Trump has been indicted on historic charges

No person is above the law. The case against ex-president Donald Trump on felony charges of wrongdoing a white presidential candidate

Monday was a dark day for Trump, despite his bravery and talk that he will make his legal problems disappear into political gold. He was going to return to his old hometown of Manhattan and be arrested for the first time in the history of a criminal case against an ex-president. Trump has long been a force of nature who rebels against constraints and has always been impossible for his staff to control. But now he will be subject to the dictates of a judge and the rules and conventions of the legal system, which will be far harder for him to disrupt and divert than the institutions of political accountability he has subverted.

And there are increasing signs that this new reality – which will come with hefty financial commitments in legal fees and locks on Trump’s calendar – could be multiplied at a time when he’s already facing the intense demands of another White House bid.

We say that no person is above the law. Prosecutors need to hold former President Donald Trump accountable for any potential wrongdoing. There are more than enough things to try to hold Trump accountable for, including his involvement in the attack on the US Capitol and his alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Appropriately, federal and state officials are investigating or already suing for these many misdeeds.

Special Counsel Jack Smith is leading the Justice Department investigation and President Trump said he was wondering what it was prior to a change.

While Trump’s comments will signal how he intends to fight the charges against him in the political arena, the former president is also preparing for the fight in court: He added a new attorney on Monday to be his lead counsel.

Former President Donald Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office alleges that the president faked his business records to hide information about 2016 election voters.

Trump’s Return to New York for a Multi-Front Reliability Test in the Confronting Mueller and the Media Circus

Trump made a big show on Monday of his return to New York ahead of his arraignment. The motorcade of SUVs used by the Secret Service to travel to his private plane was reminiscent of a presidential movement in a power play meant to send a message of strength.

He will return to his Mar-a-Lago resort after court and use the time to make his case that he is not a criminal and that the New York case is a political persecution.

A criminal prosecution is very demanding. In many cases, a multi-front defense in multiple cases would represent an extraordinary storm. It would affect the ex-presidents ability to control his political schedule as well as his destiny. When special counsel Robert Muller was conducting a Russia investigation, Trump used his popularity with Republican voters to try to undermine the evidence against him. Most GOP senators knew that they would pay a heavy price if they convicted him in an impeachment trial.

The situation is somewhat similar to the 2020 election, when the will of voters prevailed because Trump’s attempts to have votes thrown out and results changed foundered in multiple courts because of the fact-based standards of evidence and the law.

CNN and some other media organizations were denied a request by a judge to broadcast the arraignment live. Five photographers will be allowed to take pictures of the courtroom and Trump prior to the hearing.

If anyone knows how to work in a media circus it’s Trump. In this case, he fears being part of a media circus that he can’t control, similar to the difference in this case.

The Secret Service will be with Trump throughout the day. The district attorney’s office is where his arrest will be processed. There are concerns that it could leak out if a mugshot is taken, sources told CNN.

What is in the indictment of Donald Trump? The case of Cohen vs. Daniels, an ongoing affair between Trump and Daniels

What is contained in the indictment? The investigation started when Trump was in the White House and centered around a $130,000 payment Cohen made to Daniels in October 2016 to stop her from talking about their alleged relationship, days before the election. The affair has not been denied by Trump.

He appeared before a judge after surrendering to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and immediately entered a not guilty plea.

As he arrived in the courtroom, Mr. Trump was angry. He was accompanied by his legal adviser, Boris Epshteyn, and the lawyers handling this case, Todd W. Blanche, Susan R. Necheles and Joseph Tacopina. Mr. Trump left to fly back to Florida after he declined to speak at the hearing.

Mr. Blanche, speaking outside the courthouse after the arraignment, said the former president was upset over the charges but determined to prevail. He is frustrated. He’s upset. But I will tell you what. He is working harder than ever. He said it was not going to slow him down.

An investigation of a colloquium between Donald Trump and a playboy friend: What makes falsified business records a felony?

According to the legal theory Bragg is pushing, what makes the falsified business records a felony is an underlying federal campaign finance crime that Trump is accused of trying to conceal. State election law was violated by the scheme according to the district attorney.

News helicopters hovered as a string of SUVs zipped down the FDR Drive in Manhattan. A crowd of journalists, supporters and onlookers waited at the Manhattan Criminal Court, surrounded by police officers. All were awaiting the arrival of the defendant.

