Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      How Jack Smith Quickly Brought Two Indictments Against Trump

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      Last fall, a largely unknown former prosecutor with a beard and a brisk gait flew unnoticed to Washington from The Hague after being summoned to a secret meeting by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.Jack Smith’s job interview would remain unknown to all but a handful of department officials until hours before he was appointed special counsel to oversee two investigations into former President Donald J. Trump in mid-November.Over the past few months of frenetic activity, Mr. Smith’s anonymity has vanished. He has now indicted Mr. Trump twice: in June, for risking national security secrets by taking classified documents from the White House, and on Tuesday, in connection with his widespread efforts to subvert democracy and overturn an election in 2020 he clearly lost.And he has taken these actions with remarkable speed, aggressiveness and apparent indifference to collateral political consequences.Mr. Smith has now indicted former President Donald J. Trump twice.Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times“He’s going at a very fast clip — not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good — to the point that I sometimes worry they might be going a little too fast and haven’t buttoned everything up,” said Ryan Goodman, a professor at the New York University School of Law, before the release of the indictment in the election case.Mr. Smith told reporters that the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was “fueled by lies” — Mr. Trump’s lies — during brief remarks on Tuesday, after a jury in Washington indicted the former president on four counts.Mr. Smith is not the first special counsel to investigate Mr. Trump. From 2017 to 2019, Robert S. Mueller III examined ties between Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. In his final report, he laid out a frantic effort by Mr. Trump to thwart a federal inquiry but ultimately cited a Justice Department policy in not making a determination on whether the sitting president had committed a crime. Mr. Smith, by contrast, faces no such limits, given that Mr. Trump is no longer in office.But where Mr. Mueller took two years to conclude his investigations into Mr. Trump, Mr. Smith — who took over investigations into Mr. Trump that were several months old — delivered his basic assessment in two criminal investigations in a little over eight months.Beyond the contrast in circumstances and timing, there are undeniable differences between the two men, rooted in their respective ages, experiences, management styles and prosecutorial philosophies, that have shaped their divergent charging decisions.“His disposition, compared to Mueller, seems very different — he’s working against the clock, Mueller moved a lot more slowly,” said Mr. Goodman, who is a co-founder of Just Security, an online publication that has closely monitored the Trump investigations.Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans have accused Mr. Smith, without evidence, of pursuing a politically motivated investigation intended to destroy Mr. Trump’s chances of retaking the White House, including by leaking details of the case. But department officials have said Mr. Smith is committed to conducting a fair investigation, and he has defended his own lawyers against attacks from the Trump team, who accuse them of using unethical tactics.The former president has taken to calling Mr. Smith “deranged,” and some of his supporters have threatened the special counsel, his family and his team — prompting the U.S. Marshals to spend $1.9 million to provide protection for those who have been targeted, according to federal expense reports that cover the first four months of his tenure. Mr. Smith was flanked by a three-person security detail inside his own building when he delivered remarks to reporters on Tuesday.Mr. Mueller was an established and trusted national figure when he was appointed special counsel, unlike Mr. Smith, who was virtually unknown outside the department and drew a mixed record during his tenure. Mr. Mueller had already solidified a reputation as the most important F.B.I. director since J. Edgar Hoover, after protecting and reshaping the bureau at a time when some were calling for breaking it up following the intelligence failures that preceded the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel, was an established and trusted national figure when he was appointed.Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesBut there was, at times, a gap between the perception of Mr. Mueller and his ability to execute a difficult job under fire. Already in his mid-70s, he struck many of those who working with him as a notably diminished figure who, in testifying before Congress at the end of the investigation, was not entirely in command of the facts of his complex investigation.By comparison, Mr. Smith is someone who rose to the upper echelons of the Justice Department but is not well known outside of law enforcement circles. At 54, Mr. Smith, a lifelong prosecutor, is leading the investigation at the height of his career, not at the end of it.Mr. Smith is fresh off a stint as a war crimes prosecutor in The Hague and took over two investigations that were already well down the road. Mr. Smith sees himself as a ground-level prosecutor paid to make a series of fast decisions. He is determined to do everything he can to quickly strengthen a case (or end it) — by squeezing witnesses and using prosecutorial tools, such as summoning potential targets of prosecution before a grand jury to emphasize the seriousness of his inquiries, people close to him have said.When Mr. Smith took over as chief of the Justice Department’s public integrity unit in 2010, the