The House is demanding testimony and documents from the New York prosecutor

Indicting the Ex-President of the United States for Election Fraud: A Conversation with Andrew Griggs in the City solicitor’s office

Griggs called her a great lawyer, a great prosecutor, but continues, “I just think that I know her from when I worked alongside her in the city solicitors office.” And I think that justice is somewhere in the middle.” While we were in his office, Griggs pulled a book from his shelf and read aloud the section about criminal solicitation to commit election fraud, which is in the state elections law. If you played the recording of Trump’s phone conversation to a grand jury and then read the state codes, Griggs told me, “they will indict him.” Griggs said that it was fascinating to see himself on the side of the prosecution rather than the defense in this case. He didn’t say if this particular prosecutor gave him hope, but he sounded upbeat as he noted that the former president, if indicted, would receive his due process “not on Fox News, not on his Truth Social, but in a Georgia courtroom.”

It was a strong statement, even for a president who had abused his powers many times. The acting attorney general and his deputy were told by the department that Mr. Trump’s claims were false, and so Trump ordered them to lie about it.

— The first Republican nominating contests are nearly a year away, so it’s impossible to judge how GOP primary voters and a national electorate might react to any indictment of the ex-president. Sununu said that the Democrats are building sympathy for Trump with probes like Braggs, in a way that might change the paradigms as we go into the election. Some voters feel that it’s time to move on from Trump’s crazy behavior and the chaos surrounding it. The GOP lost control of the House of Representatives in the last election because of the ex-president’s attempt to get his supporters into power. An indictment would add to the debate over whether Trump’s persona and political appeal is so damaged he could not win a general election.

It was bad enough for Mr. Barr to tell the public that the forthcoming Muller report would exonerate Mr. Trump, but it was worse still to know that the Russia connection was used to help defeat Hillary Clinton. A few months later Mr. Barr assigned John Durham, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut, as a special counsel to investigate Mr. Mueller’s investigation, hoping to prove Mr. Trump’s wild public allegations that the federal intelligence officials had helped instigate the claims of Russian interference to damage him.

When the Justice Department’s own inspector general prepared to issue a report saying that, while the F.B.I. made some ethical mistakes, the investigation was legitimate and not politically motivated, Mr. Durham lobbied him to drop the finding. When that effort was unsuccessful, Mr. Barr reverted to his usual pattern of trying to spin the report before it was issued, disagreeing with its finding before it was even out. Mr. Durham then followed up with a similar statement, shattering the clear department principle of staying silent about a current investigation.

The potential prosecution of a former president is something she could be facing. The skill with which Willis presents conspiracy cases is what makes a lengthy RICO trial possible. But it’s an approach she would be choosing in the highest-pressure context imaginable — one that would require both a huge investment of her office’s resources and a political appetite for a good deal of backlash and spectacle.

Nearly two years into Willis’s term, “I give her all the positive marks for going after President Trump,” Jackson told me. “I think it’s a courageous move. And I think it’s the right move.” She paused. That is my praise. And her criticism? Jackson sighed and said Willis had come to the State Senate to make a presentation about public safety, talking about gangs and other crime. Jackson had studied local crime statistics during the pandemic, however, and found a more complicated picture: murders up, other major crimes down. As Willis spoke, “I’m literally looking at the statistics — like, they’re on my desk right in front of me,” Jackson recounted. She said she struggled with that. I know what it’s like to be a politician. I know that we have to respond to public pressure. I do not think we have to add fuel to the fire. And there have been times — I’m trying to be very careful here, because I respect her — but there have been times in which I felt like she added fuel to a fire that we could have easily put out.”

But the morning after we spoke, I sat in the back of a courtroom where the judge was holding a series of preliminary hearings for jail inmates, all Black men, who had been arrested and held since mid-July. One person who was accused of stealing a landscaping equipment had been in jail for 112 days, while another had been locked up for 116. It turned out that the initial police report had overestimated the amount of damage, presenting the crime as a felony rather than what it actually was, a misdemeanor.

The case against Donald Trump for a misdemeanor in the case of alleged cover up of a payment to an adult film star

Mark Binelli is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote about the opera director Yuval Sharon, and before that about the tangled legal aftermath of a deadly Waco, Texas, biker brawl. One of the Atlanta based visual artists is interested in telling stories through the perspective of a black female. She was listed in the Ones to Watch by The British Journal of Photography.

