Law (US)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 238 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Perverse as it sounds, Donald Trump in a prison cell may be the worst possible outcome | Emma Brockes

      by

      It seems a long time ago, but there was a brief period, after Joe Biden’s inauguration and before the 6 January hearings and the start of campaigning for next year’s presidential election, when it was possible to avoid Donald Trump for days at a time. He was still there, obviously, wandering the corridors at Mar-a-Lago, Gloria Swanson-style, and posting screeds to Truth Social. But there was no real reason to think about him and, for that short period, he was returned to his essential state: just another person posting unhinged rants online.This is not where Trump is now – in the US, at least. Thanks to a raft of legal actions, culminating earlier this month in the justice department’s arraignment of the former president for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election result, Trump is not only front and centre every day, but in danger of ascending to a new position in the news cycle: political martyr and victim of a witch-hunt. Given the preposterousness of the events leading up to this moment – only recently, a jury found Trump liable for defamation and sexual abuse – it seems inevitable we should find ourselves here.Trump, of course, is keenly aware of the potential in his superficially dire situation and has already leaned fully into it. In campaign stops across the US, and with the threat of jail hanging over him, he is doing the thing we know from experience to be the man’s absolute forte: siphoning the heat and energy from any given charge against him and refracting it back on his enemies. “They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you,” he told a crowd in New Hampshire on Tuesday. As the New York Times pointed out this week, his new campaign message for the 2024 election is: “I’m being indicted for you”. (A woman at the New Hampshire event told the reporter, nonsensically but with heart: “What, am I next?”)It is an exceedingly weird and insoluble problem. From experience we know that the only blows that land on Trump are either ridicule – recall his face when Obama mocked him, all those years ago, during the White House correspondents’ dinner – or ignoring him. Of the two, only the latter really promises results. In the shocked days after Trump’s election in 2016, I recall that Obama’s moment of mockery was singled out as an example of precisely the kind of leftwing self-indulgence that dislodged the first pebble in Trump’s psychology, and ended in his run for the White House. It is a mistake to take the man seriously; indicting him on four criminal counts of allegedly attempting to overturn a democratic election is the very definition of taking someone seriously. And yet, in a functioning democracy, how on earth might one let this pass?As such, the unfolding of the latest and most serious legal action against Trump highlights a stark divide between the political and judicial rationales for pursuing him. As has already been observed, Trump is on exceedingly thin ice with Moxila A Upadhyaya, the judge who set the terms of his conditions for release pending trial. In the last week, Trump posted what might be construed as vague threats in the direction of any prospective juror (“If you go after me, I’m coming after you!”), raising the possibility of a scenario in which he is yanked to jail and campaigns for the presidency from his cell.There is, in the current climate in the US, nothing pleasing about this image. In fact, with every passing day, and with a perversity no amount of exposure to Trump can ever quite normalise, Trump in jail seems like the worst possible outcome. Campaigning from a prison cell would lend Trump a righteousness exceeding even his present grandiose narrative, and widen the sweep of his supporters by offering them a wildly romantic and dramatic cause to join.What remains so hard to grapple with is that in spite of the deadly seriousness of the events that got us here – it is easy to forget, sometimes, that people died on 6 January – as ever with Trump, one senses the wink behind every gesture. When he tells supporters, as he did in March, “I am your retribution”, his language is like a biblical script with Mel Gibson behind it, a hokey narrative that serves two purposes: it offers a genuine cause for aggrieved supporters to latch on to and, simultaneously, it extends an invitation to join him in a cosmic joke against everyone else. One imagines Trump in jail, his demeanour unchanged, which is to say that of an after-dinner host, smirking and shrugging and rolling his eyes as he says: “I’m like Jesus Christ at this point.”
      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist based in New York
      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

    • 188 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      How a Trump adviser manipulates free speech to advance his causes and ‘hurt his adversaries’

