Trump, Donald J

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Building a Legal Wall Around Donald Trump

      by

      The American legal system is on the cusp of a remarkable historical achievement. In real time and under immense pressure, it has responded to an American insurrection in a manner that is both meting out justice to the participants and establishing a series of legal precedents that will stand as enduring deterrents to a future rebellion. In an era when so many American institutions have failed, the success of our legal institutions in responding to a grave crisis should be a source of genuine hope.I’m writing this newsletter days after the Michigan attorney general announced the prosecution of 16 Republicans for falsely presenting themselves as the electors qualified to vote in the Electoral College for Donald Trump following the 2020 election. That news came the same day that the former president announced on Truth Social that he’d received a so-called target letter from Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The target letter signals that the grand jury investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is likely to indict Trump, perhaps any day now.On Monday, a day before this wave of news, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected a desperate Trump attempt to disqualify the Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis from prosecuting Trump and to quash a special grand jury report about 2020 election misconduct. Trump’s team filed their petition on July 13. The court rejected it a mere four days later. Willis can continue her work, and she’s expected to begin issuing indictments — including potentially her own Trump indictment — in August, if not sooner.Presuming another Trump indictment (or more than one) is imminent — or even if it is not — the legal response to Jan. 6 will continue. But to truly understand where we are now, it’s important to track where we’ve been. If you rewind the clock to the late evening of Jan. 6, 2021, America’s long history of a peaceful transfer of power was over, broken by a demagogue and his mob. To make matters worse, there was no straight-line path to legal accountability.Prosecuting acts of violence against police — or acts of vandalism in the Capitol — was certainly easy enough, especially since much of the violence and destruction was caught on video. But prosecuting Trump’s thugs alone was hardly enough to address the sheer scale of MAGA misconduct. What about those who helped plan and set the stage for the insurrection? What about the failed candidate who set it all in motion, Donald Trump himself?Consider the legal challenges. The stolen election narrative was promulgated by a simply staggering amount of defamation — yet defamation cases are difficult to win in a nation that strongly protects free speech. Trump’s legal campaign was conducted by unethical lawyers raising frivolous arguments — yet attorney discipline, especially stretching across multiple jurisdictions, is notoriously difficult.The list continues. Trump’s team sought to take advantage of ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act, a 19th-century statute that might be one of the most poorly written statutes in the entire federal code. In addition, Trump’s team advanced a constitutional argument called the independent state legislature doctrine that would empower legislatures to dictate or distort the outcomes of congressional and presidential elections in their states.There’s more. When we watched insurrectionists storm the Capitol, we were watching the culminating moment of a seditious conspiracy, yet prosecutions for seditious conspiracy are both rare and difficult. And finally, the entire sorry and deadly affair was instigated by an American president — and an American president had never been indicted before, much less for his role in unlawfully attempting to overturn an American election.Now, consider the response. It’s easy to look at Trump’s persistent popularity with G.O.P. voters and the unrepentant boosterism of parts of right-wing media and despair. Does anything make a difference in the fight against Trump’s lawlessness and lies? The answer is yes, and the record is impressive. Let’s go through it.The pro-Trump media ecosphere that repeated and amplified his election lies has paid a price. Fox News agreed to a stunning $787 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, and multiple defamation cases continue against multiple right-wing media outlets.Trump’s lawyers and his lawyer allies have paid a price. Last month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the bulk of a sanctions award against Sidney Powell and a Mos Eisley cantina’s worth of Trump-allied lawyers. A New York State appellate court temporarily suspended Rudy Giuliani’s law license in 2021, and earlier this month a Washington, D.C., bar panel recommended that he be disbarred. Jenna Ellis, one of Guiliani’s partners in dangerous dishonesty and frivolous legal arguments, admitted to making multiple misrepresentations in a public censure from the Colorado Bar Association. John Eastman, the former dean of Chapman University’s law school and the author of an infamous legal memo that suggested Mike Pence could overturn the election, is facing his own bar trial in California.Congress has responded to the Jan. 6 crisis, passing bipartisan Electoral Count Act reforms that would make a repeat performance of the congressional attempt to overturn the election far more difficult.The Supreme Court has responded, deciding Moore v. Harper, which gutted the independent state legislature doctrine and guaranteed that partisan state legislatures are still subject to review by the courts.The criminal justice system has responded, securing hundreds of criminal convictions of Jan. 6 rioters, including seditious conspiracy convictions for multiple members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. And the criminal justice system is still responding, progressing steadily up the command and control chain, with Trump himself apparently the ultimate target.In roughly 30 months — light speed in legal time — the American legal system has built the case law necessary to combat and deter American insurrection. Bar associations are setting precedents. Courts are setting precedents. And these precedents are holding in the face of appeals and legal challenges.Do you wonder why the 2022 election was relatively routine and uneventful, even though the Republicans fielded a host of conspiracy-theorist candidates? Do you wonder why right-wing media was relatively tame after a series of tough G.O.P. losses, especially compared to the deranged hysterics in 2020? Yes, it matters that Trump was not a candidate, but it also matters that the right’s most lawless members have been prosecuted, sued and sanctioned.The consequences for Jan. 6 and the Stop the Steal movement are not exclusively legal. The midterm elections also represented a profound setback for the extreme MAGA right. According to an NBC News report, election-denying candidates “overwhelmingly lost” their races in swing states. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the relentless legal efforts also had a political payoff.And to be clear, this accountability has not come exclusively through the left — though the Biden administration and the Garland Justice Department deserve immense credit for their responses to Trump’s insurrection, which have been firm without overreaching. Multiple Republicans joined with Democrats to pass Electoral Count Act reform. Both conservative and liberal justices rejected the independent state legislature doctrine. Conservative and liberal judges, including multiple Trump appointees, likewise rejected Trump’s election challenges. Republican governors and other Republican elected officials in Arizona and Georgia withstood immense pressure from within their own party to uphold Joe Biden’s election win.American legal institutions have passed the Jan. 6 test so far, but the tests aren’t over. Trump is already attempting to substantially delay the trial on his federal indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case, and if a second federal indictment arrives soon, he’ll almost certainly attempt to delay it as well. Trump does not want to face a jury, and if he delays his trials long enough, he can run for president free of any felony convictions. And what if he wins?Simply put, the American people can override the rule of law. If they elect Trump in spite of his indictments, they will empower him to end his own federal criminal prosecutions and render state prosecutions a practical impossibility. They will empower him to pardon his allies. The American voters will break through the legal firewall that preserves our democracy from insurrection and rebellion.We can’t ask for too much from any legal system. A code of laws is ultimately no substitute for moral norms. Our constitutional republic cannot last indefinitely in the face of misinformation, conspiracy and violence. It can remove the worst actors from positions of power and influence. But it cannot ultimately save us from ourselves. American legal institutions have responded to a historical crisis, but all its victories could still be temporary. Our nation can choose the law, or it can choose Trump. It cannot choose both. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Obstruction Law Cited by Prosecutors in Trump Case Has Drawn Challenges