The thought that an ex-president and a candidate would be charged with a crime appeared much more realistic after Trump predicted his arrest this week. America is headed for an even more divisive incident that will test his influence over the GOP.

onlookers are concerned about the idea of a case against Trump outside the bubble of the grand jury and district attorney’s office. The ex-president could be charged with a misdemeanor over allegedly improper classification in business records of a payment to Daniels, although hush money payments themselves aren’t illegal. If it is proven that Donald Trump tried to cover up the payment in order to commit another crime, it could be a felony and the charges could rise to a felony. Trump has previously denied knowledge of the payment.

The Manhattan District Attorney is investigating an alleged pay off of an adult film star before the 2016 election, a matter that was brought up after Trump warned he could be arrested. It looks like an extraordinary attempt to influence an open grand jury investigation.

A question of credibility is likely to be posed by the extent to which Michael Cohen would be used as a central figure in the prosecution of the Daniels case.

One outcome of the Manhattan probe is that Trump would have serious consequences if he was to be indicted for a trivial crime. “It is going to cause mayhem, Paula. I mean, it’s just a very scary time in our country,” Habba said. Trump supporters should be peaceful and no one wants them to get hurt, she said.

The Republican assault on trying to hold Trump accountable is a lot like what happened when Trump was in office.

In an ideal world, someone who is indicted, as Trump could be in the coming days, has the opportunity to disprove a case they say is unfair and not supported by the evidence. But Trump and his allies are not waiting for that moment, and in the process, are offering a preview of the months of deepening political turmoil that a prosecution could entail – not just in Manhattan but in multiple other investigations against him. Those probes into his role in the run up to the Capitol insurrection, his attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 election in Georgia and his handling of classified documents could have far greater constitutional implications than the Bragg case.

Kevin McCarthy thinks it is the weakest case out there. The California Republican, who has ordered GOP-led committees to investigate whether the Manhattan District Attorney used federal funds to look into a hush money payment, told a news conference that he’d already spoken to Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan.

The prosecution of the former vice president, J.P.T.C. Trump, in the wake of the Daniels investigation and the case of the first US president

But the speaker also said people should not protest over what may or not happen and insisted that Trump didn’t want that either. McCarthy said that they want calmness out there if this were to happen.

Further underscoring Trump’s firm hold on the GOP base, his social media post prompted several of his Republican critics to line up beside him. In an interview with ABC News, the former Vice President stated that the campaign to challenge Trump for the presidential nomination felt like a political prosecution. I think it is not what the American people want to see.

New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who has said it is time for Republicans to move on from Trump, told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union” the Bragg investigation was “building a lot of sympathy for the former president.” He added: “I (had) coffee this morning with some folks, and none of them were big Trump supporters, but they all said they felt like he was being attacked.”

If a former president was indicted it would be the first time a US president had been charged with a crime since the Civil War. Ex-US leaders are not pursued by successor administrations. So, even if the cases against Trump are legally justified, prosecutors in New York, as well as in Georgia and at the Justice Department, face a perilous and uncharted moment.

The debate is if putting Trump on trial would in any way be in the national interest, and if it would have lasting constitutional implications, at least in a fairly constrained case. History may not look kindly on any failed prosecution.

The fact that the Daniels case dates back to an election that is now more than six years old, even as the nation faces another White House campaign, could also raise questions for the public, especially given the uncertainty about the case for anyone outside the small bubble of the investigation. Kelly said on CNN that nobody in the country should be above the law. But he also said: “I would hope that, if they brought charges, that they have a strong case, because this is … unprecedented. And there are certainly risks involved here.”

Kelly emphasized that the convention concerning the role of presidents and ex-presidents in national life has been shattered by Trump, who burst onto the scene with an upstart presidential campaign eight years ago. He again may be about to leap to the center, in the most contentious of ways, of the national psyche and political debate.

The Case for an Indictment of the Ex-President Using Prosecutors: Three House Committee Chairmen Kicked Off Their Own Probe

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, House Oversight Committee Chair Jim Comer, R-Ky., and House Administration Committee Chair Bryan Steil, R-Wis., kicked off their own probe on Monday, sending Bragg a letter demanding documents, communications and testimony related to his investigation of the former president.

The three chairmen called a possible indictment “an unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority” and said it was based on “a novel legal theory untested anywhere in the country and one that federal authorities declined to pursue.”

