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      The case(s) against Trump: New York charges only beginning of legal woes

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      It was the day that Donald Trump got mugged by reality. After years of dodging legal accountability, the former US president found himself being driven towards a New York courtroom where he would be charged with a crime.“WOW, they are going to ARREST ME,” he wrote on his Truth Social media platform, the true scale of his predicament finally dawning on him. “Can’t believe this is happening in America.”But dramatic as the day was, as Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records relating to hush money payments, it represented only the first drop of rain in what could be a legal thunderstorm. Several more cases are fast approaching and some are potentially far more devastating.Whereas the ex-president has so far been able to spin the hush money indictment to his political advantage as he seeks to win back the White House in 2024, experts suggest that the quantity and gravity of the upcoming investigations could ultimately bury him and his electoral chances.Tuesday’s court appearance, in which Trump – the first former US president in history to be arrested and arraigned on criminal charges – had to answer meekly to a judge and found there was no one to hold doors open for him, was the humbling and sobering moment that he discovered his legal troubles are no longer theoretical.Michael D’Antonio, a political commentator and author of The Truth About Trump, said: “His attitude prior to this has always been obstinance and a chin-jutting pride and refusal to appear to be affected. But he sure appeared to be affected this time. There was a quality of a cow being led to the slaughter.”He added: “He must realise that he’s in trouble and that the situation is grave and that showed on his face. He doesn’t care as much about the proceedings politically as he cares about the story that he can tell about them. He is a storyteller above all and a fabulist. If he can tell a story that motivates his base and also manage to stay out of prison, he will argue that it’s a victory over a corrupt system.”Trump himself will not be in jeopardy when Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against Fox News goes to trial, currently scheduled for 17 April. But the case, which could hear testimony from the Fox Corporation executives Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and an array of Fox News hosts, could provide some deeply embarrassing details about how the ex-president is perceived by the network.Then, on 25 April, a civil trial in a New York lawsuit involving Trump is scheduled to begin. E Jean Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, accuses Trump of defaming her by denying he raped her in New York’s Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in late 1995 or early 1996. Carroll is seeking monetary damages and it is not known whether Trump will testify.Another important trial is set for 2 October. Letitia James, the New York attorney general, is suing Trump and his Trump Organization for fraud. James has said her office found more than 200 examples of misleading asset valuations between 2011 and 2021, and that Trump inflated his net worth by billions of dollars.James said the scheme was intended to help Trump obtain lower interest rates on loans and better insurance coverage. The civil lawsuit seeks to permanently bar Trump and three of his adult children from running companies in New York state, and recoup at least $250m obtained through fraud.Before then, there may have been developments in Georgia, where a prosecutor is investigating Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in that state. Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who will ultimately decide whether to pursue charges, told a judge in January that a special grand jury had completed its work and that decisions were “imminent”.If convicted, Trump would not be able to seek clemency from a future Republican president since such pardons do not apply to state offences. Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said: “The most perilous is probably the case out of Georgia because it relates to election interference and because there is no ability for Trump, if he becomes president again, to pardon himself.“We know the grand jury foreperson said that they were recommending indictments of more than a dozen people and she strongly hinted one of those people was Trump. That one might pose the most danger to him at the moment.”Meanwhile the justice department has investigations under way into both Trump’s actions in the 2020 election, including lies that led to the January 6 insurrection, and his retention of highly classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021. Both are overseen by Jack Smith, a war crimes prosecutor and political independent.When he returned to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Tuesday night and hurled abuse at the investigators one by one, Trump devoted the lion’s share of his comments – and patent falsehoods – to the classified documents case, implying that he recognises it as posing the maximum danger.The FBI seized 13,000 documents from Mar-a-Lago last August; about 100 documents were marked classified and some were designated top secret. Earlier this week the Washington Post newspaper reported that investigators have fresh evidence pointing to possible obstruction of justice by the former president as he resisted a subpoena demanding the return of all classified documents.As for the charges over hush money payments during the 2016 election campaign, Trump is expected back in court in New York on 4 December – about two months before the official start of the 2024 Republican presidential primary calendar.Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “The moment he set foot into official custody in New York probably was a chilling realisation for him of the difficulties that lie ahead, and not just in this case, although it’s serious.“It’s that feeling of the walls closing in from every direction. He’s got a lot of serious problems on his hands. Even in a Republican primary, the compound of all of these challenges will be very deleterious because Republican primary voters are going to ask: can he win?”Asked if the 45th president could end up in prison, Eisen, author of Overcoming Trumpery: How to Restore Ethics, the Rule of Law, and Democracy, replied yes. “It won’t be easy, it may not be fast but it’s certainly possible,” he said.Beneath the cries of a witch-hunt by Democrats and the “deep state”, and despite a bounce in primary polls as Republicans rally in his defence, Trump, 76, may no longer be sleeping easy at Mar-a-Lago. Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, commented: “He looked like a man with pins sticking into his torso. He is scared stiff.“Sure, he’s going to bluster and express bravado and confidence, but he is terrified of being confined. No doubt about that. This is the beginning of the first day of the rest of his life. The issues are just going to pile on. It’s extraordinary. Outside of the mafia, it’s hard to find any American with such legal problems.” More