      by

      Towards the end of July Leonard Leo, architect of the rightwing takeover of the American judiciary, emerged from his vacation retreat in Maine to write an opinion piece for the local newspaper, the Bangor Daily News, headlined: “When is free speech protected?”Leo, 58, is the low-profile, deceptively nondescript co-chair of the conservative legal group Federalist Society. That he turned his hand to this topic was in itself no surprise – he has long presented himself as a champion of the first amendment, with its guarantees of freedom of religion, speech, press and peaceable assembly.“Free speech is essential for a free society,” he wrote. “As such, it is something that I have defended and will continue to defend, and I have always accepted that there will be objections and opposition to the work I do.”But a couple of eye-catching, and seemingly incongruous, events have led to speculation that his commitment to free speech might be more complicated than he professes, and more self serving. If all American citizens are equal in front of this vital element of the US constitution, could it be that some people – notably Leo himself – are more equal than others?The first of the two events took place in the bailiwick of the Bangor Daily News, in Maine, where Leo has a $3m waterfront estate on an elite island community in Northeast Harbor. On 20 July, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker reported on a new lawsuit that had been brought by a 23-year-old local resident for wrongful arrest.Eli Durand-McDonnell, a landscaper, was part of a group of progressive activists who staged a series of peaceful protests outside Leo’s home. They were angry about his role in securing a rightwing supermajority on the US supreme court, and the evisceration of fundamental rights that flowed from that.Leo had proposed to Donald Trump the names of all three of the justices appointed by the former president: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. As such, he played a critical role in the court’s overturning of the right to an abortion in June 2022.Leo isn’t named as a defendant in the civil lawsuit, which accuses two local police officers of making an illegal and retaliatory arrest of Durand-McDonnell during one of the protests on 31 July 2022, a month after the devastating abortion ruling. But it does claim that the arrest was made “at the direct behest of Leo, a powerful and wealthy conservative political activist who has used millions of dollars as political speech to influence American politics and courts”.The complaint discloses that the head of Leo’s private security detail contacted the Bar Harbor police while one of the protests was occurring outside his home, singling out Durand-McDonnell for supposedly harassing the Federalist Society chief and his family. Leo told a police officer who turned up at the scene: “I think it’s time for us to press some charges,” adding, “I really feel like this is a guy who’s got to be in jail someday, and sooner rather than later.”In his Bangor Daily News op-ed, Leo said that before the protest Durand-McDonnell had yelled at his wife and daughter that they should burn in hell. “I don’t take reporting someone to the police lightly. But, as a husband and a father, neither can I take harassment of my wife and children lightly,” he wrote.Durand-McDonnell saw the event differently. He denies harassing anyone, insisting that all his actions were political protest that is protected by the first amendment.“I think this case sums it up perfectly,” he told the New Yorker. “The rules don’t apply to Leonard Leo … If he doesn’t agree with what someone else says, it’s no longer free speech.”The second event burst into public view five days after Mayer’s New Yorker article. On 25 July, Leo wrote a letter through his lawyer to two leading Democratic US senators on the judiciary committee, Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse.The senators wanted Leo to answer a series of questions about his ties to the supreme court justices as part of an ethics investigation they were conducting. Leo has long been a figure of interest for Congress, given his outsized influence on US politics and the courts.He is credited as being both brains and brawn behind the long campaign to steer the federal judiciary sharply to the right. He helped place at least 200 judges on the federal bench, and then went on to transform the nation’s most powerful court.“Leo has been the central driving figure of the conservative movement’s decades-long effort to reshape the supreme court’s composition and outcomes,” said Alex Aronson, a judicial accountability advocate and Whitehouse’s former chief counsel in the US senate. “He has his fingerprints on every one of the six Republican-appointed justices who are now on the court.”Leo has also become a focus of intense public scrutiny after he was handed a $1.6bn fund to spend on boosting conservative causes. He now controls a pot of money that represents possibly the largest single donation to a political non-profit in US history.Leo’s name has repeatedly popped up in the wave of ethics scandals that has washed over the supreme court this year. In April, when ProPublica published its blockbuster expose of Justice Clarence Thomas’s chummy relations with the Texas real estate magnate Harlan Crow, there was Leo depicted in a painting that hangs at Crow’s luxury lakeside resort in upstate New York sitting alongside Crow and Thomas in amicable conversation.A month later the Washington Post revealed that Leo had arranged for Thomas’s wife, the pro-Trump extremist Ginni Thomas, to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting. “No mention of Ginni, of course,” Leo instructed the polling firm that supplied the cash.A month after that, ProPublica unleashed another blockbuster that disclosed the luxury fishing trip in Alaska that Justice Samuel Alito went on in 2008 bankrolled by the hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. There was Leo again, pictured with Singer and Alito holding king salmon they had caught.Leo, who assisted Alito in his 2006 confirmation to the supreme court, had a hand in arranging the trip. That included asking Singer for seats on his private jet which the justice failed to disclose as he was legally required to do.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the wake of these ethically dubious bombshells, Durbin and Whitehouse decided to conduct their own inquiry as part of congressional oversight. They wanted to know from Leo further details of the Alaska fishing trip and what transportation, lodging and gifts he had provided to any of the justices.In his response, Leo turned once more to the first amendment. This time, though, he made the opposite argument: unlike the Maine protester who he said had no free speech right to harass him, Leo said he had an absolute first amendment right that protected his dealings and communications with Alito and the other justices.“Mr Leo is entitled by the First Amendment to engage in public advocacy, associate with others who share his views, and express opinions on important matters of public concern,” his lawyer wrote. Leo declined to cooperate with Congress.One of the striking aspects of Leo’s use of the first amendment in these two events is that in both instances he sets himself up as the victim of harassment. In Maine, he was “harassed” by Durand-McDonnell who in Leo’s view went beyond civil speech and therefore forfeited his first amendment protections.In the letter to Congress, Leo presents himself as being “harassed” by the senators for exercising his first amendment rights to interact with the supreme court justices in any way they liked.This glaring duality – the same harassment claim played both ways with the first amendment – has caught the attention of Leo’s critics. “He’s a free speech champion when it means forcing his radical agenda on everyday Americans and refusing to cooperate with Congress,” said Kyle Herrig, senior adviser to the government corruption watchdog Accountable.US. “But he does an about-face as soon as the free speech is directed at him.”The Guardian reached out to Leo to invite his reaction to this criticism, but he did not respond.Aronson called the arguments laid out in Leo’s letter refusing to cooperate with Congress “comically absurd”. “What Leo argued here is that Congress lacks authority to investigate the supreme court. That position has no basis in the constitution or in any precedent.”Aronson said that this was nothing new: Leo and the network of dark money groups he coordinates, along with the conservative justices of the supreme court he helped into power, have long massaged the first amendment for political gain. “The first amendment has been a particular target of political manipulation by Leo and the conservative legal movement across a range of subjects,” he said.In 2010 the supreme court ruling Citizens United used free speech as a way to open the door to massive spending in elections by corporate donors. Then in 2021, in a much less noticed ruling, Americans for Prosperity v Bonta, the rightwing justices effectively created a new first amendment right to keep the identity of big donors secret.In the judicial term that ended in June, the six conservative justices again turned to the first amendment – this time to unleash open discrimination against LGBTQ+ communities in the name of protected speech. In a dissent, Sonia Sotomayor warned that business services could now be denied any vulnerable group, such as interracial couples or parents with disabled children, all in the name of “free speech”.Now, in the latest iteration of the use of the argument by the right, Trump himself is leaning on a free speech defense in response to this week’s indictment over his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election.Stand back from all this, and Aronson believes we are witnessing the unfolding of Leo’s judicial revolution. “Highly influential political actors are developing incomparable sway over the judiciary after decades of coordinated investment,” he said.“The law is becoming manipulable to advance their ends. And hurt their adversaries.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Prosecutors seek to prevent Trump from sharing January 6 case evidence

