Thread: Legal Charges Against Trump

Originally Posted by Norton

It won't. He will as he has done his entire life slither out of the many crooked dealings he has committed. Spoil a kid by a rich father and this is what you get.

He's charged with Class E felonies, which are a slap on the wrist anyway. A fine and nothing more at worst.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

He's charged with Class E felonies, which are a slap on the wrist anyway. A fine and nothing more at worst.

But, if they can use this sort of stuff to flip Wiesselburg, if they haven't already..

Originally Posted by Topper

But, if they can use this sort of stuff to flip Wiesselburg, if they haven't already..

And how can they flip him when he's already been sentenced? Or did I miss something?

another court date is set for trump

more later

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

And how can they flip him when he's already been sentenced? Or did I miss something?

More charges on different crimes....

Originally Posted by Topper

More charges on different crimes....

Are you aware of any further crimes he has committed for which he has not been indicted?

Originally Posted by S Landreth

another court date is set for trump

more later

starting during the election year

Arf

April 25^th

Carroll v. Trump judge won't relax jury anonymity rules

Citing Trump’s attacks on ‘hush money’ judge, court keeps E. Jean Carroll rape jury completely anonymous

Some weeks after cloaking a jury in complete anonymity to preside over E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit accusing former President Donald Trump of rape, a federal judge refused to relax that ruling even enough to confidentially share their identities with the attorneys.

Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said he couldn’t issue such an order in “good conscience,” especially in light of Trump’s continuing attacks on the jurist presiding over the former president’s criminal case.

On March 23, 2023, Kaplan said that he needed to protect jurors’ safety and privacy in light of Trump’s attacks on “courts, judges, various law enforcement officials and other public officials, and even individual jurors in other matters.”

“The likelihood of such difficulties since the Court made those findings only has increased,” Kaplan wrote in a six-page ruling on Monday. “That is so in view of Mr . Trump’ s public statements, characterized by the media as attacks against the New York State judge presiding over the recently filed New York State criminal case against Mr. Trump and the threats reportedly then made, presumably by Mr. Trump’s supporters, against that judge and members of his family.”

After this remark, Judge Kaplan footnotes multiple reports about threats pouring into the chambers of Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan in the wake of Trump’s attacks. In one citation, the Washington Post noted that Merchan urged Trump to refrain from making statements that might incite violence. A New York Post article reported that Donald Trump Jr. disseminated an image of Merchan’s daughter. Fox News and NBC News both reported on the threats the poured in after that.

“The overriding goal is the selection of fair and impartial jurors who can perform their duties free of unwanted media attention, free of inappropriate influence attempts, and free of any fear of harassment or retaliation, regardless of the outcome of the case,” the ruling states. “In light of that preeminent goal, I cannot in good conscience grant the request that these parties’ ‘legal teams’ — or even their attorneys of record only – should have the names of the otherwise anonymous jurors.”

DocumentCloud

• Georgia looms next after Trump’s indictment in New York

The indictment of Donald Trump in New York over hush-money payments to a porn actress was a global spectacle, with the former president glumly returning to his old stamping grounds in Manhattan as TV networks closely tracked his procession of black SUVs on their way to the courthouse.

But strip away the high drama, and the actual charging document in the case was far less grand: 34 felony counts of a fairly narrow and common bookkeeping charge that Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, described as the “bread and butter” of his office’s white-collar criminal prosecutions.

In Georgia, however, there is another criminal investigation of Trump nearing completion, this one also led by a local prosecutor, Fani Willis of Fulton County. While nothing is certain, there are numerous signs that she may go big, with a more kaleidoscopic indictment charging not only Trump, but perhaps a dozen or more of his allies.

Her investigation has targeted a wide range of conduct centered around efforts to subvert the democratic process and overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss. Nearly 20 people are already known to have been told that they are targets who could face charges, including Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former personal lawyer, and David Shafer, the head of the Georgia Republican Party.

For Trump, the possibility of a second and potentially more complex criminal indictment in another state underscores the blizzard of legal challenges he is facing, even as he emerges as the clear front-runner among Republican presidential candidates.

For Willis, the choice to pursue a narrowly focused indictment or a more sprawling one – a classic prosecutor’s dilemma – carries with it potential risks and benefits on both sides. And American history offers few examples in which the stakes are so high.

“Certainly, prosecutors would have this conversation of what’s in the best interest of justice and what is strategically preferable for a case,” said Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and former federal prosecutor. A narrow case can be easier for jurors to understand. But it is also possible to go “too narrow,” McQuade said, denying a jury the ability to see the entire scope of a defendant’s criminal behavior.

If, on the other hand, a wide-ranging scheme is charged, “you allow them to see the full scope of criminal conduct,” she said. But going big could cause jurors to become lost amid a profusion of evidence, with a long trial increasing the possibility of a mistrial.

In Georgia, the investigation is focused on myriad efforts to overturn Trump’s narrow loss in Georgia after his 2020 election defeat, including his January 2021 phone call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he pressed Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to recalculate the results and “find” him enough votes to win.

Trump is also under investigation by Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, for his role in the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and his decisions to retain sensitive government documents at his home in Florida.

If Willis chooses to seek indictments in the Georgia case, she may do so after a new grand jury begins its work in the second week of May, though nothing is set in stone. Typically, presenting such cases to a regular grand jury is a short process that takes a day or two.

The wide scope of the investigation has been evident for months, and Willis has said that seeking an indictment under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, statute is an option that she is considering. Like the similar federal law, the Georgia RICO statute allows prosecutors to bundle what may seem to be unrelated crimes committed by a host of different people if those crimes are perceived to be in support of a common objective.

Willis has extensive experience with racketeering cases, including a case she won involving a group of public school educators accused of altering students’ standardized tests. Her office is currently pursuing racketeering charges against two gangs connected to the hip-hop world, including one led by Atlanta rapper Jeffery Williams, who performs as Young Thug.