      by

      Hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters have been charged with obstruction of an official proceeding, but the charge, which could be applied to former President Donald J. Trump, has come under scrutiny.Well before the prosecutors investigating Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election laid out for him three laws that could be the basis for an indictment, one of the statutes, covering obstruction of an official proceeding, had already been used against — and challenged by — scores of rioters who took part in the storming of the Capitol.The legal questions around applying the obstruction law to the attack on Jan. 6, 2021, have spawned a pair of federal appeals court cases — and could even end up in front of the Supreme Court. But while it might seem risky for the special counsel, Jack Smith, to include the obstruction count in an indictment before the attacks against it are resolved, the way in which the law is written could make it almost uniquely suited to charging Mr. Trump.The count — formally known in the penal code as 18 U.S.C. 1512(c)(2) — makes it a crime to “corruptly” obstruct, impede or interfere with any official government proceeding, and carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.In more than 300 Jan. 6 riot cases, prosecutors have used the law to describe the central event that day: the disruption of the Electoral College vote certification that was taking place inside the Capitol during a joint session of Congress.In general, defendants have been charged with the obstruction count when prosecutors believe they have evidence that their actions on Jan. 6 played some role in stopping the certification process or in chasing lawmakers away from their duties. But as soon as the charge began to be used in Capitol riot cases, defense lawyers started arguing that the government was stretching the statute far beyond its intended scope.By its plain text, the measure seemingly has nothing to do with mobs or riots. It was passed into law in 2002 as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which sought to clamp down on corporate malfeasance, and was initially meant to prohibit things like shredding documents or tampering with witnesses in congressional inquiries.In April, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the use of the obstruction count, even while acknowledging that it had never been applied in quite the way it had been in the Jan. 6 cases.The decision by the three-judge panel — which included two Trump appointees — largely homed in on just one of the complaints against the statute. The panel said that any obstruction committed by rioters at the Capitol did not have to relate exclusively to the law’s original prohibitions against tampering with witnesses or destroying documents.But the panel reserved judgment on a separate challenge to the law, one involving the definition of the word “corruptly.” That issue could relate more directly to Mr. Trump, should he be charged with the count.In its arguments to the appeals court, the government said that acting corruptly should be broadly construed to include all sorts of unlawful behavior, such as destroying government property or assaulting police officers. The defense argued for a much narrower interpretation, seeking to define the term as acting illegally to procure something to directly benefit oneself.This challenge is at the center of the second appeals court case in Washington and could be decided any day now. It could also affect how the law applies to Mr. Trump: Unlike many of the rioters on the ground who stood to gain little for themselves by stopping the certification process on Jan. 6, Mr. Trump stood to gain something of immense personal value that day: a victory in the election.While it remains unknown how Mr. Smith might structure an obstruction charge, he could opt to use it to describe the pressure campaign that Mr. Trump and some of his allies mounted against Vice President Mike Pence. The president and lawyers close to him like John Eastman sought to strong-arm Mr. Pence into using his role in overseeing the election certification on Jan. 6 to unilaterally toss the race to Mr. Trump.Last year, the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 urged that Mr. Trump be charged with obstruction of an official proceeding among other counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and incitement to insurrection. But long before those recommendations were made, judges and lawyers involved in Jan. 6 criminal cases were exploring whether Mr. Trump’s behavior — specifically his attempts to pressure Mr. Pence — violated the obstruction count.In November 2021, for example, at an early hearing discussing the validity of the charge, James Pearce, a prosecutor who has handled many of the Justice Department’s thorniest Capitol riot legal issues, argued in court that if someone urged Mr. Pence to break the law on Jan. 6, it could qualify as a corrupt act of obstruction. While Mr. Pearce never mentioned Mr. Trump by name, it was clear he was discussing the former president’s attempts to get Mr. Pence to do his bidding that day.“One of the definitions of ‘corruptly’ is trying to get someone to violate a legal duty,” Mr. Pearce said.Mr. Smith’s election interference inquiry is not the first time prosecutors have used 1512(c)(2) as the basis for scrutinizing Mr. Trump. The provision was also instrumental in the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who examined whether Mr. Trump obstructed efforts to look for ties between Russia and his 2016 presidential campaign.In 2018, William P. Barr, before he got the job as Mr. Trump’s attorney general, wrote a memo to top officials in the Justice Department complaining that Mr. Mueller’s use of the obstruction count was “premised on a novel and legally insupportable reading of the law.”Mr. Mueller, Mr. Barr wrote, was “proposing an unprecedented expansion of obstruction laws” in an effort to find a way to charge Mr. Trump for actions that he had the constitutional power to carry out. (Mr. Mueller never sought to charge Mr. Trump.)Some legal experts have said that Mr. Trump could mount an attack against the obstruction charge, if it is brought by Mr. Smith, by arguing that he truly believed he had been robbed of victory by fraud in the election and, therefore, could not be accused of having acted corruptly.But last week, a senior federal judge in Washington, Royce C. Lamberth, found a high-profile Jan. 6 rioter guilty of the obstruction count despite the defendant’s repeated claims that he believed the election had been stolen.Judge Lamberth’s reasoning — which came in the case of Alan Hostetter, a former police chief turned yoga instructor from Southern California — made no mention of Mr. Trump’s potential criminal exposure, but it could set a legal basis for refuting any attempts by the former president to get around the law’s references to “corruptly.”“Even if Mr. Hostetter genuinely believed the election was stolen and that public officials had committed treason, that does not change the fact that he acted corruptly with consciousness of wrongdoing,” Judge Lamberth wrote. “Belief that your actions are serving a greater good does not negate consciousness of wrongdoing.” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is Where Paranoia Meets Legacy Admissions