      by

      Federal prosecutors asked a federal judge to reject Donald Trump’s request for fewer restrictions over how he can publicly share evidence in the case involving his efforts to subvert the 2020 election, arguing the former president was seeking to abuse the discovery process.“The defendant seeks to use the discovery material to litigate this case in the media,” prosecutors wrote in an eight-page brief on Monday. “But that is contrary to the purpose of criminal discovery, which is to afford defendants the ability to prepare for and mount a defense in court.”The court filings, submitted to US district court judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, highlighted comments made over the weekend by Trump lawyer John Lauro about former vice-president Mike Pence being a potential witness to stress the importance of strict restrictions.“This district’s rules prohibit defense counsel from doing precisely what he has stated he intends to do with discovery if permitted: publicize, outside of court, details of this case, including the testimony of anticipated witnesses,” prosecutors wrote.Trump has characterized the indictment, charging him with four felonies over his attempt to obstruct the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win on 6 January 2021 and overturn the results of the 2020 election, as a political witch-hunt and infringing on his first amendment rights.To that end, his lawyers filed a brief earlier on Monday asking the judge to issue a less restrictive protective order, a routine step in criminal cases to ensure evidence turned over to defendants in discovery is used to help construct a defense and not to chill witnesses.The 29-page document asked for various accommodations, such as giving Trump the ability to make public any transcripts of witness interviews that are not protected by grand jury secrecy rules, and to expand the circle of people who could gain access to the discovery material.But the prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith provided a line-by-line refutation of Trump’s requests, including that he be permitted to share evidence turned over to his legal team in discovery with people other than his own lawyers, such as volunteer attorneys.Allowing such broad language, prosecutors wrote, would render it boundless and allow Trump to share evidence, for instance, with any currently unindicted co-conspirators who are also attorneys and could benefit from otherwise confidential information.The procedural dispute between prosecutors and Trump’s legal team sets up an early test for Chutkan, who will now decide the matter. Chutkan ordered both sides to confer and jointly inform her by Tuesday 3pm of potential dates for a hearing to take place before 11 August.But a bitter fight this early in the process, over the protective order, which prosecutors say must be implemented before they start turning over evidence to Trump, suggests the case could be marked by contentious pre-trial motions from the former president with an eye on delay.As in the classified documents case, Trump’s overarching strategy in legal cases is to delay them. If a trial drags past the 2024 election and Trump were to win, he could try to pardon himself or direct his attorney general to drop the charges and jettison the case.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe current dispute started almost immediately after Trump was arraigned last week, when prosecutors took the routine step of asking for a protective order but specifically referenced a vaguely threatening post from Trump that read “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”The prosecutors did not ask the judge to impose a gag order on Trump to prevent him from discussing the case, but made an inferential argument that there needed to be clear rules on how Trump could publicly use evidence turned over to him in discovery.Their main requests were to limit the people with access to the discovery materials to just people with an interest in the case, such as Trump’s lawyers, and to create a special category of “sensitive materials” that “must be maintained in the custody and control of defense counsel”.The sensitive materials would include things like “personally identifying information” of witnesses and information that emerged from the grand jury during the criminal investigation, which is kept secret under federal law.Under the proposed protective order, the government also allowed Trump’s lawyers to show him the sensitive materials. But he would not be permitted to keep copies or write down any personal information about the people in the materials, since that would circumvent the rule about copies.The Trump campaign responded hours later, saying in a statement that the post had not been directed at anyone involved in the case and suggesting that prosecutors were seeking to punish him for engaging in first amendment activity, or “the definition of political speech”. More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Trump claims protective order against him would infringe his free speech rights – live

      by

      From 19m agoAhead of an afternoon deadline for his lawyers to respond to a request from special counsel Jack Smith for a protective order in the January 6 case, Donald Trump said such a ruling would infringe on his free speech rights.From his Truth social account:
      No, I shouldn’t have a protective order placed on me because it would impinge upon my right to FREE SPEECH. Deranged Jack Smith and the Department of Injustice should, however, because they are illegally “leaking” all over the place!
      The former president’s attorneys have until 5pm eastern time to respond to the request from Smith, who asked for the protective order after Trump on Friday wrote, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” on Truth.Smith wants Trump’s attorneys barred from publicly sharing “sensitive” materials including grand jury transcripts obtained during the January 6 case’s pre-trial motions.Aileen Cannon, the federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s trial on charges related to keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, appeared to disclose an ongoing grand jury investigation in a court filing today, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports:Cannon was appointed to the bench by Trump, and faced scrutiny last year for a decision in an earlier stage of the Mar-a-Lago case that some legal experts viewed as favorable to the former president, and which was later overturned by an appeals court.Cannon’s is presiding over Trump’s trial in Florida on charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith, who alleges the former president illegally stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, and conspired to hide them from government officials sent to retrieve them.In response to the charges filed against him over January 6, Donald Trump’s lawyers have argued the former president did not know that he indeed lost the 2020 election. But as the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports, that defense may not be enough to stop prosecutors from winning a conviction:Included in the indictment last week against Donald Trump for his efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election was a count of obstructing an official proceeding – the attempt to stop the vote certification in Congress on the day his supporters mounted the January 6 Capitol attack.The count is notable, because – based on a review of previous judicial rulings in other cases where the charge has been brought – it may be one where prosecutors will not need to prove Trump knew he lost the election, as the former president’s legal team has repeatedly claimed.The obstruction of an official proceeding statute has four parts, but in Trump’s case what is at issue is the final element: whether the defendant acted corruptly.The definition of “corruptly” is currently under review by the US court of appeals for the DC circuit in the case titled United States v Robertson. Yet previous rulings by district court judges and a different three-judge panel in the DC circuit in an earlier case suggest how it will apply to Trump.In short: even with the most conservative interpretation, prosecutors at trial may not need to show that Trump knew his lies about 2020 election fraud to be false, or that the ex-president knew he had lost to Joe Biden.“There’s no need to prove that Trump knew he lost the election to establish corrupt intent,” said Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House judiciary committee in the first Trump impeachment.“The benefit under the statute is the presidency itself – and Trump clearly knew that without his unlawful actions, Congress was going to certify Biden as the winner of the election. That’s all the corrupt intent you need,” Eisen said.Donald Trump’s team has clearly been paying attention to Ron DeSantis’s NBC News interview, with a spokeswoman attacking the Florida governor for his comments dismissing the ex-president’s false claims about his 2020 election loss:Speaking of Republican presidential candidates, NBC News scored a sit-down interview with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and got him to again say that his chief rival Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.DeSantis, whose campaign for the White House is in troubled waters, had been vague on the issue until last week, when he started saying publicly that he did not believe the former president’s false claims about his election loss.Here he is saying it again, on NBC:In his final days as vice-president, Mike Pence faced pressure from Donald Trump to go along with his plan to disrupt Joe Biden’s election victory. Pence refused his then-boss’s request, and the two running mates are now foes, but could Pence potentially be a witness in the trial on the federal charges brought against Trump over the election subversion plot?In an interview with CBS News broadcast over the weekend, Pence, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, said he has “no plans to testify”, but added “people can be confident we’ll obey the law. We’ll respond to the call of the law, if it comes and we’ll just tell the truth.”Far from being worried about what Trump’s former deputy might have to say about him, the former president’s attorney John Lauro said his legal team would welcome Pence’s testimony.“The vice-president will be our best witness,” Lauro said in a Sunday appearance on CBS, though he didn’t exactly say why he felt that way. “There was a constitutional disagreement between the vice-president [Pence] and president Trump, but the bottom line is never, never in our country’s history, as those kinds of disagreements have been prosecuted criminally. It’s unheard of.”Good morning, US politics blog readers. Mere days have passed since special counsel Jack Smith indicted Donald Trump for his failed effort to reverse his 2020 election loss, but the two sides are already battling over what the former president can say and do. On Friday, Trump wrote “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”, prompting Smith’s prosecutors to request a protective order that would restrict what the former president’s legal team can share publicly, saying it is necessary to guard people involved in the case against retaliation.Trump’s lawyers have until 5pm eastern time today to respond. It’s an early salvo in what is expected to be the lengthy process Smith’s case is expected to take, and which will undoubtedly hang over the 2024 election, where Trump is currently the frontrunner. Either way, the former president has not been shy about sharing his thoughts regarding the unprecedented criminal charges leveled against him, and do not be surprised if today is no different.Here’s what else is happening:
      Voters in Ohio are gearing up to decide on Tuesday whether to approve a Republican-backed proposal that will raise the bar for changing the state’s constitution. What this is really about is a ballot initiative scheduled to be put to a vote in November that would enshrine abortion protections in the state’s laws, but which would face a much more difficult road to passage if tomorrow’s vote succeeds.
      Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor whose presidential campaign appears to be floundering, just sat down for an interview with NBC News, where, among other things, he reiterated that he believed Trump lost the 2020 election.
      Joe Biden is hosting World Series winners the Houston Astros at the White House today, before heading to the Grand Canyon. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Will Donald Trump be jailed before his trial? | Robert Reich