“I think jurors are very, very intelligent,” Willis said at a news conference in August, in which she announced a racketeering case against a third Atlanta-area gang known as Drug Rich. “RICO is a tool that allows a prosecutor’s office or law enforcement to tell the whole story. And so we use it as a tool so that they can have all the information they need to make a wise decision.”

After starting the Trump investigation in February 2021, Willis’ office sought the aid of a special grand jury to gather and consider evidence. In Georgia, such juries do not have indictment powers but can issue subpoenas in long-running investigations. The body was empaneled last spring and completed its work in January after hearing closed-door testimony from 75 witnesses, though its recommendations have remained largely under seal.

Emily Kohrs, the foreperson of that special grand jury, strongly hinted in an interview with The New York Times in February that Trump was among more than a dozen people who had been recommended for indictment. “You’re not going to be shocked,” she said when asked whether Trump was named in the report. “It’s not rocket science.”

Court records show that the special grand jury sought testimony from witnesses including Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff under Trump; Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., an ally of the former president; and Trevian Kutti, a former self-described publicist for rapper Kanye West who, according to prosecutors, was involved in a plot to force a Fulton County elections worker to give a false confession of election fraud.

Documents also show that prosecutors are following numerous narrative threads in Georgia involving either Trump or his allies. These include Trump’s phone calls to Georgia officials, including the one to Raffensperger; specious statements about election fraud made by Giuliani and others at state legislative hearings; the convening of pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College at the Georgia state Capitol; Kutti’s bizarre meeting with the elections worker, Ruby Freeman, two days after Trump’s phone call to Raffensperger, in which Trump falsely accused Freeman of being a “vote scammer”; and a plot by allies of Trump involving the copying of sensitive election software in rural Coffee County, Georgia.

The battle lines have already been drawn. Trump has steadfastly maintained his innocence and used inflammatory language to assail the prosecutors in both Georgia and New York. And last month, his legal team in Georgia filed a 52-page motion, with more than 400 additional pages of exhibits, challenging a case that has yet to be filed. Legal experts saw it as a sign of what’s to come.

“That’s indicative of the type of motions you’ll see if there’s an indictment,” said Melissa Redmon, a law professor at the University of Georgia who has been a prosecutor in Fulton and Clayton counties. “Every single step is going to be challenged from the beginning.”

In New York, Bragg said he too was focusing on crimes that thwarted the democratic process, though these were from the 2016 campaign. In a statement, he said that Trump had “repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal crimes that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.” He is accused of covering up a potential sex scandal involving porn actress Stormy Daniels.

Trump more than once has compared his legal tribulations to those of the notorious Chicago mob boss Al Capone. He said on social media, as recently as February, that he had more lawyers working for him than Capone, who was famously found guilty in 1931 and sentenced to 11 years in prison for tax evasion – hardly the most lurid or troubling of his many misdeeds.

Bragg’s decision in New York opened him up to intense criticism from Republicans, who have called the charges flimsy and politically motivated, and the alleged offenses insufficient to merit the nation’s first indictment of a former president. Even some Democrats note that the New York charges seem pedestrian compared with the allegations looming against Trump elsewhere.

“Is it as problematic as Jan. 6 or what happened at Mar-a-Lago? No,” said David Pepper, the former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, referring to federal investigations into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t investigate it.”

If Willis brings a sprawling RICO case, it could present its own problems, said Michael Moore, a former U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia. Asking a jury to consider multiple acts that do not tie directly back to Trump might make it more difficult “to point the finger at him with the strength that you might have been able to in a simpler case,” he said.

Moore also wondered how far a trial involving Trump would stretch into the coming presidential election season. He noted that the jury selection process in the multidefendant racketeering case involving Young Thug had been going on for roughly four months and that the judge in the case had estimated the trial could take up to nine months.

“We’re just going to have to face the reality that we’re going to have to deal with that,” he said.

Fvckin’ pussy

• Trump asks to postpone defamation and sexual battery trial after indictment

Former President Trump’s attorneys have asked for a four-week delay in a defamation and sexual battery lawsuit brought by author E. Jean Carroll, citing the media coverage surrounding Trump’s indictment.

The trial is currently slated to begin on April 25, but Trump’s lawyers said prospective jurors would have the recent indictment top of mind when judging the former president’s defense.

“President Trump’s right to a fair trial depends upon a brief ‘cooling off’ period between the trial of this matter and the recent deluge of prejudicial media coverage concerning his unprecedented criminal indictment and arraignment in Manhattan,” wrote Trump’s attorneys Alina Habba and Joe Tacopina.

Carroll has accused Trump during his presidency of raping her in the mid-1990s at a New York department store. Trump has repeatedly denied Carroll’s claims.

She first filed a defamation lawsuit against the then-president in 2020 for statements he made about casting doubt on her claims and credibility. That case will likely turn on whether Trump’s statements were made within the scope of his employment as president, which would effectively protect him from the lawsuit.

In a second lawsuit, which is the one currently scheduled for trial this month, Carroll included an allegation of defamation made after Trump’s presidency. The case also sues Trump over the alleged assault itself by leveraging a New York law that temporarily lifted the statute of limitations.

“The threat to President Trump’s rights is particularly dire because the coverage of the indictment has repeated a salacious and false allegations—exactly what Ms. Carroll alleges in this case,” Trump’s attorneys wrote.

“Jurors selected to hear Ms. Carroll’s allegations against President Trump will have the breathless coverage of President Trump’s alleged extra-marital affair with Stormy Daniels still ringing in their ears if trial goes forward as scheduled,” their letter continued. “To avoid this egregious violation of President Trump’s constitutional rights, the trial should be adjourned for a brief period to allow the media frenzy to recede.”