Prosecutors cited three occasions in which they say Trump “orchestrated” such a scheme with executives at American Media Inc., the company that publishes the National Enquirer. All three took place after Trump announced his candidacy for president in June of 2015.

Karen McDougal, a Playboy playmate of the Year in 1998, received a payment from the tabloid in exchange for her story of a relationship she had with Donald Trump. She reached a $150,000 agreement with the National Enquirer, which bought the rights to her story to suppress it — a practice known as “catch and kill.”

The case against Trump stems from a 2018 guilty plea by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, who admitted to making illegal campaign contributions in the form of buying women’s silence about their alleged relationships with Trump. He stated that in 2016 he paid $130,000 to silence Daniels, who claimed to have an affair with Trump.

The monthly checks, totaling $420,000, were identified as a “retainer” payment for Cohen. Cohen said some of the items came from Trump’s own account, while others came from the trust. If it was done to further a crime, Falsifying business records could be considered a felony in New York. He said he discussed the checks with Trump at the White House.

A Conversation with Donald Bragg About a 2016 New York State Sentiment Case involving Stormy Daniels and a Porn Star

In remarks that lasted just around 25 minutes, Trump dismissed the other investigations he’s facing, said DA Bragg had “no case” and attacked Judge Juan Merchan and his family as “Trump-hating” people.

Mr. Trump’s surrender was the culmination of a monthslong drama that first centered on the question of whether he would be indicted — and soon broadened to include predictions about how he would respond. He is worried about the prospect of an arrest and has fretted over the fact that his aides are using the indictment to ramp up fund-raising and push his competition into an awkward dance.

In a previous case involving Cohen, Trump behavior was sleazy. But some legal analysts pointed out that Bragg’s legal roadmap could open the way to robust pre-trial motions by Trump’s attorneys.

Georgia Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is a supporter of Donald Trump and held a rally at the park across from the courthouse. Her speech was often drowned out by protesters and counter-protesters, who blew whistles and chanted. After speaking for a little while, she was thrown out of the park by the police.

Bragg has the benefit of a cooperating cooperator in the form of Cohen, whose account can be verified by a tape of a conversation with Trump.

It’s been known for a while that the case revolved around hush-money payments that Mr. Trump made to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, to cover up an affair they had. Falsifying business records can sometimes be charged as a misdemeanor in New York State, and to bump up the charges to felonies requires proof that they were falsified to conceal another crime. That crime was widely believed to be a federal campaign finance violation, and some legal experts described that combination as an untested legal theory, because federal violations are outside Mr. Bragg’s jurisdiction.

Bragg said the business records have been altered in order to hide criminal conduct connected to the 2016 campaign. He stated that it’s a crime in New York to promote a candidacy by illegal means.

Bragg’s approach is described by a new statement of facts but not much else, except for the prosecutor’s legal theory which was laid out at the news conference.

The statement of facts points to court filings in the federal investigation into the hush-money payments to assert that the participants in the alleged illegal scheme, including Cohen, have admitted the payoffs to the two women were unlawful.

The accusation was made by the editor-in-chief and CEO of the National Enquirer that Stormy Daniels had an affair with Trump, according to the charging documents.

A repayment arrangement was confirmed by the defendants and Lawyer A in the Oval Office early in February of this year.

Many of these specific facts have been public for years. Cohen publicly revealed one of the $35,000 checks while testifying to Congress in 2019 in an effort to corroborate his story that Trump played a role in coordinating and orchestrating the payment to Daniels.

American Media paid Karen McDougal $100,000 in order to keep her story out of the public eye regarding her affair with Donald Trump.

According to the statement of facts, the company made a payment to McDougal so that she wouldn’t reveal damaging allegations about President Trump prior to the election.

The Indictment of a New York Business Corrupted by the New York Mania Implications for State and Local Public Prosecutors

Bragg said that Manhattan is home to the country’s most significant business market. New York businesses can’t manipulate their records to cover up criminal conduct.

Even as the magazine concluded that the story was not true, executives agreed not to release the doorman from the agreement until after the election, prosecutors say, and the payment was “falsely characterized” in AMI’s books and records.

Cohen had agreed that Trump or his business would reimburse the publisher. That reimbursement never took place on the advice of the general counsel.

