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    Trump Says He Would Have Had a ‘Very Nasty Life’ if He’d Lost the Election

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    President Trump said Wednesday he would have had a “very nasty life” if he lost the presidential election, a surprisingly public acknowledgment that his legal challenges could have consumed his life and brought jail time.“If I lost, it would have been very bad,” Mr. Trump said at an investment summit in Miami Beach. “It was dangerous, actually very dangerous.”When Mr. Trump won in November, the Justice Department abandoned the two federal cases against him, and a judge in Manhattan issued an unconditional discharge in his hush money case.Mr. Trump gave voice to something that his advisers had long said he had in the back of his mind as he campaigned. But he did not publicly acknowledge throughout 2024 that he was campaigning for his freedom as much as for the White House itself.The president made the comments in response to a question about how he would spend a year if granted a sabbatical. Mr. Trump did not directly answer the question, saying he was honored to be president. But he said it took “a certain amount of courage” to run again because of the personal risks.Mr. Trump also said he disagreed with historians’ assessment that Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated, were the two most mistreated presidents.“Nobody was treated like me,” he said. “Nobody, and I will tell you, you learn a lot about yourself, but there’s nothing I’d rather do.”During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump faced dozens of criminal charges across four different cases. Jack Smith, who served as a special counsel, charged him in two different cases, one related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and another related to his handling of classified government documents after he left the White House in 2021. The documents case had been dismissed by a Trump-appointed judge, but Mr. Smith’s team was appealing it.He also faced charges in Georgia over attempts to overturn his election loss in 2020, and he was found guilty on all counts in the hush-money case in New York, where he could have faced up to four years in prison.Maggie Haberman More

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      End of Trump Cases Leaves Limits on Presidential Criminality Unclear

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      Donald J. Trump is set to regain office without clarity on the scope of presidential immunity and with a lingering cloud over whether outside special counsels can investigate high-level wrongdoing.The end of the two federal criminal cases against President-elect Donald J. Trump on Monday left momentous, unsettled questions about constraints on criminal wrongdoing by presidents, from the scope of presidential immunity to whether the Justice Department may continue to appoint outside special counsels to investigate high-level wrongdoing.Both cases against Mr. Trump — for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his later hoarding of classified government documents and obstruction of efforts to retrieve them — were short-circuited by the fact that he won the 2024 election before they could be definitively resolved.Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought both cases against Mr. Trump, asked courts on Monday to shut them down. The prosecutor cited the Justice Department’s longstanding view that the Constitution implicitly grants temporary immunity to sitting presidents, lest any prosecution distract them from their official duties.The result is not just that Mr. Trump appears set to escape any criminal accountability for his actions. (Mr. Smith left the door open to, in theory, refiling the charges after Mr. Trump leaves office, but the statute of limitations is likely to have run by then.) It also means that two open constitutional questions the cases have raised appear likely to go without definitive answers as Mr. Trump takes office.One is the extent of the protection from prosecution offered to former presidents by the Supreme Court’s ruling this summer establishing that they have a type of broad but not fully defined immunity for official acts taken while in office.The other is whether, when a president is suspected of committing crimes, the Justice Department can avoid conflicts of interest by bringing in an outside prosecutor to lead a semi-independent investigation into the matter.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Trump’s Win Helps Him Fight Off His Legal Charges

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      By triumphing at the ballot box, Donald Trump can dispense with federal charges against him while postponing or derailing other pending cases that have dogged him.For all that former President Donald J. Trump’s election to a second term was a remarkable political comeback, it was also the culmination of an audacious and stunningly successful legal strategy that could allow him to evade accountability for the array of charges against him.The string of accusations lodged during the two years of Mr. Trump’s candidacy, seemingly enough to end the career of almost any politician, became in his hands a fund-raising bonanza and a rallying cry, a deep pool of fuel for his rage and a call to demand retribution. The intensity of his campaign fed off the recognition that his personal freedom could be on the line.He was indicted not just once but twice for plotting to overturn the last election. He was accused of mishandling national security secrets and obstruction. He was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and for inflating his net worth. And he was found guilty of criminal charges stemming from a hush money payment to a porn star.Throughout it all, however, starting with his first indictment in the hush money case, legal proceedings that were meant to hold him to account only seemed to strengthen his support. His political standing strengthened, he was relentless in fighting off some charges, delaying a trial on others and banking on the election itself to settle what he could not win in the courtroom.The Justice Department has taken the position under administrations of both parties that prosecutors cannot pursue criminal charges against a sitting president to avoid interfering with his performance of his constitutional duties. That is a legal principle that the Trump administration Justice Department and his defense lawyers will surely press state courts and local prosecutors to adhere to as well.The result is that the decision by voters this week to return Mr. Trump to the White House could lead all or many of the proceedings against him to be postponed or derailed altogether.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Secret Files in Election Case Show How Judges Limited Trump’s Privilege

