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One can trace former President Donald Trumps indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg back to the media/Democrat belief that Trumps 2016 election was illegitimate.

Sure, some, like Hillary Clinton, questioned former President Barack Obamas birthplace. And, after the 2000 Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision some, for a time, groused and called George W. Bush president select. But never in modern times has a president been so widely and consistently described as illegitimate as has candidate, president and now former President Donald Trump. It never stopped.

I write as the son of a lifelong Democrat mother, as the younger brother of a lifelong Democrat, a Navy vet who was my best friend. My Marine vet father was a registered Republican with whom my mother and brother disagreed in spirited but never hateful debate across the kitchen table.

When John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in 1960, my father never cried foul! despite credible allegations of vote-stealing, especially in Illinois. Nixon knew about this, but chose not to protest and filed no lawsuit, perhaps fearing counter-allegations against his campaign.

Last year, The New York Times published a review of a Nixon-friendly biography. According to the book, Nixon, at his Christmas party after Kennedys narrow victory, told his guests, We won, but they stole it from us. The Times review dismissed Nixons complaint: The weakness of the case did not stop Nixons men from pushing their allegations. But six decades hence in the absence of new evidence, at a time when false claims of a stolen election pose a mounting threat to our system of self-government historians ought to think twice before endorsing them.

Historians ought to think twice about endorsing allegations of stolen elections. Sound advice. And the advice applies to non-historians, particularly media pundits and politicians.

This brings us to the 2016 election in which the upstart Trump, not taken seriously by Democrats and most of the media, defeated the heavy favorite Hillary Clinton, whose chance of winning The New York Times on Election Day pegged at 85%.

Obamas Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson testified before Congress that the Russians, despite their efforts, failed to change a single vote tally. As to the Russian election interference, largely through ads and posts on Facebook, Johnson called it unknowable whether this altered public opinion or the outcome of the election.

Yet two years later, a 2018 YouGov poll found 66% of Democrats believe that Russia in 2016 changed vote tallies. And a 2018 Gallup poll found 78% of Democrats believe that the Russian 2016 interference changed the outcome of the election. This means a greater percentage of Democrats believe the 2016 election was stolen than Republicans who felt that way about 2020.

Nearly 25% of the Democrat congressional delegation refused to attend Trumps inauguration. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., one of the most respected members of the House, called Trumps election illegitimate, a charge Lewis reiterated months before he died. Former President Jimmy Carter said: I think a full investigation would show that Trump didnt actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf. Hillary Clinton routinely called the election stolen and President Trump illegitimate.

Yet Republicans and the mainstream media did not call Clinton, Carter, Lewis and the Democrats who boycotted Trumps inauguration election deniers. The First Amendment gives losers, with or without evidence, the right to complain without fear of prosecution, let alone persecution.

Notably, Hillary Clinton has been silent about Trumps indictment. Why? She likely does not want to remind the country that she clearly violated the Espionage Act with her basement server but skated because the FBIs James Comey said she lacked the intent to violate the statute though her violation does not require intent.

About Trumps indictment over hush money payments, two can play the rouge prosecutor game. There are republican DAs and attorneys general, too. In the movie Tora! Tora! Tora! about the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto said, I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

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ELDER: Dear Trump haters: Can you contain this fire? - Odessa American

April 4 (Reuters) - When Donald Trump walks into Justice Juan Merchan's courtroom on Tuesday to face criminal charges, it will be a first for a former U.S. president but familiar territory for the veteran judge who serves on Manhattan's criminal court.

Merchan last year oversaw a criminal trial of the Trump Organization that ended with the real estate company convicted by a jury of tax fraud and hit with fines, while one of its longtime executives, Allen Weisselberg, pleaded guilty and was sent to jail.

Trump is expected to be arraigned before Merchan on Tuesday following a grand jury investigation into hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The grand jury has indicted Trump, though the specific charges have not been publicly disclosed.

Susan Necheles, a Trump attorney, told Reuters the former president will plead not guilty.

Merchan sentenced the Trump Organization to pay $1.6 million after jurors convicted the company in December. The judge also sentenced Weisselberg, who long served as an executive under Trump but was the prosecution's star witness in the trial, to five months of incarceration.

On Friday, Trump, who was not charged in his company's case, lashed out at Merchan on his Truth Social platform.