      by

      At Donald Trump’s arraignment last Thursday for trying to overturn the result of the 2020 election, the magistrate judge Moxila A Upadhyaya warned him that he could be taken into custody if he violated the conditions of his release, including attempting to influence jurors or intimidate future witnesses.Calling him “Mr Trump” rather than President Trump – thereby emphasizing that he was being treated as any criminal defendant would be treated – she said:“I want to remind you that it is a crime to try to influence a juror or to threaten or attempt to bribe a witness or any other person who may have information about your case, or to retaliate against anyone for providing information about your case to the prosecution, or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice.”The judge then warned Trump: “You have heard your conditions of release. It is important you comply. You may be held pending trial in this case if you violate the conditions of release.”She asked Trump: “Do you understand these warnings and consequence, sir? Are you prepared to comply?”Trump responded: “Yes.”But not 24 hours later, Trump posted on social media a message that could be understood as an attempt to influence potential jurors or retaliate against any witness prepared to testify against him: He wrote: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”On Friday evening, prosecutors from the office of special counsel Jack Smith asked the court for a protective order to stop Trump from making public any of the information they were about to deliver to his lawyers under the discovery phase of the upcoming criminal trial, such as the names of witnesses who will testify against him.They noted that such protection was “particularly important” because Trump “has previously issued public statements on social media regarding witnesses, judges, attorneys and others associated with legal matters pending against him”.Citing his social media message from earlier in the day, they argued that publishing such information “could have a harmful chilling effect on witnesses”. The prosecutors included a screenshot of Trump’s threatening post from that same evening.On Saturday, the presiding judge in the case, Tanya Chutkan, ordered that Trump’s lawyers respond to the prosecutor’s request for a protective order by 5pm Monday.All through the weekend, Trump continued to threaten potential witnesses.“WOW, it’s finally happened! Liddle’ Mike Pence, a man who was about to be ousted as Governor Indiana until I came along and made him VP, has gone to the Dark Side,” he posted on Saturday.And Trump hasn’t stopped attempting to obstruct justice.On Sunday he called Jack Smith “deranged”, and in another all-caps message he accused Smith of waiting to bring the case until “right in the middle” of his election campaign.In another post he asserted that he would never get a “fair trial” with Chutkan and jurors from Washington DC.These statements directly violate the conditions of Trump’s release pending trial.They also could inflame Trump supporters, thereby endangering those who are trying to administer justice, such as Smith and Chutkan, as well as potential witnesses like Pence.It’s going to get a lot worse unless Chutkan – on her own initiative or at the urging of prosecutors – orders Trump’s lawyers to show cause why his release pending trial should not be revoked, in light of his repeated violation of the conditions of his release.This would at least put Trump on notice that he will be treated like any other criminal defendant who violates conditions of release pending trial.That’s what the rule of law is all about.At this moment, about 400,000 criminal defendants are in jail in the United States awaiting trial because they didn’t meet a condition of their release.Trump is now under the supervision of the court, as would be any criminal defendant after an arraignment.But he will continue to test the willingness and ability of the court to treat him like any other criminal defendant unless he’s reined in.The court must fully assert the rule of law during these proceedings, even if that requires threatening Trump with jail pending his trial. And if he continues to refuse to abide by the conditions of his release, it might be time to actually jail him.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

