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      US courts ruling in favor of justice department turns legal tide on Trump

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      US courts ruling in favor of justice department turns legal tide on TrumpThe ex-president’s supporters will no longer be able to avoid testifying before grand juries in Washington DC and Georgia A spate of major court rulings rejecting claims of executive privilege and other arguments by Donald Trump and his top allies are boosting investigations by the US justice department (DoJ) and a special Georgia grand jury into whether the former US president broke laws as he sought to overturn the 2020 election results.Justice department asks Pence to testify in Trump investigationRead moreFormer prosecutors say the upshot of these court rulings is that key Trump backers and ex-administration lawyers – such as ex-chief of staff Mark Meadows and legal adviser John Eastman – can no longer stave off testifying before grand juries in DC and Georgia. They are wanted for questioning about their knowledge of – or active roles in – Trump’s crusade to stop Joe Biden from taking office by leveling false charges of fraud.Due to a number of court decisions, Meadows, Eastman, Senator Lindsey Graham and others must testify before a special Georgia grand jury working with the Fulton county district attorney focused on the intense drive by Trump and top loyalists to pressure the Georgia secretary of state and other officials to thwart Biden’s victory there.Similarly, court rulings have meant that top Trump lawyers such as former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who opposed Trump’s zealous drive to overturn the 2020 election, had to testify without invoking executive privilege before a DC grand jury investigating Trump’s efforts to block Congress from certifying Biden’s election victory.On another legal front, some high level courts have ruled adversely for Trump regarding the hundreds of classified documents he took to his Florida resort Mar-a-Lago when he left office, thus helping an inquiry into whether he broke laws by holding onto papers that should have been sent to the National Archives.“Trump’s multipronged efforts to keep former advisers from testifying or providing documents to federal and state grand juries, as well as the January 6 committee, has met with repeated failure as judge after judge has rejected his legal arguments,” ex-justice department prosecutor Michael Zeldin told the Guardian. “Obtaining this testimony is a critical step, perhaps the last step, before state and federal prosecutors determine whether the former president should be indicted … It allows prosecutors for the first time to question these witnesses about their direct conversations with the former president.”Other ex-justice lawyers agree that Trump’s legal plight has now grown due to the key court rulings.“Favorable rulings by judges on issues like executive privilege and the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege bode well for agencies investigating Trump,” said Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney for eastern Michigan. “Legal challenges may create delay, but on the merits, with rare exception, judges are consistently ruling against him.”Although Trump has been irked by the spate of court rulings against him and his allies, experts point out that they have included decisions from typically conservative courts, as well as ones with more liberal leanings.Former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut, for instance, said that: “Just last month, the 11th circuit court of appeals, one of the country’s most conservative federal courts, delivered key rulings in both the Fulton county and DoJ Trump investigations.”Specifically, the court in separate rulings gave a green light to “DoJ criminal lawyers to review the seized, classified documents that Trump took to Mar-a-Lago, reversing renegade district court judge Aileen Cannon’s freeze-in-place order”, Aftergut said.In the other ruling, the court held that Graham “couldn’t hide behind the constitution’s ‘speech and debate’ clause to avoid testifying before the Atlanta grand jury”, Aftergut noted.“The speech and debate clause,” he pointed out, “only affords immunities from testifying about matters relating to congressional speeches and duties. That dog didn’t hunt here.”Soon after these rulings, the supreme court left both orders in place. “It’s enough to make an old prosecutor with stubborn faith in the courts proud,” Aftergut said.Separately, federal court judge David Carter, who issued a scathing decision earlier this year that implicated Trump and Eastman in a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, last month ruled that Eastman had to turn over 33 documents to the House January 6 panel including a number that the judge ruled were exempt from attorney-client privilege because they involved a crime or an attempted crime.Ex-justice lawyers say that a number of the recent court rulings should prove helpful to the special counsel Jack Smith, who attorney general Merrick Garland recently tapped to oversee both DoJ’s investigation into Trump’s retention of sensitive documents post presidency and the inquiry into his efforts to stop Biden from taking office.True to form, Trump didn’t waste any time attacking the new special counsel.“I have been going through this for six years – for six years I have been going through this, and I am not going to go through it any more,” Trump told Fox News Digital in an interview the same day Smith was appointed. “And I hope the Republicans have the courage to fight this.” More