      by

      It feels dangerous to write about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: In the lag between when I put the finishing touches on this and when it becomes publicly available, I could be a conspiracy theory or two behind.I could be mulling his apparent belief that the coronavirus was diabolically engineered to spare Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish people while he has already moved on to the hypothesis that Ron DeSantis is a hologram gone haywire (I could buy into this one), the revelation that earbuds deliver subconsciously perceptible government propaganda through our auditory canals or the epiphany that French bulldogs cause global warming. He’s a crank who cranks out whoppers the way Taylor Swift disgorges perfect pop songs.But we hang on her words for her craft. We hang on his for his clan. Kennedy is where paranoia meets legacy admissions. Like Donald Trump, with whom he has much more in common than he probably cares to admit, he’s an elitist hawking anti-elitism, an insider somehow branding himself an outsider, a scion styled as a spoiler, a populist as paradox. Why do Americans keep falling for these arrogant oxymorons?Oh, I understand the appeal of the perspective that narcissists like Trump and Kennedy peddle: that sinister operators deploy nefarious tricks to shore up their own dominance and keep hard-working, well-intentioned, regular folks in their places. It’s an exaggeration of inequities and injustices that really do exist, and it simplifies a maddeningly complex world. Ranting about George Soros or Anthony Fauci feels a whole lot better than raging at the vicissitudes of fate.But why turn to preachers like Trump and Kennedy for this anti-gospel? It’s like consulting sharks about veganism. Trump commenced his career with a big, fat wad of money from his rich father. He attended business school in the Ivy League. He hobnobbed with big-name politicians before he turned against them. He has an eagle’s nest of a penthouse in the financial capital of the world.And Kennedy? He belongs to perhaps the most storied family in American political life. His uncle’s White House was nicknamed Camelot, for heaven’s sake.That legacy is suffused with immeasurable heartache. I can’t imagine his pain at seeing that uncle murdered and then having his own father meet the same fate. I bet it stings to this day.But Kennedy’s place in a bona fide dynasty has also meant access, influence, mulligans. “Kicked out of an elite roster of prep schools, he still managed to arrive at Harvard in 1972,” Rebecca Traister wrote in an excellent recent profile of him and his presidential campaign in New York magazine, where she also described how he is “leaning hard into his family in this contest; his logo even borrows the iconography of his father’s 1968 campaign.”In an insightful column in The Times, my colleague Michelle Goldberg noted how, at a June rally in New Hampshire, Kennedy pitched his presidential bid as a return of his family’s magic and majesty. “We can restore America to the awesome vitality of the original Kennedy era,” he told an adoring crowd.It takes a yachtload of nerve to flaunt that pedigree while disparaging an entrenched political class, but across his speeches and interviews, Kennedy tries to have it all ways. He’s marginalized! He’s royalty! He’s the skunk at the garden party! He’s the cucumber sandwiches!All of which makes him an especially incoherent opportunist. Let’s be clear: As Kennedy promotes the specter of microchips in vaccines, as he posits that H.I.V. may not be the sole cause of AIDS, as he says that Anne Frank had it better than Americans under Covid lockdown, as he claims that Covid vaccines are often deadlier than what they’re supposed to prevent, as he fingers the C.I.A. for his uncle’s assassination and Prozac for mass shootings, he can portray a society in which the deck is stacked against all the little people because the deck has been stacked so heavily in his favor. His rapt audiences and his shimmering Kennedy-ness are inextricable.He has complained of being “deplatformed” for his, um, unconventional thinking, but he has conventional platforms aplenty. He does interviews galore. If there’s a conspiracy afoot, it’s working to his advantage. His visage, voice and views are everywhere I turn.And they speak to what a strange and scary time this is. So many Americans are so angry and distrustful that they’ll look for answers in the strangest of places. They’ll bow down to and elevate the unlikeliest of prophets. Trump and Kennedy are the self-proclaimed martyrs of the moment. There will be more where they came from.For the Love of SentencesDiane Keaton in the 1984 film adaptation of the John le Carré novel “The Little Drummer Girl.”Everett CollectionAs someone who has barely scratched the surface of John le Carré’s oeuvre, I very much needed Sam Adler-Bell’s recent guide in The Times to the best plotted, best written and most alluring of the prolific novelist’s works. It was, additionally, a lode of deft prose, such as his pitch for “A Perfect Spy,” published in 1986: “This is a great, whooshing thrill of a book! I recommend it constantly, the way annoying people recommend hydration.” (Thanks to Eric Andrus of Chelmsford, Mass., for nominating this.)Also in The Times, Kevin Roose wrestled with the grim undercurrent of the work done at a company trying to develop safe, responsible A.I. tools: “Not every conversation I had at Anthropic revolved around existential risk. But dread was a dominant theme. At times, I felt like a food writer who was assigned to cover a trendy new restaurant, only to discover that the kitchen staff wanted to talk about nothing but food poisoning.” (Ralph Begleiter, Ocean View, Del.)And Nick Kristof contrasted the dynamism and visual vibrancy of Eastern European countries today with their drabness when he traveled through them during the Soviet era and his “main impression was that in the Communist bloc you didn’t need color film.” (Jim Grout, Brentwood, Tenn.)In The Atlantic, Matt Seaton described his area of Vermont after the recent deluge: “If you were close enough to the river on Monday, above the roar of millions of gallons of raging brown murk, you could hear the uncanny kerthunk of huge rocks being smashed into one another, like a terrifying subaquatic game of pinball played by angry rain gods.” (Donna Meadows, Houston)Also in The Atlantic, Yair Rosenberg assessed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s antisemitic rant about Covid: “Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist, and the arc of conspiracy is short and bends toward the Jews.” (Rhoda Leichter, Pacific Palisades, Calif.)In The New Yorker, Susan Orlean conducted a funny, incisive tour of cooking gadgets come and gone: “The graveyard of kitchen fads is wide and deep, littered with the domestic equivalent of white dwarf stars that blazed with astonishing luminosity for a moment and then deteriorated into space junk.” (Ray Smith, Lutz, Fla.)In The New York Review of Books, Jessica Riskin assessed the limits of a new kind of student shortcut: “My teaching assistants and I became expert at sniffing out A.I.-generated essays by their flat, featureless feel, the literary equivalent of fluorescent lighting.” (Paul Ansell, Tampa Bay, Fla.)In The Los Angeles Times, Justin Chang managed, in his review of “Barbie,” to allude to its pink-and-purple palette and its opening on the same weekend as “Oppenheimer” in the same sentence: “I must point out the existence of Emma Mackey as Physicist Barbie, who presumably discovered the secrets of nuclear fuchsian.” (Bob Meadow, Los Angeles) That review also had an aptly playful headline that made rhyming reference to the movie’s stars, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling: “With Robbie in pink and Gosling in mink, ‘Barbie’ (wink-wink) will make you think.”And in The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay appraised Carlos Alcaraz’s victory over Novak Djokovic in an epic five-set showdown at Wimbledon by noting Djokovic’s preternatural stamina. “There may be no harder opponent to close out in sports,” Gay wrote, adding: “Even after you defeat Djokovic, you should go up to the scorekeeper and get the result in writing, just to confirm.” (Barbara Gaynes, Harrison, N.Y.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.What I’m Reading, Watching and DoingFrank BruniThe work of the Washington Post columnist David Von Drehle is a mainstay of the For the Love of Sentences section. His recently published book, “The Book of Charlie: Wisdom From the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man,” is a gorgeously written examination of one centenarian’s eventful past as an example of all the disruption that life can mete out — and all the fortitude with which a human being can respond.A line from Anthony Lane’s review in The New Yorker of “Master Gardener,” Paul Schrader’s latest movie, appeared in For the Love of Sentences in early June, but I hadn’t seen the film at that point. I subsequently watched it. While it doesn’t rise nearly to the level of “First Reformed,” the first installment of what Schrader has called a trilogy of movies about boxed-in, haunted men — the second was “The Card Counter” — it has one sublime supporting performance, by the actress who plays Norma Haverhill, the owner of an estate with extensive formal gardens “whose name is like a mash-up of Norma Desmond and Miss Havisham, and whose gaze could nip the buds off a damask rose at 40 yards,” as Lane wrote. Lane went on to pay fitting tribute to that performer: “One thing I do believe in is the power of Sigourney Weaver. She makes Norma authentically scary, investing every gesture with the fierce languor of entitlement.” (“Master Gardener” is streaming on several platforms and can, for example, be rented through Prime Video or Apple TV+.)I don’t keep careful track, but it has apparently been about a month and a half since I gave you a report or photo of my four-legged companion. And you let me know it! I love that many of you miss Regan and ask after her and even worry that her absence from the newsletter means that something’s wrong. She and I recently hit the road for just a bit to visit a few friends, and as you can see from the picture above, Regan has an awful time trying to get comfortable in new surroundings. If only she could learn to relax.On a Personal NoteChristopher Dubia/Gallery StockAlmost every afternoon last week, I took a very long, very fast walk with intervals of running mixed in; just once, I didn’t bother to stretch when I was done. The next morning, I paid for that. My creaky knees! My knotted calves! There was no forgiveness for my lapse, not the way there was in years past, when my stretching was reliably unreliable.Similarly, I get no allowance anymore for evenings of gluttony. Back when I was The Times’s restaurant critic in my early 40s, I could atone for an excessive dinner and erase its effects by just increasing my exercise in its immediate aftermath. Now I need the better part of a week to get back to where I was.At 58, I reflect often on the differences between youth and age. One of the biggest is the margin for error. You have a big, broad one when you’re young, and that applies not just to muscles and midriffs but also to relationships, jobs and more.You can be sloppy, and the wages are modest. You can be heedless and recover. You can squander an opportunity and still find another (and maybe even another) and make the most of it, having learned from your mistakes. You have time. You have flexibility. Everything is more elastic — your knees, your calves, your skin, your heart.Don’t get me wrong: Age has its benefits. I much prefer 58 to 28. As I described in my most recent book, “The Beauty of Dusk,” age can bring a perspective and sense of peace that are so elusive in youth, when many of us are too distracted — by self-doubt, by want, by envy, by vanity — to learn the trick of contentment.But age also compels us to proceed with caution. To take greater care. The flesh-and-blood vessels that we occupy are more fragile. The promises we mean to keep and the plans we intend to execute can be postponed only so much. Time is of the essence. Which is perhaps why we’re graced with the wisdom to see that. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Trump’s Trial Dates Collide With His 2024 Campaign Calendar