    • 188 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump pleads not guilty to new charges in classified documents case – US politics live

      by

      From 2h agoDonald Trump has entered pleas of not guilty to new charges federal prosecutors brought against him last week in the case of the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, CNN reports:Special counsel Jack Smith last week added charges to the indictment against Trump claiming he tried to erase surveillance footage that prosecutors subpoenaed, which showed boxes of classified documents being removed from a storage room at his South Florida resort. Smith also indicted property manager Carlos De Oliveira, who allegedly worked with Trump to destroy the footage.De Oliveira made an initial court appearance this week, but did not enter a plea as he was still looking for a lawyer to represent him in Florida.In John Bolton’s op-ed published on Tuesday, he said Donald Trump “disdains knowledge” and accused him of “seeing relations between the United States and foreign lands, especially our adversaries, predominantly as matters of personality”.“Foreign leaders, friend or foe, are far more likely see him as ignorant, inexperienced, braggadocious, longing to be one of the big boys and eminently susceptible to flattery,” Bolton wrote. “These characteristics were a constant source of risk in Trump’s first term, and would be again in a second term.”Bolton condemned Trump for his decision-making, saying:
      Beyond acting on inadequate information, reflection or discussion, Trump is also feckless even after making decisions. When things go wrong, or when he simply changes his mind subsequently (a common occurrence), he invariably tries to distance himself from his own decision, fearing negative media coverage or political criticism.
      Following his firing in 2019, Bolton published a book, The Room Where It Happened, in which he strongly criticized Trump’s leadership. Earlier this year, Bolton called Trump’s 2024 presidential bid “poison” to the Republican party.Ex-national security adviser John Bolton issued harsh remarks against his former boss and the leading 2024 Republican presidential candidate, saying that the US will likely withdraw from Nato if Donald Trump wins the election.In an interview with the Hill on Thursday, Bolton criticized the former president’s foreign policy after an op-ed he wrote earlier this week called Trump’s behavior “erratic, irrational and unconstrained”.“Donald Trump doesn’t really have a philosophy, as we understand it in political terms,” Bolton said.
      He doesn’t think in policy directions when he makes decisions, certainly in the national security space.
      Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, also lambasted Trump for his foreign policy legacy with regard to the alliance, saying in the interview:
      He threatened the existence of Nato, and I think in a second Trump term, we’d almost certainly withdraw from Nato.
      He also criticized Republicans who have praised Trump for his foreign policy positions. He said:
      Those who make these claims about what Trump did in his first term don’t really understand how we got to the places we did. Because many of the things they now give Trump credit for, he wanted to go in the opposite direction.
      Nearly of half of Republicans said they would not vote for Donald Trump if he were convicted of a felony, according to a new poll.The Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted before the former president’s court appearance on Thursday, asked respondents if they would vote for Trump for president next year if he were “convicted of a felony crime by a jury”.Among Republicans, 45% said they would not vote for him, while 35% said they would. The rest said they did not know.Asked if they would vote for Trump if he were “currently serving time in prison”, 52% of Republicans said they would not, and 28% said they would.About two-thirds of Republicans said the accusation in Trump’s latest indictment that he solicited election fraud was “not believable”, compared with 29% who said it was.Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Guardian in a telephone conversation that Thomas Klingenstein’s pivot may indicate an effort to “pull of Republican outfits and donors towards more extreme positions”.While the Claremont Institute has been called “the nerve center of the American Right” for its intellectual leadership and formation of hard right activists, Klingenstein appears to have a new appetite for directly impacting electoral politics.Klingenstein is a partner in Wall Street investment firm Cohen Klingenstein, which administers a portfolio worth more than $2.3bn, according to its most recent Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.Klingenstein’s grandfather was a successful investor, and other members of his family pursue more conventional avenues for their philanthropy, but beginning in the Donald Trump era, Klingenstein has increasingly used his resources to pursue a hard-edged version of rightwing politics.Klingenstein’s characterization of the political divide as a cold civil war – spelled out in a series of glossy YouTube videos – has been previously reported, as have some of his activities as chair of the rightwing Claremont Institute, a Claremont, California-based thinktank.That organization charted a radical, pro-Trump course from 2016, culminating in Senior Fellow John Eastman advising Trump in his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and delivering a fiery speech to the crowd of protesters in Washington DC on 6 January 2021.But newly available filings reveal how he has advanced these ideas in electoral and cultural battles.Read the full story here. Newly released tax and election records show that since 2020 controversial financier Thomas Klingenstein has become one of the largest individual donors to national Republicans, contributing more than $11.6m to candidates and Pac, after decades as the far-right Claremont Institute’s biggest donor and board chairman.The spending spree dwarfs the total $666,000 Klingenstein spent between 1992 and 2016, and in the last election cycle put Klingenstein in the top 40 contributors to national Republican candidates and committees.In turn the spending has allowed him to connect with a long-standing network of conservative mega-donors centered on the billionaire-founded Club for Growth, which advocates for the reduction of government.Klingenstein and the Claremont Institute push a harder-edged rightwing politics, and he appeared in a series of videos released in 2022 where he argued that American conservatives are in a “cold civil war” with “woke communists”, and that “education, corporate media, entertainment, big business, big tech… together with the government function as a totalitarian regime”.A group of House Democrats called on the body overseeing federal courts to allow Donald Trump’s election fraud trial be publicly televised live.In a letter led by Representative Adam Schiff, who served on the House select committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection, the group of 38 House Democrats asked that the judicial conference “explicitly authorize the broadcasting of court proceedings in the cases of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump”.The group wrote:
      It is imperative the [court] ensures timely access to accurate and reliable information surrounding these cases and all of their proceedings, given the extraordinary national importance to our democratic institutions and need for transparency.