"The Judge 'assigned' to my Witch Hunt Case, a 'Case' that has NEVER BEEN CHARGED BEFORE, HATES ME," wrote Trump, who has launched a campaign to regain the presidency in 2024. "He strong armed Allen, which a judge is not allowed to do, & treated my companies, which didn't 'plead,' VICIOUSLY."

Merchan did not reply to a request for comment.

The Trump Organization trial is not Merchan's only recent encounter with people close to the former president. Merchan also is presiding over a criminal case involving former Trump campaign and White House adviser Steve Bannon, who has pleaded not guilty to charges of money laundering, conspiracy and fraud related to a nonprofit that raised funds for building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico.

Merchan has been a Manhattan criminal court judge since 2009 after prior stints on the state's Court of Claims, which hears cases against the state and its agencies, and family court in the Bronx.

The judge was born in Colombia and moved to the United States at age 6, growing up in New York City's borough of Queens, according to news reports. Merchan graduated from Baruch College and Hofstra University School of Law and began his legal career in the same District Attorney's office that is now prosecuting Trump.

Merchan presided over the 2012 case of the so-called "Soccer Mom Madam" Anna Gristina, which garnered lurid headlines in the New York media. Gristina was accused of running a high-end brothel out of her Manhattan apartment and eventually pleaded guilty. Gristina sued Merchan in 2021 to unseal records in her case as part of an effort to vacate her record. Her case was dismissed, according to court records.

In 2011, Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer of New York recommended that President Barack Obama nominate Merchan for a federal judgeship in Brooklyn, saying he would have been the first Colombian-born federal judge, according to the New York Law Journal. Merchan was not nominated for the post.

Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Additional reporting by Karen Freifeld; Editing by Will Dunham and Noeleen Walder

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Thomson Reuters

Tom Hals is an award-winning reporter with 25 years of experience working in Asia, Europe and the United States. Since 2009 he has covered legal issues and high-stakes court battles, ranging from challenges to pandemic policies to Elon Musk's campaign to end his deal for Twitter.

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Juan Merchan: Who is the judge overseeing the Donald Trump ... - Reuters

It is the freshness of the secret and top secret documents, and the hints they hold for operations to come, that make these disclosures particularly damaging, administration officials say. On Sunday, Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said U.S. officials had notified congressional committees of the leak and referred the matter to the Justice Department, which had opened an investigation.

Amajor intelligence breach. After U.S. intelligence documents, some marked top secret, were found circulating on social media, questions remain about how dozens of pages from Pentagon briefingsbecame public and how much to believe them. Here is what we know:

Are the documents real? Yes, officials say at least, for the most part. Some of the documents appear to have been altered, officials say. U.S. officials are alarmed at this exposure of secret information, and the F.B.I. is working to determine the source of the leak.

Where did the materials come from? The evidence that this is a leak, and not a hack, appears strong. The material may be popping up on platformslike Discord, Twitter, 4chan and the Telegram messaging app, but what is being circulated are photographs of printed briefing reports.

What other countries are named? The leak appears to go well beyondclassified material on Ukraine. Analysts say the trove of documents also includes sensitive material on Canada, China, Israeland South Korea, in addition to the Indo-Pacific military theater and the Middle East.

The 100-plus pages of slides and briefing documents leave no doubt about how deeply enmeshed the United States is in the day-to-day conduct of the war, providing the precise intelligence and logistics that help explain Ukraines success thus far. While President Biden has barred American troops from firing directly on Russian targets, and blocked sending weapons that could reach deep into Russian territory, the documents make clear that a year into the invasion, the United States is heavily entangled in almost everything else.

It is providing detailed targeting data. It is coordinating the long, complex logistical train that delivers weapons to the Ukrainians. And as a Feb. 22 document makes clear, American officials are planning ahead for a year in which the battle for the Donbas is likely heading toward a stalemate that will frustrate Vladimir V. Putins goal of capturing the region and Ukraines goal of expelling the invaders.

One senior Western intelligence official summed up the disclosures as a nightmare. Dmitri Alperovitch, the Russia-born chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, who is best known for pioneering work in cybersecurity, said on Sunday that he feared there were a number of ways this can be damaging. He said that included the possibility that Russian intelligence is able to use the pages, spread out over Twitter and Telegram, to figure out how we are collecting the plans of the G.R.U., Russias military intelligence service, and the movement of military units.

