The subpoena could have consequences over the interpretation of executive privilege
Subpoenas. Trump is not Oz, but he is trying to make the case that Trump is all power: The case against a former president
The subject of a congressional subpoena, Trump must be aware that he’s a former president. Just another person who is a citizen. The kind of person who can issue a subpoena.
The committee still has a report to publish and could also request that the Justice Department pursue charges against Trump or his former aides for their roles in helping to incite the attack on the Capitol and their efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
“They are trying to make the case that Trump is Oz,” said CNN’s John King, interpreting the committee’s subpoena of Trump. The little guy behind a curtain is trying to pull a machine, but he is presenting himself as all powerful.
Contempt. The Democrats in the Congress could vote to hold him in contempt if he doesn’t cooperate.
Prosecution. If found guilty, as Bannon was, Trump could theoretically face a minimum of 30 days in jail. Bannon will be sentenced for failing to comply with the House subpoena later this month.
Investigating the case of a former president accused of treason in front of the House Judiciary Committee on a lawsuit against the White House
“None of that is going to happen,” the Trump critic and conservative lawyer George Conway predicted during an appearance on CNN Thursday. This is about doing something. This is about getting an answer from Trump.
The Supreme Court has made clear that it stands on Trump’s presidency when it ignores his attempt to block the National Archives from providing information to the committee.
In a new twist to his classified material saga, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and Katelyn Polantz reported that two people who found two classified documents in a Trump storage facility in Florida testified before a federal grand jury. CNN said that prosecutors want to look at documents on a staff member’s computer at Mar-a-Lago. The former president has not been charged with a crime, but these developments are the latest sign of an aggressive approach by special counsel Jack Smith in probing the matter. And it shows how a regular drumbeat of legal problems could detract from the former president’s attempts to inject energy into a so-far tepid campaign – especially given the multiple criminal threats he may face.
The January 6 committee feels it has enough information to refer some cases to the Justice Department for prosecutions, according to Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney. Over 30 witnesses have invoked the Fifth Amendment against themselves in regards to their dealings with the former President.
Ford later testified as a former president in 1983 to a Senate subcommittee. The last time lawmakers posed a question to a president was 39 years ago when that hearing took place.
President Thomas Jefferson declined to appear at former Vice President Aaron Burr’s trial for treason even though he was subpoenaed by then-Chief Justice John Marshall. Jefferson did ultimately provide some documents. Burr was eventually acquitted of all charges.
The Senate Appropriate Sessions Revisited: Trump’s Investigation of the House Committee on Taxes and Personal Communications, and a Court Indictment
The Supreme Court did rule New York investigators could get access to the financial documents. Trump’s company will go on criminal trial this month on charges of violating tax laws.
The New York Attorney General’s civil inquiry into his business practices resulted in him being ordered to comply with subpoenas. He invoked the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination during that deposition.
James sued Trump, his three oldest children and the Trump Organization. On Thursday, James asked a state court to block Trump from moving assets to shield them from the lawsuit.
That means the January 6 committee must plan to wrap up all of its work by January 3, 2023, when the next Congress begins and the January 6 committee may be no more.
Trump also tried to sue the heads of the House select committee and the National Archives to block the release of Jan. 6-related documents, but a court ruled against him last year.
Trump is challenging both the legitimacy of the committee – which multiple courts have upheld – and is claiming he should be immune from testimony about the time he was president.
Since Trump’s team replied on November 9 that he wouldn’t testify and found no records to turn over related to personal communications, the House hasn’t respond substantively, the court papers said.
The issue came up many times during the House committee’s investigation. The committee subpoenaed numerous Trump aides and advisers, several of whom refused to testify on the basis of executive privilege. The DOJ brought criminal charges against two advisers, including Steve Bannon, who was found guilty of contempt for refusing to testify. The case against Peter Corsica is expected to begin this year.
Trump’s attorney, David Warrington, said in a statement in part that “long-held precedent and practice maintain that separation of powers prohibits Congress from compelling a President to testify before it.”
The lawsuit raises some protections for the presidency, which has never been tested by appeals courts, and it also gives Trump a court where he hasn’t commented on his disputes with House Democrats in the past.
The letters that Trump provided to the court show that the House panel tried to get records from his personal phones or apps from January 6, 2021, but were denied by the president. The letters show that the House tried to identify every communication device that Trump used from Election Day until he left the presidency.
The panel subpoenaed Trump on October 21 seeking documents by November 4 and testimony starting on November 14. When the former president did not turn over documents by the first deadline, Thompson accused Trump’s team of trying to delay, according to court documents.