unit was reeling from the collapse of a criminal case against former Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska. In his first few months on the job, he closed several prominent investigations into members of Congress without charges.At the time, Mr. Smith brushed off the suggestion that he had lost his nerve. “If I were the sort of person who could be cowed,” he said, “I would find another line of work.”Among his more notable corruption cases was a conviction of Robert McDonnell, the Republican former governor of Virginia, that was later overturned by the Supreme Court, and a conviction of former Representative Rick Renzi, Republican of Arizona, whom Mr. Trump pardoned during his final hours as president.Mr. Smith appears to be somewhat more involved than Mr. Mueller in the granular details of his investigations. Even so, he seldom sits in personally on witness interviews — and spoke only sparingly during two meetings with Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers, delegating the discussions to subordinates, according to people familiar with the situation.Mr. Smith’s stony style, intentional or not, has the effect of sowing considerable unease across a conference table or courtroom.James Trusty, who quit the former president’s defense team a day after meeting with Mr. Smith’s team in June, worked for years with Mr. Smith as a senior criminal prosecutor at Justice Department headquarters and told associates he was a “serious” adversary not to be underestimated. Other lawyers said Mr. Smith’s team has fed the sense of mystery by describing him in veiled or cryptic terms, with one calling him “the man behind the curtain.”He has been more public-facing than Mr. Mueller in one critical respect — delivering short, sober statements to the news media after each grand jury indictment.Mr. Mueller said little when faced with a barrage of falsehoods pushed publicly by Mr. Trump and his allies about him and his investigative team. But at a news conference after Mr. Trump was indicted in the documents case, Mr. Smith seemed to be speaking with an added purpose: to rebut claims that one of his prosecutors, Jay I. Bratt, had inappropriately pressured a defense lawyer representing one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.“The prosecutors in my office are among the most talented and experienced in the Department of Justice,” he said. “They have investigated this case hewing to the highest ethical standards.”While much attention has centered on Mr. Smith, most of the day-to-day work on critical elements of the case has been done by several prosecutors known for their aggressive approaches.One of them is J.P. Cooney, the former leader of the public corruption division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. Mr. Cooney has worked on several politically fraught trials and investigations that drew the ire of Republicans and Democrats alike.He unsuccessfully prosecuted two Democrats — Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Greg Craig, a former White House counsel during the Obama administration — and investigated Andrew G. McCabe, the former F.B.I. deputy director, who was vilified by Mr. Trump for the bureau’s Russia investigation. (Mr. McCabe was never prosecuted.)More recently, Mr. Cooney oversaw the lawyers prosecuting Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime political adviser to Mr. Trump. The lawyers quit in protest after the Justice Department under William P. Barr intervened in his sentencing. (Mr. Cooney was deeply upset by the intervention, but he said the case was “not the hill worth dying on” according to Aaron Zelinsky, a career prosecutor, who testified before the House Oversight Committee in 2020.)A second key player is Thomas P. Windom, who was brought in nearly a year before Mr. Smith’s appointment to coordinate the complicated Jan. 6 investigation that had once been seated in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington.Mr. Smith had a stint as a war crimes prosecutor at The Hague, in the Netherlands.Pool photo by Peter DejongMr. Smith has relied on F.B.I. agents to perform investigative tasks, which is not uncommon for special counsels. But the F.B.I. is not walled off from Mr. Smith’s investigation, unlike the agents who were detailed to work for John H. Durham, a special counsel who investigated the origins of the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation.In a letter to House Republicans in June, Carlos F. Uriarte, the Justice Department’s legislative affairs director, disclosed that Mr. Smith employed about 26 special agents, with additional agents being brought on from “time to time” for specific tasks related to the investigations.Mr. Smith, unlike many previous special counsels, did not hire most of the staff: He inherited two existing Trump investigations and moved them from Justice Department headquarters to his new office across town. Some of the investigative legwork was also done by investigators with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and agents with the Justice Department’s inspector general working alongside Mr. Windom at one point.He has, however, exerted direct control over both inquiries, trying to keep even the most quotidian information about his efforts away from the news media, and been present, if sotto voce, at the most critical moments.During Mr. Trump’s arraignment in Miami in June, Mr. Smith sat in the gallery, closely watching the proceedings. Some in the courtroom suggested he stared at Mr. Trump for much of the hearing, sizing him up.But that was not really the case. He listened intently to the lawyers on both sides, at times leaning in toward a colleague to make a whispered comment or ask a question.Alan Feuer More

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      After Indictment, DeSantis Suggests Trump Can’t Get a Fair Trial in D.C.

