging “the evolving complexities” in the proceeding, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, also said it would be “prudent” to push back several deadlines she had set for pretrial motions to be filed, especially those involving the classified materials at the heart of the case.While Judge Cannon’s ruling left the question of the trial’s timing unresolved, it staked out a temporary middle ground between Mr. Trump’s lawyers and federal prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith.Mr. Trump’s legal team, pursuing a persistent strategy of delay, has repeatedly asked the judge to postpone the trial until after the 2024 election. Prosecutors under Mr. Smith have admitted that the case is complicated, but have asked Judge Cannon to hold the line and stick to the current trial date of May 20.At a hearing last week in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, signaled that she was ready to make some “reasonable adjustments” to the timing of the case. She expressed concern in particular that her trial in Florida might “collide” with Mr. Trump’s other federal trial, a Washington-based proceeding on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election that is set to begin in early March.In an order on Friday explaining her decision, Judge Cannon reiterated her concern that the schedules for the two federal trials “as they currently stand overlap substantially.” That, she noted, could make it difficult to ensure that Mr. Trump had “adequate time to prepare for trial and to assist in his defense.”But Judge Cannon also said that Mr. Trump’s legal calendar — he is facing a total of four criminal cases — was “less important at this stage” than the challenges presented by the large volume of discovery evidence that the defense needs to digest. It was also less significant, she said, than the various difficulties involved in handling the sensitive materials at the center of the case under a law known as the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA.Judge Cannon’s ruling left open the chance that the very sort of collision she has worried about might eventually take place. As part of her decision, she set a hearing on March 1 to determine the schedule for her case in Fort Pierce. That is only three days before Mr. Trump’s election subversion case is supposed to begin in Washington.Her ruling also did not foreclose the possibility that she might at some point delay the trial until after the election — a move that would be a major victory for Mr. Trump. Were that to happen, and were Mr. Trump to win the race, he could have the case thrown out entirely simply by ordering his attorney general to drop the charges.Notably absent from Judge Cannon’s ruling was any mention of how the trial calendar might intersect with Mr. Trump’s increasingly busy campaign schedule. It has been a challenge to find ample time for each of Mr. Trump’s four trials not merely in relation to one another, but also against the backdrop of a rapidly approaching set of primary elections and the Republican Party’s nominating convention in July.Judge Cannon chose to ignore Mr. Trump’s political calendar and to focus instead on logistical matters related to the nuts and bolts of the case. She pushed back several of her initial filing deadlines because of delays in constructing a secure facility in which she could review classified materials and because at least one lawyer in the case only recently obtained a full security clearance.She also said she was anticipating that the legal battles between the defense and the prosecution over how many — and precisely which — classified materials should be handed over as part of the discovery process would be “more robust than initially forecasted.”These fights, conducted under CIPA, she said, would require her to conduct a review of a “significant volume of information,” conduct more hearings and consider motions by the defense for additional disclosures. More

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      Judge Hints at a Delay in Trump Documents Trial

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      Responding to a request from the former president’s lawyers, Judge Aileen Cannon said she could make “reasonable adjustments” to the timetable for the trial, which is scheduled to start in May.The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s prosecution on charges of mishandling classified documents signaled on Wednesday that she was inclined to make some “reasonable adjustments” to the timing of the case, expressing concern that it could “collide” with Mr. Trump’s other federal trial.Speaking during a hearing in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, did not specify how she planned to change the schedule of the documents case and said she would soon issue a written order with the details.But she seemed skeptical that the trial date in the documents case — now set for May 20 — could comfortably coexist with Mr. Trump’s Washington-based trial on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, which is set to start in early March.“I’m having a hard time seeing, realistically, how this work can be accomplished in this compressed time period,” Judge Cannon said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Trump Asks Again to Delay Documents Trial Until After Election

