Archive for the ‘Donald Trump’ Category

Witness Testimony Helps Prosecutors Advance Trump Election Case – The New York Times

Without fanfare, the Justice Departments investigation into former President Donald J. Trumps attempts to overturn the 2020 election is approaching an important milestone.

After nearly nine months of behind-the-scenes clashes, Mr. Trumps lawyers have largely lost their battle to limit testimony from some of his closest aides to a federal grand jury. The decisions, in a string of related cases, represent an almost total failure by Mr. Trump to constrain the reach of the inquiry and have strengthened the position of Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the investigation, as he builds an accounting of the former presidents efforts to retain power after his defeat at the polls.

Having lost their challenges to grand jury subpoenas and largely failed to limit the scope of their testimony with assertions of executive and attorney-client privilege, a last group of aides is now being forced to answer questions.

On Tuesday, it was Stephen Miller, an adviser and top speechwriter for Mr. Trump, who showed up in Federal District Court in Washington and spent several hours in front of the grand jury. On Thursday, it was John Ratcliffe, the former director of national intelligence. The process could culminate near the end of this month with an appearance by former Vice President Mike Pence.

While questions linger over pending appeals and potential efforts by some of the witnesses to delay things further by invoking the Fifth Amendment, the developments suggest that Mr. Smith is close to finishing the fact-finding phase of his work and is moving closer to a decision about seeking charges against Mr. Trump and others.

There are no clear indications about when Mr. Smith might decide about charges in the case, but he faces pressure on several fronts to keep the process moving.

The political season could be a consideration: The 2024 presidential race is heating up, with Mr. Trump still regarded as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, and the first debate of the G.O.P. primary season has been scheduled for August.

On the legal front, the looming decision by a district attorney in Georgia, Fani T. Willis, on whether to seek indictment of Mr. Trump on charges related to his efforts to overturn his election loss has placed added pressure on Mr. Smith, who must decide whether allowing another prosecutor to go first with similar charges could complicate any prosecution he pursues.

The speed of the Georgia state investigation increases the pressure on Jack Smith to move with alacrity and to get his witnesses before the federal grand jury now, said John P. Fishwick Jr., an Obama appointee who served as the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia from 2015 to 2017. Once the state indictment comes down, it can really bog down the D.O.J. investigation.

Among those who have worked with him, Mr. Smith is seen as a diligent manager bent on collecting the information needed to make a decision while remaining cognizant of the time pressures and the highly partisan atmosphere in which he is operating.

In his first and only public comments a statement emailed to reporters shortly after his appointment in November he vowed that the pace of his Trump investigations would not pause or flag, noting that he would move the investigations forward expeditiously and thoroughly to whatever outcome the facts and the law dictate.

Mr. Smith is also overseeing the parallel investigation into Mr. Trumps handling of classified information after leaving office and whether the former president obstructed government efforts to reclaim the materials.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who will ultimately make the decision on whether to indict Mr. Trump, has told associates that he will not overrule Mr. Smiths judgment, whatever it turns out to be, unless he believes the special counsel has deviated from departmental standards and procedures.

Mr. Garland, and his top deputy Lisa O. Monaco, have publicly projected an air of detachment from the case, but they have been following developments in the privilege fights that have been playing out in the federal courthouse that sits just a few blocks from their office. They have been receiving regular briefings from aides who are getting updates from members of Mr. Smiths team, according to two people familiar with the situation.

The legal battles over privilege began well before Mr. Smith was appointed to the special counsel post and have pitted two powerful forces against each other.

In the course of the investigation into Mr. Trumps efforts to overturn the election, federal prosecutors have subpoenaed an army of Mr. Trumps former aides in an effort to have the grand jury hear as many firsthand accounts as possible of his behavior in the White House in the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mr. Trumps lawyers have countered by asserting that any adviser close to the former president should not have to answer certain questions in front of the grand jury because of attorney-client privilege, which protects communications between lawyers and those they represent, and executive privilege, which shields some communications between the president and members of his administration.

Among the first people to engage in this debate were Marc Short and Greg Jacob, two of Mr. Pences top aides, who went into the grand jury in July and asserted privilege in response to certain questions, prompting prosecutors to file motions compelling their full testimony. Setting a pattern for the months that followed, Mr. Trumps lawyers fought those motions but ultimately lost their case in front of Beryl A. Howell, then the chief federal judge in Washington, and subsequently in front of a federal appeals court.