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      The partly unsealed rulings, orders and transcripts open a window on a momentous battle over grand jury testimony that played out in secret, creating important precedents about executive privilege.Court documents unsealed on Monday shed new light on a legal battle over which of former President Donald J. Trump’s White House aides had to testify before a grand jury in Washington that charged him with plotting to overturn the 2020 election, showing how judges carved out limits on executive privilege.The trove — including motions, judicial orders and transcripts of hearings in Federal District Court in Washington — did not reveal significant new details about Mr. Trump’s efforts to cling to power. But it did open a window on important questions of presidential power and revealed how judges grew frustrated with Mr. Trump’s longstanding strategy of seeking to delay accountability for his attempts to overturn his defeat to Joseph R. Biden Jr.The documents also created important — if not binding — precedents about the scope of executive privilege that could influence criminal investigations in which a current or former president instructs subordinates not to testify before a grand jury based on his constitutional authority to keep certain internal executive branch communications secret.Starting in the summer of 2022, and continuing with the appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel later that year, the Justice Department undertook a wide-ranging and extraordinary effort to compel grand jury testimony from several close aides to Mr. Trump. Prosecutors believed the aides had critical information about the former president’s attempts to overturn the results of the election.The effort, which ended in the spring of the following year, was largely intended to obtain firsthand accounts from key figures who had used claims of executive privilege and other legal protections to avoid testifying to investigators on the House committee that examined the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the events leading up to it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Rally in Michigan Dominated by More False Statements

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      Former President Donald J. Trump held a rally on Thursday in the key battleground state of Michigan that was notable mainly for his continued false statements and exaggerations on a number of subjects as varied as the 2020 election and the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene.In the roughly 85 minutes that Mr. Trump was onstage, he repeated a pattern of untrue assertions that have characterized many of his events as the 2024 presidential race heads into its final weeks. The crowd of supporters in Saginaw County, which he narrowly lost four years ago, included Mike Rogers, the former Michigan congressman and the Republican candidate for Michigan’s open Senate seat, and Pete Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican Party chairman.Mr. Trump reiterated his familiar false claim that he had won the 2020 election and made no acknowledgment of new evidence that was unsealed against him on Wednesday in the federal election subversion case. He also said his campaign was up in all polls in every swing state, while several public polls show close races and Vice President Kamala Harris leading narrowly in a number of battlegrounds.Mr. Trump also mischaracterized the state of funding at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, saying that the Biden administration had stolen disaster-relief money allocated to the agency to give to housing for undocumented immigrants so they would vote for Democrats.He cast electric cars as a threat to the auto industry, while at the same time praising Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive who has endorsed his candidacy and featured him prominently on X, the Musk-owned social media platform.Michigan was one of a handful of swing states where Mr. Trump and his allies tried to overturn his defeat in 2020 through a series of maneuvers that included breaching voting equipment and seeking to seat a set of fake presidential electors. Some of his supporters have been criminally charged in the state, where Mr. Trump was named as an unindicted co-conspirator this year.Mr. Trump spent time in his speech taking satisfaction over his choice of running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, whose debate performance this week was applauded by many.“I drafted the best athlete,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Vance. The audience — several thousand supporters at a recreation center at Saginaw Valley State University, roughly 100 miles north of Detroit — cheered.And he mused, at one point, that instead of being on a beach in Monte Carlo or someplace else, he was running for the presidency again. “If I had my choice of being here with you today or being on some magnificent beach with the waves hitting me in the face, I would take you every single time.”Overall as of Thursday, Ms. Harris led by two percentage points in Michigan, according to The New York Times’s polling average, 49 percent to 47 percent. The vice president is scheduled to return to the state on Friday, campaigning in Detroit and Flint. More

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      Four Takeaways From Jack Smith’s Brief in the Trump Election Case

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      The special counsel provided new details that help flesh out how Donald Trump sought to remain in power, while setting out his argument for the case to survive the Supreme Court’s immunity decision.The special counsel who has charged former President Donald J. Trump with a criminal conspiracy over his attempt to overturn his loss of the 2020 election has filed a lengthy brief laying out his key evidence along with an argument for why the case should be able to go forward despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in July on presidential immunity.Here are some key takeaways from the 165-page brief, which a judge largely unsealed on Wednesday:The prosecutor revealed new evidence.The brief contained far more detail than the indictment and included many specific allegations that were not previously part of the public record of the events leading up to the attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.None of the new details were game-changing revelations, but they add further texture to the available history. For example, part of the brief focuses on a social media post that Mr. Trump sent on the afternoon of the attack on the Capitol, telling supporters that Vice President Mike Pence had let them all down.Mr. Trump was sitting alone in the dining room off the Oval Office at the time. According to the brief, forensic data shows he was using the Twitter app on his phone and watching Fox News. Fox had just interviewed a man who was frustrated that Mr. Pence was not blocking the certification and then reported that a police officer may have been injured and the protesters had breached the Capitol.Rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesMr. Trump posted to Twitter that Mr. Pence had lacked the “courage” to do what was right. The mob became enraged at the vice president, and the Secret Service took him to a secure location. An aide to Mr. Trump rushed in to alert him to the peril Mr. Pence was in, but Mr. Trump looked at the aide and said only, “So what?” according to the brief.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Jan. 6 Case Filing, Trump Lawyers Again Demand Dismissal