      by

      The Republican front-runner is facing a growing tangle of criminal and civil trials that will overlap with next year’s presidential primaries.As former President Donald J. Trump campaigns for the White House while multiple criminal prosecutions against him play out, at least one thing is clear: Under the laws of physics, he cannot be in two places at once.Generally, criminal defendants must be present in the courtroom during their trials. Not only will that force Mr. Trump to step away from the campaign trail, possibly for weeks at a time, but the judges overseeing his trials must also jostle for position in sequencing dates. The collision course is raising extraordinary — and unprecedented — questions about the logistical, legal and political challenges of various trials unfolding against the backdrop of a presidential campaign.“The courts will have to decide how to balance the public interest in having expeditious trials against Trump’s interest and the public interest in his being able to campaign so that the democratic process works,” said Bruce Green, a Fordham University professor and former prosecutor. “That’s a type of complexity that courts have never had to deal with before.”More broadly, the complications make plain another reality: Mr. Trump’s troubles are entangling the campaign with the courts to a degree the nation has never experienced before and raising tensions around the ideal of keeping the justice system separate from politics.Mr. Trump and his allies have signaled that they intend to try to turn his overlapping legal woes into a referendum on the criminal justice system, by seeking to cast it as a politically weaponized tool of Democrats.Already, Mr. Trump is facing a state trial on civil fraud accusations in New York in October. Another trial on whether he defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll is set to open on Jan. 15 — the same day as the Iowa caucuses. On Jan. 29, a trial begins in yet another lawsuit, this one accusing Mr. Trump, his company and three of his children of using the family name to entice vulnerable people to invest in sham business opportunities.Because those cases are civil, Mr. Trump could choose not to attend the trials, just as he shunned an earlier lawsuit by Ms. Carroll, in which a jury found him liable for sexual abuse.But he will not have that option in a criminal case on charges in New York that he falsified business records as part of covering up a sex scandal shortly before the 2016 election. The opening date for that trial, which will most likely last several weeks, is in late March, about three weeks after Super Tuesday, when over a dozen states vote on March 5.Jack Smith, the special counsel leading two federal investigations into Mr. Trump, has asked the judge overseeing the indictment in the criminal inquiry into Mr. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive documents to set a trial date for late 2023.But on Tuesday — the same day Mr. Trump disclosed that federal prosecutors may charge him in the investigation into the events that culminated in the Capitol riot — his defense lawyers argued to Judge Aileen M. Cannon that she ought to put off any trial in the documents case until after the 2024 election. The intense publicity of the campaign calendar, they said, would impair his rights.Mr. Trump has long pursued a strategy of delay in legal matters, seeking to run out the clock. If he can push his federal trial — or trials, if he is ultimately indicted in the Jan. 6 inquiry — beyond the 2024 election, it is possible that he or another Republican would win the presidency and order the Justice Department to drop the cases.A president lacks the authority to quash state cases, but even if Mr. Trump were to be convicted, any inevitable appeals would most likely still be pending by Inauguration Day in 2025. If he is back in office by then, the Justice Department could also raise constitutional challenges to try to defer any additional legal proceedings, like a prison sentence, while he is the sitting president.In making the case for delaying the trial until after the election, Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers contended on Tuesday that Mr. Trump was effectively squaring off in court against his 2024 rival, President Biden.“We don’t know what’s going to happen in the primaries, of course, but right now, he’s the leading candidate,” said Todd Blanche, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers. “And if all things go as we expect, the person he is running against — his administration is prosecuting him.”But David Harbach, a prosector on Mr. Smith’s team, said Mr. Trump was “no different from any other busy important person who has been indicted.” He called the claim of political influence “flat-out false,” seemingly more intended for “the court of public opinion” than a court of law.“The attorney general appointed the special counsel to remove this investigation from political influence, and there has been none — none,” he said.Judge Cannon, who has not yet made a decision about the eventual trial date, indicated that in considering delay, she believed the focus should be not on the campaign but on legal issues, like the volume and complexity of classified evidence.Setting a trial date for the documents case is the first and most basic logistical issue. But the possibility of indictments from two inquiries into Mr. Trump’s attempts to stay in power after the 2020 election, the federal investigation led by Mr. Smith and a state investigation overseen by Fani T. Willis, a district attorney in Georgia who has signaled that charges could come in August, may soon bump up against that.There is no overriding authority that acts as an air traffic controller when multiple judges are deciding dates that could conflict. Nor are there rules that give federal or state cases precedence or that say that any case that was charged first should go to trial first.Brandon L. Van Grack, a former prosecutor who worked on the Russia investigation led by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, pointed to that inquiry as an example. Prosecutors brought charges against Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in two jurisdictions, first in the District of Columbia and then in the Eastern District of Virginia, but the trials took place in reverse order.“There was sensitivity to hearing dates, and it was incumbent on counsel to educate both judges on the scheduling and conflicts, but there wasn’t a rule that said the District of Columbia matter was charged first and therefore went to trial first,” he said. “It’s judicial discretion.”As an informal practice, Mr. Green said that judges overseeing potentially conflicting matters sometimes call each other and work out a calendar. No procedural rule authorizes such conversations, he said, but it is considered appropriate.Looming over Mr. Trump’s legal peril is an unwritten Justice Department norm known as the 60-day rule. As a primary or general election nears, prosecutors should not take overt actions that could improperly influence voting.It is not clear, however, how that principle applies to matters that are already public and so less likely to alter a candidate’s image. Notably, Raymond Hulser, a veteran prosecutor who has been consulted for years about how to apply the 60-day rule, is a member of Mr. Smith’s team.Further complicating matters, Mr. Trump has hired some of the same defense lawyers to handle multiple investigations against him, leaving them stretched for time.Christopher Kise, another lawyer for Mr. Trump, cited the former president’s crowded legal calendar at the hearing on Tuesday. Not only did Mr. Kise indicate that he would need to prepare for the fraud-related trials in October and January, but he also pointed to Mr. Blanche’s role in the criminal trial in March involving falsified business records in New York.“So these are the same lawyers dealing with the same client trying to prepare for the same sort of exercises, and so I think that’s highly relevant,” Mr. Kise said.Several legal experts said that while people have a Sixth Amendment right to choose their legal representation, it is not absolute. They noted that judges could tell defendants that, if their chosen lawyers are too busy to take on additional matters in a timely manner, they must hire others.Such an order would give Mr. Trump something more to complain about to an appeals court, said Professor Green, who added, “I think it’s probably a losing argument.”Alan Feuer More

