I am simply appalled by what they’re doing down there. This is outrageous.
But I think they’re making a mistake. Go ahead guys, mobilize Black people, women, and normal people everywhere who are sick and tired of all this gun violence. You are turning guns into an issue like abortion. Fine. Let’s have it out.
Jones: You cannot deny what you heard today where my colleagues telling me that I'm uppity.. I didn't bow down and I won't bow down because this is too important for the next generation.. There is a system of systemic racism that governs Tennessee pic.twitter.com/sHnShUyyCZ
Former President Trump — now a criminal defendant — has consolidated control over the House GOP, scrambling the majority’s agenda and cementing his status as the true power behind the gavel.
Trump’s allies had already ensured that the central themes of his 2024 campaign — victimhood and vengeance — would permeate the House GOP’s priorities. Trump’s indictment has kicked that dynamic into overdrive — unnerving some vulnerable Republicans in the process.
Trump on Wednesday called for Republicans to “defund” the Justice Department and the FBI “until they come to their senses,” throwing his support behind an effort championed by House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
With House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) already walking a tightrope, Trump’s call to action has injected a fresh demand into budget negotiations that will be virtually impossible to achieve.
But McCarthy — who has stridently defended Trump since news of the indictment — can hardly afford to alienate the former president at such a sensitive moment, leaving the speaker in a tactical bind.
In the meantime, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’sindictment is pushing Republicans to revitalize their weaponization subcommittee and other investigative panels — coordinating with Trump in the process.
Top House Republicans such as GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) have kept Trump apprised of their committee work, including briefing him on the investigations into Bragg.
McCarthy, Jordan and House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) are holding a call this week to discuss next steps to hold Bragg accountable, Comer told Fox News.
While McCarthy personally attacked the indictment and arrest, House GOP leadership so far has avoided distributing coordinated talking points and messaging guidance in response to the charges.
One Republican stressed to Axios that they believe McCarthy has intentionally kept silent to avoid putting vulnerable members in a tough spot.
That messaging vacuum has been filled by Trump and his top aides.
Screenshot: NRCC fundraising email
House Republicans — including the National Republican Congressional Committee — are seizing on Trump’s arrest for fundraising appeals, temporarily sidelining issues such as inflation and crime that helped propel them to the majority.
Several of the 18 Biden-district Republicans have bristled, both in public and private, at Trump’s proposal to defund federal law enforcement.
“It’s not going to happen. We have a country to run,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) told Axios.
A spokesman for Rep. Marc Molinaro told Axios the congressman does not support defunding the FBI or DOJ, stressing that he “was elected to address the issues facing Upstate NY — not to be a political pundit.”
Democrats, sensing vulnerability, have blasted out fundraising emails flipping the script on Republicans by accusing them of seeking to “defund the police.”
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan is all for it:
“We control the power of the purse, and that’s, we’re gonna have to look at the appropriations process and limit funds going to some of these agencies, particularly the ones who are engaging in the most egregious behavior,” Jordan told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo in an interview Sunday.
When Bartiromo asked if he meant the Justice Department and FBI, Jordan responded: “Yeah.”
I think Charlie Sykes is right. They now seem to be on a suicide mission. Unfortunately, there’s always the chance they will take the country down with them.
Thomas “virtually every year” has accepted rides on private jets, stays at private resorts, and invitations to hang out on superyachts owned by real-estate mogul Harlan Crow. He hasn’t disclosed any of it, which ethics experts spoken to by ProPublica say could violate a federal law requiring justices to disclose most gifts.
Meanwhile, Thomas has been one of the most conservative justices on a court dominated by conservatives. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, Thomas wrote a concurring opinion arguing it should reconsider rulings that established the right to contraception and same-sex marriage. He also made controversial rulings about the 2020 election results while his wife, Ginni Thomas, was pushing conspiracy theories and aggressively lobbying for the results to be overturned.
Crow has given $10 million in public political contributions, ProPublica notes, but there’s no telling how much undisclosed dark money he’s ferried to conservative causes. He’s been a driving force behind the right-wing Club for Growth and sits on the board of multiple conservative groups. He also gave $500,000 to Liberty Central, the Tea Party group founded by Ginni Thomas. Crow claimed in a statement to ProPublica that the hospitality he’s offered Thomas over the years is “no different” than what he has “extended to our many other dear friends.”
Here’s the convergence of big money and Ginni’s extremist activism into Clarence’s extra-curricular activities. It’s grotesque. Yes, Clarence would vote the way he votes because he’s a sour, bitter, brittle, right wing asshole. But he sure as hell doesn’t mind being rewarded for being who he is.
This is yet another example of impunity for these high echelon elites and is the reason why the public no longer trusts the Supreme Court. They have completely jettisoned the concept of stare decisis and the previous norms of the Court (prolific use of the shadow docket) and are showing themselves to be hyper-partisan and totally corrupt.