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      Trump reportedly seeks 2024 campaign role for far-right activist Laura Loomer

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      Donald Trump has told aides to hire the far-right anti-Muslim activist and failed congressional candidate Laura Loomer for a role in his campaign to return to the White House in 2024, the New York Times has reported.Citing four anonymous sources, the Times noted that Loomer, 29, attended Trump’s speech at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Tuesday night, an angry rant delivered hours after the former president pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges in New York over hush money payments, including to the porn star Stormy Daniels.Trump remains the clear frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, enjoying big leads over his closest challenger, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, despite the historic indictment and multiple other forms of legal jeopardy.DeSantis has not declared a campaign but has nonetheless presented himself as a candidate in Trump’s hard-right mould. The former governors Nikki Haley (South Carolina) and Asa Hutchinson (Arkansas), declared candidates closer to the political centre, barely register in polling.Loomer told the Times: “I’m not going to comment on private conversations that I had with the president. The president knows I have always been a Trump loyalist and that I’m committed to helping him win re-election in 2024.”A Trump spokesperson said: “The entire movement is united behind President Trump and his campaign, and it will take everyone rowing in the same direction in order to beat [Joe] Biden and take our country back.”Loomer said Trump “likes me very much. And it’s a shame that he’s surrounded by some people that run to a publication [the Times] notorious for attacking him in order to try to cut me at the knees instead of being loyal.”Loomer ran for Congress in Florida in 2020, winning Trump’s endorsement and a Republican primary but losing the general election.She told the Times she was a “Jewish conservative woman, a Trump loyalist and a free speech absolutist”. In the current election cycle, she has agitated against DeSantis, in one instance picketing an appearance to promote his campaign memoir.Loomer has previously described herself as “pro-white nationalism”, claiming “there’s a difference between white nationalism and white supremacy … and a lot of liberals and leftwing globalist Marxist Jews don’t understand that”.In the same conversation with a white supremacist podcast, in 2017, Loomer said the US “really was built as the white Judeo-Christian ethnostate, essentially. Over time, immigration and all these calls for diversity, it’s starting to destroy this country.”Another attendee at Trump’s speech on Tuesday, the far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, greeted news of Trump’s courtship of Loomer with evident dismay.“Laura Loomer is mentally unstable and a documented liar,” wrote Greene, who has risen to power in the Republican party despite spreading conspiracy theories including that wildfires are caused by space technology controlled by the Rothschild family and that the Parkland school shooting in Florida was a “false flag” operation.Loomer, Greene said, “can not [sic] be trusted. She spent months lying about me and attacking me just because I supported Kevin McCarthy for [House] speaker and after I had refused to endorse her last election cycle.”Greene also accused Loomer of “loving” Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic white supremacist activist who controversially dined with Trump and the rapper Ye last November.Observers pointed out that Greene has appeared with Fuentes in public and spoken at a conference he staged.Regarding Trump, Greene said she would “make sure he knows” why hiring Loomer would be a bad move. More

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      Anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr announces run for president