With the privilege waived, Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob testified for a second time in October. They were followed two months later by Pat A. Cipollone and Patrick F. Philbin, the two top lawyers in Mr. Trumps White House, who went through the same process.

The fight dragged on into this year as another round of aides including Mr. Miller; Dan Scavino, a onetime deputy chief of staff; and Mr. Scavinos boss, Mark Meadows, Mr. Trumps final chief of staff all tried, and failed, to assert forms of privileges. The last skirmish took place just a couple of weeks ago when a new chief judge, James E. Boasberg, turned down efforts to limit Mr. Pences testimony.

While getting these witnesses in front of the grand jury has been challenging and time consuming, the accounts they have given or will eventually give are only a fraction of the total body of evidence that Mr. Smith and his predecessors have gathered.

Well before Mr. Smith arrived, another prosecutor, Thomas P. Windom, obtained grand jury testimony from pro-Trump figures like Ali Alexander, who organized several prominent Stop the Steal events, and from a wide array of state officials involved in a plan to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in swing states that were actually won by President Biden.

Mr. Windom, who now works with Mr. Smith, also oversaw the seizure of phones from lawyers close to Mr. Trump, including John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Boris Epshteyn. Mike Roman, a campaign strategist who was the director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign in 2020, also had his phone seized under Mr. Windoms watch.

Other prosecutors who now work with the special counsel began an inquiry before Mr. Smith arrived into Save America PAC, a fund-raising operation that Mr. Trump created after his loss in the election. As part of that investigation, dozens of subpoenas have been issued to companies that have received money from the PAC, including some law firms.

Danny Hakim contributed reporting.

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Witness Testimony Helps Prosecutors Advance Trump Election Case - The New York Times

The Donald Trump indictment is not like the case against John Edwards – Business Insider

Former Senator John Edwards campaigning in Iowa City, Iowa on December 12, 2007 in Iowa City, Iowa. Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images

A politician paying hush money during a campaign to keep an alleged affair out of the headlines there is, undeniably, a striking similarity between the cases of one Donald J. Trump, former president, and John Edwards, a disgraced senator, with both accused not just of cheating but of skirting laws to cover it up.

The legal cases against both, however, are quite different.

For one, Trump has not been charged with violating federal campaign finance laws. Edwards was.

"Mr. Edwards is alleged to have accepted more than $900,000 in an effort to conceal from the public facts that he believed would harm his candidacy," Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said in 2011, announcing that the North Carolina Democrat was being charged with accepting illegal campaign contributions and a conspiracy to conceal them.

The gist of the government's case against Edwards was that the money which was given to Edwards' mistress should have been reported as a campaign donation, given that it came from the former senator's largest donors and would aid his 2008 presidential campaign. The case fell apart at trial, however, with jurors failing to convict Edwards on a single charge, history that some have suggested illustrates the difficulty of prosecuting Trump for his own alleged payments to Stormy Daniels.

"I think that shows that the one time the Justice Department tried to pursue a case like this, it failed," Hars von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told Fox News. "That was probably the biggest reason why the Justice Department and the FEC didn't go after Trump because they didn't believe that it was based on prior experience a violation of federal campaign finance law, and that's the biggest flaw in this whole case."

It may well be true that the Edwards precedent is why the Justice Department didn't charge Trump with a campaign finance violation. But, while Trump was still president, it did go after his former fixer, Michael Cohen and it did so successfully. Cohen, in 2018, was sentenced to three years in prison over a hush payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels that is at the heart of Trump's legal troubles today. Among other things, prosecutors charged Cohen with breaking campaign finance laws, arguing that his $130,000 payment to Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election constituted an illegal contribution to the Trump campaign.

Trump has denied the affair and any knowledge of the payments to Daniels, pleading not guilty to the charges he falsified business records.

In other words, federal prosecutors demonstrated that it is indeed possible to put someone behind bars for a hush payment to an alleged mistress which is itself legal by arguing that it broke campaign finance laws, coming as it did during a heated election. They were helped, to be sure, by the fact that Cohen pleaded guilty, eliminating the need for a trial; the Edwards prosecution failed, by contrast, because it went before jurors and because key witnesses, namely the donors who provided the cash for Edwards' mistress, were unable to appear and be questioned at trial (one had already died and one was over 100 years old and deemed too elderly).

When Cohen was indicted, prosecutors noted that he did not act alone, stating that he had made the payment to Daniels to "influence the 2016 election," and that he did so after having "coordinated with one or more members of the [Trump] campaign."