      Trump was arraigned at a federal courthouse in Washington on Thursday and charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.The arraignment was not televised publicly, as cameras are generally not allowed in federal courtrooms. Trump’s next court hearing in the case is set for 28 August.The letter’s signatories included other members who served on the January 6 committee which concluded with a recommendation that the justice department pursue a criminal investigation of Trump over his involvement in the insurrection.It continued:
      Given the historic nature of the charges brought forth in these cases, it is hard to imagine a more powerful circumstance for televised proceedings. If the public is to fully accept the outcome, it will be vitally important for it to witness, as directly as possible, how the trials are conducted, the strength of the evidence adduced and the credibility of witnesses.
      As we reported earlier, Donald Trump pleaded not guilty on Friday to new charges brought against him by special counsel Jack Smith in his classified documents criminal case.Trump, who just a day ago pleaded not guilty in a Washington federal courtroom to federal charges over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, officially entered a plea of “not guilty” to the 40-count superseding indictment in a separate case against him in the Southern District of Florida.The former president did not appear in court on Friday. He also waived his right to be present in court for his arraignment on the three additional charges, scheduled for Thursday 10 August before a US magistrate judge in Fort Pierce, Florida.Federal prosecutors filed the new charges last week against Trump and two of his employees, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, in the criminal case over the retention of sensitive government records at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump now faces 40 charges in the case, after originally being indicted on 37 counts last month.Trump’s co-defendants, De Oliveira and Nauta, have not indicated in court filings their plans for the arraignment, according to CNN.After months of waffling, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appeared to finally reject Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, the New York Times reports.“All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” DeSantis said in response to a question from a reporter during a campaign stop in Iowa, a day after Trump appeared in a Washington DC federal court to answer charges related to his failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election.The governor has previously been vague about whether he adhered to Trump’s disproven claims that fraud caused him to lose re-election, though DeSantis has characterized the state and federal charges filed against the former president as politically motivated.The comments come amid a pronounced drop in DeSantis’s recent poll numbers, who is otherwise in second place to Trump among Republican primary voters.Donald Trump has entered pleas of not guilty to new charges federal prosecutors brought against him last week in the case of the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, CNN reports:Special counsel Jack Smith last week added charges to the indictment against Trump claiming he tried to erase surveillance footage that prosecutors subpoenaed, which showed boxes of classified documents being removed from a storage room at his South Florida resort. Smith also indicted property manager Carlos De Oliveira, who allegedly worked with Trump to destroy the footage.De Oliveira made an initial court appearance this week, but did not enter a plea as he was still looking for a lawyer to represent him in Florida.Iowa is the first state to vote in the Republican presidential nomination process, and New York Times/Siena College polling of the state released today shows Donald Trump with a commanding lead:However, he’s underperforming his national poll numbers in Iowa, potentially giving rivals like Ron DeSantis an opening to catch up. From the Times’s story on the data:
      Even Iowa Republicans who say they favor other candidates could still swing Mr. Trump’s way.
      “Each indictment gets me leaning toward Trump,” said John-Charles Fish, 45, a Waukon, Iowa, social media consultant who said he still supported Mr. DeSantis, but barely. “It wouldn’t take much for me to change my mind,” he said.
      For Mr. DeSantis and other competitors, the Iowa survey yielded glimmers of bright spots. About 47 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters said they would consider other candidates. Among Republicans with at least a college degree, Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis are tied at 26 percent when the whole field is under consideration.
      In a head-to-head match between the front-runner and his closest rival, Mr. Trump leads Iowa handily, 55 percent to 39 percent, but he is well behind Mr. DeSantis among college-educated Republicans, 38 percent to 53 percent.
      According to the poll, Mr. DeSantis is seen as the more moral candidate, and although the Florida governor has been knocked for some awkward moments on the campaign trail, he is seen as considerably more likable than Mr. Trump. More than half of those surveyed said the term “likable” was a better fit for Mr. DeSantis, compared with 38 percent for Mr. Trump.
      The poll also suggests that Mr. DeSantis’s argument that he is the more electable Republican may be resonating with voters, at least in Iowa. Just under half of those surveyed said Mr. Trump is the candidate more able to beat Mr. Biden, while 40 percent said Mr. DeSantis is. Nationally, Mr. Trump holds a 30-percentage-point lead on the same question.
      Robert Corry, a business consultant in Grinnell, Iowa, praised Mr. DeSantis’s stewardship of Florida’s sprawling economy, his ability to “get things done” and his “exemplary, outstanding life.”
      Donald Trump continues to consolidate his support among Republicans, criminal charges be damned.He just announced endorsements from almost the entirety of Alabama’s congressional lawmakers, including all the Republicans in its House delegation. Perhaps what is more notable is who from the deeply red state did not endorse him.While Trump picked up the support of Republican senior senator Tommy Tuberville, junior senator Katie Britt has reportedly said she will not be endorsing any candidate for the GOP’s nomination. Republican governor Kay Ivey also has not made an endorsement, though the former president did gain the support of lieutenant governor Will Ainsworth.And needless to say, the sole Democrat in Alabama’s House delegation, Terri Sewell, did not endorse Trump.Donald Trump’s detractors have long dreamed of seeing him behind bars, and now that he’s the subject of not one, not two, but three and perhaps even four criminal indictments, it seems like that dream could become a reality.Or could it?The Washington Post has a story looking at the practical considerations that would determine whether Trump actually goes to jail if convicted of the state and federal charges he currently stands accused of. That would be an unprecedented situation, and some former government officials the Post spoke to were skeptical of the former president ever actually ending up behind bars:
      Could Trump face prison? “Theoretically, yes and practically, no,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former top federal prosecutor and counsel to then-FBI Director James B. Comey. Rosenberg served briefly as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in the Trump administration and notably said the president had “condoned police misconduct” in remarking to officers in Long Island that they need not protect suspects’ heads when loading them into police vehicles.