Hasen was skeptical that a federal campaign finance prosecution could be used to support state charges. Braggs’ defenders have noted that the New York false records statute seems to contemplate the commission or concealment of any crime, and therefore, they argue, it covers federal law violations. Either way, the question could be litigated in the pre-trial phase.

After being impeached twice and still securing a record-breaking number of electoral votes, Trump tried to take advantage of his day in court.

He left the courthouse in a motorcade watched by several cable news networks. A fake mug shot for $47 was being offered by his campaign.

And to close out a full day of media attention, Trump took the stage at Mar-a-Lago before an audience of his supporters to attack the charges as political persecution.

“They can try to stop me all they want with threats, indictments and even arrests,” he wrote in an April 1 email, “but they can NEVER crush the spirits of 74 million patriots who want to make our country great again!”

Trump’s supporters are showing him their support in other ways. Advisers say his campaign has raised $10 million because of the indictment.

It was captured by some Republicans who don’t support the former president that the Bragg indictment could benefit Trump and help the district attorney’s office. Another Trump critic, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, also criticized the case.

Two-thirds of respondents think the charges in New York are not that serious, according to a poll released Wednesday. According to six in 10 people, the investigation is politically motivated.

Final Final Court Decision Against Trump in Stormy Daniels’ Defamation-Field Defamation Case: NPR’s JJ/NPR Correspondent

The next major court date is December 4. The prosecution is pushing for opening arguments to begin sometime in January 2024, but Trump’s defense asked for a few more months, maybe sometime in spring 2024. That’s right in the heart of primary season, which could complicate the former president’s reelection bid.

The defense may try to move the trial out of Manhattan, where many people voted against Trump in the presidential election.

Carrie Johnson of NPR’s Justice Correspondent says that legal experts expected the Manhattan DA case to be the weakest of the investigations.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the former president in his effort to recoup additional legal fees from adult film star Stormy Daniels, who had filed and lost a defamation suit against him.

Daniels had sued Trump in 2018 after he called an allegation by Daniels that an unknown man threatened her in a parking lot to keep quiet about her alleged affair with Trump a “total con job” in a tweet.

“The Court agrees with Mr. Trump’s argument because the tweet in question constitutes ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ normally associated with politics and public discourse in the United States. The First Amendment protects this type of rhetorical statement,” Otero wrote at the time.

“Trump’s attorneys reasonably spent the requested 183.35 hours preparing a motion to dismiss, a reply to the opposition to the motion, two extension motions, the answering brief, and the fee application,” it added.

Trump attorney Harmeet Dhillon celebrated the ruling in a tweet Tuesday, saying: “Congratulations to President Trump on this final attorney fee victory in his favor this morning. Our firm was successful in getting Attorney Fee Awards in his favor in the meritless litigation initiated by Stormy Daniels.

The Spectacular Story of a White House Criminal Justice Indicted by a Newly-Indicted Presidential Candidate

Nicole Hemmer is an associate professor of history and director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency. She is the author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s” and also co-hosted “Past Present” and ” This Day in Esoteric Political History.” The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

The atmosphere might have been unusual — the thousands of New Yorkers who pass through the court each year seldom draw much attention — but what happened inside was an ordinary process: an accused person turned himself in, was arrested and fingerprinted and appeared before a judge to hear the charges and enter a plea.

The spectacle outside — and the one that will surely evolve as former president Donald Trump attempts to seize control of the story of his indictment — might tempt observers to see Trump’s arrest as an extraordinary event. It’s the first time a former president has ever been indicted. But the story told in the images of Trump walking through the scuffed halls of the court building, is a story of accountability under the law – extraordinary only in its ordinariness.

He waves to his supporters and then raises a fist as he enters the court. But any sign of defiance had vanished by the time of his arraignment and not-guilty plea.

Beneath the familiar swoop of dyed-blond hair and thick foundation, his expression was grim and reserved. For the time being, he was dependent on a judge to decide his next move. While Trump will be trying to give a different read of those images in the coming hours and days, media outlets will be tempted to help him out by focusing on the spectacle.

While Republicans in congress refused to play a role in efforts to hold Trump accountable, processes like impeachment and congressional hearings did exist that could reveal bad acts, but not make them right.