    • 63 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      How Serious is No Labels?

      by

      GOFFSTOWN, N.H. — “I’m not afraid of losing,” Senator Joe Manchin said, with some real charm and conviction, on Monday night.He offered this in the middle of a substantive point, about honesty and political strength, but in a weird venue: the first town hall put on by No Labels, the longstanding centrist group now threatening to run a third-party presidential ticket if Joe Biden and Donald Trump are nominated. To think about losing, and not being afraid to lose, at this event went to the thing people fear about No Labels right now.The idea behind the town hall itself was to draw attention to the group’s policy agenda, titled “Common Sense.” Those words were visible at least 26 times on No Labels backdrops and placards around the room at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College. Staff members wore “Common Sense” T-shirts and handed out “Common Sense” hats and “Common Sense” booklets. Inside those booklets, prospective voters find proposals on entitlements, a vow to keep artificial intelligence research rolling, some interesting ideas about changing the way credit scores work and centrist platitudes on immigration and abortion. The idea is: On this we agree.At the actual event, though, in response to a woman’s question about climate change, Mr. Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, and John Huntsman, a Republican former governor of Utah, ended up disagreeing about carbon pricing. (Mr. Huntsman brought it up, then Mr. Manchin volunteered that he’s always been against it.) Whether No Labels is for or against carbon pricing was seemingly never resolved at the event, even though it’s exactly the kind of thing two No Labels-types would agree on during a panel in Aspen or Davos. Faced with the minor disproof of concept, the event’s moderator asked the pair, “If there is a Republican and a Democrat who are in the White House, together, how would that work?”“It would work a helluva lot better than what we have today,” Mr. Huntsman cracked to laughter and so forth from the crowd. The moderator tried again: How would this actually work?“Nobody knows because we’ve never tried it,” Mr. Huntsman replied, which produced a slight hitch in the crowd, since people’s tolerance for the unknown has probably decreased over the past decade. “Well, they tried it in 1864,” Mr. Manchin, added, which produced an uneasier noise in the crowd.People talk about this thing as if it must be a dark-money plot to tip the election Donald Trump’s way. But while No Labels says it will proceed only if it thinks the unity ticket could actually win, the compelling, magnetic quality of this effort is its opaqueness. It’s really not clear what exactly No Labels is doing or why.At times, the entire enterprise seems more like an attractive market opportunity (the opportunity made possible by our national unhappiness) — like seeing a spike in electric vehicle production and buying up mineral rights to mine lithium. But even then, it’s not clear who in the No Labels universe believes what: Is threatening to run a third-party candidate a leverage thing? Against whom? Do they think that the right unity ticket could reach the ephemeral threshold of belief where enough voters think they could win to make the ticket viable?No Labels won’t say yet who’s funding it, or who its candidates will be or which party will take the presidential slot. There will be a convention, in April in Dallas, with delegates, but who are the delegates going to be? One of the Maine voters who accidentally switched their party registration to No Labels? The group rarely if ever seems to mention the circumstance where setting up the logistically challenging mechanisms for a backup candidate would make sense: for instance, if Mr. Biden withdrew late from the presidential race. If Mr. Biden weren’t president, he might even be the hypothetical candidate that Joe Lieberman, a No Labels co-chair — also present in New Hampshire — would be calling for.At least one No Labels board member has quit over the likelihood that the group could help re-elect Mr. Trump. At least one local chapter says it isn’t interested in the idea of a third-party run. On the anniversary of D-Day, Third Way (a different centrist group) convened a wide array of figures, including former Obama campaign advisers and former senators such as Heidi Heitkamp, to meet about how to stop No Labels. Dick Gephardt, a former House majority leader, is planning to establish a different group to stop No Labels.Since its beginning more than a decade ago, No Labels has taken on a dislocated, strange quality. Nine years ago, Mr. Manchin actually quit when the group endorsed Republican Cory Gardner (who is no longer in the Senate) against Democrat Mark Udall (also no longer in the Senate). In 2015, two of the three senators who were members of the group’s Problem Solvers Caucus were Republican Kelly Ayotte (who lost in 2016) and Democrat Bill Nelson (who lost in 2018). People tend to become “bipartisan problem solvers” in districts and states that routinely flip back and forth between parties. For a long time, No Labels members have been disappearing, or about to disappear or reappearing after a loss in this way.But it’s not just impermanence — there’s always been a kind of detachment from reality, too. No Labels is dedicated to bipartisanship and working together, leaning on the ways staying in Washington for decades creates the kind of personal, fruitful relationships better able to solve problems. Zoom out, though, and the entire life span of No Labels coincides with a period defined by how much voters hate Washington.In our time of No Labels, politics has taken such an apocalyptic, nihilistic turn that a mob tried to ransack the Capitol while we were midway through a once-a-century pandemic. It’s hard to believe sometimes that when robots can think and it’s 120 degrees in Arizona, No Labels is throwing out PoliSci seminar ideas about rejiggering how speakers of the House are chosen. The “Common Sense” booklet mentions, in a section on how expensive health care is, how Congress hasn’t tackled tort reform. Whose fault was that?No Labels’s dissociation from the problems it identifies comes through in weirder, more absurd, more hostile ways at times. At the event this week, a reporter asked Chris Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire, whether he’d endorse a No Labels candidate, to which he immediately replied, “I’m a Republican!” while what sounded like Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” played over the loudspeakers.In May, when a Problem Solvers Caucus member, Representative Brad Schneider of Illinois, said he wasn’t into this idea of a third-party ticket, No Labels sent this insane text to voters: “We were alarmed to learn that your U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider recently attacked the notion that you should have more choices in the 2024 presidential election.”On Monday night, when the moderator asked about the widely shared concern that No Labels would throw the election in Mr. Trump’s direction, Mr. Huntsman said this was “the latest talking point” and then actually compared No Labels critics to Russian and Chinese authoritarians. “So if you live in a place like China or Russia — and I’ve lived in both, running both U.S. embassies — they don’t allow any choice,” he said. “There’s no participation. They’re complete, pure authoritarian systems. So when I start hearing people here say, ‘That’s not a good thing. You shouldn’t do things to expand and enhance our participation in the system. It might result in A, B or C losing,’ I say, ‘I’ve heard that before — but not in this country.’”Alongside the group’s strangeness, there’s also been an earnestness that in the end, people still want the kinds of things they wanted before, in the 1990s and 2000s in particular. No Labels is this last refuge, a resting place inside and outside the two parties and a half-finished Washington dreamscape. In New Hampshire, the Manchin-Huntsman event drew a crowd that on the surface looked like a Republican event of 20 years ago — collared shirts in shades of blue. That kind of voter, in New Hampshire or suburban Atlanta or Colorado, can feel the Republican Party falling away from them in real time.And the country can feel like it’s in fading, chaotic straits more often than anyone would like. Voters do not want what they seem likely to get in a Biden-Trump rematch. This fact is the firm but vibrating floor beneath the No Labels project and the panic it has produced — the recognition that we’re approaching a 2024 election that will make American voters unhappy. But how unhappy? Unhappy enough to resume voting for protest candidates? Unhappy enough to vote for a mystery unity ticket, only on the principle of their unhappiness?I don’t know that the electoral effects of No Labels are as clear as people say. It’s possible that running Mr. Manchin and Larry Hogan, a former governor of Maryland, would peel off those old-school suburban Republicans who voted for Mr. Biden, or that those voters might be the ones who would otherwise stay home or return to the Republican fold, or that few people would risk a third-party vote anyway. What is real, though, in a deep and human way, is that plenty of people fear a second Trump term and are dissatisfied with how life is in America. And No Labels is here to take advantage of that sadness with a half-finished idea.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.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

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Biden Attacks Trump and MAGA but Avoids Indictment Talk