Tacopina and Habba said a trial beginning in late May would take place during a two-month window in which there is not expected to be significant developments or new headlines in Trump’s criminal case, since Trump’s legal team is not required to file their motions until Aug. 8.

Trump was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, becoming the first former U.S. president to be indicted. Carroll’s trial is set to take place down the street from where Trump was arraigned in Lower Manhattan.

• Donald Trump to face deposition in $250 million fraud case

Trump braces for second New York deposition in $250 million fraud case against him, his family and his business

Former President Donald Trump geared up for his second bout of deposition testimony on Thursday in New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $250 million fraud case.

If it’s anything like the first line of questioning, Trump will assert his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

Trump once claimed to avail oneself of this constitutional right is something the “mob” might do.

“If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” Trump asked in 2016.

On Aug. 10, 2022, Trump revisited his former rhetorical stance.

“Now I know the answer to that question,” Trump said in a prepared statement preceding his questioning. “When your family, your company, and all the people in your orbit have become the targets of an unfounded, politically motivated Witch Hunt supported by lawyers, prosecutors, and the Fake News Media, you have no choice.”

At the time, Trump had not yet become the first former president to face criminal charges in U.S. history. That distinctly ratchets up the stakes of any sworn testimony, and he is widely expected to respond to questions from New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office with more Fifth Amendment invocations. James assisted in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal investigations that produced the indictments of the Trump Organization and its former chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg.

A little more than a month after Trump’s first deposition, James filed her massive $250 million lawsuit against the former president, his adult children and his namesake corporation. On top of the massive award sought, the attorney general wants to permanently bar Trump and three of his adult children — Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Ivanka Trump — from ever serving in a New York corporation.

James also wants the judge to extend the tenure and reach of a court-appointed monitor, who has been assigned to watch over the company pending trial.

Trump asserting his Fifth Amendment rights will shield him from any criminal consequences from his testimony, but it could hurt him in civil court.

The attorney general’s lawsuit accuses Trump, his family members, and his business of “numerous acts of fraud and misrepresentation in the preparation of Mr. Trump’s annual statements of financial condition” from 2011 to 2021. Some of these discrepancies were quite drastic, James alleges. Her office has said that the former president inflated the size of his Trump Tower triplex by nearly three, and the Trump Organization valued rent-stabilized units 66 times higher than an outside appraiser did.

“With the help of his children and senior executives at the Trump Organization, Donald Trump falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars to unjustly enrich himself and cheat the system. In fact, the very foundation of his purported net worth is rooted in incredible fraud and illegality,” James said when she filed her complaint.

While his first deposition fell during pre-litigation discovery, Trump’s second turn on the hot seat will be the first to follow the filing of the lawsuit. The trial is slated firmly for Oct. 2, 2023. Last month, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron rejected a request to postpone it by declaring: “That’s written in stone.”

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• "Special counsel focuses on Trump fundraising off false election claims"

Federal prosecutors probing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol have in recent weeks sought a wide range of documents related to fundraising after the 2020 election, looking to determine if former president Donald Trump or his advisers scammed donors by using false claims about voter fraud to raise money, eight people familiar with the new inquiries said.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s office has sentsubpoenas in recent weeks to Trump advisers and former campaign aides, Republican operatives and other consultants involved in the 2020 presidential campaign, the people said. They have also heard testimony from some of these figures in front of a Washington grand jury, some of the people said.

The eight people with knowledge of the investigation spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing criminal investigation.

The fundraising prong of the investigation is focused on money raised during the period between Nov. 3, 2020, and the end of Trump’s time in office on Jan. 20, 2o21, and prosecutors are said to be interested in whether anyone associated with the fundraising operation violated wire fraud laws, which make it illegal to make false representations over email to swindle people out of money.

The new subpoenas received since the beginning of March, which have not been previously reported, show the breadth of Smith’s investigation, as Trump embarks on a campaign for reelection while assailing the special counsel investigation and facing charges of falsifying business records in New York and a separate criminal investigation in Georgia.

The subpoenas seek more specific types of communications so that prosecutors can compare what Trump allies and advisers were telling one another privately about the voter-fraud claims with what they were saying publicly in appeals that generated more than $200 million in donations from conservatives, according to people with knowledge of the investigation.

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• Federal investigators asked about Trump showing a map with classified information - NYT

Multiple witnesses were asked whether former President Donald Trump showed them a map containing classified information that he took from the White House when he left office, as part of a U.S. Justice Department investigation, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

It is unclear what the map depicted beyond "sensitive intelligence information," the Times reported, citing four people familiar with the matter.

Trump is being investigated by the Justice Department for his handling of classified documents after he left office in 2021. In particular, investigators are focusing on whether he improperly stored boxes of documents containing sensitive information at his home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.

FBI agents seized thousands of government records, some marked as highly classified, from Mar-a-Lago in August. The investigation is one of two criminal inquiries into the former president being led by Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Trump, who was indicted in late March in a separate inquiry in New York, has denied any wrongdoing in the cases and describes them as politically motivated.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fed...on-2023-04-12/

Judge rejects Trump's request to delay trial in rape accuser Carroll's lawsuit

A U.S. judge on Monday rejected former President Donald Trump's request to delay a scheduled April 25 trial over whether he defamed former Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll by denying he raped her.

Last week, Trump's lawyers urged U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan to grant a four-week "cooling-off" period to at least May 23 to give Trump a fair trial, citing a recent "deluge of prejudicial media coverage" of criminal charges against him filed by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

In a written order on Monday, Kaplan said Carroll's case was "entirely unrelated" to the state prosecution, in which Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment made to a porn star before the 2016 election.