The first and second impeachments had to be debated and exposed, but it was clear that most of the Republicans would not turn on Trump. The January 6 Committee played out the same way as before, with Republicans refusing to engage in a process that might end with a referral of charges against the former president.

Since the New York indictment, Mr. Trump has faced criminal charges, and Tuesday was his first chance to address them. He went back to his mansion at Mar-a-Lago, surrounded by American flags and supporters with red hats and campaign signs, and gave a half hour battle cry that was painfully on brand: a greatest hits of his witch-Hunt grievances interwoven with his dark take on how the country is As he tells it, “all-out nuclear World War III” is just around the corner. It can happen! We’re not very far away from it!” He also suggested that the investigation into his squirreling away sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago could somehow lead to his being executed.

He has been working with his team to figure out how best to present himself since news of the indictments broke. Should he wave to the crowd or not? Should he smile or stay solemn? Should he get a mugshot or not?

These questions were asked of both campaign aides and lawyers since Trump clearly plans to leverage the images in his bid for the presidency. Already his campaign is promoting t-shirts with digitally-created mugshots, and his campaign emails burst with warnings that after “they” come for the president, they’re coming for his voters next.

He unleashed a rant after returning from Mar-a-Lago to find out that the investigations against him, Biden’s presidency and his term in office had been false. He said that Bragg was trying to fix another election and renewed false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

The other was that Trump would respond with such fury and incitement that he would rip even deeper divides in a nation estranged by his aberrant presidency and stoke new turmoil that could further damage vital political and judicial institutions.

On a day that Trump described as the worst of all-worlds, he was forced to turn himself in to police after sending a post on social media. The result is that another grim and even tragic chapter may lie ahead for a country that is still far from working through the fallout from Trump’s single term as it girds for yet another bitter election.

He said our country had gone to Hell and he ranted against prosecutors in other, more serious investigations than the one in Manhattan.

The next hearing in the Manhattan case could be followed by other cases which could put the events of Tuesday behind them. The day a former president was charged with a crime will always be remembered, but it might come to be seen as the start of an ominous process for Trump more than a historic culmination.

There was a “disappointment” among his fellow veteran law enforcement officers that the Bragg indictment and statement of facts had not been more specific regarding the jump required to charge Trump with a felony.

“Everyone was hoping we would see more about the direction that they intend to take this prosecution, what is the legal theory that ties that very solid misdemeanor case … to the intent to conceal another crime?” He said that.

If our legal friends don’t see a way to be charged with a felony, it’s difficult to convince a jury that they should get there.

“We cannot and will not normalize serious criminal conduct,” he said at a news conference after Trump appeared in court. He said that such cases were part of the work of his office.

This case is at the core of so many white collar cases. Bragg said that there are allegations that someone lied again and again in order to protect their interests.

The legal case will play out in court. It will also have political implications because of Trump’s desire to win the White House in four years.

“I believe President Trump’s character and conduct make him unfit for office. Even so, I believe the New York prosecutor has stretched to reach felony criminal charges in order to fit a political agenda,” Romney said.

He is going to follow the footsteps of demagogues by trying to destroy trust in institutions that try to constrain his behavior and by claiming that he is the victim of political persecution. It is clear from the way in which he has persuaded millions of his supporters that the last election was corrupt, that Trump has a talent for propaganda.

Some political pundits have predicted that Trump’s indictment could help him politically, at least in the short term. The grand jury voted last week to indict him, and his campaign says it has raised tens of thousands of dollars. And Trump’s opponents and potential rivals for the GOP nomination have had little choice but to line up and criticize Bragg over his actions if they want to avoid alienating Trump’s base.

But months ahead of the GOP primary, it’s impossible to know how Tuesday’s events will play out. Past evidence suggests that the more extreme Trump gets, the more popular he becomes with base voters.

The past does not have a good political lesson for the ex-president. The extremism that he displayed on Tuesday night to a primetime television audience was exactly the brand of radicalism that contributed to disappointing Republican finishes in the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms.

The New York Times reports that a convicted felon will be tried for the defamation of an ex-President and the prosecution of a former attorney

Observers from across the political spectrum have been skeptical of the legal theory that underlies Bragg’s case. The New York Times reported in March that it could be possible for a court to throw out a felony charge against a former president because of a violation of state election law. Trump, in other words, may still wriggle out of this predicament.