      “Any federal district judge ought to understand it raises enormous and unprecedented logistical issues,” Rosenberg said of the prospect Trump could be incarcerated. “Probation, fines, community service and home confinement are all alternatives.”
      And even if he is convicted, there are a range of possibilities for the type of sentence he could receive:
      The prospect of potentially decades in prison for Trump is politically loaded, though the charges he faces could carry such a penalty. After entering a not-guilty plea in Miami federal court on June 13, Trump claimed he was being threatened with “400 years in prison,” adding up the statutory maximum penalty for the 37 counts against him. The charges he faces in D.C. related to his alleged efforts to stay in power despite losing the election could add additional decades, based on that math.
      Judges almost never apply maximum penalties to first offenders and rarely stack sentences rather than let them run concurrently. However, federal sentencing guidelines are highly technical. Specialists estimate that a first offender convicted of multiple counts of willfully retaining national defense information and obstructing or conspiring to obstruct an investigation by concealing evidence might face a range of anything from 51 to 63 months on the low end — about five years — to 17½ to 22 years on the high end — or about 20 years, given Trump’s alleged leadership role and abuse of trust.
      Similarly, Jan. 6 riot defendants convicted at trial of two of the same counts with which Trump is charged — conspiring to or actually obstructing an official proceeding — have faced sentencing guideline ranges as high as seven to 11 years, and as low as less than two years.
      But judges always have the final say.
      “Without question, if it were anyone else [but Trump], prison would be a certainty,” said Thomas A. Durkin, a former federal prosecutor who teaches national security law at Loyola University Chicago. However, he said, “The Secret Service waiver issue is a novel and complex issue” that could theoretically factor into an exception.
      That said, if he does go to prison, the Post reports that it could actually things easier for his Secret Service details:
      Former and current Secret Service agents said that while there is no precedent, they feel certain the agency would insist on providing some form of 24/7 protection to an imprisoned former president. And, they say, the agency is probably planning for that possibility, seeking to match to some degree its normal practice of rotating three daily shifts of at least one or two agents providing close proximity protection.
      “This question keeps getting raised, yet no official answers” from the Secret Service, said Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent and now chief operating officer for Teneo Risk, a corporate advisory and communications firm. “However, we can infer how security measures could be implemented based on existing protective protocols. Unless there are changes in legislation or the former president waives protection, the U.S. Secret Service would likely maintain a protective environment around the president in accordance with their current practices.”
      Current and former agents said Trump’s detail would coordinate their protection work with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to ensure there was no conflict about duties or about how they would handle emergencies, as well as the former president’s routine movements in a prison — such as heading to exercise or meals. The Secret Service, they said, would maintain a bubble around Trump in any case, keeping him at a distance from other inmates.
      “In some ways, protection may be easier — the absence of travel means logistics get easier and confinement means that the former president’s location is always known,” Wackrow said. “Theoretically, the perimeter is well fortified — no one is worried about someone breaking into jail.”
      Ron DeSantis is having a rough go of his presidential campaign. His solution? “Start slitting throats”, as the Guardian Martin Pengelly reports:Rightwing Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis was widely condemned after he said that if elected to the White House, he would “start slitting throats” in the federal bureaucracy on his first day in power.The president of the National Treasury Employees Union, Tony Reardon, called the hardline Republican’s comment “repulsive and unworthy of the presidential campaign trail”.The president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), Everett Kelly, said: “Governor DeSantis’ threat to ‘start slitting throats’ of federal employees is dangerous, disgusting, disgraceful and disqualifying.”Among commentators, the columnist Max Boot called DeSantis’s words “deranged” while Bill Kristol, founder of the Bulwark, a conservative site, said the governor was “making a bold play to dominate the maniacal psychopath lane in the Republican primary”.DeSantis is a clear second in the Republican primary but more than 30 points behind Donald Trump in most averages, notwithstanding the former president’s proliferating legal jeopardy including 78 criminal charges.Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie visited Ukraine on Friday and met with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in an attempt to underscore US support for Kyiv by one of the people bidding to be the next Republican president of the US.The former New Jersey governor met Zelenskiy at the presidential palace after visiting a mass grave in Bucha and touring damage in Iprin. Christie also toured a child protection center in Kyiv.Other Republican candidates, including frontrunner Donald Trump, have been critical of the cost of supporting Ukraine. Florida governor Ron DeSantis earlier this year suggested that the war was simply a “territorial dispute” before backtracking. Another candidate, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, has called for an immediate end to the war and for Russia to keep its territorial gains.Former vice-president Mike Pence and US senator Tim Scott of South Carolina are also in the race, and Reuters notes both have argued it remains vital for the US to push back against Russian aggression.For more updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine, follow our live blog. A day after pleading not guilty to federal charges related to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection, Donald Trump is calling on the US supreme court to intercede in the legal battles he is facing.Trump, in a Truth Social post earlier today, repeated accusations that the legal troubles he brought upon himself amount to “election interference” from President Joe Biden.He said Biden “hit me with a barrage of weak lawsuits” that will “require massive amounts of my time [and] money to adjudicate”, resources that he claimed would have been used for advertising and rallies.Trump added:
      I am leading in all Polls, including against Crooked Joe, but this is not a level playing field. It is Election Interference, & the Supreme Court must intercede. MAGA!
      Mounting legal fees have forced Trump to drain his campaign’s financial resources ahead of the GOP primary season. In filings with the Federal Election Commission FEC) on Monday, Trump’s political action committee, Save America, said that at the end of June it had less than $4m cash on hand, having paid tens of millions of dollars in legal fees for the former president and associates. More

