With much of the focus on the courthouse in lower Manhattan, investigations from Atlanta to Washington will continue, underscoring the wide range of dangers he faces as he seeks to regain the presidency.
Former President Donald Trump faces the most urgent legal challenge of his life this week in New York, where he will be arraigned Tuesday on charges stemming from hush money payments during his 2016 campaign.
But with much of the focus on the courthouse in lower Manhattan, investigations from Atlanta to Washington will continue, underscoring the wide range of dangers he faces as he seeks to regain the presidency.
The vulnerability Trump faces alone in Washington has become apparent over the past month, as judges in a succession of sealed rulings have dismissed efforts by Trump’s team to block grand jury testimony, including from his own attorney and his former vice president, from witnesses who were, or still are, close to him and who could possibly offer direct insight into key events.
The rulings ordering advisers and aides to testify do not suggest that the Justice Department is close to filing criminal charges, nor do they guarantee that prosecutors will be able to obtain valuable testimony for potential prosecution. Yet they are a key victory behind closed doors for the administration as it investigates whether classified documents were criminally tampered with at Trump’s Florida home and the possible obstruction of that investigation, as well as the efforts of Trump and his allies. to undo the results of the investigation. the 2020 presidential election.
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“I think when you’re talking about an attempted insurrection and the kinds of issues that we’re talking about there, there’s going to be a lot of arguments on the Justice Department’s side” to get the testimony, said Randall Eliason, a former federal official, prosecutor and law professor. from George Washington University.
Meanwhile, the Atlanta district attorney continues to investigate attempts by Trump and his allies to undo his election loss in Georgia. In February, a special grand jury said it believed “one or more witnesses” committed perjury and urged local prosecutors to press charges.
The former president never testified before the special grand jury, which means he is not among those who could have committed perjury. But the report does not rule out the possibility of other charges, and the case still poses particular challenges for Trump, in part because his actions in Georgia were so public.
In general, the number of sealed disputes over the scope of grand jury testimony is unusual, but perhaps appropriate for high-stakes investigations like that of a former president. It is also in stark contrast to the last special counsel investigation involving Trump, when he was president and when Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors tried to determine whether the 2016 Trump campaign had colluded with Russia to skew the election.
In that investigation, an attorney inside the White House, Ty Cobb, facilitated voluntary interviews of White House staff, without subpoenas, in the hope that cooperation would expedite the conclusion of the investigation.
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“If I could find a way to cooperate and still preserve executive privilege, it would speed things up, which in my view … was imperative for the president and for the country,” Cobb said in a recent interview. “We were able to speed up getting all the information.”
Trump in that investigation was protected by the power of his office and by Justice Department legal opinions that say a sitting president cannot be impeached. No longer president, Trump has lost that shield, raising the stakes of his criminal exposure. And as prosecutors have tried to question people close to him, either to better understand Trump’s state of mind and possible defenses, or to gather potentially damaging testimony, Trump’s lawyers have repeatedly objected, often to no avail. .
Perhaps the most vivid example came last month when the then-chief judge of the DC federal court ordered Trump’s attorney, M. Evan Corcoran, to give further grand jury testimony in the Mar-a-inquest. Lake. He had invoked attorney-client privilege in a previous grand jury appearance by refusing to answer more questions, but prosecutors pressed for more testimony.
[Con información de The Associated Press]
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