Those discoveries allowed Trump to claim that he was being unfairly singled out, even if the cases have significant differences. Any Trump attempt to argue that he, like Biden and Pence, inadvertently took documents to his home will be undermined by the fact that he claimed the material belonged to him, and not the government, and what appears to be repeated refusals to give it back.
Donald Trump and Mar-a-Lago: When Subpoenas Get Closer, Filtering the Evidence in the Investigative Bubble
The committee has previously held witnesses in contempt of Congress for defying the panel’s subpoenas but has little ability to force compliance with the subpoena quickly through the courts.
Thompson and Cheney said in their statement on Monday, “[Trump’s] attorneys have made no attempt to negotiate an appearance of any sort, and his lawsuit parades out many of the same arguments that courts have rejected repeatedly over the last year.”
Donald Trump, like other of his closest allies, is refusing to do what more than a thousand other witnesses have done, according to Thompson and Cheney. “Donald Trump orchestrated a scheme to overturn a presidential election and block the transfer of power. He is obliged to give answers to the American people.
Sources familiar with the investigation say two people who found a pair of classified documents for Donald Trump in a Florida storage facility testified before a federal grand jury in Washington.
Two people, who were hired to search four of Trump’s properties, were each interviewed in separate appearances last week.
They were hired to search Trump’s Bedminster golf club, Trump Tower in New York, an office location in Florida and a storage unit in Florida last October, months after the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. The extent of information they offered the grand jury remains unclear, though they didn’t decline to answer any questions, one of the sources said.
The development comes at a time federal prosecutors are looking at files from a laptop of a staffer at Mar-a-Lago, according to multiple sources. In some instances, the special counsel’s office has been unwilling to negotiate over subpoenas, leading to tense conversations.
By giving investigators access to computers, investigators are trying to figure out if there is an electronic paper trail related to the classified documents.
For all the political noise, the investigation into Donald Trump and Mar-a-Lago is taking place inside its own legal bubble.
This remains the case, despite the political gift handed to Trump with the discovery of classified documents at Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home and at a Washington office he once used that should have been handed back when he left the vice presidency. There was also some classified material found at Pence’s home.
The First Two-State Campaign of J.P. Smith and the Mar-a-Lago Investigative Investigations: Donald Trump and the Phenomenology of Justice
Special counsel Jack Smith and prosecutors who now work for him have used the federal grand jury nearly weekly to question witnesses in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.
The twice-impeached former president began his first two-state campaign swing on Saturday in hopes of a stunning political comeback after he was impeached.
Then on Monday, Trump’s potential exposure – in two of his multiple strands of legal peril – appeared to grow, foreshadowing a campaign likely to be repeatedly punctuated by distractions from criminal investigations.
Trump is well known for his ability to use legal and political methods to call him to account. He’s already built a central foundation of his new presidential quest around the idea that he’s being political persecuted by Justice Department investigations and what he claims are rogue Democratic prosecutors.
“We’re going to stop the appalling weaponization of our justice system. There’s never been a justice system like this. The former president said over the weekend that it was all an investigation.
This is a message that may be attractive to some of Trump’s base voters who themselves feel alienated from the federal government and previously bought into his claims about a “deep state” conspiracy against him. It’s also a technique, in which a strongman leader argues that he is taking the heat so his followers don’t have to, that is a familiar page in the authority playbooks of demagogues throughout history.
The probe of the Democrat-Democratian Correspondence to the U.S. Senator from the 2020 midterm elections: The case against prosecuting an ex-president
Since taking over the DOJ investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Smith, who has a reputation for moving quickly, has accelerated the probe’s pace.
It sounds like he is trying to prepare them for how the prosecutors would use incriminating evidence against Trump, or at the very least how they would use exonerating evidence if they win a trial.
The simple, politically charged act of investigating an ex-president was always bound to create a political furor. The fact that Trump is running for the White House again multiplies the stakes and means profound decisions are ahead for Attorney General Merrick Garland if evidence suggests Trump should be charged.
“If someone can show me evidence that there was influence peddling with those classified documents that were in the possession of President Trump, then we would certainly expand it,” the Kentucky Republican said. He went on to accuse Biden and his family of being “very cozy” with people from the Chinese Communist party but offered no evidence of such links or that they had anything to do with classified documents. The GOP has claimed that the DOJ is employing double standards towards Trump, and that his remarks suggested that the committee was trying to find evidence to condemn Biden, but was treating Trump differently.
CNN’s Pamela Brown asked House Oversight Chairman James Comer why he had no interest in more than 325 documents found at Trump’s home but was interested in 20 classified documents uncovered in Biden’s premises.