In fact, the documents released so far are a brief snapshot of how the United States viewed the war in Ukraine. Many pages seem to come right out of the briefing books circulating among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and in a few cases updates from the C.I.A.s operations center. They are a combination of the current order of battle and perhaps most valuable to Russian military planners American projections of where the air defenses being rushed into Ukraine could be located next month.

Mixed in are a series of early warnings about how Russia might retaliate, beyond Ukraine, if the war drags on. One particularly ominous C.I.A. document refers to a pro-Russian hacking group that had successfully broken into Canadas gas distribution network and was receiving instructions from a presumed Federal Security Service (F.S.B.) officer to maintain network access to Canadian gas infrastructure and wait for further instruction. So far there is no evidence that Russian actors have begun a destructive attack, but that was the explicit fear expressed in the document.

Because such warnings are so sensitive, many of the top secret documents are limited to American officials or to the Five Eyes the intelligence alliance of the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. That group has an informal agreement not to spy on the other members. But it clearly does not apply to other American allies and partners. There is evidence that the United States has plugged itself into President Volodymyr Zelenskys internal conversations and those of even the closest U.S. allies, like South Korea.

In a dispatch that is very reminiscent of the 2010 WikiLeaks disclosures, one document based on what is delicately referred to as signals intelligence describes the internal debate in Seoul over how to handle American pressure to send more lethal aid to Ukraine, which would violate the countrys practice of not directly sending weapons into a war zone. It reports that South Koreas president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was concerned that Mr. Biden might call him to press for greater contributions to Ukraines military.

It is an enormously sensitive subject among South Korean officials. During a recent visit to Seoul, before the leaked documents appeared, government officials dodged a reporters questions about whether they were planning to send 155-millimeter artillery rounds, which they produce in large quantities, to aid in the war effort. One official said South Korea did not want to violate its own policies, or risk its delicate relationship with Moscow.

Now the world has seen the Pentagons delivery timeline for sea shipments of those shells, along with estimates of the cost of the shipments, $26 million.

With every disclosure of secret documents, of course, there are fears of lasting damage, sometimes overblown. That happened in 2010, when The New York Times started publishing a series called States Secrets, detailing and analyzing selected documents from the trove of cables taken by Chelsea Manning, then an Army private in Iraq, and published by Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder. Soon after the first articles were published, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed fear that no one would ever talk to American diplomats again.

In addition to endangering particular individuals, disclosures like these tear at the fabric of the proper function of responsible government, she told reporters in the Treaty Room of the State Department. Of course, they did keep talking though many foreign officials say that when they speak today, they edit themselves with the knowledge that they may be quoted in department cables that leak in the future.

When Mr. Snowden released vast amounts of data from the National Security Agency, collected with a $100 piece of software that just gathered up archives he had access to at a facility in Hawaii, there was similar fear of setbacks in intelligence collection. The agency spent years altering programs, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, and officials say they are still monitoring the damage now, a decade later. In September, Mr. Putin granted Mr. Snowden, a low-level intelligence contractor, full Russian citizenship; the United States is still seeking to bring him back to face charges.

But both Ms. Manning and Mr. Snowden said they were motivated by a desire to reveal what they viewed as transgressions by the United States. This time it doesnt look ideological, Mr. Alperovitch said. The first appearance of some of the documents seems to have taken place on gaming platforms, perhaps to settle an online argument over the status of the fight in Ukraine.

Think about that, Mr. Alperovitch said. An internet fight that ends up in a massive intelligence disaster.

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How the Latest Leaked Documents Are Different From Past Breaches - The New York Times

As part of the CGI U, students developed initiatives focused on health, education, poverty, environment, human rights, poverty alleviation and public health, impacting local and global communities.

As part of the CGI U, students developed initiatives focused on health, education, poverty, environment, human rights, poverty alleviation and public health, impacting local and global communities.The University of Alabama at Birmingham had a historic number of students selected for the Clinton Global Initiative University annual meeting, with 15 students attending.

The students developed new, specific and measurable initiatives that addressed one of the five focus areas: education, environment and climate change, peace and human rights, poverty alleviation, and public health.