Kaplan said there was no reason to assume it would be easier to seat a fair and impartial jury in May rather than in April. He also said that some of the recent media coverage of the criminal charges against Trump was based on his own public statements.

"It does not sit well for Mr. Trump to promote pretrial publicity and then to claim that coverage that he promoted was prejudicial to him," Kaplan wrote.

This week.........

Donald Trump Prepares For E. Jean Carroll Trial By Flipping Off Judge

If the pre-trial shenanigans are a prelude, Donald Trump’s lawyers are about to turn next week’s defamation trial in the case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump into a three-ring circus.

In the four years since Carroll sought redress for an alleged mid-90s sexual assault by the former president, Trump has thrown sand in the gears at every turn. From ducking the process server, to claiming he was acting in his official capacity when he slimed her, to filing motion after motion seeking to delay the trial, Trump’s lawyers have made themselves completely obnoxious to the court. And while attorney Joseph Tacopina promised when he entered his appearance in February to turn down the temperature after years of his co-counsel Alina Habba antagonizing Judge Lewis Kaplan, things have only gotten crazier since then.

In the past week, Tacopina and Habba filed two additional requests to postpone the case, in addition to a spurious allegation that Carroll’s lawyer behaved unethically. But nothing can top the comedy of their response to an April 10 order for the parties to inform the court of their intention to attend the trial and on which days. (Although an order on April 18 in which the court referred to “material inaccuracies in Mr. Tacopina’s letter” as “misunderstandings” due to his failure to attend a meeting comes close.)

On April 18, two days before the court’s deadline, Carroll’s lawyers informed the court that she will be present “throughout the trial.”

Yesterday, on the 19th, Tacopina requested that the judge instruct the jury that his client was “excused” from attending the trial because his security team would be a burden on the court:

Although Defendant Trump wishes to appear at trial, in order to avoid the burdens outlined above, if he does not do so, we respectfully request that the Court issue to the jury the following preliminary instruction: While no litigant is required to appear at a civil trial, the absence of the defendant in this matter, by design, avoids the logistical burdens that his presence, as the former president, would cause the courthouse and New York City. Accordingly, his presence is excused unless and until he is called by either party to testify.

Carroll’s team responded that. “If Mr. Trump decides not to appear at his own trial for sexual assault and defamation, the jury may draw whatever inferences it chooses—and Mr. Trump has no right to a judicial endorsement of his (flimsy) excuse. ” They also noted that Trump’s security needs did not prevent him attending the NRA convention, a UFC fight, and his deposition by the New York Attorney General in just the past week, and that he intends to hold a campaign rally in New Hampshire next Wednesday during the trial itself.

Today the court unceremoniously dropkicked Trump’s request for a hall pass, noting that “the Court neither excuses nor declines to excuse Mr. Trump from attending the trial or from testifying in this case. As far as the Court is aware, Mr. Trump is under no legal obligation to be present or to testify. The plaintiff has made clear that she does not intend to call him as a witness. The decision whether to attend or to testify is his alone to make. There is nothing for the Court to excuse.”

After expressing his confidence that the US Marshals are perfectly capable of accommodating Trump’s security needs, Judge Kaplan observed that Trump is currently traipsing all over the country to campaign, including his New Hampshire event next week.

“If the Secret Service can protect him at that event, certainly the Secret Service, the Marshals Service, and the City of New York can see to his security in this very secure federal courthouse,” he continued, noting that there has been “quite ample time within which to make whatever logistical arrangements should be made for his attendance, and certainly quite a bit more time than the five or six days between his recent indictment on state criminal charges and his arraignment on that indictment approximately one block from the location of the trial of this case.”

The order concluded by banning “reference by counsel for Mr. Trump in the presence of the jury panel or the trial jury to Mr. Trump’s alleged desire to testify or to the burdens that any absence on his part allegedly might spare, or might have spared, the Court or the City of New York.” Notably, it did not absolve Trump of the obligation to tell the court by today if he intends to attend the trial. (He does not, this is all for show.)

And yet!

This afternoon Tacopina replied that his client will not, after all, be complying with the court’s April 10 order.

“Because the decision of the defendant, who is not required to appear as a civil litigant, will be made during the course of the trial, we are not yet in a position to advise the Court in this regard,” he writes. “However, we will inform the Court as soon as a decision is reached, particularly in light of the logistical concerns that will need to be addressed in coordination with the Secret Service, the Marshals Service, and the City of New York.”

Well, it’s a choice. Maybe not a great one but … we’ll find out next week.

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Extra

Appeals court returns E. Jean Carroll defamation case to district judge who earlier ruled against Trump

A federal appeals court in New York on Friday returned E. Jean Carroll's initial case against former President Donald Trump to a district court judge who had previously decided Trump did not act within the scope of his employment as president when he denied Carroll's rape claim and allegedly defamed her.

Carroll, a former Elle columnist who alleges that Trump attacked her in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman luxury department store in the 1990s, claims Trump defamed her in 2019 when, during his presidency, he denied her rape claim by calling her a liar and saying "she's not my type."

Trump, who also denies the accusations, has argued that the Justice Department should be substituted as the defendant in the case because, at the time of his allegedly defamatory statements, he was acting in his official capacity as an employee of the federal government.

Friday's decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals remands the case to the district court for further consideration.

The decision follows an indeterminate opinion from the D.C. Court of Appeals, which last week declined to shield Trump from accountability but did not fully resolve the question of whether denying allegations of misconduct that occurred prior to his term fell within the scope of his employment as president of the United States.

If Trump is determined to have been acting as a government employee, the U.S. government would substitute as the defendant in Carroll's defamation lawsuit -- which means the case would go away, since the government cannot be sued for defamation.

The presiding district court judge, Lewis Kaplan, previously denied the government's motion to substitute for Trump, ruling that the president is not an employee of the government and that Trump did not act within the scope of his employment when he allegedly defamed Carroll.