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida raced to respond to news that former President Donald J. Trump had been indicted a third time not by opining one way or the other on the new federal charges, but by leveling an unusual attack at residents of the District of Columbia, where the case is being prosecuted.Suggesting that Mr. Trump could not get a fair trial if the jurors were residents of the nation’s capital, an overwhelmingly Democratic city, Mr. DeSantis called for enacting reforms to let Americans have the right to remove cases from Washington, D.C. to their home districts.“Washington, D.C. is a ‘swamp’ and it is unfair to have to stand trial before a jury that is reflective of the swamp mentality,” Mr. DeSantis wrote on Twitter. “One of the reasons our country is in decline is the politicization of the rule of law. No more excuses — I will end the weaponization of the federal government.”The judge assigned to Mr. Trump, who was indicted on charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is Tanya S. Chutkan, a D.C. District Court judge who has routinely issued harsh penalties in Jan. 6-related cases against people who stormed the Capitol.The Republican candidates, who have sought to overtake the former president’s substantial lead in early polls with little success, have campaigned amid a backdrop of Mr. Trump’s legal battles that have sucked up valuable airtime and dominated media coverage. Here’s what the others said on Tuesday: Former Vice President Mike Pence, who was present at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack and was the target of some rioters — and whom the indictment describes as a key target of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the 2020 election — said that the indictment “serves as an important reminder: Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States.”Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, in a statement to The Times, echoed a common refrain among Republicans: that the Justice Department, under the Biden administration, had been weaponized against Mr. Biden’s political opponents. He referenced the case against Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s son, and said, “We’re watching Biden’s D.O.J. continue to hunt Republicans while protecting Democrats.”Vivek Ramaswamy, a tech entrepreneur and one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal defenders in the 2024 field, called the indictment “un-American.” He sought to absolve Mr. Trump of any responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and reiterated his previous promise that, if elected, he would pardon Mr. Trump. “The corrupt federal police just won’t stop until they’ve achieved their mission: eliminate Trump,” he said, and added: “Trump isn’t responsible for what happened on Jan 6. The real cause was systematic and pervasive censorship of citizens in the year leading up to it.”Former Representative Will Hurd of Texas, who has refused to pledge his support to Mr. Trump if he is the eventual nominee, was the first candidate to respond to the new indictment. “Let me be crystal clear: Trump’s presidential bid is driven by an attempt to stay out of prison and scam his supporters into footing his legal bills,” Mr. Hurd wrote. “His denial of the 2020 election results and actions on Jan. 6 show he’s unfit for office.”Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, who is running an explicitly anti-Trump campaign, reiterated his earlier calls for Mr. Trump to quit his campaign, calling him “morally responsible for the attack on our democracy.” Mr. Hutchinson said that if Mr. Trump does not drop out of the race, “voters must choose a different path.” More

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      Here Are the Charges Trump Faces in the Jan. 6 Case

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      The newly unsealed indictment of former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday leveled four criminal counts against him over his efforts to stay in power after the 2020 election: a conspiracy to violate civil rights, a conspiracy to defraud the government, the corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding and a conspiracy to carry out such obstruction.Here is a closer look at the charges.One of the charges, a conspiracy to violate rights, is Section 241 of Title 18 of the United States Code. A conviction on this charge is punishable by up to five years in prison.Congress enacted what is now Section 241 after the Civil War to go after white Americans in the South, including members of the Ku Klux Klan, who used terrorism to prevent formerly enslaved African Americans from voting. But in a series of cases in the 20th century, the Supreme Court upheld expanding use of the statute to election-fraud conspiracies, like ballot-box stuffing.In invoking the statute, the indictment frames it as “a conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.” Essentially, Mr. Smith has accused Mr. Trump of trying to rig the outcome of the election to falsely claim victory.“The purpose of the conspiracy was to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by using knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the federal government function by which those results are collected, counted and certified,” the indictment said.The indictment cites five means by which Mr. Trump and his accused co-conspirators sought to reverse the results of the election, including pushing state legislators and election officials to change electoral votes won by his opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., in his favor instead.