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr, an anti-vaccine activist and scion of one of the most famous American political families, is running for president.Kennedy, 69, filed a statement of candidacy on Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission.The campaign to challenge President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination is a long shot, in the vein of that launched by the self-help author Marianne Williamson.Kennedy, a nephew of President John F Kennedy and son of the US attorney general and New York senator Robert F Kennedy, was once a bestselling author and environmental lawyer who worked on issues such as clean water.But more than 15 years ago he became fixated on a belief that vaccines are not safe. He emerged as one of the leading voices in the anti-vaccine movement, his work described by public health experts and members of his own family as misleading and dangerous.Kennedy’s efforts intensified amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the development of a vaccine.His anti-vaccine charity, Children’s Health Defense, prospered, with revenues more than doubling in 2020 to $6.8m, according to filings with charity regulators.The organization has targeted false claims at groups that may be more prone to distrust the vaccine, including mothers and Black Americans, experts have said, which could have resulted in deaths during the pandemic.In 2021, Kennedy released a book, The Real Anthony Fauci, in which he accused the top infectious disease doctor of assisting in “a historic coup d’etat against western democracy” and promoted unproven Covid treatments such as ivermectin, which is meant to treat parasites, and the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine.His push against the Covid vaccine has linked him with anti-democratic figures and groups. Kennedy has appeared at events pushing the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and with people who cheered or downplayed the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.A photo posted on Instagram showed Kennedy backstage at a July 2021 Reawaken America event with the Trump ally Roger Stone, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and anti-vaccine profiteer Charlene Bollinger. All three have promoted the lie about the 2020 election being stolen.Bollinger has appeared with Kennedy at multiple events. She and her husband sponsored an anti-vaccine, pro-Trump rally near the Capitol on January 6. Bollinger celebrated the attack and her husband tried to enter the Capitol. Kennedy later appeared in a video for their Super Pac.Kennedy has repeatedly invoked Nazis and the Holocaust when talking about measures aimed at mitigating the spread of Covid, such as mask requirements and vaccine mandates.He has sometimes apologized for those comments, including when he suggested that people in 2022 had it worse than Anne Frank, the teenager who died in a Nazi concentration camp after hiding with her family in Amsterdam for two years.Kennedy has invoked his family’s legacy in his anti-vaccine work, including sometimes using images of JFK.His sister Kerry Kennedy, who runs Robert F Kennedy Human Rights, an international rights group founded by their mother, Ethel, said her brother has at times removed content at her request.She told the Associated Press in 2021 her brother is “completely wrong on this issue and very dangerous”. More

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      Trump remains the most popular Republican despite his indictment