EXCLUSIVE: DA says indictment announcement coming this summer in Trump probe

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Monday said she would announce this summer whether former President Donald Trump and his allies would be charged with crimes related to alleged interference in Georgia’s 2020 election.

Willis revealed the timetable in a letter to local law enforcement in which she asked them to be ready for “heightened security and preparedness” because she predicted her announcement “may provoke a significant public reaction.”

In the letters, Willis said she will announce possible criminal indictments between July 11 and Sept. 1, sending one of the strongest signals yet that she’s on the verge of trying to obtain an indictment against Trump and his supporters.

“Please accept this correspondence as notice to allow you sufficient time to prepare the Sheriff’s Office and coordinate with local, state and federal agencies to ensure that our law enforcement community is ready to protect the public,” Willis wrote to Fulton Sheriff Patrick Labat.

Similar letters were hand delivered to Darin Schierbaum, Atlanta’s chief of police, and Matthew Kallmyer, director of the Atlanta-Fulton County Emergency Management Agency.

“We have seen in recent years that some may go outside of public expressions of opinion that are protected by the First Amendment to engage in acts of violence that will endanger the safety of those we are sworn to protect. As leaders, it is incumbent upon us to prepare,” Willis told the metro Atlanta leaders.

Trump has called for mass demonstrations in response to overreach from prosecutors — triggering concerns about violent unrest not unlike the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection he promoted.

Norm Eisen, a former ethics czar under President Barack Obama who has co-authored a Brookings Institute report on the Fulton probe, said Willis’s letter makes it sound like she will certainly seek charges against the former president.

“It’s hard to imagine how Willis would announce that she will be filing charges without including Donald Trump,” Eisen said. “While she does not have the former president’s name in her letter, the evidence and the applicable law in Georgia point to the substantial likelihood that Donald Trump and his principal co-conspirators will be included when she follows through on the plans she confirms in this letter.”

This isn’t the first time law enforcement in Atlanta has been ramped up in response to the Fulton DA’s Trump investigation.

Last May, as a Fulton judge selected members of the special grand jury, the Fulton Sheriff’s office blocked off vehicle traffic on the streets surrounding the courthouse and stationed deputies with guns on many street corners with semi-automatic rifles. Snipers patrolled nearby rooftops as helicopters circled overhead. Law enforcement also deployed a SWAT team to protect jurors as they returned to their cars at the end of the day.

Six months later, before jurors interviewed Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, they assigned heavily armed officers to guard the courthouse steps and brought in a bomb-sniffing dog.

Willis herself travels with a security detail and has equipped some members of her team with bulletproof vests and keychains with panic buttons.

For Trump’s arraignment last month in Manhattan, authorities erected barricades and shut down streets surrounding the courthouse. The police issued a stand-ready order for roughly 35,000 officers in the region as well as city, state and federal law enforcement agencies.

About an hour before Trump’s afternoon court appearance, a number of Manhattan courtrooms were closed, according to published reports. There was also a total shutdown of the route the former president took to the courthouse from Trump Tower and from the courthouse to board his plane at LaGuardia Airport.

The Fulton sheriff’s office referred any questions about the letter to the DA’s office. A spokesman for APD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Extra

Georgia DA to Open Investigation Following Report of New Trump Election Texts

Two men hired by former President Donald Trump’s legal team discussed a plot to use data obtained from a breached Georgia voting machine as part of an attempt to decertify the state’s 2021 U.S. Senate run-off election, according to CNN.

Jim Penrose, a former NSA official who worked alongside Trump attorney Sidney Powell to access voting machines in Coffee County, Georgia, communicated with Doug Logan, CEO of a firm that allegedly runs audits of voting systems.

“Here’s the plan. Let’s keep this close hold,” Penrose wrote. “We only have until Saturday to decide if we are going to use this report to try to decertify the Senate run-off election or if we hold it for a bigger moment,” Penrose added, referring to a potential lawsuit related to the impending confirmation of Democrat Jim Ossoff’s triumph in the runoff.

CNN reported that the texts reveal the first instance in which Trump sympathizers contemplated using the data to overturn elections beyond the 2020 presidential race.

Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis is leading a criminal investigation into the scheme to breach voting systems. Willis has subpoenaed several individuals in connection to the probe, including Powell and former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. She has also subpoenaed both Penrose and Logan over their involvement in the Georgia runoff breach. CNN also reported that Willis’ office is considering a potential racketeering case against multiple defendants.

Former prosecutor Michael Zeldin told CNN that the report suggests violations of multiple state and federal laws.

“What we have here is unauthorized access to this privileged computer data,” Zeldin said. “There is a conspiracy to acquire and improperly distribute that data. There is probably a crime of interfering with the rights of the people of Georgia to have a free and fair election. And this is a series of crimes, a pattern of criminal activity, then it could possibly violate the Georgia RICO statute, which criminalizes a series of criminal activities by the same person or group of persons, so there’s a lot at stake here.”

Zeldin also said that the texts between Penrose and Logan are “more damning” than Trump’s phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump suggested that Raffensperger could “find” the 11,780 votes needed to flip the state election in his favor.

Much more here

E. Jean Carroll v. Trump: Opening statements begin

Donald Trump ‘jammed’ his hand up E. Jean Carroll’s dress, forced his penis inside her, lawyer tells jury in opening statement

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Trump Rape Case Judge Asks Parties Not to 'Incite Violence'

Judge makes thinly-veiled attempt to silence Trump during rape trial, advising parties against statements that could 'incite violence'

Before potential jurors were brought into the room, US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan asked attorneys for both sides to advise their clients against "making any statements that will incite violence or civil unrest."