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      Trump to barrel ahead with campaign reveal despite Republican pushback

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      Trump to barrel ahead with campaign reveal despite Republican pushbackSources say Trump will deliver the address from Mar-a-Lago Tuesday even though his candidates fared poorly in the midterms Donald Trump is expected to announce his 2024 presidential campaign on Tuesday night as planned, according to multiple sources close to the former US president, inserting himself into the center of national politics as he attempts to box out potential rivals seeking the Republican nomination.Trump for 2024 would be ‘bad mistake’, Republican says as blame game deepens Read moreTrump will deliver at 9pm ET a speech from the ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago resort, where he recently hosted a subdued midterm elections watch party, and detail several policy goals that aides hope could become central themes of the presidential campaign.Trump’s remarks were being finalized late into the night with a pair of speechwriters and his political team, the sources said, with aides keen for the former president to convey a degree of seriousness as he seeks voters to elevate him to a second term in the White House.The political team at Mar-a-Lago are aware nonetheless that Trump has a penchant for veering off script and delivering news as he pleases, often fixating on grievances over debunked election fraud claims that have historically done him no favors.Still, Trump appears to know that after the disappointing Republican results in the midterm elections, he is perhaps at his most politically vulnerable since the January 6 Capitol attack, and faces a critical moment to ensure he does not get discarded by the rest of the GOP.03:20The former president has been forced to shoulder some of the blame for poor performances in key races, including in Pennsylvania, where his handpicked Republican candidate, Mehmet Oz, lost to Democrat John Fetterman in a contest that allowed Democrats to keep the Senate majority.That prompted some of his trusted external advisers to urge him to delay announcing his 2024 candidacy until after the Senate runoff election in Georgia, where another of his Republican candidates, Herschel Walker, trailed Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock in a close general election.The group urging a delay feared that Trump could sink the Senate runoff for Republicans as he is widely considered to have done in 2020, when he focused on his own angry complaints about the 2020 election rather than helping the party’s two candidates, who both ended up losing.But Trump was told by top members of his political team to stick to the original schedule, the Guardian has previously reported, since delaying the announcement would give him the appearance of being wounded by the disappointing results in the midterms and would make him look weak.The calendar would also complicate an announcement later in the year, he was told, since waiting until the week after the runoffs in December would be the final week before Christmas – which would mean only several days of cable news coverage before the holiday season.A further consideration may have also been on Trump’s mind: the idea – though likely misguided – that declaring his candidacy would provide protection from the justice department as prosecutors investigate whether he criminally retained national security documents at Mar-a-Lago.Trump was swayed by the “go” advisers just a few days after election night for the midterms, the sources said. The decision was communicated as final and several “delay” advisers, like Jason Miller, reversed course to publicly support a Tuesday announcement.But Trump has remained unsettled about the possibility that Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who won re-election last week in a landslide, may consider a 2024 White House bid of his own – the one potential candidate he considers a genuine threat.To get ahead of rivals, reinforce his status as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, and if nothing else, seize the limelight, Trump has been itching for some time to launch his 2024 campaign and has already started laying the groundwork for the effort.The former president wanted to announce his candidacy at his final rally before the midterms when he stumped for Senate candidate JD Vance in Ohio, one of the bright spots for Trump’s endorsements given Vance’s comfortable victory.Instead, having been told to hold off his 2024 campaign launch for fear he could turn out more Democratic voters in the midterms, Trump ended up announcing that he would announce his candidacy – which his political team later rued as perhaps having the same effect.TopicsDonald TrumpRepublicansMar-a-LagoUS Capitol attackUS midterm elections 2022newsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Court files show evidence Trump handled records marked classified after presidency