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      When the history-making indictment was read out against him in a New York City courtroom on Tuesday, former president and current contender for the Republican nomination in 2024 Donald Trump gained a new title: criminal defendant.Americans saw a quiet and tense Trump walk into the courtroom under the guard of both the Secret Service and the local police force – whose officers stood behind him during his appearance before a judge, as they do with any other defendant. There, he learned he was facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to hush money payments and “catch and kill” attempts to suppress negative news coverage about his extramarital affair with the adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election.As unprecedented as that was, it has become clear in the hours after his appearance that the fundamental political calculus has not changed for Trump. He remains the most popular man in the GOP, and the break his enemies have long sought between him and the rest of the Republican party seems as distant as ever.“For those who think this will harm President Trump’s chances at running for the White House in 2024, I have news for you: it won’t,” Kevin Hern, who leads the Republican Study Committee, the influential conservative body that’s the largest ideological caucus in Congress, said following Trump’s court appearance on Tuesday.“The same people who were outraged over the possibility of Hillary Clinton’s prosecution for obvious crimes are now celebrating yet another witch-hunt against the former president and political opponent of the current president. This type of hypocrisy is disgusting, and it underscores what millions of Americans see as a blatant double standard in our justice system, causing many to lose faith in those institutions.”The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, may have scored a symbolic victory by being the first to indict Trump, but the trajectory of his prosecution – or other efforts to hold Trump to account – is far from clear. The next hearing in Bragg’s case will be well into the 2024 election season on 4 December, and the months to come will be consumed by pre-trial motions from Trump’s attorneys, who will probably try to get the case dismissed and argue that Bragg waited too long to file his charges, said former assistant US attorney Kevin O’Brien.Bragg may soon be joined in his pursuit of Trump by prosecutors elsewhere. Special counsel Jack Smith is considering whether to bring federal charges over Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection, the wider Republican effort to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election win and the classified materials discovered by the FBI at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton county, Georgia, is separately investigating attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn Biden’s win in that state, another potential source of legal peril.If any of those inquiries result in charges, courtroom defendant’s tables could become as familiar to Trump as podiums and packed arenas, even as he presses on with his attempt to return to the White House.“There may never be an indictment in Atlanta, there may never be an indictment coming out of the justice department, we just don’t know,” O’Brien said. “You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. But it’s possible that Trump could be facing two or three new sets of charges in the very near term. Which is, again, an incredible situation.”By all indications, many Republican voters still see Trump as their man, according to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll released following the indictment last week, that showed him far and away the most popular among current or potential GOP candidates.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter returning from New York to his Florida home, Trump on Tuesday evening gave an irate address at his Mar-a-Lago resort, where he vented his spleen and declared, among other things, that “our country is going to hell”.On Wednesday, he made a demand that was sure to sit poorly with his Republican allies. In a post from his Truth Social account, he called for defunding the police, the sort of thing most often heard from progressives demanding criminal justice reform in the United States.“REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS SHOULD DEFUND THE DOJ AND FBI UNTIL THEY COME TO THEIR SENSES,” Trump wrote. “THE DEMOCRATS HAVE TOTALLY WEAPONIZED LAW ENFORCEMENT IN OUR COUNTRY AND ARE VICIOUSLY USING THIS ABUSE OF POWER TO INTERFERE WITH OUR ALREADY UNDER SIEGE ELECTIONS!” More

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      Democrats bid to use censorship law against DeSantis and ban his book

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      Democrats in Florida are attempting to use a state law that censors books in public schools against the governor who signed it, Ron DeSantis, by asking schools to review or ban the Republican governor’s own book, The Courage to be Free.“The very trap he set for others is the one that he set for himself,” Fentrice Driskell, the Democratic minority leader in the Florida state house, told the Daily Beast.DeSantis published The Courage to be Free in February, in what was widely seen as an opening shot in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. He has said he wrote the book himself.Seeking to compete with Donald Trump – who enjoys convincing leads in polling – DeSantis has established himself as a ruthless culture warrior, willing to use government power against opposing interests and viewpoints.He signed the law regarding books in schools last year. It includes guidelines for content deemed inappropriate on grounds of race, sexuality, gender and depictions of violence.But the law has run into problems over interpretations of its language, not least when a children’s book about Roberto Clemente, a baseball legend who faced racial discrimination, landed at the centre of national controversy.Seeking to take advantage of such uncertainties, Florida Democrats are highlighting instances of language in DeSantis’s book which they contend could violate his own guidelines.As reported by the Beast, in The Courage to be Free, DeSantis “use[s] the terms ‘woke’ and ‘gender ideology’ 46 times and 10 times respectively, both of which could constitute ‘divisive concepts’ the governor has argued should stay out of curricula up to the college level”.DeSantis also claims students have been forced to “chant to the Aztec god of human sacrifice” and, as well as describing violence at Black Lives Matter protests, cites a video showing “dead black children, dramatically warning … about ‘racist police and state-sanctioned violence’”.DeSantis also describes the 2017 mass shooting at congressional baseball practice in which Steve Scalise, a senior Republican, was seriously wounded.Such passages, Democrats contend (in what the Florida publisher Peter Schorsch called a “clever bit of trolling”), could fall foul of the governor’s own rules.According to the Beast, only one school district initially responded to Democrats’ complaints. Marion county, near Orlando, said no public school there possessed the governor’s book.Driskell told the Beast: “We’re leaning into one of [DeSantis’s] weaknesses.“… If America doesn’t want Florida’s present reality to become America’s future reality, people need to know what it’s like here. This is our way of fighting back, but also highlighting how ridiculous some of this becomes, right?” More

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      The most consequential politics story in the US isn’t the Trump arraignment | Robert Reich