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Trump 'lunged at her,' E. Jean Carroll's lawyer tells jury in battery, defamation case

Donald Trump "banged the door closed and lunged at her," an attorney for writer E. Jean Carroll told jury members as she recounted what Carroll said happened in 1996 at the Bergdorf Goodman department store, during the opening statements of Carroll's defamation and battery case against the former president, Tuesday in Manhattan federal court.

But Trump attorney Joe Tacopina told the jury in his opening statement that Carroll's defamation and battery claims are an "affront to justice," accusing the writer of taking Trump to court "for money, for political reasons and for status."

Carroll, who brought the lawsuit in November, alleges that Trump defamed her in a 2022 Truth Social post by calling her allegations "a Hoax and a lie" and saying "This woman is not my type!" when he denied her claim that Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in the 1990s.

"Trump was famous in New York City. His name was on a bunch of buildings and his face was in the tabloids," Crowley said. "Carroll was a well-known writer," she said, and when Trump asked for her help selecting a gift Carroll agreed, thinking it would make for a good story.

"She thought it would be something to laugh about with her friends later," Crowley said.

The pair moved through the store, joking and laughing, and eventually made their way to the lingerie department on the sixth floor where Trump tossed a lace body suit at her and asked her to try it on, Crowley said, before leading her by the arm to the dressing room, where he lunged at her.

"Ms. Carroll will tell you she was shocked," Crowley said

In 2019, when Carroll decided to write about the alleged encounter, Crowley said that "Donald Trump's response was explosive."

"Suddenly Ms. Carroll was all over the headlines. The most powerful person in the world ... had branded her a liar."

Tacopina, in his opening statement, told jurors that "you can hate Donald Trump" -- but that the appropriate place to express those feelings is at the ballot box and not in a court of law.

"She's abusing the system," Tacopina said of Carroll. "You cannot let her profit from this process."

Tacopina said Carroll "falsely alleged that he raped her," and that's why Trump publicly attacked her.

"E Jean Carroll fabricated a story about Donald Trump while he was president and then made that story the center of her life and her lifestyle," Tacopina said.

The nine-member jury of six men and three women is weighing Carroll's defamation and battery claims and deciding potential monetary damages.

"Battery refers to the unjustified touching of another person without the consent of the person touched, with the intent to cause bodily contact that a reasonable person would find offensive," Judge Lewis Kaplan instructed the jurors.

Trump has repeatedly denied Carroll's allegations. The trial is expected to last around five days.

Two women are expected to testify during the trial that Carroll told them about the alleged attack shortly after it occurred. Two other women are expected to testify that Trump sexually assaulted them, claims that he denies, as Carroll's attorneys try to show a pattern of conduct.

The judge has also agreed to allow excerpts of the so-called Access Hollywood tape on which Trump is overheard in 2005 bragging to then-host Billy Bush about groping women.

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Live Updates: The Civil Rape Case Against Donald Trump Goes to Trial

Donald Trump raped me, writer E Jean Carroll testifies in New York court

The advice columnist E Jean Carroll told a New York jury on Wednesday that Donald Trump raped her, leaving her unable to have a romantic relationship, and then “shattered my reputation” by denying the attack occurred.

Carroll said Trump “snatched up” a grey-blue bodysuit in the lingerie department and demanded she try it on.

“I had no intention of putting it on. I said, ‘You put it on, it’s your colour,’” she told the court.

Carroll said Trump suggested they both try it on, and motioned toward the dressing room. She said she did not take it seriously.

“Donald Trump was being very light. It was very joshing and very funny,” she said.

“I was flirting the whole time, probably.”

But, she said, the mood changed rapidly after they stepped into the dressing room.

“He immediately shut the door and shoved me up against the wall. He shoved me so hard my head banged. I was extremely confused,” she said. “I pushed back and he thrust me back against the wall again, banging my head again.”

Carroll told the jury the situation “turned absolutely dark”.

“He leaned down and pulled down my tights,” she said. “I was pushing him back. It was quite clear I didn’t want anything else to happen.”

Carroll described the former president’s attempts to kiss her as “a shocking thing”.

“My whole reason for being alive at that moment was to get out of the room,” she said.

But Carroll said she could not escape Trump’s grip. Speaking quietly and slowly, she said he raped her.

Carroll said she escaped after she was able to lift her knee and push him off. She fled the store.

Carroll said she will always regret going into the dressing room with Trump, describing it as “very stupid”.

“It left me unable to ever have a romantic life again,” she said.

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Judge chides Trump for calling rape trial 'made up SCAM' on social media

The federal judge overseeing the civil trial in which Donald Trump is accused of rape admonished the former president for a social media post in which he called the lawsuit “a made up SCAM.”

Trump could be “tampering with a new source of potential liability,” U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan told one of Trump’s lawyers in court on Wednesday.

On Wednesday morning, Trump posted on his social media site, Truth Social, about the lawsuit. He called Carroll’s lawyer a “political operative” and said her legal defense is “financed by a big political donor that they said didn’t exist.” He attacked Carroll directly, calling her “Ms. Bergdorf Goodman” and saying she was “like a different person” during a CNN interview.

“This is a fraudulent & false story–Witch Hunt!” he wrote.

Trump also alluded to a dress that Carroll says she was wearing on the day of the alleged rape. After filing her lawsuit, Carroll’s lawyers sought a DNA sample from Trump so they could compare it with DNA found on the dress. Trump initially refused but later changed tactics, offering to provide a sample if Carroll’s legal team turned over the full DNA report on the dress. Kaplan rejected that proposal earlier this year.

Before the jury entered the courtroom on Wednesday, a lawyer for Carroll notified Kaplan of Trump’s comments. In response, Kaplan warned Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina that Trump’s statement was “entirely inappropriate.”

