What Will the Prosecutor Tell Us About the Correspondence Between the State Attorney General and the Ex-President of the United States (Democratic House of Representatives)?

Griggs calls her a wonderful lawyer, a good prosecutor, but he is just not sure if that is true.Griggs has known her since he was an undergraduate and working alongside her in the city solicitors office. I think justice is somewhere between right and wrong. When Griggs met me in his office, he read aloud a section of the state’s elections law that says solicitation to commit election fraud is against the 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 it was interesting to find himself, in this case, on the “other side of the ‘v.’” — meaning, on the side of the prosecution rather than the defense. He sounded positive about the former president getting a fair process if indicted, even if he didn’t say if that particular prosecutor gave him hope.

It was a remarkable statement, even for a president who had serially abused the powers of his office. Having been told by the very department that had investigated his claims of fraud that they were untrue, Mr. Trump told the acting attorney general and his deputy to lie about it and said he would take it from there.

— 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. If Democrats are allowed to build sympathy for Trump with probes like Bragg’s, it could affect the election in a way that would drastically alter the paradigm as we go into the election. There is a sense that it is time for the voters to get on with their lives and forget about the politics and legal troubles associated with Trump. The ex-president failed in his bid to get his supporters into power last year, which hurt the Republicans in swing states. Should Trump be indicted, the debate over whether he could win a general election would intensify.

The two men even traveled to Britain and Italy together, pressuring government agencies there to disclose what they told U.S. spy agencies about the Trump-Russia connections. The officials of those countries said they had not done anything like that and there was no evidence to back it up. But on one of those trips, The Times reported, Italian officials gave the men a tip which, people familiar with the matter said, linked Mr. Trump to possible serious financial crimes. (It is not clear what those crimes were, and more reporting will be necessary to reveal the details.) After receiving a tip, did Mr. Barr follow the protocol and turn it over to regular prosecutors? No. Instead, he gave it to his traveling companion, Mr. Durham, who opened a criminal investigation but never made it public and never filed charges, and when word began to trickle out that a suspected crime had been discovered, he falsely let the world think it had something to do with his original goal.

Mr Durham pushed the inspector general to drop his finding that the investigation was legitimate and not politically motivated. Mr. Barr went back to his usual pattern of trying to spin the report before it was released, disagreeing with the findings before it was even out. The clear department principle of not talking about a current investigation has been shattered by Mr. Durham.

Now she could be facing a much bigger case: the potential prosecution of a former president. Considering the known facts and Willis’s demonstrated skill at presenting juries with sprawling conspiracy cases, a lengthy RICO trial is a distinct possibility. 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.

With her tough-as-nails messaging on crime, a Democrat like Willis could’ve been better placed to deliver on some of the reforms the left wing of the party has been fighting for. Kim Jackson, a pastor who has been at the protests for more than two years, has been elected to the Senate and she told me that she was excited to support a woman on an anti-death-penalty platform. But three months into Willis’s tenure, a horrific mass shooting occurred at multiple spas in and around Atlanta, leaving eight dead, mostly Asian women, in what appeared to be a hate crime. Not long after, Willis announced that she would seek the death penalty for the accused shooter. The American Civil Liberties Union cited insufficient use of diversion and a failure to indict individuals in a timely manner in a report on overcrowded and unsafe conditions at the Fulton County Jail, which is considered one of her major reform issues.

The report was called a joke by the man who said he offered several reasons for the flawed data. She said that there are 25 people in the Fulton County Jail on a first offense and they are there for 48 hours. “Unfortunately,” she added, “a lot of people with crimes that I think a regular citizen would say, ‘Hey, they need to stay in jail, they burglarized my house’ — that’s not even the kind of people that stay in jail here. People are given bail.”

Investigating Donald Trump’s alleged affair with Stormy Daniels: a case for alleged hush money to a former president

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. Nydia Blas is an Atlanta-based visual artist who is interested in storytelling through a Black female perspective. She was one of the British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch in 2019.

Yet a feeling of uncertainty is also being exacerbated by a potential case against him that some legal experts warn is far from a sure-fire winner in court. A failed prosecution against a former president could bring about political turbulence in the country. Such a miss would also certainly be used by Trump and his allies to further the conceit that every attempt to hold him responsible for his outlandish behavior is nakedly partisan and unjustified.

The property developer, ex-reality TV star and former Commander in Chief faces multiple investigations after attempting to overturn the 2020 election and over his handling of classified documents after leaving office. His most immediate exposure may be a case over the payment of an alleged hush money to Stormy Daniels.

After Trump warned he could be arrested, his allies have been using the new House majority to try and block the Manhattan District Attorney’s investigation into the alleged hush money payment to the adult film star. It appears that an attempt was made to influence the grand jury.

Cohen claimed that he paid Daniels to keep her from talking about an alleged affair with the former president. Trump has denied the affair.

What if Trump is indicted for only a single low level crime? It’s going to cause mayhem, says Paula Habba

If Trump were to be indicted for only a single low level crime, there would be serious consequences, according to Habba. “It is going to cause mayhem, Paula. I mean, it’s just a very scary time in our country,” Habba said. But she also said that “no one wants anyone to get hurt” and Trump supporters should be “peaceful.”