We were so excited to return to in-person participation at the Clinton Global University Initiative for the first time since 2019, said Gareth Jones, director of UABService LearningandUndergraduate Research. While continuing to send students to the online version, we were eager to experience the in-person meeting. We had 15 amazing students who proposed Commitments to Action that will continue the tradition of UAB students being change-makers in the global community. Our office was thrilled to support these students as they shared their plans and visions with innovators and community builders from around the world.

CGI U gathers hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students worldwide to collaborate with influential leaders, experts and innovators on solving humanitys most pressing problems. This year, the first in-person assembly was held after the pandemic and the theme was Homecoming: Strengthening Community, Leadership & Action.

Vanderbilt University hosted the 2023 assembly, which was led by former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Clinton Foundation Vice Chair Chelsea Clinton. Featured speakers included Pete Buttigieg, United States secretary of Transportation, among others.

UAB students were among nearly 700 students representing 92 nations and 42 states who gained expertise and inspiration from influential leaders.

UABs CGI U students represent the School of Public Health, Collat School of Business, and College of Arts and Sciences with their Commitment to Action projects focused on specific areas:

Since President Clinton founded CGI U, more than 11,800 students from over 1,800 schools have made an impact in over 160 countries and all 50 states. Their efforts have culminated in more than 8,400 Commitments to Action, adding nearly 700 made by this years participants.

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UAB among top five schools in the nation with 15 students ... - University of Alabama at Birmingham

Ladies and Gentlemen! Tonight, for the main event in the center ring!

The indictment of former President Donald Trump, on 34 felony charges stemming from hush money payments to an adult film actor, more than anything else, has a numbing effect. We simply cannot expel this egomaniac from the center of our national debate, so we sigh, shake our heads, and try to move along through the noise.

The media circus surrounding the indictment hasnt been this frenzied over celebrity crime since O.J. Simpson got into his Ford Bronco nearly 30 years ago. It doesnt help that Trump has been eating up the coverage, raising money off of his persecution complex, and getting a polling boost for his run to be reelected in 2024. At least, until the photographers printed those unflattering pictures of him sulking through his arraignment hearing.

The charges themselves, brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, are rather mundane. Each charge points to a single falsified business record, in relation to payments Trump made through shell companies; his lawyer, Michael Cohen; and the National Enquirer to two unnamed women, presumably the adult film actor Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, and to an unnamed doorman who tried to shop a story about an illegitimate child. (The Enquirer eventually concluded that story wasnt true, but paid to keep it quiet until after the election anyway.)

The national media loves to talk about Trumps tawdry actions at the root of the charges, but thats missing the mark. This case will sink or swim based on those very narrow charges under New York states business laws, but thats nowhere near as sexy as the hush money to a porn star angle. And when the media finds the circus isnt interesting enough, theyll put on clown makeup and get in the ring themselves.

Everyone has an opinion of Trumps indictment, usually formed before reading any of the charges. Should he be indicted at all? Was it smart to have the Manhattan D.A. file charges first? Isnt this setting us up for more disappointment/violence/Trumps reelection in 2024? And why is Bragg bringing these charges when he walked away from a more compelling tax fraud case?

At the end of the day, most of those questions are moot. A person commits a crime, a prosecutor or grand jury determines there is probable cause to bring charges, an indictment or arrest follows, and then comes a trial. Thats the procedure. The fact that the suspect in question is the former president of the United States, or that hes simultaneously being investigated for serious crimes in multiple jurisdictions, is beside the point. A charge is a charge is a charge, and thats the way the justice system is supposed to operate: focused only on the facts at hand, independent of any outside factors.

Trump has escaped personal accountability for his behavior his entire life.

The reality is that our justice system often falls quite short of that ideal, as any fair-minded observer would note. Just look to our nations history of state-sanctioned violence against Black and Indigenous people from the 1500s to the present, labor unions and organizers, communists and suspected sympathizers of left-wing causes, anti-war demonstrators, women in general (including victims of rape and domestic violence, sex workers (of all genders), and women seeking abortions), LGTBQ+ people (whether while incarcerated, demanding rights in the public square, or just trying to have a drink in a private bar with their friends), and more. The difference with Trump is a matter of degree: In just seven years, his administration and followers have targeted all of the above, plus the media that reported on that violence.