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      The former president’s lawyers said his trial on charges of mishandling classified information should be delayed from its planned start in May because of problems gaining access to all the evidence.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump have again asked a federal judge to postpone until after the 2024 election his trial on charges of mishandling classified documents.In a court filing on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump’s legal team proposed moving the start of the trial to mid-November from May 20, the date set by Judge Aileen M. Cannon.It was not the first time Mr. Trump has sought to push back the trial, in which he stands accused of illegally holding onto dozens of classified documents after leaving office and conspiring with two aides to obstruct the government’s repeated effort to retrieve them. In July, his lawyers asked Judge Cannon to put off the trial indefinitely as they grappled with the complexities of the case.But after a flurry of court filings and a contentious hearing this summer in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., Judge Cannon decided that the case should go in front of a jury well before the presidential race ended.In their initial request to delay the trial, Mr. Trump’s lawyers claimed that he could not get a fair trial while he was running for office. But arguments like that were missing from his new proposal to push back the proceeding, which did not specifically mention the election. Still, the push to reschedule for mid-November 2024 was a de facto attempt to delay it until after the race was decided.Were that to happen, it would give Mr. Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican nomination, enormous sway over the case. If the trial were delayed and Mr. Trump were to win the election, he could simply order his attorney general to drop the charges. And even if he were convicted before becoming president, he could in theory seek to pardon himself.In their recent attempt to delay the documents case, Mr. Trump’s lawyers accused prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, of failing to meet their obligations to turn over evidence as part of the discovery process. The lawyers complained in particular that they lacked sufficient access to nine of the 32 classified documents that Mr. Trump has been charged with holding onto after he left office in violation of the Espionage Act.Those documents, prosecutors said last week, are so sensitive that they cannot be stored even in the highly secure facility in Miami that Mr. Trump and his legal team have been using. They said the materials would need to be reviewed under strict supervision in Washington.Mr. Trump’s lawyers also argued the delay was needed because the secure facility that was supposed to have been built for Judge Cannon to review classified materials in Fort Pierce was running at least three months behind schedule. Moreover, the lawyers claimed, Judge Cannon still lacked the necessary “electronic facilities” to write opinions and orders about the classified materials as well as “the physical space” to conduct hearings about it.The lawyers also cited Mr. Trump’s crowded courtroom calendar as another reason to delay the documents trial, claiming that neither they nor their client could “be in two places at once.”Mr. Trump is currently on trial in New York, facing civil charges of fraudulently inflating the value of several of his properties. One of his lawyers in that case, Christopher M. Kise, is also representing him in the documents case.His other federal trial, in which he stands accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election, is also on the horizon. The judge in that case, Tanya S. Chutkan, has scheduled the proceeding to start on March 4. But if it is delayed in any way, that trial could easily drag into the proposed start date for the documents trial.The appeal to Judge Cannon to delay the documents trial came a week after Mr. Trump’s legal team sought to delay the election case in Washington. They asked to push back until December their deadline — now set for next week — to file pretrial motions, saying they were still researching the “numerous novel and complex legal issues” in the case.Federal prosecutors in Mr. Smith’s office have reacted with frustration to Mr. Trump’s attempts to delay both of the proceedings.Last week, they filed court papers to Judge Cannon accusing Mr. Trump’s lawyers of seeking to “intentionally derail” the timing of the documents case. They made similar accusations on Monday to Judge Chutkan, who is overseeing the election interference case in Federal District Court in Washington. By asking for more time to file their motions, the prosecutors said, Mr. Trump’s lawyers were merely dragging their feet.The former president has acknowledged in private conversations with his aides that winning the election is likely to be his best bet for emerging unscathed from the four criminal cases he is confronting. Beyond the two federal cases, Mr. Trump has been charged in state indictments of falsifying business records in New York in connection with payments to a porn actress and of tampering with the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. More

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      Donald Trump’s Campaign of Violence and Lawlessness