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      One of the biggest challenges to the future of American democracy is unfolding this Tuesday, but not in Manhattan. It’s occurring in Wisconsin.Beyond the fact that no former president has ever faced a criminal indictment, Donald Trump’s arraignment in Manhattan on criminal charges offers little by way of news. An arraignment leading to a criminal trial that takes place months (if not years) from now is a dull technical legal proceeding.To satisfy the public’s seemingly insatiable craving for Trump entertainment notwithstanding, the media are filling the void with Trump swag: wall-to-wall “special coverage”, on-the-spot correspondents, panels of pundits, interviews with current and past Trump lawyers and former prosecutors, opinion polls, interviews with “average” Trump supporters, and mindless chatter about Trump’s moods (“troubled”, “angry”, “defiant”, “exhilarated”).Tonight, Trump is expected to deliver a prime-time address from Mar-a-Lago. No news there, either. Predictably, it will be little more than lies and smears – more free media coverage for Trump’s venomous bluster.A larger challenge to American democracy is occurring in Wisconsin, where voters will choose a new judge for the state’s supreme court and a senator for its legislature, but that’s getting far less attention than what’s occurring in New York.Wisconsin is a key swing state in the upcoming 2024 presidential election. Its supreme court and legislature could be critical to the outcome.And it is the most gerrymandered state in the nation. Although voters in the state divide almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans, Republicans hold 63 out of 99 seats in the state assembly and 21 of 33 seats in the state senate.Four years ago, the US supreme court decided to leave partisan gerrymandering cases to state courts. This means that if the justice who’s elected today alters the Wisconsin supreme court’s seven-person majority, it could strike down the state’s wildly gerrymandered voting maps – a major advance for democracy.But even this might not be enough to restore democracy in Wisconsin. Tuesday’s special election to fill an open state senate seat will decide whether Republicans gain a supermajority that could allow them to impeach the new justice.The Republican candidate for that seat, Dan Knodl, has suggested he might try to do so if he doesn’t like who’s elected to the court.Not incidentally, Knodl was one of 15 Wisconsin Republican lawmakers who in January 2022 sent a letter to then vice-president Mike Pence asking him to delay certifying presidential results that showed Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump.The underlying issue in Wisconsin is the same as it’s been since Trump lied and smeared his way into the national consciousness seven years ago: whether an authoritarian demagogue can take over a national political party so that the party can then control enough state legislatures to elect that authoritarian – even though a large majority of voters reject him.Trump lost his 2020 presidential bid by 7m votes. But he could have won the electoral college, and therefore been elected president, had he won just 42,919 more votes spread across just three swing states – Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.So the rules about who gets to vote are crucial, especially in these swing states. And who sets those rules? State legislatures, along with state courts that decide whether the legislatures are acting constitutionally. Hence, the importance of Tuesday’s two races in Wisconsin.Wisconsin Republicans have already changed state law to make voting more onerous by enacting a strict voter ID law. And last year, the state’s conservative supreme court banned drop boxes for absentee ballots. Wisconsin now ranks 47th out of 50 states on how easy it is to vote.Not incidentally, Wisconsin’s supreme court was the only state supreme court in the nation that agreed to hear Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election, eventually rejecting – by a single vote – his attempt to throw out 200,000 ballots in the state’s two large Democratic counties.Another way Trump could have won in 2020 is if the outcome of the election had been determined by Republican-controlled state legislatures in Wisconsin and other swing states – as Trump and many Republican members of Congress sought. Yet another reason why the Wisconsin races are so important.Friends, this is how authoritarian minorities steal democracies: they do it step by step. They design voting districts to freeze out a majority of voters. They then gain legislative supermajorities that allow them to control the state executive and state courts. Then they capture electoral college majorities despite the popular vote.Or they sow so much doubt about the popular vote that they decide the outcome.This was Trump’s playbook in 2020. He didn’t succeed then, but he might in 2024.What’s happening in Manhattan’s criminal court is obviously important. Holding a former president accountable to the rule of law is essential.But what’s happening today in Wisconsin may prove as, if not more, important to the future of American democracy. It will either strengthen or weaken the levers of self-government in a state where those levers could make all the difference.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More