“What seems to be the case is that your client is basically endeavoring, certainly, to speak to his quote unquote public, but more troublesome, to the jury in this case,” Kaplan said.

Before the trial began, Kaplan barred both sides from “any testimony, argument, commentary or reference concerning DNA evidence.”

“Here’s all I can tell you: I will speak to my client and ask him to refrain from any further posts regarding this case,” Tacopina told the judge. Seemingly acknowledging the difficulty of restraining the former president, Tacopina added: “I will do the best I can do, your honor. That’s all I can say.”

Trump, who isn’t required to attend the trial, hasn’t appeared in the courtroom.

The judge then warned Tacopina that Trump could expose himself to greater culpability if he continued to make statements related to the case.

“We’re getting into an area, conceivably, where your client may or may not be tampering with a new source of potential liability,” Kaplan said, adding: “and I think you know what I mean.”

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E. Jean Carroll Accuses Trump of Rape in Testimony - The New York Times

The judge has dismissed the jury for the day. He reminded them to avoid all coverage of the case.

Carroll broke down in tears toward the end of the day, amid continued discussion of the personal cost of going public with her accusations. “To be able to get my day in court, finally, is everything to me,” she said, her shaky voice rising. “I’m crying because I’m happy I got to tell my story in court.”

Federal court rules Trump cannot block Pence from testifying to grand jury investigating Jan. 6

A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected former President Trump’s effort to block former Vice President Mike Pence from testifying to a grand jury probing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to reports.

The Washington Post reported that the reasoning behind the new order from a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals remains under seal.

The former president’s legal team earlier this month appealed a judge’s order that Pence answer Justice Department questions about Trump’s role in Jan. 6 and efforts to interrupt the transition of power during the 2020 election.

Pence had initially argued that he was shielded from subpoena by the “speech and debate” clause given his role as then-president of the Senate, but the former vice president’s team later said he wouldn’t appeal the judge’s order, which said Pence wouldn’t have to testify about his role in Congress.

NBC News reports Trump can appeal to the Supreme Court, though he has not said whether he intends to do so.

guilty as sin - Might have been another bad news day for trump

• Trump legal team asks House Intel for ‘legislative solution’ amid Mar-a-Lago probe

President Trump’s legal team again turned to Congress in an ongoing criminal investigation, penning a letter to the House Intelligence Committee asking it to “formalize procedures for investigations” that would make such matters civil rather than criminal cases.

The 10-page letter to Chair Mike Turner (R-Ohio) obtained by The Hill suggests the investigation into Trump should not face criminal charges in connection with the case; it lays out three pathways for committee involvement in the matter and asks for a “legislative solution.”

“DOJ should be ordered to stand down, and the intelligence community should instead conduct an appropriate investigation and provide a full report to this Committee, as well as your counterparts in the Senate,” Trump attorneys Timothy Parlatore, John Rowley, Jim Trusty and Lindsey Halligan wrote in the letter.

“A legislative solution by Congress is required to prevent the DOJ from continuing to conduct ham-handed criminal investigations of matters that are inherently not criminal.”

The contents of the letter were first reported by CNN, and the correspondence was also sent to congressional leaders and other leaders of the intelligence committees in both chambers.

The letter focuses mainly on Trump’s actions ahead of the return of some 15 boxes of White House records. While those boxes contained 184 classified documents, it was the back-and-forth with Trump and his legal team after they were turned over that spurred DOJ to issue a subpoena and eventually secure a warrant to search the property.

While that warrant did list the Espionage Act as a possible charge that could result from retaining the documents, it also noted the potential for obstruction of justice charges stemming from the search, a nod to the months-long battle and the difficulty of recovering the documents once Trump was notified.

Trump’s legal team largely blames the National Archives (NARA) and the Government Services Administration (GSA) for removing documents from the White House and sending them to Florida, arguing that while Trump’s predecessors “had over four years to prepare for their departure upon completion of their second term, President Trump had a much shorter time to wind up his administration.”

The letter says GSA and other staffers who packed the boxes are responsible for a “stark change” from past processes.

They say Trump planned to personally review the boxes before they were sent to NARA but “due to other demands on his time, President Trump subsequently directed his staff to ship the boxes to NARA without any review by him or his staff.”

The letter does not mention other reported steps Trump took in the saga, including those detailed in an article from The Washington Post indicating the former president himself packed the first 15 boxes handed over to the Archives and that he directed an attorney to say all requested materials had been returned — a request the attorney Alex Cannon declined.

According to Trump’s legal team, the first batch of files given to NARA included “all manner of documents from the White House.”

While the classified documents themselves had been removed, “the placeholder inserts refer to briefings for phone calls with foreign leaders that were located near the schedule for those calls.”

The letter to House Intelligence comes after congressional leaders scored a victory with the Justice Department, with leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee becoming increasingly vocal about the need to review the documents and intelligence recovered from both Trump and President Biden’s homes.

Trump’s team casts the letter as a way to provide the committee with “information that we suspect DOJ has not disclosed.”

The letter takes numerous shots at DOJ and NARA, accusing both of politicization and arguing the Justice Department rushed its process with Trump’s legal team.

“DOJ chose not to work cooperatively [with] President Trump’s team and instead chose to fuel the animosity though [sic] the inappropriate use of criminal investigative tools such as a grand jury subpoena on May 11 and a search warrant on August 8,” Trump’s attorneys state.

The Aug. 8, 2022, search came more than a year and a half after Trump left office.

In an interview with The Hill, Parlatore said the request for standardizing investigations into document spillage is needed after several former executives were found to have left office with some classified records. However, no other situation appears close to having the 300 documents found among Trump’s belongings.

He said the Office of the Director of National Intelligence should take charge in such instances, calling the packout procedure during a transition “flawed across administrations.”