When he indicted the former president, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Brag did not do so on charges of violating federal law he, of course, cannot do that. Instead, he accused Trump of falsifying business records to hide the fact he was paying back Cohen for that payment to a porn star. That is a more straightforward case, in some respects: the prosecutor alleges that the payments to Cohen were marked as being for a retainer that federal prosecutors have already demonstrated did not exist.

Bragg does not need to prove that Trump broke federal campaign finance laws; he needs to prove that he falsified business records, which is a crime no matter the reason.

Where it gets dicey, in the view of legal experts, is the fact that the crime of falsifying those records is treated as a misdemeanor in New York, with a statute of limitations that has already expired. Upgrading the charges to felonies, as Bragg has (34 counts), eliminates the time limit but also requires showing that the records were fudged in the service of another crime, whether or not the accused was convicted of another crime or not.

In his indictment of Trump, Bragg does not say what crime that might be. But an accompanying "statement of facts" accuses the former president of taking part in an "unlawful scheme" that "violated election laws" (speaking to reporters, Bragg noted that state law "makes it a crime to conspire to promote a candidacy by unlawful means"); it also accuses Trump of mischaracterizing the payments to Cohen "for tax purposes."

Speaking to CNN, Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University, said that if the underlying crime is a state tax issue then Bragg would be able to avoid questions about campaign finance laws, including whether a hush payment constitutes a violation something that jurors were not convinced of in the Edwards trial more than a decade earlier.

"That is a stronger case," Goodman said, "because it is insulated from a bunch of the legal challenges, of which there are strong legal challenges to be made to election law crimes."

Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com

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The Donald Trump indictment is not like the case against John Edwards - Business Insider

Showdown: Fox News, Republican Party co-host August debate with Donald Trump and 2024 rivals – Yahoo News

WASHINGTON The leader of the Republican National Committee said Wednesday that the party and Fox News will co-host the first GOP debate of the primary season this August in Milwaukee.

The debate is expected to be the first face-to-face meeting between former President Donald Trump and his campaign rivals; the guest list is not yet setbecause some possible contendershave not officially declared their candidacy.

The date of the debate has not been set.

"The next President of the United States will be on our debate stage, and we look forward to hosting a fair and transparent platform," said RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who made the announcement on the morning program "Fox & Friends."

The GOP picked Milwaukee as the site of the first debate because the Wisconsin city will host the party convention next year. The party did the same thing in the 2016 election cycle, producing a first debate in Cleveland a year before that city hosted the Republican National Convention.

The debate over debates:Republican loyalty pledge: RNC chair says 2024 GOP candidates must sign pledge to participate in debates

Trump's situation:Trump after arrest: What's next legally and politically for the former president?

GOP candidates participate in the Fox Business Network Republican presidential debate at the North Charleston Coliseum and Performing Arts Center on Jan. 14, 2016 in North Charleston, S.C.

Trump, defeated for reelection in 2020, has announced that he will seek the White House again in 2024.He is running while under indictment, charged with false reporting of hush money payments to hide violations of campaign finance laws.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson have announced plans to seek the presidency.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is not expected to announce his candidacy until at least May.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott said Thursday he has created an exploratory committee for a potential 2024 campaign.

Former Vice President Mike Pence is also mulling a 2024 presidential campaign.

In announcing the sponsorship of Fox News, McDaniel said otherdebate partners include the Young Americas Foundationand the video platform Rumble.

Story continues

The announcement also came as Fox News is embroiled in a defamation suitwith Dominion Voting Systems over news coverage of Trump's election protests in 2020.

Trump's legal position at the time of the August debate is unknowable.

In addition to the New York indictment, Trump remains under investigation in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta in cases involving the handling of classified documents and efforts to overturn his loss in Georgia to President Joe Biden.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fox News, GOP to co-host August debate with Trump, 2024 rivals

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Showdown: Fox News, Republican Party co-host August debate with Donald Trump and 2024 rivals - Yahoo News

Melania angry about Donald Trump’s ‘affairs’ but her silence is – Hindustan Times

Melania Trump is furious about her husband Donald Trump's alleged affairs but lives in an ivory tower of denial and uses her silence as a protective armour, a former aide said as per The Mirror after the ex-US President faced charges over hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

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Melania Trump did not accompany Donald Trump for the New York arraignment and was also not seen later when the former US President returned to Florida. Former aide Stephanie Wolkoff Winston said that Melania will never divorce him" though, despite the affairs.

