The five conspiracies at the heart of the Georgia Trump indictment
https://www.vox.com/trump-investigations/2023/8/15/23831815/trump-georgia-indictment-giuliani-eastman-powell-meadows
Tag: crime
Will anyone trust these hyper-politicized courts to try Donald Trump?
“In 2016, after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death gave Democrats their first chance in a generation to control the Supreme Court — and with it the federal judiciary — Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell announced that no nominee would receive a confirmation hearing until after that year’s presidential election. He claimed that this newly invented rule against election-year confirmations was necessary to ensure that “the American people have a voice in this momentous decision.”
Yet, after McConnell successfully held this seat open until Trump could fill it, Republicans reversed course when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died fewer than two months before the 2020 election that cast Trump out of office. Republicans didn’t just give Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett a confirmation hearing, they raced to confirm her just eight days before the election.”
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“Any trial of a former head of state would be a difficult endeavor. Anyone elected to the nation’s highest office is likely to have many loyal supporters throughout the country, who will be skeptical of claims that their political leader is actually a criminal. And, in the United States, any former president will have appointed a significant percentage of the federal judiciary.
And again, Trump’s criminal trials will not be heard under the best of circumstances. Trump may try to rally his supporters to commit acts of violence similar to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Many of Trump’s judges aren’t just unusually conservative, they show little regard for the rule of law. And, in part because the United States has never tried a former president before, Trump’s criminal trials are likely to produce a raft of novel legal questions that can be readily appealed to higher courts — including the hyper-politicized Supreme Court.
On top of all of this, at least one of the former president’s trials will be overseen by Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who has previously behaved like she is a member of Trump’s legal defense team.
It is far from clear, in other words, that the judiciary enjoys enough public trust that it can endure the political strain Trump’s trials will put on its spine — even assuming that every judge who hears one of Trump’s criminal cases acts in good faith.”
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“One reason to worry about what appellate judges, including the justices of the Supreme Court, might think about Trump is that criminal trials involving famous criminal defendants often present unusual legal questions that don’t typically arise in other cases. And Trump isn’t just famous, he’s the first former president ever to be indicted. And he’s a current candidate for the presidency.
These unique facts are likely to produce unprecedented legal questions that will need to be resolved by appellate courts. And that gives the justices an unusual amount of ability to sabotage these prosecutions if they chose to do so.”
Trump’s 4 indictments, ranked by the stakes
“this case “will legally define what a politician is able to do to reverse a defeat.” The outcome of this case could have major implications for the 2024 election and every race that follows: If Trump isn’t held accountable for the actions he took on January 6 and leading up to it, he and others could try to pull the same schemes in the future.
Ultimately, this case has a significant bearing on the future of US democracy.
Number of charges: Four felony counts. They include:
Charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States, which includes plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election
Conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, including plotting to prevent the 2020 election certification
Obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, which includes actually blocking the certification of the 2020 election results
Conspiracy against rights, which includes a plan to deprive someone of a constitutional right (in this case, that is the ability to vote)”
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” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis accused Trump and several of his associates of a sprawling racketeering conspiracy related to their efforts to overturn Biden’s win in the state. In contrast to the federal election indictment, where Trump is the only one charged so far, here 18 others were also charged for participating in this alleged conspiracy. These include famous names like Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, notorious Trump lawyers like John Eastman and Sidney Powell, and lower-level Georgia players.”
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“This case centers on a president’s ability to endanger the country’s national security by taking and mishandling classified documents after leaving office. Documents that Trump kept addressed everything from US nuclear programs to the country’s defense and weapons capabilities to how America could respond in the face of a possible attack. Additionally, the case looks at how Trump obstructed FBI efforts to take back the documents.”
Trump’s Indictments Might Be Hurting Him — Just Not In The Primary Polls
“Two theories may explain why the biggest shift in Trump’s favorability rating happened after Trump was charged with mishandling of classified material. For one, it is the only crime (so far) that was not known before this year. The Wall Street Journal reported on the hush money payments way back in 2018, and the events surrounding efforts to overturn the 2020 election played out mostly in public, with lots of the evidence presented in the Justice Department’s indictment initially reported by U.S. media outlets and documented in a report from the House of Representatives last year. And while there was some reporting on Trump’s legal efforts to hold onto classified material, including wall-to-wall coverage of a 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago conducted as part of the investigation, the unsealing of Trump’s indictment for maintaining classified documents after he left the White House represented the first time the breadth of the prosecution’s allegations became clear.
That case also deals with matters of national security, which are important both to the average American and average Republican.”
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“Trump’s indictments for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, meanwhile, could have additional political costs, particularly if he wins the Republican nomination. GOP primary voters might not care about allegations of interference, but general election voters are another story: Two studies of election results in the 2022 midterms found that the Republican candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives who received endorsements from Trump or voiced support for his election denialism performed worse than Republican House candidates who did not. In a CBS/YouGov poll conducted Aug. 2-4, a majority of adults said the indictments against Trump were “upholding the rule of law” (57 percent) and an effort to “defend democracy” (52 percent), although more than half also said the indictments and investigations were trying to stop the Trump campaign (59 percent).