“That is, on the pretext of baseless fraud claims, the defendant pushed officials in certain states to ignore the popular vote; disenfranchise millions of voters; dismiss legitimate electors; and ultimately, cause the ascertainment of and voting by illegitimate electors in favor of the defendant,” the indictment said.It also cited the recruitment of fake electors in swing states Mr. Biden won, trying to wield the power of the Justice Department to fuel lies about election conspiracy, and pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to delay the certification of the election or reject legitimate electors.The special counsel has accused Mr. Trump of trying to rig the outcome of the 2020 election to falsely claim victory.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAnd when all that failed, it said, Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators “exploited” the violent disruption of the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, by “redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those claims.”The indictment, which recounts each of those episodes in detail, relies on the same basic facts for the other counts against Mr. Trump.One of those, conspiracy to defraud the United States, involves Section 371. Any conviction on this charge is also punishable by up to five years in prison.The possibility of this charge has long been part of public discussion of the investigation. In March 2022, for example, a federal judge ruled that emails of John Eastman, a lawyer who advised Mr. Trump in the effort, were most likely involved in that crime and qualified for an exemption from attorney-client privilege.And the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 recommended in its final report in December 2022 that the Justice Department charge Mr. Trump and others with this offense.The third and fourth counts are closely related: corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to commit that crime. Both are provisions of Section 1512. Any conviction under that statute is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.Prosecutors have used this law to charge hundreds of people who participated in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, accusing them of obstructing the joint session of Congress to certify Mr. Biden’s victory.In April, a federal appeals court upheld the viability of applying that charge in relation to the Capitol attack, but using it against Mr. Trump may raise different issues since he did not personally participate in the riot. More

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      Donald Trump es acusado de cuatro cargos

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      El expresidente, que está en campaña para regresar a la Casa Blanca, ha sido imputado por sus intentos de usar los mecanismos del Estado para permanecer en el poder.El expresidente Donald Trump fue imputado el martes por sus esfuerzos generalizados de revertir las elecciones de 2020, luego de una amplia investigación federal sobre su intento de aferrarse al poder después de perder la presidencia ante Joseph Biden.La imputación la presentó el fiscal especial Jack Smith en la Corte Federal de Distrito en Washington.Se acusa a Trump de tres conspiraciones: una para defraudar a Estados Unidos, otra para obstruir un procedimiento oficial del gobierno y una tercera para privar al pueblo de derechos civiles previstos en la ley federal o la Constitución.“Cada una de estas conspiraciones, que se aprovechaban de la desconfianza generalizada que el acusado creaba a través de mentiras generalizadas y desestabilizadoras sobre el fraude electoral, atacaban una función esencial del gobierno federal de Estados Unidos: el proceso nacional de recolección, conteo y certificación de resultados de las elecciones presidenciales”, decía la acusación.También se indicó que Trump tuvo seis conspiradores pero no los nombró.Los cargos representan un momento extraordinario en la historia estadounidense: un expresidente, que está en campaña para regresar a la Casa Blanca, ha sido imputado por sus intentos de usar los mecanismos del poder gubernamental con el fin de trastocar la democracia y quedarse en el cargo contra la voluntad de los votantes.La acusación se produjo más de dos años y medio después de que una turba favorable a Trump —alentada por los discursos incendiarios del exmandatario y sus aliados— irrumpieron en el Capitolio el 6 de enero de 2021, en el peor ataque contra la sede del Congreso desde la Guerra de 1812.Un gran jurado federal devolvió la acusación unos ocho meses después de que el procurador general Merrick Garland nombrara a Smith, un fiscal federal de carrera, para que supervisara dos investigaciones contra Trump, una sobre el manejo de documentos clasificados y la otra sobre la manipulación de las elecciones. Sucedió un año después de que la Cámara de Representantes realizó audiencias de alto nivel sobre el ataque del 6 de enero y sus causas que dieron como resultado pruebas extensas de los esfuerzos de Trump por revertir los resultados electorales.Garland procedió a nombrar a Smith como fiscal especial unos días después de que Trump declarara que volvía a postularse.El expresidente enfrenta dos acusaciones federales distintas. En junio, Smith presentó cargos en Florida acusando a Trump —el principal contendiente a la nominación republicana a la presidencia para 2024— de retener de manera ilegal un conjunto de documentos de defensa nacional muy delicados y luego obstaculizar los intentos del gobierno para recuperarlos. Se espera que ese caso llegue a juicio en mayo.El esquema que Smith imputó el martes en el caso de la elección se desarrolló sobre todo en los dos meses transcurridos entre el Día