      by

      The president has taken swipes at Republicans, including a video playfully featuring Marjorie Taylor Greene as a narrator, but he and his allies are avoiding one target: his predecessor’s legal woes.For months, President Biden has appeared to delight in needling Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies, trying at every turn to make MAGA and ultra-MAGA a shorthand for the entire party.This week, Mr. Biden cheekily highlighted a video in which Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia derisively ticks through his first-term accomplishments and likens him — not positively — to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “I approve this message,” the president commented on the video, which was viewed more than 43 million times in 24 hours.Mr. Biden recently did a victory lap when Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama promoted local spending in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which Mr. Tuberville had voted against.And his campaign took a shot at Mr. Trump for not visiting Wisconsin during his current presidential bid, accusing him of a “failure to deliver on his promised American manufacturing boom.”But when it comes to the topic dominating the presidential race this week, Mr. Biden and his top allies are treating Mr. Trump’s legal troubles like Voldemort — avoiding, at all costs, any mention of the indictments that must not be named.This moment comes after weeks of polling, both public and private, that suggests Mr. Trump, who is comfortably the front-runner in the Republican primary race, would be a weaker general-election opponent next year than Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida or other G.O.P. candidates.The White House and the Biden campaign have not sent explicit instructions to surrogates and supporters telling them to steer clear of Mr. Trump’s legal issues, but plenty of those on Team Biden have gotten the message loud and clear: Don’t talk about the Trump indictments.“The American people want the judicial process to play out without interference from politicians,” said Representative Ro Khanna of California, a member of the Biden campaign’s national advisory board. “President Biden has his pulse on the sentiments of the American public by talking about what matters to them.”Mr. Biden has said he won’t comment on investigations into and charges against Mr. Trump — a reflection of his clear desire not to be seen as intruding on Justice Department independence, as well as the political imperative of deflecting Republicans’ relentless, evidence-free accusations that he is the hidden hand behind the prosecutions.The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee have repeatedly declined to comment or answer questions about Mr. Trump’s indictments. The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, has dodged numerous questions about Mr. Trump’s legal travails in recent weeks.“I’m just not going to respond to any hypotheticals that’s currently, you know, out there in the world,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said Tuesday after Mr. Trump revealed he had received a so-called target letter from federal investigators, a sign that he could soon be indicted in the investigation into the events that culminated in the Capitol riot. “Just not going to comment from here.”The Biden world’s approach to Mr. Trump’s indictments echoes how Democrats handled Mr. Trump, then the president, during the 2018 midterm elections.Scores of resistance-fueled Democrats ran for and won House seats by focusing on health care policy without placing Mr. Trump at the center of their campaigns. They didn’t have to talk Trump then, the thinking went, because voters had already made up their minds about him.“He is omnipresent and the voters who are motivated to vote against him and his party already know what they need to know,” said Meredith Kelly, a strategist who worked for the House Democrats’ campaign arm in 2018. “This allowed congressional candidates to talk about real kitchen-table issues impacting families and continues to be the case this cycle as he looms large over the battlefield in 2024.”There’s also little question that polling shows Mr. Biden is stronger against Mr. Trump than Mr. DeSantis or others, giving the president little incentive to do anything to hurt Mr. Trump’s standing among Republican primary voters.A Michigan poll conducted last week by a Republican-leaning polling firm found Mr. Biden up by a percentage point against Mr. Trump but down by two to Mr. DeSantis. The same firm’s poll of Nevada showed Mr. Biden up by four against Mr. Trump and trailing Mr. DeSantis by two. And in Wisconsin, a poll last month from Marquette University Law School found Mr. Biden with a nine-point lead over Mr. Trump but a two-point lead over Mr. DeSantis.According to the Marquette pollster, Charles Franklin, both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis hold support from hard-core Republicans in a matchup against Mr. Biden, but among Republican-leaning independents, Mr. Trump’s support drops while Mr. DeSantis’s does not.The public polling aligns with the White House’s own polling of battleground states.One person who is more than happy to amplify discussions about the investigations and indictments is Mr. Trump himself. It was the former president, of course, who revealed that he had received the target letter.“Crooked Joe Biden has weaponized the Justice Department to go after his top political opponent, President Trump, who is the overwhelming front-runner to take back the White House,” said Steven Cheung, Mr. Trump’s campaign spokesman. “Biden wants to meddle in the election because he knows he stands no chance against President Trump.”Mr. Biden’s campaign on Wednesday referred to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene as an “unintentional campaign” spokeswoman.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesThe Biden campaign’s video of Ms. Greene served to tweak and elevate one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest far-right supporters and promote Mr. Biden’s own record without getting into the legal cases against Mr. Trump. Polling conducted for the White House last year found that Ms. Greene was known and disliked by a large portion of voters and that independent voters associated her with Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement.Mr. Biden’s campaign referred to her on Wednesday as an “unintentional campaign” spokeswoman.“Joe Biden had the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs that is actually finishing what F.D.R. started, that L.B.J. expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete,” Ms. Greene said at the Turning Point Action conference over the weekend, in the video clipped by the Biden campaign.The result is a crisp 35-second video, distributed on Mr. Biden’s Twitter feed with the introduction, “I approve this message.”The clip was similar to the moment last month when Mr. Biden highlighted unusual and unexpected support from another Trump-centric Republican, Senator Tuberville, who praised spending in Alabama from the infrastructure law, which Mr. Biden signed and the senator had voted against.In that instance, Mr. Biden played up Mr. Tuberville’s support during a Chicago speech, theatrically drawing the sign of the cross on his chest as if the senator had undergone a political conversion.The president has previously sought to draw attention to Ms. Greene, who is already a leading social media and fund-raising star in the Republican Party. During a speech this month in South Carolina, he said that he would soon make a visit to her northwest Georgia district to celebrate the beginning of construction of a solar power manufacturing plant there.The crowd laughed. Mr. Biden has not yet scheduled a trip to the groundbreaking. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Are We Doomed to Witness the Trump-Biden Rematch Nobody Wants?