The two special counsel investigations probing Trump and Biden’s retention of secret documents are unfolding independently. In a legal sense, there is no overlap between them. They will be subject to the same political fire if findings are made public.
Were Trump, for instance, to be prosecuted – over what so far appears to be a larger haul of documents and conduct that may add up to obstruction – and Biden is not, the ex-president would incite a firestorm of protest among his supporters. Even though the sitting president is protected from prosecution because of historic Justice Department guidance, it is difficult to see how the political will for prosecuting Biden and Trump would hold up in a presidential election.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/31/politics/trump-documents-grand-jury-2024-campaign/index.html
Robert Birchum and the Associated Attorney General Michael J. Pence: The Biden D.O.J. Subpoena
The country got a reminder of what happens to lower-ranking workers when they’re sent home with secret material, as the political repercussions from the documents furor deepened on Monday.
Robert Birchum was in the Air Force for 30 years and held a top secret clearance. According to his plea agreement, he stored hundreds of files that contained confidential or top secret information outside of authorized locations. A plea agreement stated that the only place where the defendants could store classified information was at their residence.
Former Vice President Mike Pence recently announced he would challenge Special Counsel Jack Smith’s subpoena for him to appear before a grand jury in Washington as part of the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and the related Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Mr. Pence claimed that “the Biden D.O.J. subpoena” was “unconstitutional” and “unprecedented.” He told them that they need to decide where they stand and that he supports the constitution of the United States. Mr. Pence wanted to go all the way to the Supreme Court.
When Joe Biden won the election, Donald Trump and his allies demanded that the congressional vote be disrupted. As president of the Senate, Pence was tasked with presiding over the certification proceedings.
The Limit on Executive Privilege in the Post-Watergate Era, Including Subpoenas to a Grand Jury
In the constitution, executive privilege is not explicitly stated. Instead, it implicitly stems from Article II, outlining the power of the executive branch, and the separation of powers.
“If some documents were to be made public, it would damage the country in a variety of ways,” explained Shaub, the former Justice Department official who is now a professor at the University of Kentucky.
The protection allows advisers to give candid counsel without fear of public disclosure, which may make the president’s deliberations more productive.
The idea was first proposed in the Nixon administration when the special prosecutor in the Watergate break-in case subpoenaed tapes and transcripts from President Richard Nixon.
Although the court ruled against Nixon, it ultimately found that there is confidentiality interest in communications between a president and their senior-most advisers. But, the court specified, there’s one very clear limit — executive privilege does not apply when the communications are relevant to a criminal investigation.
For example, in Nixon’s case, the Supreme Court found a compelling interest in the criminal case against the Watergate burglars, since there was a “demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial.”
Legal experts said that most disputes over executive privilege have been solved through compromise between those seeking the documents and those providing them.
According to the New York Times, the former president has tried to use executive privilege to block testimony to a federal grand jury but those efforts have been less successful.
Victoria Nourse served as chief counsel to Vice President Joe Biden while she was at the Department of Justice and she said that a subpoena issued by the DOJ is harder to ignore. Congressional subpoenas lack teeth because the process to get a judge to enforce them takes too long.
Jack Smith’s subpoena and the Supreme Court: Why he fought to oust President Biden in 2024
As the former vice president, he cannot claim executive privilege. It’s the executive who has the power in this case. That’s noteworthy, as the two men have not had the smoothest of relationships when it comes to the events of Jan. 6.
If Trump is successful in asserting executive privilege, there will likely be a battle in court. There is no executive privilege for committing a crime. So the question is how far they want to take this and if they want a judge to adjudicate it,” she said.
When a possible presidential candidate wants the Supreme Court to decide a constitutional case that could undermine his chances in an upcoming campaign, it is important for him to be careful.
The campaign style politics of Mr. Smith is being used to score points by the voters who would like to oust President Biden. Well done. That’s what politicians do. But Jack Smith’s subpoena was neither politically motivated nor designed to strengthen President Biden’s political hand in 2024. Thus the jarring dissonance between the subpoena and Mr. Pence’s characterization of it. The D.O.J. was not politicized by Mr. Pence.
It is unclear how long it will take for the sealed proceedings to unfold, but it’s possible that the district court resolves the dispute, or that it will be appealed to a federal appeals court and perhaps, eventually, to the US Supreme Court.
Pence ultimately rebuffed those calls for him to disturb Congress’ plans – a decision he stands by now. He has plans to fight the subpoena.
The Speech or Debate Clause of the constitution protects lawmakers from being targeted by law enforcement, according to the former vice president.