de las Elecciones en noviembre de 2020 y el ataque al Capitolio. En ese tiempo. Trump participó en un amplio repertorio de esfuerzos para permanecer en el poder, a pesar de haber perdido frente a Biden en la contienda presidencial.Trump también enfrenta dificultades legales en las cortes estatales, además de los cargos a nivel federal en los casos de los documentos y las elecciones.La oficina del fiscal de distrito de Manhattan lo acusó en un caso enfocado en pagos hechos a la estrella porno Stormy Daniels con el fin de acallarla antes de las elecciones de 2016.Los esfuerzos de Trump y sus aliados para revertir su derrota electoral también son motivo de otra investigación a cargo del fiscal de distrito del Condado de Fulton, Georgia. Parece ser que esa indagatoria podría formular cargos este mes.Alan Feuer cubre los tribunales y la justicia penal para la sección Metro. Ha escrito sobre mafiosos, cárceles, mala conducta policial, condenas injustas, corrupción gubernamental y El Chapo, el jefe encarcelado del cártel de Sinaloa. Se unió al Times en 1999.Maggie Haberman es corresponsal de la Casa Blanca. Se unió al Times en 2015 como corresponsal de campaña y fue parte del equipo que ganó un premio Pulitzer en 2018 por informar sobre los asesores del presidente Trump y sus conexiones con Rusia. More

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      Jack Smith’s Experience in The Hague and the Trump Investigations

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      Donald Trump openly flatters foreign autocrats such as Vladimir V. Putin and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and in many ways Mr. Trump governed as authoritarians do around the globe: enriching himself, stoking ethnic hatreds, seeking personal control over the courts and the military, clinging to power at all costs. So it is especially fitting that he has been notified that he may soon be indicted on charges tied to alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election by an American prosecutor who is deeply versed in investigating the world’s worst tyrants and war criminals.Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel — who has already indicted Mr. Trump on charges of illegally retaining secret documents and obstructing justice — has a formidable record as a career federal prosecutor in Tennessee, New York and Washington. Yet he also has distinctive expertise from two high-stakes tours of duty as an international war crimes prosecutor: first at the International Criminal Court and then at a special legal institution investigating war crimes in Kosovo. For several momentous years in The Hague, he oversaw investigations of foreign government officials and militia members who stood accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.There are two competing visions of national and international justice at play in Mr. Smith’s investigation of Mr. Trump. One is the lofty principle that even presidents and prime ministers must answer to the law. The other is the reality that such powerful leaders can try to secure their own impunity by decrying justice as a sham and rallying their followers, threatening instability and violent backlash. These tensions have defined the history of international war crimes prosecutions; they marked Mr. Smith’s achievements in court; they are already at play in Mr. Trump’s attempts to thwart the rule of law.Start with the ideals. The United States championed two international military tribunals held at Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II, which put senior German and Japanese leaders on trial for aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Henry L. Stimson, the U.S. secretary of war, privately exhorted Franklin Delano Roosevelt that even Nazi war criminals should be given a “well-defined procedure” including “at least the rudimentary aspects of the Bill of Rights.”Both the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials convicted senior leaders for atrocities committed while in government, treating their deeds not as acts of state but as personal crimes punishable by law. After the Cold War, these principles of legal punishment for the world’s worst criminals were revived with United Nations tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as well as special courts for East Timor, Sierra Leone and elsewhere.Mr. Smith hewed to the ideal of individual criminal responsibility as the prosecutor for the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, which was created under U.S. and European pressure to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity from 1998 to 2000 related to Kosovo’s struggle for independence from Serbia. Although part of Kosovo’s legal system, the institution is headquartered in The Hague and staffed by international judges and personnel — which is how Mr. Smith, a U.S. citizen, wound up serving as its specialist prosecutor.In June 2020, his office revealed that it was seeking to indict Hashim Thaci, then Kosovo’s popular president, who was on his way to the White House for a summit with Serbia convened by the Trump administration. Mr. Thaci, a former Kosovo Liberation Army guerrilla leader, returned home, later resigning as president and being detained in The Hague in order to face several counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity in an ongoing trial that could last for years.It is always difficult and risky to prosecute national leaders with some popularity among their people. Savvy dictators will often secure a promise of amnesty as the price for a transition of power, which is why a furtive impunity — such as that promulgated in Chile by Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s