    • 200 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Finally, three reasons for Donald Trump to be afraid: a courtroom, a jury and the truth

      by

      I blame the father. Frederick Trump raised his children, one in particular, to believe that the world was divided into winners and losers and that there was no greater crime than to fall into the latter category. In 2020, Donald Trump was ready to bring down the American republic rather than admit before the shade of his dead father that he had lost a presidential election. Scholars speak of “losers’ consent” as an essential prerequisite of a democratic system: without it, there can be no peaceful transfer of power. For two and a half centuries, that model held in the US. But in 2020 it ran into a man who would rather destroy his country than wear the scarlet letter L on his forehead.The result is the indictment against Trump that arrived this week, the third – with one more expected – and easily the most serious. Across 45 pages, Trump is charged with plotting to overturn a democratic election – to thwart the will of the voters who had rejected him at the ballot box and thereby remain in power.The weary assumption is that, like the two previous indictments, this will not much damage Trump’s prospects in the 2024 election and might even boost them: a major national poll this week found him crushing all his Republican rivals for the party’s presidential nomination and dead even in the presumed match-up against Joe Biden. Even so, this case, whose court date will be set on 28 August, could scarcely be more significant. It will be the first great trial of the post-truth age.None of this should come as a surprise. Trump never hid who he was or what he intended. In 2016, he refused to say whether he would accept the outcome of the election he fought against Hillary Clinton: “I’ll keep you in suspense,” he said, and he was similarly coy four years later.Nor did he conceal his belief that his seat in the Oval Office put him above the law. Referring to the second article of the US constitution, he told an audience of teenagers in 2019, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”As for the impunity granted to him by his supporters, who give him more cash every time another felony charge lands, that too was foretold – by Trump himself. Back in January 2016, he predicted that he could stand on Fifth Avenue and “shoot somebody” and he would not lose any voters. So far, murder has not appeared on any Trump charge sheet, but the prescience of the remark still stands.More subtly, Trump revealed, and reveals, much of himself in the attacks he makes on others. He is currently insistent that he is the victim of Biden’s “weaponised” Department of Justice, suggesting that the independent federal prosecutors who drew up this week’s indictment were, in fact, mere partisan hacks doing the bidding of the president. And yet it is not Biden but Trump himself who has signalled that, if returned to the White House, he would end the independence of the criminal justice system, as part of a takeover of swathes of the administrative state, concentrating colossal power in his own hands. “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” one senior Trump lieutenant told the New York Times. It is Trump, not Biden, who envisages using the justice department as a hit squad against his enemies: he has promised, if re-elected, to order a criminal investigation into the current president. Again, no surprise: remember the way Trump led the 2016 crowds in anti-Clinton chants of “lock her up”.But just because we can’t claim to be surprised does not mean we shouldn’t be shocked. Several crucial principles are at stake in this case. One is that every vote must count: the victims of Trump’s conspiracy were the tens of millions of Americans who voted for Biden, whose ballots would have been cast aside had the ex-president prevailed.Another is that nobody is above the law. While Trump claims to be the victim of political persecution, the truth is that it would have been an intensely political decision not to pursue him, especially when more than 1,000 of his devotees have been charged for storming the Capitol on 6 January 2021. If they can be prosecuted for seeking to overturn the 2020 election, why can’t he?But perhaps the central principle at stake here is that there is such a thing as the truth. Trump has challenged that notion from the very start. Not just by lying – he’s not the first politician to do that – but by seeking to shake public faith in the very idea that truth is even possible.The former president spread specific lies claiming decisive electoral fraud in key states – as the indictment memorably puts it, “These claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false” – in order to construct the big lie of a stolen election. He built an alternative reality on that lie that persists to this day – a reality made up, incidentally, of the kind of “alternative facts” to which we were introduced within hours of his taking office. That episode related to the seemingly trivial matter of the size of his inauguration crowd. But it established Trump’s post-truth position: that there are no commonly accepted facts – not even those you can see with your own eyes – only claim and counter-claim.That’s why one of Trump’s go-to lines has long been “Nobody really knows”. (“Nobody really knows” if climate change is real was a 2016 classic of the form.) In a blizzard of competing claims, the blinded citizen can either retreat, confused, or else be guided by the leader who kindly tells them what is true and what is not. That was the Putin manoeuvre – his power rests on it – and Trump has made it his own. Not for nothing is his personal social media platform called Truth.Now, though, Trump’s brand of post-truth is set to face its most severe challenge. As the Economist notes this week, “a courtroom is a place where reality counts … In court, truth means something”. Up until now, Trump has succeeded in persuading half the country that they cannot trust awkward, discomforting facts, including those uncovered by federal investigators, because all such people – FBI agents, judges – are tools of the deep state. Every morsel of evidence can be dismissed as the handiwork of the “globalists and communists” who constitute America’s “corrupt ruling class”.The tactic has been remarkably effective. The acid of Trumpian post-truth has corroded large parts of the US system already, breaking public trust in elections, the media and much else. Will the courtroom that hears the United States of America v Donald J Trump be able to shut it out and remain free of its sulphuric touch? On the answer, much more than the fate of one poisonous man – shaped by a poisonous father – depends.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump valet lawyer has three potential conflicts of interest, prosecutors say

      by

      Federal prosecutors requested a hearing to inform Donald Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, about his lead lawyer’s potential conflicts of interest stemming from his defense work for at least three witnesses that could testify against Nauta and the former president in the classified documents case.The prosecutors made the request to US district court judge Aileen Cannon on Wednesday, explaining that Nauta’s lead lawyer, Stanley Woodward, represents two key Trump employees and formerly advised the Mar-a-Lago IT director, Yuscil Taveras, who is cooperating in the case.“All three of these witnesses may be witnesses for the government at trial, raising the possibility that Mr Woodward might be in the position of cross-examining past or current clients,” prosecutors wrote in the 11-page court filing. “These potential conflicts warrant a Garcia hearing.”At issue is Woodward’s prior representation of Taveras during the grand jury investigation earlier this year, when prosecutors concluded that Taveras had evidence that incriminated Nauta and had enough of his own legal exposure to warrant sending him a target letter.After Trump and Nauta were indicted in the classified documents case on 8 June, Taveras changed lawyers and swapped out Woodward, whose legal bills were being paid by Trump’s political action committee Save America, and retained a new lawyer on 5 July.In the weeks that followed, Taveras decided to share more evidence with prosecutors about how Nauta and Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker Carlos De Oliveira had asked him to delete surveillance footage – details that resulted last week in a superseding indictment against Trump, Nauta and De Oliveira.Trump and Nauta were charged last month in a sprawling indictment that outlined how Trump retained national security documents and obstructed the government’s efforts to retrieve them with the help of Nauta, who was seen moving boxes of documents on surveillance tapes, and lied to the FBI.The superseding indictment, filed in federal district court in Miami, added a new section titled “The Attempt to Delete Security Camera Footage” that described a scheme to wipe a server containing surveillance footage that showed boxes of classified documents being removed from the Mar-a-Lago storage room.The court filing said that Taveras told prosecutors he was unopposed to Woodward continuing to represent Nauta, but did not consent to Woodward using or disclosing his confidential deliberations in the course of defending Nauta.That would mean Woodward could face some limits in how vigorously he could defend Nauta at trial, since he might be obligated to stand down certain arguments he might have otherwise used to attack Taveras’s testimony during cross-examination.“An attorney’s cross-examination of a former or current client raises two principal dangers. First, the conflict may result in the attorney’s improper use or disclosure of the client’s confidences during the cross-examination. Second, the conflict may cause the attorney to pull his punches,” the filing said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWoodward could not immediately be reached for comment, but he has previously indicated he would file a motion in response.In their court filing, prosecutors added there could be additional conflicts for Woodward because out of the eight total witnesses who were ensnared by the grand jury investigation, the government intended to use at least two of them against Trump and Nauta at trial.The first witness “worked in the White House during Trump’s presidency and then subsequently worked for Trump’s post-presidential office in Florida” and the second “worked for Trump’s reelection campaign and worked for Trump’s political action committee after Trump’s presidency ended”.That raised the possibility of Woodward having multiple clients testifying against each other, and ultimately against Trump, with whom Nauta is said to be in an informal joint-defense agreement, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. More