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      Court files show evidence Trump handled records marked classified after presidencyJustice department filing claims former US president kept secret documents in drawer at Mar-a-Lago with other files from after his time in office Donald Trump retained documents bearing classification markings, along with communications from after his presidency, according to court filings describing the materials seized by the FBI as part of the ongoing criminal investigation into whether he mishandled national security information.The former US president kept in the desk drawer of his office at the Mar-a-Lago property one document marked “secret” and one marked “confidential” alongside three communications from a book author, a religious leader and a pollster, dated after he departed the White House.‘Where’s the beef?’: special master says Trump’s Mar-a-Lago records claims lack substanceRead moreThe mixed records could amount to evidence that Trump wilfully retained documents marked classified when he was no longer president as the justice department investigates unauthorised possession of national security materials, concealment of government records, and obstruction.The classification status of the two documents is in dispute after Trump claimed that all documents at Mar-a-Lago had been declassified before he left office, though no such evidence has emerged and his lawyers have not repeated it in court.New details about the commingled documents came in a eight-page filing submitted by the justice department on Saturday to Raymond Dearie, the special master examining whether the 103 documents seized by the FBI should be excluded from the evidence cache.The justice department said towards the end of the filing: “Because plaintiff [Trump] can only have received the documents bearing classification markings in his capacity as president, the entire mixed document is a presidential record.”The commingled records appear to have some significance to the criminal investigation, since the two classified documents were the only ones found in Trump’s office besides those contained in a leather-bound box and one additional document that the FBI seized during its search on 8 August.The leather-bound box contained some of the most sensitive records found at Mar-a-Lago: seven documents marked “top secret”, 15 marked “secret”, two marked “confidential”, as well as 45 empty folders with “classfied” banners and 28 folders marked “Return to Staff Secretary/Military Aide”.Trump has attacked the investigation as a partisan effort designed to hurt him politically, as analysts speculate he will announce his 2024 campaign on Tuesday. The Guardian identified the nature and location of the commingled documents at issue by comparing the unique identifier numbers with a spreadsheet filed by the justice department showing they were part of “Item #4” seized by the FBI, which is described in another filing as “Documents from Office”.The documents investigation is expected to intensify in the coming weeks, with the midterm elections largely finished and federal investigators closing in on several key witnesses.The justice department gained testimony last Friday from top Trump adviser Kash Patel about claims that all the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago were declassified, after he was forced to take limited immunity and appear before a federal grand jury in Washington.It comes after federal investigators also obtained contradictory accounts from Walt Nauta, a former White House valet who followed Trump to Florida after his presidency, about removing boxes from a storage room at Mar-a-Lago that was used to keep some documents marked classified.The justice department has also attempted in recent weeks to compel Trump to return more government documents that it believes to be in his possession, prompting some of Trump’s lawyers to discuss ideas such as having an outside firm certify that no more records remain, say people close to the matter.TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsMar-a-LagonewsReuse this content More

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      DoJ mulls immunity deal for Trump ally to secure testimony in Mar-a-Lago case

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      DoJ mulls immunity deal for Trump ally to secure testimony in Mar-a-Lago caseKash Patel’s close relationship with ex-president could provide information on how documents ended up at Trump’s resort The justice department is weighing whether to grant immunity to the Trump adviser Kash Patel and force his testimony about claims that highly sensitive government documents the FBI seized from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort were declassified, according to sources familiar with the matter.The status of the documents has emerged as relevant to the criminal investigation surrounding Trump’s mishandling of national security materials since it could strengthen a potential case that the former president was in violation of state secrecy laws.Trump and advisers such as Patel have claimed repeatedly since the FBI search