military government in 1978 — is more common than spectacular trials such as Nuremberg or Tokyo. In order to impose justice on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the Allies had to commit to a devastating policy of unconditional surrender, which meant that German and Japanese war criminals could not negotiate for their own necks. Even so, the Truman administration quietly undercut that pledge of unconditional surrender for Emperor Hirohito, fearing that the Japanese might fight on if he was prosecuted as a war criminal. The Truman administration left the emperor securely in the Imperial Palace while his prime ministers and generals were tried and convicted by an Allied international military tribunal in Tokyo.At an earlier point in his career, from 2008 to 2010, Mr. Smith worked as the investigation coordinator in the prosecutor’s office at the International Criminal Court, the permanent international war crimes tribunal based in The Hague. Although 123 countries from Afghanistan to Zambia have joined the I.C.C., the tribunal was a bugbear for the Trump administration; Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, vowed to let it “die on its own,” while his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, reviled it as a “renegade, unlawful, so-called court.”Anyone working at the I.C.C. must understand how constrained and weak the court actually is. In 2009 and 2010, the I.C.C. issued arrest warrants for Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, charging him with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the Darfur region; he is still at large, even after being overthrown. When a prominent Kenyan politician, Uhuru Kenyatta, was charged with crimes against humanity after ethnic violence in the wake of his country’s 2007 presidential election, he decried the I.C.C. as a neocolonial violation of Kenya’s sovereignty. In 2013 he was narrowly elected president of Kenya. In 2014, the I.C.C. prosecutor dropped the charges against Mr. Kenyatta, fuming that Kenya’s government had obstructed evidence and intimidated witnesses.From Kenya to Kosovo, Mr. Smith presumably knows all too well how an indicted politician can mobilize his loyalists to defy and obstruct a prosecution. When Mr. Thaci’s trial started in The Hague in April, some Kosovars rallied in support of a leader seen by them as a heroic guerrilla fighter against Serbian oppression. Mr. Smith’s office has complained that Mr. Thaci and other suspects were trying to obstruct and undercut the work of prosecutors, as well as convicting two backers of the Kosovo Liberation Army for disseminating files stolen from the office.Mr. Trump is already instinctively following a similar playbook of bluster and intimidation — even though he is not facing an international tribunal, but the laws of the United States. He has compared the F.B.I. agents investigating him to the Gestapo and smeared Mr. Smith as “deranged,” while crudely warning an Iowa radio show that it would be “very dangerous” to jail him since he has “a tremendously passionate group of voters.”Yet Mr. Trump will find that Mr. Smith has dealt with the likes of him — and worse — before. The American prosecutor is well equipped to pursue the vision of a predecessor Robert H. Jackson, the eloquent Supreme Court justice who served as the U.S. chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, who declared in his opening address there: “Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance.”Gary J. Bass is the author of “The Blood Telegram” and the forthcoming “Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump Team Creates Legal-Defense Fund to Cover His Allies’ Bills

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      With investigations and legal fees piling up, a fund is planned to help witnesses and defendants. The former president’s legal bills are not expected to be included, however.Former President Donald J. Trump’s team is creating a legal-defense fund to handle some of the crush of legal bills stemming from the investigations and criminal indictments involving him and a number of employees and associates, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.The fund, which is expected to be called the Patriot Legal Defense Fund Inc., will be led by Michael Glassner, a longtime Trump political adviser, according to the people familiar with the planning, who were not authorized to discuss it publicly. Another Trump aide who worked at the Trump Organization and then in Mr. Trump’s administration, Lynne Patton, will also be involved, the people said.It is unclear how broad a group of people the legal-defense fund will cover, but one person said it was not expected to cover Mr. Trump’s own legal bills. In recent months Mr. Trump’s political action committee has paid legal bills for him and several witnesses, spending over $40 million on lawyers in the first half of 2023.But a wide swath of people have become entangled in the various Trump-related criminal investigations, both as witnesses — of which there are many who work for Mr. Trump personally or did in the White House — as well as defendants.A spokesman for Mr. Trump, Steven Cheung, said that the Justice Department had “targeted innocent Americans associated with President Trump,” and that “to combat these heinous actions” and “protect these innocent people from financial ruin and prevent their lives from being completely destroyed, a new legal defense fund will help pay for their legal fees to ensure they have representation against unlawful harassment.”Mr. Trump’s PAC, Save America, has been a focus of one of the investigations by the special counsel Jack Smith, who has had at least two grand juries looking at Mr. Trump and his allies and advisers. Mr. Smith’s team has questioned why some lawyers for specific witnesses are being paid, as well as whether aides to Mr. Trump and Republicans knew Mr. Trump had lost the election but continued to raise money off his debunked claims.The creation of the legal-defense fund could ease some of the financial pressure on Save America, which was severe enough that it requested a refund of the $60 million it had transferred to a pro-Trump super PAC late last year. Michael Glassner, a longtime Trump political adviser, will lead what is expected to be called the Patriot Legal Defense Fund Inc.