That is nonsense. There’s no good reason to exempt Trump from prosecution when his former lawyer Michael Cohen went to prison for his role in surreptitiously moving these funds to benefit the campaign, as have others for similar conduct.

Indeed, what’s struck me over the last two days in New York is a distinct lack of excitement. Many who detest Trump, I suspect, have lost faith in the ability of the legal system to hold him to account. Many of his supporters don’t seem to be willing to fight in Manhattan because they are told it is a crime-ridden hellhole.

This uncomfortable reality is actually something for every member of the G.O.P. to think about. Again. Mr. Trump said on Tuesday that he was going to make everyone else in the party expendable, and it is possible this will be a central theme of his third presidential run.

It was not one of Mr. Trump’s more compelling speeches. The crowd at Mar-a-Lago was friendly but not like a roaring mass of fans from which Mr. Trump draws energy and the former president sounded scripted. The address was offensive in its attacks on the justice system as a whole and the people who are leading the investigations of Mr. Trump. What was the reason for all the wife bashing? He lashed out at officials who were trying to get him. He went on a bizarre riff about how President Biden had hidden a bunch of documents in Chinatown. The attacks on Jack Smith suggest that business is not going well for the former president.

Get ready for more magic. These investigations will distract Mr. Trump from his legal troubles, and will eat at him. The majority of his campaign will be about his martyrdom, which is likely to put other Republicans in the awkward position of defending him. And they won’t really have any choice as he whips his devoted followers into a frenzy over his persecution — and, of course, by extension, theirs.

That is certainly what we have seen happening. Republicans were going to trash the Manhattan district attorney. Representative Lauren Boebert was no surprise to see that she compared the indictment of Mr. Trump to that of Mussolini and Hitler. Governor Ron DeSantis was known as the greatest threat to Mr. Trump’s ambitions, but instead he refused to help extradite Mr. Trump to New York. Weak, Ron. Very weak.

Editor’s Note: Norman Eisen is a CNN legal analyst who was former President Barack Obama’s ethics czar and impeachment counsel to the House Judiciary Committee in 2019-2020. John W. Dean is a CNN contributor and former White House counsel to Richard Nixon. The views expressed in this commentary are their own. CNN has more opinion.

Despite the salacious details, this is an important case for democracy. The election was close. In the wake of the “Access Hollywood” tape of Trump proclaiming that he was free to sexually assault women, which threatened his candidacy, another disgraceful revelation could have altered the outcome of that contest – and American history.

It might have been a gatewaydrug for Trump’s attempted electoral tampering with respect to the 2020 contest.

Nevertheless, the indictment has been greeted by decidedly mixed reactions – including from some who are usually critical of the former president. They have argued that the hush money case appears too political, it’s too thorny legally and should have been brought by federal authorities – or not at all.

Among the other criticisms of pursuing a felony charge is that the campaign finance theory failed in a similar criminal prosecution of 2008 Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards for alleged campaign-related payments to his mistress.

In fact, making various types of concealed payments to benefit a campaign is commonly prosecuted – ergo Cohen’s plea. There was nothing legally wrong with the prosecution theory in the Edwards case or the judge would not have allowed it to go to the jury. Instead, the jury found that the proof was not sufficient in that particular case.

Some complain that too much time has passed to bring charges now, about six years after the payments were made. It can take time to charge a president, even a former one. While the Justice Department could not give guidance on charging a president, Trump spent many years litigating the New York state investigation.

Why should we be prosecuting the bedrooms of candidates? Attorney-General David Orentlicher’s Comment on “Trump Investigations Have Came to an End”

It’s hard to fault Bragg for lost time when his predecessor, Cy Vance, stated this weekend that federal prosecutors had told him and his team to “stand down” during the Trump administration because their own investigation was underway.

Editor’s Note: David Orentlicher is the Judge Jack and Lulu Lehman Professor at the William S. Boyd School of Law at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he specializes in constitutional law and health law. He also serves as a Democrat in the Nevada Assembly. The views he expresses in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinion on it.

Moreover, consider the implications of treating hush money payments — which are not illegal — as campaign expenditures that have to be reported in campaign finance filings. If a disgruntled lover threatens to disclose past intimacies, a candidate would open the door to the former lover going public by not making hush money payments. But if the candidate pays the hush money, the payments would then need to be included in the candidate’s financial reports, which are public records.