They added that if Bragg does indict Trump, Bragg’s actions “will erode confidence in the evenhanded application of justice and unalterably interfere in the course of the 2024 presidential election.”

They don’t have a date for a hearing, but they expect him to show up soon. They gave Bragg a deadline of Thursday to respond to them to set up a possible appearance.

House Republicans are huddling at their annual retreat in Orlando, Fla., and the former president, who is running for the GOP nomination in 2024, is dominating the conversation.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said that it was perfectly alright for the ex-president’s allies to publicly lambast a prosecutor as he conducts his work, despite the fact that his job depends on Trump’s patronage. Or as the California Republican put it, House committees have the right to ask questions.

“One of the reasons we won races in New York is based upon this DA of not protecting the citizens of New York, and now he’s spending his time on this,” McCarthy said. The statute of limitations are no longer in place. He added about an indictment: “This will not hold up in court, if this is what he wants to do.”

Bragg, Bragg and DeSantis: Trump’s Charges with Politics and Ethics in the New York and Washington Wall Streets

As House Republicans sought to showcase their legislative agenda in the majority, questions about Trump continued to be front and center — a dynamic they struggled with during his time in the White House.

The first question at the Hispanic Republicans press conference was about Bragg. It certainly smells like it’s political and that is what Carlos Gimenez, R- Fla., said to reporters.

In fact, the House GOP appears to be using the exact same tactic they accuse the Biden administration, Bragg and any other investigators on Trump’s trail of employing – weaponizing the powers of government to advance a partisan political end.

There are questions about the case’s authenticity, since there are doubts about a potential prosecution and the unusual nature of potential charges related to business and electoral law violations. This is an especially fateful issue given the gravity of any potential case against a former president.

In New York and Washington, the authorities have put up cameras and barricaded roads because of Trump’s calls for protests, and because he wants to end his political career on January 6, 2021.

On Monday, for instance, there was intense scrutiny around a courthouse in New York where one witness delivered testimony that might have been potentially helpful to Trump. And an ugly spat broke out between Trump and his potential top rival in the GOP nominating race, Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor took a jab at his one-time mentor by suggesting he didn’t know anything about “paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair,” while also condemning what he said were political prosecutions. Trump launched a vicious counter-attack, which gave rise to a potentially nasty GOP primary campaign and showed that he was upset with what he saw as disloyalty from his opponent.

“I do get concerned when I look out there, and I see justice not being equal to others, especially in the history of where we are,” he said. It will happen if a local Democrats plays in Presidential politics, do you think that will happen across the country?

What has changed with respect to New York in the investigation of the Cohen-Coyle-Kooke case? CNN’s Carol Cordero on the Status of the Peach State

But the use of government power to advance political ends appears to mirror exactly the behavior Republicans, in their new subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, are accusing the FBI, the Justice Department and other government agencies of.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan warned that the investigation was a sham and that they wanted to know if federal funds were involved. The Ohio Republican also told CNN’s Manu Raju: “We don’t think President Trump broke the law at all.”

Republicans, along with every other American, do not know exactly what the evidence against Trump might be other than hints contained in media accounts and a previous case involving his ex-lawyer – Michael Cohen, a pivotal witness in the current matter – who was previously sent to jail for for tax fraud, making false statements to Congress and violating campaign finance laws.

CNN reported on Monday, for instance, that Atlanta-area prosecutors are considering bringing racketeering and conspiracy charges in connection with Trump’s election stealing effort in the Peach State, citing a source with knowledge of the investigation.

My biggest question in the New York case is what has changed? CNN legal analyst Carrie Cordero told Wolf Blitzer on the “Situation Room” on Monday. The facts of this case are not new. And so the big question that I have with respect to New York is what has changed more recently in the past year or so that has gotten it to this point?”

This is a complicated legal narrative that might convince a jury but could also be a tricky sell in the wider fight for public opinion in such a highly political case.

In an appearance that led some experts to doubt whether his testimony could affect any grand jury vote, Costello said he had listened to Cohen stand in front of the courthouse and say things that were not in line with what he said to us.

The idea that a case could only be made on Cohen’s word, without much corroborating evidence, is unlikely. But there is much about this grave matter that the rest of the country doesn’t yet understand.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/21/politics/republicans-trump-playbook/index.html

Trump’s return to political center stage is not enough: a hurricane for the road to St. Paul’s Throat?

That is not, however, quelling the storm that has accompanied Trump’s return to political center stage, which could reach hurricane strength in the days ahead.