      by

      Have you met anyone truly excited about Joe Biden running for re-election? And by that, I mean downright Obama-circa-2008 energized — brimming with enthusiasm about what four more years of Biden would bring to our body politic, our economy, our national mood, our culture?Let’s be more realistic. Is there a single one among us who can muster even a quiet “Yay!”? And no, we’re not counting the guy who sounds like he’s performing elaborate mental dance moves to persuade himself nor anyone who is paid to say so. According to a recent report in The Times, Biden’s fund-raising thus far doesn’t exactly reveal a groundswell of grass roots excitement.Instead, most Democrats seem to view what looks like an inexorable rematch between Biden and Donald Trump with a sense of impending doom. My personal metaphor comes from Lars von Trier’s film “Melancholia,” in which a rogue planet makes its way through space toward an inevitable collision with Earth. In that film, the looming disaster symbolized the all-encompassing nature of depression; here, the feel is more dispiritedness and terror, as if we’re barreling toward either certain catastrophe or possibly-not-a-catastrophe. Or it’s barreling toward us.A Biden-Trump rematch would mean a choice between two candidates who, for very different reasons, don’t seem 100 percent there or necessarily likely to be there — physically, mentally and/or not in prison — for the duration of another four-year term.To take, momentarily, a slightly more optimistic view, here is the best case for Biden: His presidency has thus far meant a re-establishment of norms, a return to government function and the restoration of long-held international alliances. He has presided over a slow-churning economy that has turned roughly in his favor. He’s been decent.But really, wasn’t the bar for all these things set abysmally low during the Trump administration (if we can even use that word given its relentless mismanagement)? We continue to have a deeply divided Congress and electorate, a good chunk of which is still maniacally in Trump’s corner. American faith in institutions continues to erode, not helped by Biden’s mutter about the Supreme Court’s most recent term, “This is not a normal court.” The 2020 protests led to few meaningfully changed policies favoring the poor or disempowered.A Biden-Trump rematch feels like a concession, as if we couldn’t do any better or have given up trying. It wasn’t as though there was huge passion for Biden the first time around. The 2020 election should have been much more of a blowout victory for Democrats. Yet compared with his election in 2016, Trump in 2020 made inroads with nearly every major demographic group, including Blacks, Latinos and women, except for white men. The sentiment most Democrats seemed to muster in Biden’s favor while he was running was that he was inoffensive. The animating sentiment once he scraped by into office was relief.This time, we don’t even have the luxury of relief. In the two other branches of government, Democrats have been shown the perils of holding people in positions of power for too long — Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the judiciary and Dianne Feinstein in the legislature. Democrats and the media seem to have become more vocal in pointing out the hazards of Biden’s advancing age. In an April poll, of the 70 percent of Americans who said Biden shouldn’t run again, 69 percent said it’s because of his old age.That old age is showing. Never an incantatory speaker or a sparkling wit, Biden seems to have altogether thrown in the oratorical towel. Several weeks ago, he appeared to actually wander off a set on MSNBC after figuratively wandering through 20 minutes of the host Nicolle Wallace’s gentle questions. In another recent interview, with Fareed Zakaria, when asked specific questions about U.S.-China policy, Biden waded into a muddle of vague bromides and personal anecdotes about his travels as vice president with China’s leader, Xi Jinping. When asked point blank whether it’s time for him to step aside, Biden said, almost tangentially, “I just want to finish the job.”But what if he can’t? Kamala Harris, briefly a promising figure during the previous primary season, has proved lackluster at best in office. Like Biden, she seems at perpetual war with words, grasping to articulate whatever loose thought might be struggling to get out. The thought of her in the Oval Office is far from encouraging.One clear sign of America’s deepening hopelessness is the weird welcoming of loony-tune candidates like Robert Kennedy Jr., who has polled as high as a disturbing 20 percent among Democratic voters. Among never-Trumpian Republicans, there is an unseemly enthusiasm for bridge troll Chris Christie, despite his early capitulation to Trump, for the sole reason that among Republican primary candidates, he’s the one who most vociferously denounces his former leader. And a Washington nonprofit, No Labels, is gearing up for a third-party run with a platform that threatens to leach support from a Democratic candidate who is saddled with a favorable rating of a limp 41 percent.Trump, of course, remains the formidable threat underlying our malaise. Though he blundered into office in 2016 without a whit of past experience or the faintest clue about the future, this time he and his team of madmen are far better equipped to inflict their agenda. As a recent editorial in The Economist put it, “a professional corps of America First populists are dedicating themselves to ensuring that Trump Two will be disciplined and focused on getting things done.” The idea that Trump — and worse, a competent Trump — might win a second term makes our passive embrace of Biden even more nerve-racking. Will we look back and have only ourselves to blame?It is hard to imagine Democrats, or most Americans, eager to relive any aspect of the annus horribilis that was 2020. Yet it’s as if we’re collectively paralyzed, less complacent than utterly bewildered, waiting for “something” to happen — say, a health crisis or an arrest or a supernatural event — before 2024. While we wait, we lurch ever closer to something of a historical re-enactment, our actual history hanging perilously in the balance.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

