News overlooked on Friday
This news was largely obscured Friday by the Republicans’ Speaker follies:
The special counsel investigating Donald Trump could decide whether to file criminal charges against him in just weeks after amassing a trove of new state documents concerning pressure to overturn the 2020 election, sources have told Bloomberg.
Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team of Justice Department prosecutors are currently poring over new emails, letters and other records from battleground states.
“You can tell that it’s moving quickly,” Brian Kidd, a former federal prosecutor who served under Smith at the Department of Justice, told Bloomberg.
Officials in Arizona, Georgia, New Mexico and Nevada confirmed to Bloomberg that they have complied with grand jury subpoenas from Smith’s office. The material turned over by Nevada and reviewed by Bloomberg reveals that Trump representatives baselessly accused the state’s local officials of allowing election “fraud and abuse” soon after Trump lost the vote to Joe Biden.
“Moving quickly” is good. A decision “in just weeks” is better.
First charges are likely to involve federal documents seized by the FBI last summer at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound, former federal prosecutor Cynthia Alksne told MSNBC’s “The Katie Phang Show” on Saturday (Newsweek):
“Well, I would guess that one is going to come pretty soon. I mean, let’s face it—that’s an easy prosecution,” she said. “You stole the documents. We’re asking for them. We ask you ‘pretty please.’ You said ‘no.’ You lied about it. You move them, and then we found them.”
Alksne said the case could likely be prosecuted “at any time,” but the DOJ still has work to do to craft its strongest argument, including fully identifying obstruction allegedly committed by Trump’s team.
“They also have to figure out, now that they have the documents, were they shared with anybody and what exactly happened with them,” Alksne added. “And that may take some time.”
Special Counsel Jack Smith has hired two prosecutors with longtime experienced in public corruption cases.
Ray Hulser and David Harbach, Bloomberg reports, “have prosecuted some of the most high-profile public corruption targets of both political parties in recent years, including cases against Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and former presidential candidate and Senator John Edwards.”
Trump continues his losing streak in court as he attempts to fend off the law (The Hill):
A New York state judge on Friday rejected a motion from former President Trump to dismiss a lawsuit filed against him by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), allowing the case to proceed.
New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ruled the arguments from Trump’s legal team were frivolous and rejected an argument that the case is a “witch hunt.”
James sued Trump and three of his adult children — Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump — in September following a three-year investigation into whether the former president inflated the value of his properties to his investors to get loans and deflated the value on tax forms.
James is seeking a $250 million penalty and will ask the court to permanently bar all four from serving as an officer or director of any corporation licensed in New York state.
What was it the Rev. Martin Luthor King said about the arc of the moral universe?
May he be proved right sooner rather than later. Because, honestly, the universe seems not to have a great track record when it comes to bringing the rich and powerful to justice.
As Rachel Maddows’s “Ultra” podcast explains, in the largest sedition trial of the century held during the height of WWII, the Department of Justice could not deliver. The political forces aligned behind the alleged Nazi collaborators were simply too powerful:
Maddow: “We had reached the point where our legal remedies were inadequate.”
What John Rogge saw, what he had been up-close to in his prosecutions, was an entrenched ultra-right movement in this country, opposed to democracy, which saw violence as a legitimate means of achieving political aims. One that had support not only among some parts of the far-right media, but also among elected political leaders on the right.
He saw alongside that a criminal justice system that was simply unable to deal with that threat.
What do you do as a country when you are faced with that?
When you are up against those kinds of forces, trying to tear apart the very thing that makes you the country you are? How do you push back against it?
What’s more, the defendants brought to trial (it collapsed) in the 1940s were the smaller fry. The DOJ did not bring charges against the two dozen members of Congress implicated in advancing a fascist plot to overthrow the U.S. government. “Legal remedies were inadequate.” Moreover, civilian opponents of seeing the law applied equally to the elite today will resort to extra-legal remedies of the 2nd Amendment kind. Their political patrons have long not been shy about suggesting them.
This is not a popcorn moment, but a deadly serious one.