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressMr. Trump now has two co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, in the federal investigation into his retention of reams of presidential material and classified documents after he left office. Both men work for Mr. Trump; Mr. Nauta works for the Trump campaign, and Mr. De Oliveira is the property manager at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club.Last month, Mr. Trump appeared at a fund-raiser at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., for a group that assists those arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 riot and their families. “I’m going to make a contribution,” Mr. Trump told them, according to a video of his remarks. That group’s name, the Patriot Freedom Project, echoes the new name of Mr. Trump’s legal fund.Mr. Trump had long resisted such an entity. For years, he told people that only guilty people have legal-defense funds.Mr. Trump, a wealthy businessman, has been using money parked in Save America to pay legal bills for himself and a number of witnesses in the four criminal investigations into his actions in and out of office. Save America was created to house the more than $100 million that Mr. Trump raised shortly after the November 2020 election, as he claimed he needed his supporters’ help to combat widespread voter fraud.No such widespread fraud was ever proved, but Mr. Trump had tens of millions of dollars at his disposal. He cannot spend the money directly on his 2024 presidential candidacy, but has been using it for legal bills. Last year, he made the $60 million transfer to the super PAC that is backing him, well before the refund request was made.In 2021 and 2022, Save America paid for Mr. Trump’s political operation while he was out of office and not an official candidate, paying for staff members and rallies. It also picked up $16 million in legal fees. Mr. Trump’s rivals have been using the Save America legal payments as an attack on him. And he appears to have recognized it as a potential weak point: On Saturday evening, at a rally in Erie, Pa., he said he would put whatever money he needs to put into his campaign, if it comes to that. More

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      Trump Says Republicans Should Investigate Democrats or Risk Losing Their Seats

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      Casting Republicans as meek, former President Donald J. Trump said members of his party should pursue investigations against Democrats — or risk losing their seats.Former President Donald J. Trump lashed out at Republicans in Congress while campaigning in Pennsylvania on Saturday, threatening members of his party who do not share his appetite for pursuing corruption investigations against President Biden and his family — and for retribution.In a litany of grievances about his deepening legal woes and the direction of the country, the twice-indicted former president cast G.O.P. holdouts as meek during a rally in Erie, Pa., criticizing their response to what he described as politically motivated prosecutions against him.“The Republicans are very high class,” he said. “You’ve got to get a little bit lower class.”And then Mr. Trump, the overwhelming front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, put party members on notice.“Any Republican that doesn’t act on Democratic fraud should be immediately primaried,” said Mr. Trump, to the roaring approval of several thousand supporters at the Erie Insurance Arena. Throughout the night he referenced the case against Hunter Biden and accused the president of complicity in his son’s troubles.It was the first solo campaign event and the second public appearance for Mr. Trump since the Justice Department added charges against him in connection with his mishandling of classified documents after leaving office.In a superseding indictment filed on Thursday in U.S. District Court in Florida, federal prosecutors presented evidence that Mr. Trump told the property manager of Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, that he wanted security camera footage there to be deleted.Prosecutors also charged him, along with one of his personal aides, with conspiring to obstruct the government’s repeated attempts to reclaim the classified material.On the same day that the additional charges were announced, Mr. Trump’s lawyers met with federal prosecutors to discuss another expected indictment, one centering on Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.Mr. Trump’s rally on Saturday was his first solo campaign event since the Justice Department added new charges against him in the documents case.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesTo Mr. Trump’s unflinching supporters gathered inside the arena, the cascade of indictments was a punchline — if not a badge of honor.Edward X. Young, 63, a debt consolidation company consultant and part-time actor who was dressed like Elvis Presley, wore a T-shirt with a mock-up mug shot of Mr. Trump. He said he had driven 10 hours from Point Pleasant, N.J., to attend Mr. Trump’s rally, his 59th.