in August that the documents bearing classification markings found at the property had in fact been declassified before the former president departed the White House.The claims that the documents were declassified have not been supported by evidence, however, and Trump’s lawyers have not repeated the assertions in a related legal dispute before a judge or in court filings where they could face penalties for lying.Justice department officials are examining whether to allow federal prosecutors to seek an order from the chief US district court judge in Washington Beryl Howell granting Patel limited use immunity to compel his testimony on the declassification issue and other matters, the sources said.The consideration for Patel appears to center on the fact that as one of Trump’s appointed representatives with the National Archives, he could offer material insight into the nature of the documents and how the former president regarded the records.And as a confidant to Trump with whom he maintains a close personal relationship, Patel appears to be in a position to speak to additional areas of interest in the investigation, including about how the documents came to end up at Mar-a-Lago and how Trump responded to requests for their return.Patel is an ardent Trump loyalist who started the Trump administration railing against the Russia investigation when he served on the House intelligence committee’s Republican staff and ended it as chief of staff to the defense secretary.Trump considered installing Patel as deputy CIA director in the weeks after the 2020 election until he was dissuaded by lawyers in the White House counsel’s office. Patel remained at the defense department, which delayed the deployment of the national guard for hours during the Capitol attack.The justice department is broadly averse to granting immunity – which offers guarantees against prosecution based on testimony or information derived from testimony – since it can potentially make bringing charges against the person in the future more difficult.The approval must also come from the top echelons of the justice department, according to guidelines, and the preference for prosecutors to obtain testimony is to have defendants plead guilty and then have them offer cooperation for a reduced sentence.In contemplating granting use immunity to Patel, the justice department would essentially be weighing whether to forgo a case against him in order to secure testimony that could lead to constructing a case against a more significant target such as Trump, a former US attorney said.The justice department had sought testimony from Patel when he was summoned to testify before a grand jury in Washington hearing evidence about Trump’s potential mishandling of national security materials and obstruction when he appeared resisted requests for their return, one source said.But Patel asserted his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination to an array of questions at the 13 October appearance, the source said, though the basis for some was not clear; even if the documents were not declassified, making false public statements would probably not be a crime.In the obstruction investigation surrounding Trump by the former special counsel Robert Mueller, for instance, prosecutors concluded that the former president’s false statements about his campaign’s ties to Russia would only have been criminal if he made them to Congress or the FBI.That led to the justice department seeking a hearing before Howell, the source said, where prosecutors disputed Patel’s basis for declining to testify – but the chief judge broadly agreed with Patel’s lawyers that he could reasonably believe he had reason to assert the fifth.A spokesman for the justice department and a lawyer for Patel declined to comment. But it appears to face a tricky decision about how to proceed with Patel, as well as with additional Trump aides and employees who have become caught up in the ongoing criminal investigation.Prosecutors in recent weeks have attempted to reinterview Trump’s personal valet Walt Nauta, who previously worked as West Wing valet before following the former president to Mar-a-Lago at the end of the administration, the sources said.The justice department grew skeptical of Nauta’s accounts about how he removed boxes from a storage room at the property where documents marked classified were being stored, after it issued a grand jury subpoena in May for the return of a range of documents.Nauta’s accounts – as well as testimony about Trump directing him to move boxes from the storage room – changed slightly between interviews, the sources said, leading prosecutors to seek a further interview under the tacit threat of potentially charging him with obstruction.That shadow of potential prosecution has alarmed Nauta, according to a source directly familiar with the matter, and he appears to have so far declined to be interviewed on the advice of his lawyer, who coincidentally also represents Patel.TopicsDonald TrumpMar-a-LagoUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      US supreme court rejects Trump appeal in Mar-a-Lago documents case