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      Though it was lost in the four-year cyclone that was the presidency of Donald Trump, one of his most immoral acts was to pardon soldiers who were accused of committing war crimes by killing unarmed civilians or prisoners. Military leaders, including his own defense secretary and the secretary of the Army objected, saying it would undermine good order and discipline. Lawlessness can easily beget lawlessness.But the American system is ill prepared to deter leaders bent on undermining the rule of law. Checks and balances spread powers across the government, but that isn’t enough to temper or stop bad-faith actors looking to subvert the law. According to a new article in The Atlantic, Gen. Mark Milley, upon becoming the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019, “found himself in a disconcerting situation: trying, and failing, to teach President Trump the difference between appropriate battlefield aggressiveness on the one hand, and war crimes on the other.”Donald Trump, as General Milley discovered and many Americans already knew, is a man unencumbered by any moral compass. He goes the way he wants to go, legalities and niceties be damned. Last week in a post on his social network, Mr. Trump argued that General Milley’s actions would have once been punishable by death.Most Americans probably didn’t notice his screed. Of those who did and were not alarmed, far too many nodded along in agreement. As Josh Barro said in a Times Opinion round table this week about the former president’s recent comments, “Trump is and has been unhinged, and that’s priced in” to the views that many voters have of him.It is no exaggeration to say that Mr. Trump is running for the presidency on a platform of lawlessness, promising to wield the power of the state against his enemies — real or imagined. Today, millions and millions of Americans support him for that reason or despite it.In poll released this week, 51 percent of American adults said they’d vote for Mr. Trump over President Biden, including the vast majority of Republicans. And Wednesday night’s farcical G.O.P. debate may only increase Mr. Trump’s large lead in the primary.That advantage over the Republican field is growing even as prosecutors are finally trying to hold Mr. Trump legally responsible for his misdeeds — from the plot to overturn the 2020 election to fraud allegations concerning his real estate empire.The backlash has been predictable: In the past few months, Mr. Trump has argued that federal laws about classified documents don’t apply to him; floated the idea of pardons for his supporters jailed for attacking the Capitol; said that judges with whom he disagrees are unfit to preside over cases against him; and has been accused of threatening to prejudice the jury pool in one case. A judge decided to shield the identity of jurors in another after Trump supporters posted the names, photos and addresses of grand jurors involved in issuing an indictment in that case. He is also pushing for a government shutdown to halt Justice Department investigations, to force a show of loyalty and try to bend our political system to his will — even when he is out of office.All this has accompanied a sharp uptick in the often incoherent statements from the 77-year-old former president, on social media and at his rallies. And while many Americans long ago tuned him out, his most extreme supporters, like Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, have not. In his newsletter, Mr. Gosar recently wrote that General Milley should be hanged.As the legal cases against Mr. Trump have picked up, “so too have threats against law enforcement authorities, judges, elected officials and others,” The Times reported this week. “The threats, in turn, are prompting protective measures, a legal effort to curb his angry and sometimes incendiary public statements and renewed concern about the potential for an election campaign in which Mr. Trump has promised ‘retribution’ to produce violence.”Mr. Trump’s targets extend to other Republicans. In a biography out next month, Senator Mitt Romney disclosed that he was spending $5,000 per day on security for himself and his family against threats from Trump supporters.This combustible combination of heated political rhetoric, unhinged conspiracy theories, anti-government sentiment and a militant gun culture have created fertile ground for political violence. The country is not powerless to stop the spread of lawlessness but it requires addressing those precursors to violence.Many of those elements swirled around a visit by Mr. Trump this week to a gun store in South Carolina that this summer, sold an AR-15-style rifle to a man who later carried out a racist mass shooting at a dollar store. During his visit, Mr. Trump hefted a custom Glock handgun with his face etched onto the handle. Though he said he wanted to buy one of the weapons — they’re big sellers! — it is unclear if he could legally do so since he is under indictment.Mr. Trump’s whims and erratic online missives should not be dismissed as “Trump being Trump.” Take his call this month for House Republicans to shut down the government. Mr. Trump egged them on, urging them to settle for nothing less than their full slate of demands, including forcing the Justice Department to end its investigations of him. He called it “the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”While a government shutdown won’t end the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, a Trump presidency could easily do so. After all, there are few moral or legal hurdles left to clear after pardoning war criminals.There are many nations where citizens live in fear of governments that wield unchecked and arbitrary authority against their enemies, real or imagined. That is the America that Mr. Trump is promising his supporters. When Mr. Trump told supporters “I am your retribution,” all Americans should take him at his word.Defeating Mr. Trump at the ballot box is going to require a lot more political courage than it takes to put flashes of honesty in the pages of a memoir. The former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson is the latest in a long line of memoirists, declaring in an interview on Tuesday for her new book that Mr. Trump is “most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.”True enough. Which is why Americans can’t wait until January 2025, and another shelf of memoirs, to hear the truth that so many Republicans have long known.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump Tells Gun Store He’d Like to Buy a Glock, Raising Legal Questions

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      Officials have increasingly voiced concerns about threats of violence related to the former president’s trials, as he faces charges that would make it illegal for a store to sell him a firearm.A spokesman for former President Donald J. Trump posted a video on Monday showing him at a gun shop in South Carolina, declaring that he had just bought a Glock pistol.The post on X, formerly known as Twitter, included video of Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican Party’s nomination for president who is facing four criminal indictments. He looked over the dullish gold firearm, a special Trump edition Glock that depicts his likeness and says “Trump 45th,” as he visited the Palmetto State Armory outlet in Summerville, S.C. “I want to buy one,” he said twice in the video.“President Trump buys a @GLOCKInc in South Carolina!” his spokesman, Steven Cheung, wrote in his post. The video showed Mr. Trump among a small crowd of people and posing with a man holding the gun. A voice can be heard saying, “That’s a big seller.”The gun was decorated with Mr. Trump’s name and likeness.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe statement immediately set off an uproar and prompted questions about whether such a purchase would be legal. Mr. Trump is under indictment on dozens of felony counts in two different cases related to his efforts to reverse the results of the 2020 election and to his possession of reams of classified documents after he left office.There were also questions about whether the store could sell a firearm to Mr. Trump if people there knew that he was under indictment.Federal prosecutors are asking a federal judge in the case that accuses Mr. Trump of breaking several laws in his efforts to stay in office to impose a limited gag order after he made repeated threats against prosecutors and witnesses in various cases against him. Mr. Trump’s lawyers were under a late-Monday-night deadline to respond to the government’s request for the order.But within two hours of the initial post on social media, Mr. Cheung deleted his post, and issued a statement saying, “President Trump did not purchase or take possession of the firearm. He simply indicated that he wanted one.”A man who answered a phone registered to the shop’s owner hung up when a reporter called. A salesperson at the Summerville location, who declined to give her name or answer additional questions, said Mr. Trump had not bought a gun.Mr. Trump has increasingly been faulted by prosecutors, security experts and others for his language on his social media site, Truth Social, in relation to his trials.At the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for instance, officials have increasingly voiced concerns about threats of violence, as Mr. Trump and his allies have targeted the agency.Under the main federal gun law, 18 U.S.C. 922, it is illegal for merchants to sell firearms to people who are under indictment for crimes carrying sentences of more than a year. Indicted defendants are also barred from shipping or receiving any weapons that have crossed state lines.But the statute does not appear to prohibit people under indictment from simply buying or possessing weapons. More