Of course she knows about Donald's affairs, she knows everything. But her silence is her dignity," Stephanie Wolkoff Winston said.

She will stand by her husband, as she always does. I don't think Melania is humiliated by his affairs but she is angry, she added.

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Donald Trump became the first former president in history to face criminal charges even though he denied all the charges.

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"Her silence is deliberate, it is her weapon of choice and her protective armour." Still she isn't leaving him. This is a transactional marriage, she knew what she was getting into when she married Donald. Her means of survival is to just act like it never happened," the ex-aide added.

When not reading, this ex-literature student can be found searching for an answer to the question, "What is the purpose of journalism in society?"...view detail

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Melania angry about Donald Trump's 'affairs' but her silence is - Hindustan Times

What are 34 felony charges against Trump, and what do they reveal? – BBC

Updated 5 April 2023

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Watch: Three takeaways from Trump's day in court

Last week, we learned Donald Trump had been charged with a crime. Now we know the former US president faces 34 counts of falsifying business records.

Although falsifying records are usually treated as lesser misdemeanours, Mr Trump is accused of committing felony offences. That denotes a more serious crime, which could include prison time if a maximum sentence is given.

"At its core, this case today is one with allegations like so many of our white-collar cases," New York City District Attorney Alvin Bragg said of the charges his office has brought against the former president. "Allegations that someone lied, again and again, to protect their interests and evade the laws to which we are all held accountable."

Mr Trump - who pleaded not guilty to all the charges - insisted after leaving the courthouse that there was no case to answer. "There was nothing done illegally!" he posted on his social media website.

That, however, will be for a jury to decide. In the meantime, here are the details of the historic first-ever criminal indictment of a former president.

All 34 charges relate to hush-money payment

The charges all relate to a $130,000 hush-money payment by lawyer Michael Cohen to adult film star Stormy Daniels just before 2016 election in order to prevent her from talking about her allegations that she had an affair with Mr Trump in 2007.

In the court documents, Cohen is referred to as Lawyer A and Stormy Daniels as Woman 2.

Trump's alleged cover-up happened when he was president

New York's case against Mr Trump hinges on how Cohen was compensated for those hush-money payments.

In 2017, after becoming president, Mr Trump met with Cohen in the White House. Shortly thereafter - and over the course of 10 months - Mr Trump began sending cheques from a trust handling his assets, and later from his own bank account, to Cohen.

Those cheques were registered as "legal fees," but Cohen says they were, in fact, reimbursements for the hush-money payment.

The prosecution case states: The payment records, kept and maintained by the Trump Organization, were false New York business records. In truth, there was no retainer agreement, and Lawyer A was not being paid for legal services rendered in 2017. The Defendant caused his entities' business records to be falsified to disguise his and others' criminal conduct.

From a misdemeanour to a felony

Mr Bragg alleges that Mr Trump falsified the true nature of the payments because those payments were made in support of a crime. While hush-money payments are not by themselves illegal, spending money to help a presidential campaign but not disclosing it violates federal campaign finance law.

Cohen was convicted of just such a violation for not disclosing his payment to Ms Daniels. By reimbursing Cohen for that payment, Mr Bragg asserts, Mr Trump is tied to that criminal act - and it makes his falsification of business record a more serious offence.

Mr Trump's defenders argue that is a legal stretch, and that this is a politically-motivated prosecution.

'A pattern of criminal behaviour'

Mr Bragg cites two other examples of hush-money payments by Mr Trump's campaign. These payments, he says, support the prosecution case that Mr Trump knew his payments to Cohen were part of an illegal attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election.

"The defendant orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the defendant's electoral prospects," the indictment's Statement of Facts asserts. "In order to execute the unlawful scheme, the participants violated election laws and made and caused false entries in the business records of various entities in New York."

In one case, a doorman who said he knew Mr Trump had a child out of wedlock received $30,000. In another, a second woman who claimed she had an an affair with Mr Trump received $150,000. Mr Trump has denied the affair.

These payments came from the tabloid National Enquirer magazine and its then-publisher, David Pecker, who Mr Bragg says co-ordinated with Mr Trump to suppress potentially damaging information from seeing the light of day. As a reward, the indictment notes, Mr Pecker received an invitation to Mr Trump's inauguration.

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What are 34 felony charges against Trump, and what do they reveal? - BBC