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      US supreme court rejects Trump appeal in Mar-a-Lago documents caseFormer president requested independent arbiter to vet more than 100 documents marked classified seized from his Florida home The US supreme court on Thursday rejected Donald Trump’s bid to let an independent arbiter vet more than 100 classified documents that were seized from his Florida home as he confronts a criminal investigation into his handling of sensitive government records.Trump privately admitted he lost 2020 election, top aides testifyRead moreThe justices, in a brief order, denied Trump’s emergency request that he made on 4 October asking them to lift a federal appeals court’s decision that prevented the arbiter from reviewing more than 100 documents marked as classified that were among the roughly 11,000 records seized by FBI agents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach on 8 August.There were no publicly noted dissents by any of the nine justices to the decision, which came two days after the justice department urged them to deny Trump’s request and keep the classified documents out of the hands of the arbiter, known as a special master.The court has a 6-3 conservative majority, including three justices appointed by Trump, who left office in January 2021.Federal officials obtained a court-approved warrant to search Trump’s residence after suspecting that not all classified documents in his possession had been returned after his presidency ended.Investigators searched for evidence of potential crimes related to unlawfully retaining national defense information and obstructing a federal investigation. Trump has denied wrongdoing and has called the investigation politically motivated.Trump went to court on 22 August in a bid to restrict justice department access to the documents as it pursues a criminal investigation.TopicsDonald TrumpUS supreme courtLaw (US)Mar-a-LagoUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Donald Trump seeks to withhold two folders seized at Mar-a-Lago

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      Donald Trump seeks to withhold two folders seized at Mar-a-LagoThe former US president is trying to exclude a specific set of seized documents from an inquiry into his handling of government records Donald Trump is seeking to withhold from the justice department two folders marked as containing correspondence with the National Archives and signing sheets that the FBI seized from his Mar-a-Lago resort, according to court filings in the special master review of the confiscated documents.The former US president’s privilege assertions over the folders, which appear to have direct relevance to the criminal investigation into whether he retained national defense information and obstructed justice, are significant as they represent an effort to exclude the items from the inquiry and keep them confidential.Most notably, Trump asserted privilege over the contents of one red folder marked as containing “NARA letters and other copies” and a second, manilla folder marked as containing “NARA letters one top sheet + 3 signing sheets”, a review of the court filings indicated.Trump lawyer refused to report all Mar-a-Lago records had been turned inRead moreThe former president also asserted privilege over 35 pages of documents titled “The President’s Calls” that included the presidential seal in the upper left corner and contained handwritten names, numbers, notes about messages and four blank pages of miscellaneous notes, the filings showed.Trump additionally also did the same over an unsigned 2017 letter concerning former special counsel Robert Mueller, pages of an email about election fraud lawsuits in Fulton County, Georgia, and deliberations about clemency to a certain “MB”, Ted Suhl and former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich.A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The documents the former president is attempting to withhold from the criminal investigation by asserting some sort of privilege – it was not clear whether he asserted executive or attorney-client privilege over the two folders, for instance – became clear after a Friday ruling by the special master.In the three-page order, US district court judge Raymond Dearie – appointed as the special master with a mandate to screen the seized materials for potential privilege issues – made public the unique identifier numbers for documents for which Trump is not claiming privilege.James Brown’s cape and Rudy gone wild: key takeaways from Haberman’s Trump bookRead moreOrdinarily, the exact nature of the documents being claimed as protected would remain private. But an apparent docketing error by the court earlier in the week revealed the seized materials that the justice department’s “filter team” identified as potentially privileged.By comparing the unique identifier numbers for which Trump was not claiming privilege with the inadvertently unsealed list of potentially privileged documents, the Guardian was able to identify which documents the former president was seeking to withhold from the department.The special master directed that the “filter team” should transfer the documents not deemed to be privileged by Trump to the “case team” conducting the criminal investigation before 10 October, the ruling showed.Once the documents are transferred, the special master wrote, Trump’s lawyers and the department should confer and attempt to resolve any disputes about executive privilege over the remaining records before 20 October – and then submit any outstanding issues to him to decide.TopicsDonald TrumpMar-a-LagoBiden administrationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Trump lawyer refused to report all Mar-a-Lago records had been turned in