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      Testing procedure, and perhaps the judge’s patience, the former president’s team sought to short-circuit a process to consider how much of the indictment can survive the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.For more than a year, lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump have employed aggressive tactics in defending him against two federal indictments.But late Thursday night, the lawyers tested the boundaries of normal legal process — and perhaps the patience of the federal judge overseeing the case in which the former president stands accused of plotting to overturn his 2020 election defeat.They used what was supposed to have been a procedural request for more information from prosecutors to demand that the judge strike the charges altogether — or at least remake the carefully considered schedule she set this month for pursuing next steps in the proceeding.“This case should be dismissed,” the lawyers wrote in the first sentence of their 30-page motion to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan. “Promptly.”While that sort of blunt assertion might not have been surprising in a filing that was actually meant to seek dismissal, Judge Chutkan had requested only that the lawyers weigh in on a procedural question. They were supposed to provide her with their arguments as to why she should force federal prosecutors led by the special counsel, Jack Smith, to give them more discovery information about the charges their client is facing.And yet, as they have done in other cases Mr. Trump is facing, the lawyers sought to repurpose the filing to their client’s own ends, employing the same type of combativeness expressed by Mr. Trump in discussing the charges against him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Trump’s 2020 Election Interference Case Is Back in Court

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      The hearing Thursday in the case accusing former President Donald J. Trump of seeking to overturn the 2020 election is largely being held to answer a single question: How should the presiding judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, move the matter forward in light of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling granting Mr. Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution?That is, the hearing will focus on the legal steps that will be used in the later and more substantive undertaking of sorting out which parts of Mr. Trump’s indictment need to be tossed out under the court’s immunity decision and which can survive and go to trial.To that end, Judge Chutkan will consider proposals from Mr. Trump’s lawyers and from prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith. By the end of the proceeding, in Federal District Court in Washington, she will most likely at least signal how she intends to move forward and how much time it may take to complete the task.When justices handed down their immunity ruling in July, they granted Mr. Trump — and all other future former presidents — wide-ranging protections against charges arising from actions they took in their official capacity. And as part of the ruling, they sent the case back to Judge Chutkan and ordered her to do the complex work of determining which of the indictment’s many allegations stemmed from Mr. Trump’s official acts as president and which arose from unofficial acts — say, from his private role as a candidate running for office.There are different ways that Judge Chutkan could conduct that sorting process.She could order the two sides to submit filings to her laying out their separate positions, perhaps supported by facts drawn from interviews with — or sworn statements from — some of the many witnesses who gave information to Mr. Smith’s team during their investigation.In theory, Judge Chutkan could also schedule another hearing and make some of those witnesses testify in public, though that seems unlikely in the near term given that neither Mr. Trump’s lawyers nor Mr. Smith’s deputies have requested such a proceeding.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      La jueza Tanya Chutkan vuelve a encargarse del caso de Trump por las elecciones federales

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      Si su historial sirve de guía, Chutkan intentará que los procedimientos previos al juicio sigan su curso tras un largo paréntesis y la decisión de la Corte Suprema de conceder amplia inmunidad a los expresidentes.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]La jueza Tanya Chutkan no perdió el tiempo el mes pasado cuando le devolvieron el caso más importante de su carrera: la acusación contra el expresidente Donald Trump por interferencia electoral.Después de ver durante casi ocho meses cómo los abogados de Trump luchaban hasta llegar a la Corte Suprema con lo que terminó siendo un argumento, en gran medida exitoso, que se basaba en que tenía amplia inmunidad de procesamiento por cargos derivados de sus actos oficiales como presidente, la jueza Chutkan actuó con rapidez para que los procedimientos previos al juicio volvieran a activarse.A las 24 horas de recuperar el caso, estableció un calendario para debatir el impacto de la decisión del tribunal sobre la inmunidad en el caso. Mientras trabajaba durante un sábado de agosto, también tuvo tiempo para poner orden en su escritorio y negar dos mociones de los abogados de Trump que el proceso de apelación le había prohibido analizar durante casi un año.El jueves, la jueza Chutkan presidirá una audiencia en el Tribunal Federal de Distrito de Washington en la que es probable que explique cómo piensa abordar la tarea de determinar qué partes de la acusación contra Trump tendrán que ser anuladas en virtud de la sentencia de inmunidad y cuáles podrán sobrevivir e ir a juicio.Su decisión final no solo determinará el futuro del caso, sino que también servirá para poner a prueba el estilo sobrio que ha aplicado desde que le fue asignado el pasado mes de agosto.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More