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Potential Trump Jan. 6 Charges Include a Civil Rights Law Violation

      by

      A target letter sent by the special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss cited three statutes that could be the basis for a prosecution.Federal prosecutors have introduced a new twist in the Jan. 6 investigation by suggesting in a target letter that they could charge former President Donald J. Trump with violating a civil rights statute that dates back to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, according to three people familiar with the matter.The letter to Mr. Trump from the special counsel, Jack Smith, referred to three criminal statutes as part of the grand jury investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss, according to two people with knowledge of its contents. Two of the statutes were familiar from the criminal referral by the House Jan. 6 committee and months of discussion by legal experts: conspiracy to defraud the government and obstruction of an official proceeding.But the third criminal law cited in the letter was a surprise: Section 241 of Title 18 of the United States Code, which makes it a crime for people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”Congress enacted that statute after the Civil War to provide a tool for federal agents to go after Southern whites, including Ku Klux Klan members, who engaged in terrorism to prevent formerly enslaved African Americans from voting. But in the modern era, it has been used more broadly, including in cases of voting fraud conspiracies.A Justice Department spokesman declined to discuss the target letter and Mr. Smith’s theory for bringing the Section 241 statute into the Jan. 6 investigation. But the modern usage of the law raised the possibility that Mr. Trump, who baselessly declared the election he lost to have been rigged, could face prosecution on accusations of trying to rig the election himself.A series of 20th-century cases upheld application of the law in cases involving alleged tampering with ballot boxes by casting false votes or falsely tabulating votes after the election was over, even if no specific voter could be considered the victim.In a 1950 opinion by the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, for example, Judge Charles C. Simons wrote of applying Section 241 in a ballot box-stuffing case that the right to an honest count “is a right possessed by each voting elector, and to the extent that the importance of his vote is nullified, wholly or in part, he has been injured in the free exercise of a right or privilege secured to him by the laws and Constitution of the United States.”In a 1974 Supreme Court opinion upholding the use of Section 241 to charge West Virginians who cast fake votes on a voting machine, Justice Thurgood Marshall cited Judge Simons and added that every voter “has a right under the Constitution to have his vote fairly counted, without its being distorted by fraudulently cast votes.”The line of 20th-century cases raised the prospect that Mr. Smith and his team could be weighing using that law to cover efforts by Mr. Trump and his associates to flip the outcome of states he lost. Those efforts included the recorded phone conversation in which Mr. Trump tried to bully Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough additional votes to overcome Mr. Biden’s win in that state and promoting a plan to use so-called fake electors — self-appointed slates of pro-Trump electors from states won by Mr. Biden — to help block or delay congressional certification of Mr. Trump’s defeat.“It seems like under 241 there’s at least a right to an honest counting of the votes,” said Norman Eisen, who worked for the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. “Submitting an alternate electoral certificate to Congress (as opposed to casting false votes or counting wrong) is a novel scenario, but it seems like it would violate this right.”The prospect of charging Mr. Trump under the other two statutes cited in the target letter is less novel, if not without hurdles. Among other things, in its final report last year, the House committee that investigated the events that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol had recommended that the Justice Department charge the former president under both of them.One, Section 371 of Title 18, makes it a crime to conspire to defraud the United States. The other, Section 1512, includes a provision that makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct an official proceeding.A spokesman for Mr. Trump declined requests to clarify what was in the letter.Citing the statutes in the letter, which Mr. Trump has said he received on Sunday, does not necessarily mean that any charges brought by Mr. Smith would have to be based on them. But the letter’s contents provide a road map to investigators’ thinking.The conspiracy to defraud the United States statute, if used, raises the question of who Mr. Trump’s co-conspirators would be.Some of those who worked most closely with Mr. Trump in promoting the lie that Mr. Trump had been robbed of a victory by widespread fraud, including lawyers like Rudolph W. Giuliani and John Eastman, had not received target letters, their lawyers said on Tuesday.The corrupt obstruction of a proceeding charge has been used against hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters and has served as the Justice Department’s go-to count in describing the central event that day: the disruption of the Electoral College certification process that was taking place inside the Capitol during a joint session of Congress.The law was originally passed as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a measure meant to curb corporate malfeasance. Defense lawyers for several rioters have challenged its use against their client, saying it was meant to stop crimes like witness tampering or document destruction and had been unfairly stretched to include the chaos at the Capitol.But in April, a federal appeals court upheld the viability of applying that charge to participants in the Capitol attack. Still, unlike ordinary rioters, Mr. Trump did not physically participate in the storming of the Capitol, although he had summoned supporters to Washington that day and railed about the unwillingness of Vice President Mike Pence, who was presiding over the proceedings in Congress, to stop them.A second attempt to invalidate the obstruction count in the federal appeals court in Washington has focused specifically on a provision of the law dictating that defendants must act “corruptly” in committing the obstructive act.Defense lawyers have argued that this provision does not apply to many ordinary Jan. 6 rioters who did not act corruptly because they stood to gain nothing personally by entering the Capitol. It could, however, be applied more easily to Mr. Trump, who stood to gain an election victory by obstructing the certification process.William K. Rashbaum More