Candidates would have to sacrifice their privacy if they were to run. The public has an interest in candidates’ health and finances, but not their sex lives. consensual relationships are unfairly stigmatized, so we should not be policing the bedrooms of candidates.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/05/opinions/weakness-manhattan-district-attorney-trump-case-orentlicher/index.html

The second impeachment of Donald J. Bragg in the January 6 attack on the Capitol is a violation of the local law, and it’s a path to conviction

Consider his second impeachment. While the US House of Representatives acted correctly in bringing charges against Trump for his role in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, House Democrats filed charges that were legally problematic instead of charges that were solidly grounded.

When the House accused Trump of incitement in the January 6 violence, it wasn’t clear that his actions satisfied the very strict legal standard for proving incitement. For example, Trump sent mixed messages when he spoke to the assembled crowd before it marched on the Capitol, telling them both to fight like hell and peacefully make their voices heard.

In contrast, the evidence clearly showed that Trump failed miserably in his duty as president to “protect and defend the Constitution” by not stemming the violence once rioters breached the Capitol. The second impeachment should have been based on the fact that they had failed to fulfill their duty.

“There are some risks and complications, but I also think there’s a path to conviction,” said Cheryl Bader, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches criminal law and procedure at Fordham University School of Law.

At this stage of the proceedings, prosecutors don’t have to show their hand, and there are very minimal requirements for an indictment to say anything. Critics think the public would be better served by more detail in the case because it seems to rest on a novel theory for bringing felony charges.

“I’m not saying there isn’t a hint of what the other crime is,” said Robert Kelner, a defense attorney who specializes in political and election law. “But when you have this weird local statute – in which to prove one crime, you have to show he intended to commit another – you think you’d be very specific.”

The Bragg case is unnecessarily preceding the missile launch of the F-35 attack piloted by Jack Smith and also named after him, according to Ty Cobb, a defense attorney who represented the Trump White House in the Russia investigation.

If Bragg wanted to bring the charge as a misdemeanor he would need to show that the records were falsified with the intent to cheat, which is a fairly easy hurdle to overcome.

Paul Ryan, an elections law expert who is the deputy executive director of the Funders’ Committee for Civic, predicts that the trial will be the most difficult part because Bragg brought 34 counts all as felonies and persuaded courts that they were justified.

To make it a felony, prosecutors will have to point to another potential crime that Trump was trying to further or concealed when he allegedly falsified how the Cohen payments were recorded.

The Kaluza-Klein Charges: A Case Study of a Manhattan Prosecutor and the New York Attorney General Letitia James

The lack of transparency surrounding how Bragg will lay out his case, as well as the district attorney’s theory, are raising concern about whether the case will stand up in court.

Manhattan prosecutors have teased three different potential underlying crimes that could support the felonies, but each has their own assortment of novel legal questions.

When it comes to governing federal elections, federal election law generally supersedes state election law, except in certain instances, according to Jerry H. Goldfeder, a veteran election and campaign-finance lawyer. “Apparently [prosecutors] have looked at this seriously enough to conclude they were within their bounds.”

The case seems weak on both the legal and jurisdictional levels and a state judge might dismiss it. There is a chance the case is taken to federal court in order to lose on federal pre-emption, which gives only federal courts jurisdiction over campaign finance. Even if it survives a challenge that could reach the Supreme Court, a trial would most likely not start until at least mid-2024, possibly even after the 2024 election.

The payments at issue were made six years ago. The basic facts have been public for five years. The case was delayed because of politics, but the Justice Department declined it, just as Mr. Bragg did, after Mr. Trump left office. Mr. Bragg had a duty to give a more in-depth explanation of the legal basis of the case in the famous speaking indictment that was filed by the team of former counsel Robert Muller.

Trump said, of the case being led by Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis, that she is “doing everything in her power to indict me over an absolutely perfect phone call, even more perfect than the one I made with the president of Ukraine.”

Finally, Trump went on to condemn New York Attorney General Letitia James’ investigation into the Trump Organization saying she, “campaigned on ‘I will get Trump.’ I will get him. This was her campaign. Never ran for office. I will get him. Letitia James is her name, he said.