The Republican campaign to hold Trump accountable is very much in tune with the times, as it reminds me of the constant shattered rules and conventions when he was in office.

Trump’s effort to politicize the case and to distract from the allegations against him has already worked as his top allies in Republican House leadership attack Bragg.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Sunday called it “the weakest case out there.” The California Republican told a news conference he had spoken to Jim Jordan, who was investigating the weaponization of the government against political opponents.

McCarthy did break with the former president on his calls for protests around any announcement of an indictment, telling reporters, “I don’t think people should protest this, no.” He said they want calm out there. No one hurt, violence or harm to anything else.

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. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who is mulling a campaign to challenge Trump for the 2024 nomination, told ABC News, “It just feels like a politically charged prosecution here. I feel like it’s not what the American people want to see.

The Bragg investigation was helping the former president, according to the GOP governor of New Hampshire who said it was time for Republicans to move on from Trump. He said some people he coffee with felt like he was being attacked, even though they weren’t big Trump supporters.

It would be the first time in US history that a former president would be indicted and the second time that Trump would be indicted for lying about his defeat. No tradition has been established for the pursued of ex-US leaders. 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 issue of whether the political division and trauma of putting Trump on trial should be in the national interest is not as significant as those related to the January 6 investigations. History will not be good on failed prosecutions.

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. Mark Kelly, a Democratic senator from Arizona, told Jake Tapper on CNN on Sunday that “everyone in our nation is or 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. There are risks involved.

Kelly’s comment emphasized how Trump, nearly eight years after he burst onto the scene with an upstart presidential campaign, is again shattering convention about the role of presidents and ex-presidents in national life. He again may be about to leap to the center, in the most contentious of ways, of the national psyche and political debate.

The Indictment of the Ex-President Donald J. Bragg, the Deputy Attorney General, and the House Select Committee on Investigating the G-term in 2024

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 said that the indictment was based on a novel legal theory that federal authorities didn’t pursue and they called it an unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority.

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 said they expect him to appear as soon possible before Congress but did not set a date for a hearing. 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.

Kevin McCarthy said on Monday that it was perfectly acceptable for the ex-president’s allies to publicly lambast a prosecutor because he was conducting his work. The California Republican thought that the 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 gone. He added about an indictment: “This will not hold up in court, if this is what he wants to do.”

The New York Times reports on an investigation of the investigation of a possible probe of the Biden administration during his time in the White House, after the run-up to January 6, 2021

Questions about Trump were a large part of the agenda in the majority, but they struggled with him during his time in the White House.

At a bilingual press conference with Hispanic Republicans Monday morning, the first question was about Bragg’s probe. Rep. Carlos Gimenez, R-Fla., used the same refrain most GOP lawmakers have used, telling reporters, “It certainly smells like it’s political.”

The House GOP has accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the power of government to advance political ends, just like they accused Bragg and others on the Trump trail of doing.

There are questions about the case’s authenticity, as well as doubts about Bragg’s ability to assemble a prosecution, due to the unusual nature of potential charges pertaining to business and electoral law violations. This is an issue that cannot be taken lightly given the seriousness of the potential case against a former president.

New York is on edge due to the security cameras and barricades that have been put up, as well as the painful memories of Trump’s call for violence in the run up to January 6, 2021, when he will be out of office.

In New York on Monday there was lots of scrutiny surrounding a courthouse where a witness gave testimony that might have been helpful to Trump. There was a fight between Trump and Ron DeSantis, who is in the race for the GOP nomination. The Florida governor made fun of his one-time mentor by implying he did not know anything about paying a porn star $100,000 to stay out of trouble, as well as condemning political prosecutions. Trump responded with a vicious counter-attack full of unsubstantiated innuendo about his rival’s private life, which previewed a potentially nasty GOP primary campaign and hinted at the ex-president’s fury over what he sees as disloyalty from DeSantis.

He said that justice not being equal to others is one of the reasons he gets concerned. “And the tough part is with a local DA playing in presidential politics, if that starts right there, don’t you think it’ll happen across the country?”

What have we learnt in the last seven years from the investigation of the sham-and-bribery case against president Trump in 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.

The Manhattan investigation is obvious that it is a sham and we want to know if federal funding was involved, warned House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan. The Ohio Republican also told CNN’s Manu Raju: “We don’t think President Trump broke the law at all.”

There are hints contained in media accounts and a previous case involving his ex-lawyer, Michael Cohen, who was sent to jail for tax fraud, that make it hard for the Republicans to know what the evidence is against Trump.

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.

The New York case has a big question about what has changed. CNN legal analyst Carrie Cordero spoke to Wolf Blitzer on Monday. The facts from this case are still valid over seven years later. What has changed recently in New York has gotten me to this point, so the big question is what has changed over the past year or so?

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 a new wrinkle in the grand jury’s apparent endgame on Monday, Robert Costello, an attorney who has previously represented Trump allies like Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani, testified before for nearly three hours after appearing at the request of Trump’s legal team.

The idea that a case would be made solely on Cohen’s word, without considerable corroborating evidence, seems unlikely. The rest of the country doesn’t understand this grave matter.

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

Can a hurricane quell Trump’s return to political center stage in the coming days? A warning on the role of hurricanes in economic and political climate change

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.