“I’m saying the legislative solution is fix White House document handling procedures and fix the Presidential Records Act procedures so that this never happens again,” Parlatore said, adding that anything specific to the investigation into Trump led by special counsel Jack Smith would be “a step too far.”

During an appearance on Fox News on Thursday morning, Turner noted the panel has spoken with Archives about the handling of records.

“Our committee has already been looking at this issue on the misuse of classified documents. We had the archivists into our committee to testify, and they actually testified that every administration since Reagan has delivered to them boxes of a mixture of classified and declassified documents — unclassified documents — that were mixed together,” he told the network’s Maria Bartiromo.

“There’s been mishandling with a history that goes all the way back to the Reagan Administration. We’re looking at how do we change the laws, how do we change the rules, and how do we address this so it doesn’t affect future administrations, and it certainly shouldn’t affect these two.”

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• Pence testifies before federal grand jury investigating Trump's role in Jan. 6

Former Vice President Mike Pence appeared Thursday before the federal grand jury convened as part of the special counsel investigation into former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and remain in power, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The testimony is a significant development in the special counsel’s probe, as Pence could provide critical insights into Trump’s thinking in the days leading up to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. The former vice president published a memoir and Wall Street Journal opinion article detailing several of his interactions with Trump, but some details were left vague. Special counsel Jack Smith’s team is particularly interested in Trump’s efforts to try to block the certification of the election, NBC News previously reported.

Pence's appearance came amid an increased security presence at the federal courthouse in Washington on Thursday. NBC News spotted multiple black SUVs with tinted windows entering the parking garage in the morning. Two black SUVs entered the courthouse garage at around 9 a.m., an entrance that would allow witnesses to head up to the grand jury rooms on the third floor without being seen in the public areas of the courthouse.

The SUVs left the courthouse at about 4:30 p.m.

When reporters asked Chief Judge James Boasberg, who oversees grand jury proceedings, what was happening, he demurred.

A spokesman for special counsel Jack Smith declined to comment.

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• U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan called a break for the day, saying the trial will resume Monday. He reminded jurors not to read or talk about the case. Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina said he is “more than halfway” through his questioning of accuser E. Jean Carroll. Kaplan said things would move “a lot faster” if Tacopina stopped the repetition and “argumentative questions.”

Trump attorney Joe Tacopina is still trying to frame the details E. Jean Carroll describes of the alleged assault as implausible, repeatedly returning to Carroll’s testimony that she was able to eventually raise her knee to Trump’s thigh with her tights pushed down, that she didn’t scream and that she also gripped her purse throughout, while being pinned to the wall.

Tacopina sounded incredulous when he repeated back Carroll’s earlier testimony she had been wearing four-inch heels that day.

Carroll scoffed at Tacopina’s question: “I can dance forwards and backwards in four-inch heels.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...l-trump-trial/

^ That'd read much better like:

Alvin Bragg wants to bar Trump from spilling grand jury info

Manhattan DA urges judge to bar Trump from ‘misuse’ of ‘grand jury and other sensitive materials’

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg sought a protective order on Wednesday barring former President Donald Trump from spilling grand jury and other sensitive materials.

In a 26-page motion, Bragg’s assistant district attorney Catherine McCaw noted Trump’s history of trying to undermine the various criminal investigations against him in New York, Georgia and Washington, D.C.

“Defendant has posted extensively regarding these investigations on social media and has discussed these investigations in speeches, at political rallies, and during television appearances,” her motion states. “His posts have included personal attacks on those involved in the investigation, including witnesses, jurors, and those involved in conducting or overseeing the investigations. In many instances, he has even posted regarding their family members.”

Hours after his arraignment in his hush-money case, Trump attacked presiding Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan at a rally at Mar-a-Lago. His son Donald Trump Jr. posted a photograph attacking Merchan’s daughter, noting that she worked on Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign in 2020. Trump and his allies also have gone after Bragg, who has been besieged with threats — and received an envelope with white powder — since the former president posted on Truth Social that he expected to be arrested.

The DA’s office made note of the attacks, obliquely.

“Defendant has begun to mount similar attacks against those involved in the instant criminal case, publicly disparaging witnesses associated with the case, as well as the District Attorney, District Attorney’s Office personnel, and the Court,” the DA’s filing states. “This pattern, particularly given that Defendant is currently under federal investigation for his handling of classified materials, gives rise to significant concern that Defendant will similarly misuse grand jury and other sensitive materials here.”

What follows in the motion is a lengthy history of Trump’s attacks on prosecutors before Bragg, dating back to former special counsel Robert Mueller and his assistants in that investigation. Bragg’s office notes that Trump called him, in all caps, a “SOROS-BACKED ANIMAL,” referring to the wealthy Jewish financier.

Bragg argues that Trump’s past behavior makes it likely that the former president will misuse grand jury material.

“The risk that this Defendant will use the Covered Materials inappropriately is substantial,” the motion states. “Defendant has a long history of discussing his legal matters publicly—including by targeting witnesses, jurors, investigators, prosecutors, and judges with harassing, embarrassing, and threatening statements on social media and in other public forums—and he has already done so in this case.”

On April 12, Trump filed a massive $500 million lawsuit against Michael Cohen, his ex-fixer and a key witness in his criminal case. Bragg says Trump might use protected materials to prosecute that case too.

“The legislature did not mandate broad disclosures by the People in advance of trial so that the People’s discovery materials could be used for these purposes,” the motion says. “Rather, the purpose of the discovery reforms was to allow defendants to make informed decisions about whether to plead guilty in criminal cases.”

Bragg seeks an order that would only allow Trump to review certain discovery materials in the presence of counsel — and barring the former president from “posting the Covered Materials to any news or social media platforms, including, but not limited, to Truth Social, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Snapchat, or YouTube, without prior approval from the Court.”

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