We shouldnt kid ourselves that Trump will ever spend a day in prisonthe sheer logistical challenge of securing the personal safety of a former president, even in a Club Fed-style light-security facility, makes that nearly impossible. The best possible outcome would be to have him banned from public office for life, but the Republican Party already decided to give him a pass on that one. He might have his assets seized, his businesses closed, his family shunned forever. He might get an ankle monitor and detention in his gilded Florida prison, but hell never be looking at the rest of the world through bars. Hundreds of thousands of people have suffered worse for lesser crimes, or for none at all.

But we can expect Trump to use his time-proven tactics of filing countless frivolous pretrial motions to delay the case in an effort to run out the clock until he wins the 2024 presidential election. After which, hell pardon himself and then fight to delay any reckoning on that violation of all that is good and lawful until long after hes dead.

And if the worst of all possible outcomes occurs, and Trump does find himself ensconced in the Oval Office on Jan. 21, 2025, its easy to imagine that the first thing hed do is order his interim attorney general to arrest Joe Biden, legal reasoning be damned, plus anyone else who he believes wronged him during his spectacular failure of his first term: Robert Mueller, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton a hundred times over, Barack Obama. There is no depth to which Trump will not sink to satisfy his bottomless, foundational hunger for revenge.

But even as we dread that possibility (and wed be foolish to think it couldnt happen), the flaws of our justice system do not begin and end with Trumps unique ability to manipulate them. Trump didnt do anything new (aside from launching an attempted coup to remain in power after he lost reelection), he just pushed to new heights every unconscionable behavior wed seen in previous presidents, from paying to cover up affairs to betraying Americans to hostile foreign powers to stealing an election from the winner of the vote. Our presidents, congresspeople, governors, police, CEOs, and other powers in our society have always pushed the boundaries of legality and often gotten away with it.

Trump has escaped personal accountability for his behavior his entire life (his company, however, not so much), so theres no reason why the most un-self-reflective politician in U.S. history should believe the outcome of his current morass would be any different.

Granted, no U.S. president has evertried to overthrow our democracy before. And theres good evidence that charges related to the Jan. 6 insurrection are forthcoming from Special Counsel Jack Smith. As are potential charges around Trumps retention (i.e., theft) of classified documents, and from Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis around his caught-on-tape attempt to commit election fraud.

And if Manhattan D.A. Braggs indictment over hush payments to Stormy Daniels and others seems somewhat deaf to the political reality were facing, again, thats by design. Prosecutors from separate jurisdictions filing separate criminal cases arent supposed to collaborate to achieve the most ideal political outcome.

If Trump has to burn jet fuel flying between court dates in New York, Washington, and Atlanta, well, thats on him. But its also on us to deal with the fallout from the justice system in the political sphere.

And if Trump gets a ratings or funding boost as his unhinged minions triple-down on their persecution complex, well, they were going to do that anyway. As a nation that is allegedly rooted in certain principles of fairness and equality (no matter how imperfectly applied), we cant refrain from applying our standards of justice equally because were worried about what other people might do in response.

Another way of looking at the current situation is this: The Prohibition-era mobster Al Capone has been plausibly linked to anywhere from a few dozen to hundreds of murders, plus all the other crimes a racketeer of the age would be privy to. Yet Capone was put away for income tax evasion, which had the same effect as putting him away for murder would have donehe lost control of his gang and businesses, and by the time he was released, he was too sick (with neurosyphilis, contracted in the days before penicillin) to be a threat anymore.

The Capone case also helped create the judicial precedent that illegal income is still taxable income under federal law, which is something we can appreciate more as Trumps empire continues to unravel. And, like Trump, Capone was also prone to bragging about those crimes, believing he was above the law.

History will account for the true toll of Trumps perfidy (turning COVID-19 into a political issue probably led to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths from the disease, for example). But by the mere act of filing criminal charges against him, the nation is saying he is not, after all, above the law. A majority of Americans would agree.

In the case of laffaire Stormie, it is possible prosecutors have finally caught up to Trumps pre-presidential crimes and are soon moving on to those committed while in office. From the perspective of the media circus, the main act is about to begin.

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Opinion | Turns Out, Trump Isn't Above the Law - YES! Magazine