And of course, these are just the indictments. Potential fallout from the trials for each series of charges (which could start as soon as January) could be even more significant. Not only will the public see an actual prosecution, Trump will also be forced to divert focus from running for president to appear in court — which could distract from his campaign.”
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“French adds that “the case is no slam dunk.” But “if a prosecutor believes—as Smith appears to—that he can prove Trump knew his claims were false and then engineered a series of schemes to cajole, coerce, deceive and defraud in order to preserve his place in the White House, it would be a travesty of justice not to file charges,” he writes.”
Republican senator who voted to convict Trump speaks out on his third indictment
“Murkowski added that Trump “is innocent until proven guilty and will have his day in court,” and encouraged people to read the indictment “to understand the very serious allegations being made in this case.””
Opinion | Why Trump Was Indicted (Again)
“the notion that Biden or Garland was somehow determined to prosecute Trump relies on a serious distortion of the public record. Indeed, that record vexed some observers, including me, who repeatedly expressed frustration over how the two men seemed to be going out of their way for most of the first two years of the administration to avoid investigating and potentially prosecuting Trump.
What changed?
The best explanation at the moment — the one that most neatly fits the available facts and a robust body of credible reporting — is that the work of the Jan. 6 select committee spurred the Justice Department to action.
The committee’s investigation uncovered new and important information that was impossible to ignore, and their hearings last summer generated intense and legitimate political and public pressure on DOJ and Garland. Ultimately, it appears that they no longer had a choice but to shift course”
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“As the hearings unfolded, there was testimony from former Attorney General Bill Barr, Trump 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien and other Trump administration officials and campaign advisers indicating that Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election even as he began his monthslong campaign to overturn the results. There was firsthand testimony about the legally baseless effort to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to throw the election to Trump that featured White House lawyers and Pence advisers. There was also a hearing, among others, devoted to Trump’s personal efforts to pressure — or threaten — state officials to swing their election results to him.
Given the one-sided nature of the committee’s presentation, there were reasons to question whether all of the testimony provided the full picture of the underlying events. Still, it quickly became apparent that the committee had exposed some glaring shortcomings at the Justice Department. A series of stories last summer in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported that senior officials at the Justice Department were not aware of critical evidence that the committee had obtained, and in fact had been trying to avoid directly confronting Trump and his potential criminal liability. Meanwhile, some of us were complaining (again) that the department seemed to be falling short of its duty to the country, and members of the media and the public began asking much harder questions about the department’s actions — or lack thereof.”
If Trump Gets Convicted, Blame Ulysses S. Grant
“The Enforcement Acts, one of which was known also as the Ku Klux Klan Act, given its prime target, criminalized widespread attempts by former Confederates to deny Black Southerners their right to vote, to have their votes counted and hold office — rights they enjoyed under the Reconstruction Act of 1867, the 14th Amendment and soon, the 15th Amendment. Coming at a time when American democracy teetered on the edge, these laws gave teeth to the federal government’s insistence that no eligible voter could be denied the right to vote and have his vote counted. (At the time, only men could exercise the franchise.) The laws were a direct response to Southern Democrats’ efforts to abrogate the practical effects of the Civil War and nullify Black political participation and representation.
Today, American democracy stands once again at a crossroads. The refusal of many Republican officeholders to accept the outcome of a free and fair election, and Trump’s outright appeal to fraud and violence in an effort to overturn that election, are precisely the kinds of antidemocratic practices the Enforcement Acts were intended to criminalize and punish.”
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“In the days to come, Trumps’ defenders may claim that the 1870 Enforcement Act is antiquated and obsolete or, as the National Review argued, irrelevant to the case in hand.
In fact, as the Washington Post recently documented, while the act was precipitated by Klan violence in the 1860s, throughout the 20th century and even in more recent times, “Section 241 has also been used to prosecute a wider range of election subversion, including threatening or intimidating voters, impersonating voters, destroying ballots and preventing the official count of ballots.” That includes its use to prosecute white people who terrorized civil rights volunteers during the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi and in cases involving election interference in states like Oklahoma, Tennessee and Kentucky. In other words, it is hardly what legal observers call a “strange law,” or a law still on the books but no longer relevant or enforceable.
Moreover, the acts of which Trump stands accused of committing are precisely what the Enforcement Act was intended to combat. Nullifying the votes of citizens. Fraudulently submitting fake elector slates. Attempting to intimidate state officials into falsifying returns. Bullying a vice president into discarding the official election count. And yes, inciting violence in the furtherance of overturning a free and fair election.
Our system presumes that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty. It is now incumbent upon the Department of Justice to make its case. But the shameful events of late 2020 and early 2021 only reinforce the lasting relevance and importance of the 1870 Enforcement Act, a law constructed to meet challenges that, a century and a half later, still hang over America’s fragile democracy.”