“I think he’s being persecuted,” he said of the former president. Ruth Jenkins, 61, a Republican from Rochester, N.Y., who works for a Wegmans grocery store, said that she did not believe that Mr. Trump had been motivated to run for president to avoid criminal liability.“Well, who wouldn’t want to be kept out of prison?” she said, claiming that the latest charges against Mr. Trump were the latest attempt to shift attention away from the case against the president’s son.As Mr. Trump prepared to take the stage, campaign workers helped fill in an empty section near the back of the arena, which had been configured to seat 8,000.The playlist for the rally featured “Try That in a Small Town,” the Jason Aldean hit that was filmed at the site of a lynching and pulled from Country Music Television amid criticism.With Mr. Trump as its standard-bearer, the Republican Party has watched Democrats in Pennsylvania secure high-profile victories in the last year, including flipping a U.S. Senate seat, holding on to the governor’s office and gaining control of the statehouse.In 2020, Mr. Trump lost the battleground state by nearly 82,000 votes to Mr. Biden, who was born there.Despite several courts rejecting his election lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Mr. Trump has continued to cling to falsehoods about results, including on Saturday.“We got screwed,” he said, baselessly claiming that news outlets had delayed their race calls because he had been ahead. “I said, ‘Why aren’t they calling Pennsylvania?’”Mr. Trump, who spoke for more than 100 minutes, said that he still had not decided whether he would take part in the first Republican presidential debate, which will take place on Aug. 23 and be televised by Fox News.Mr. Trump said that there appeared to be little upside to debating on a “hostile” network — Fox News began to fall out of favor with the former president after it became the first major outlet to call Arizona for Mr. Biden in 2020 — and noted his commanding polling lead over his G.O.P. opponents. His nearest competitor, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, trailed him by about 30 percentage points in national polls.“If I don’t go to the debate, they say — I’m not saying this — they say the ratings are going to be very bad,” he said. “Should I do it or not?”The crowd’s answer was resounding: “No.” More

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      Trump’s Lawyers Meet With Prosecutors as Election Interference Charges Loom

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      The former president’s legal team reportedly arrived at the office of Jack Smith, the special counsel leading the inquiry.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump were expected to meet on Thursday with officials in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, as federal prosecutors edged closer toward bringing an indictment against Mr. Trump in connection with his wide-ranging efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to three people familiar with the matter.It was not immediately clear what subjects would be discussed at the meeting or if Mr. Smith would take part. But similar gatherings are often used by defense lawyers as a last-ditch effort to argue against charges being filed or to convey their version of events in a criminal investigation.ABC News reported earlier that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had arrived at Mr. Smith’s office in Washington. They were seen driving into an underground garage shortly before 10 a.m.The former president’s legal team — including Todd Blanche and a newly hired lawyer, John Lauro — has been on high alert since last week, when prosecutors working for the special counsel sent Mr. Trump a so-called target letter in the election interference case. It was the clearest signal that charges could be coming.The letter described three potential counts that Mr. Trump could face: conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an official proceeding and a Reconstruction-era civil rights charge that makes it a crime to threaten or intimidate anyone in the “free exercise or enjoyment” of any right or privilege provided by the Constitution or by federal law.Another team of lawyers working at the time for Mr. Trump had a similar meeting with officials at the Justice Department last month, days before prosecutors led by Mr. Smith filed an indictment in Florida charging the former president with illegally holding onto 31 highly sensitive classified documents after leaving the White House.The indictment in the Florida case, which is set to go to trial in May, also accused Mr. Trump of conspiring with one of his personal aides, Walt Nauta, to obstruct the government’s repeated attempts to retrieve the classified documents.If Mr. Trump is charged in connection with his efforts to reverse his election loss, it would be an extraordinary moment in which a former president — and current presidential candidate — stood accused of using the powers of his own government to remain in office against the will of the voters.Mr. Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has already been charged not only in the classified documents case but also by the Manhattan district attorney, who has accused him of dozens of felonies related to hush money payments made to a porn actress in the run-up to the 2016 election.Mr. Trump also faces scrutiny from the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who is investigating his efforts to bend the results of the 2020 election in that state in his favor. More