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      Trump lawyer refused to report all Mar-a-Lago records had been turned inTrump told lawyer to report to National Archives that he had given them all the documents, but lawyer was ‘not sure’ that was true A lawyer for Donald Trump refused to report to the National Archives that the former president had turned over all Oval Office documents as required out of concern that the claim was a lie.Earlier this year, Trump returned 15 boxes of federal government records from his Mar-a-Lago resort home to the National Archives, and he directed one of his lawyers, Alex Cannon, to inform the agency that the boxes contained all the documents taken from his time in office.Cannon, who was facilitating the records’ return, refused Trump’s request because he “told others he was not sure if other documents were still at the [Florida resort] and would be uncomfortable making such a claim”, The Washington Post reported.Faced with Cannon’s refusal, Trump later directed a statement in February to aides saying that all his documents from his time in office had been returned to the National Archives and Records Administration. But federal agents later learned Trump still had government documents at Mar-a-Lago, including some records marked with the highest level of classification.The FBI seized those documents during its 8 August search of Mar-a-Lago.On Monday, the National Archives released a letter that revealed they had alerted lawyers for Trump in May 2021 that the former president’s correspondence with Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, were missing along with two dozen boxes of other records.The US justice department has been investigating whether Trump’s unauthorized retention of such government secrets violated multiple laws, including the Espionage Act.Trump’s aides turned over a set of documents in June to the justice department. The August search of Mar-a-Lago produced the seizure of thousands of documents, among them dozens of classified records.When archives officials opened the initial 15 boxes they recovered in January, they found a large volume of documents with classified markings and notified the justice department, which set off the chain of events leading the criminal investigation into Trump.Legal wrangling between the justice department and Trump’s lawyers has slowed that investigation down.Trump has claimed, without evidence, that the FBI planted evidence during its search of Mar-a-Lago residence. The federal judge presiding over those claims, Aileen Cannon, granted Trump’s request for an independent official known as a “special master” to review the seized documents before the case proceeded further.That review process is expected to last until between the end of November and the middle of December.TopicsDonald TrumpMar-a-LagoUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      DoJ pushes back on Trump’s claims it planted evidence at Mar-a-Lago

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      DoJ pushes back on Trump’s claims it planted evidence at Mar-a-Lago Agency files slightly amended list of seized materials and an affidavit that the list reflects what was taken during search The Department of Justice has pushed back on the unsubstantiated claims from Donald Trump that the agency planted evidence during its search of Mar-a-Lago, submitting a slightly amended list of seized materials and an affidavit that the list reflects what was taken during the 8 August search.The FBI submitted a first version of the inventory list several weeks ago. It only had one business day to compile the first list but had more time to submit the most recent version, reported CNN.The agency also said that, in the updated version, it filtered out potentially privileged items.“I am not aware of any documents or materials seized from the Premises on that date by the FBI that are not reflected in the Revised Detailed Property Inventory … other than materials that the Privilege Review Team has not provided to the Case Team,” wrote an FBI agent in the affidavit.The unnamed agent noted that changes between the two versions were “minor”.Judge Raymond Dearie, the special master appointed to review the documents case, requested that the FBI submit an inventory to provide a “full and accurate” picture of what was obtained in the search.Dearie’s request came after Trump and several allies claimed, without evidence, that the FBI planted items during its search of the Florida mansion.Dearie has given Trump’s lawyers until Friday to provide any evidence to back up the accusation that the agency is “incorrectly describing” any materials. “This submission shall be Plaintiff’s final opportunity to raise any factual dispute as to the completeness and accuracy of the Detailed Property Inventory,” Dearie wrote.TopicsDonald TrumpMar-a-LagoUS politicsFBInewsReuse this content More