The right professes that the founders were demi-gods whose every word must be respected as a sacred but they sure don’t understand that this kind of thing is what they were most concerned about. (Actually, they don’t really revere the founders and they don’t care about what motivated them or anyone else.) They thought the system of checks and balances and the wisdom of the people would prevent this but they were wrong.
The right understands that there is almost no likelihood they will be held to account for anything so they just do what they want.
We need term limits for Supreme Court justices. At the very least.
QOTD: Andrew Weissman on Trump going after the prosecutor and judge’s families:
“You do not have this behavior from a mob boss. There is a rule in organized crime. You do not do this with respect to prosecutors. You don’t do this with respect to the judge. You certainly don’t go after their families. It’s bad business to do that.”
Trump’s more like a street thug. The mafia has too many rules for him.
Charlie Sykes (subs. only) wonders if the Republican Party is heading toward extinction:
The key to survival of any species is its ability to adapt.
That’s as true of politics as it is of biology. Political parties must learn when to fight or flee, or risk being mauled by some rough beast, whose hour has come round at last.
So students of history will fascinated by the torpor of the GOP circa 2023. Republicans were, after all, warned. Again and again. On Trump and abortion, but also on guns, moral Grundyism, and their addiction to the crazy.
Yet despite all the red blinking lights— and they are flashing everywhere — the GOP simply smacks its lips and says, ‘This is fine.” More, please.
The latest flare comes from my home state, Wisconsin. As Bill Lueders writes in today’s Bulwark, the race for Supreme Court here was the most expensive judicial race in American history. But, ultimately, the election was decided not by money, but by issues, especially abortion. And it was a landslide in a crucial swing state.
Republicans had better get their abortion position straight, and more in line with where voters are or they will face another disappointment in 2024. A total ban is a loser in swing states. Republicans who insist on that position could soon find that electoral defeats will lead to even more liberal state abortion laws than under Roe. That’s where Michigan is now after last year’s rout.
But there are few signs that Republicans will pivot. As The Journal notes, Wisconsin’s 1849 law bans abortion in nearly all cases. Republicans who control the legislature actually contributed to Janet Protasiewicz’s victory by failing to amend the law, even though they “had ample warning from results last year in Michigan and Kentucky, where abortion drove Democratic turnout.”
I especially appreciated the shout-out to my hometown of Mequon here:
The Wisconsin results show abortion is still politically potent. In a special election for the state Senate on Tuesday, the Republican candidate barely won in a longtime GOP stronghold in the northern Milwaukee suburbs. If Republicans can’t win in Mequon, their legislative majorities will soon be imperiled, and you can move Wisconsin out of the swing-state column for the Presidency in 2024.
Welcome to our world. Democrats compromised and negotiated and “pivoted” for 50 years and these people were unmovable. They do not believe there can be a compromise — they think abortion is genocide. And, by the way, Republicans were happy to benefit from that extreme position as long as the constitutional right to abortion was secure — they knew the other side was unlikely to mobilize on the issue. Now that the court gave them what they wanted it’s blowing back on them. But they should have anticipated it. The anti-abortion extremists never hid the fact that they wanted a total ban. “Returning it to the states” was always just a slogan. They want it all.
Reactionaries are playing for keeps in the provinces
Confederate Veterans Reunited for Group Portrait – Crawfordville, Florida, 1904. Photograph Courtesy of: Florida Photographic Collection, State Library and Archives of Florida.
Under the guise of “election integrity,” Republican secretaries of state held a two-day conference in Washington in February to discuss efforts to restrict voter access to the ballot box. The watchdog group Documented shared documents from the Heritage Foundation-sponsored event with the Guardian.
“A list of attendees namechecks the chief election officials of Indiana, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia,” write Ed Pilkington and Jamie Corey:
The keynote speech was given by Ken Blackwell, former secretary of state in Ohio. He was an early adopter of Trump’s lie about rigged elections, championing the idea in the 2016 presidential race which Trump won.
Blackwell now chairs the Center for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute, a rightwing thinktank led by former Trump officials. The center has been touting election-related model legislation.
Heritage was careful to organize the conference amid tight secrecy. Among the records obtained by Documented is an email from Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer at the foundation who leads their election work.
Responding to a query about the event from a Texas official, Von Spakovsky said: “There is no livestream. This is not a public event. It is a private, confidential meeting of the secretaries. I would rather you not send out a press release about it.”
The Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf) and the Honest Elections Project (HEP) joined Heritage in sponsoring the event.
Pilf “sues election officials to force them to purge voter rolls,” Pilkington and Corey write, while HEP “is a conservative dark-money group closely tied to the Republican operative Leonard Leo who was instrumental in engineering the current conservative supermajority on the US supreme court.”
Speakers were a who’s-who of GOP “election denial and voter suppression” promoters.
Heritage has updated the “election fraud database” it once called a voter fraud database. When last I looked, it padded out its list of 1,088 citations with cases dating back to 1948. As I wrote in 2018, any and all varieties of election rigging, registration fraud, vote-buying, even ballot petition fraud are lumped together under the rubric of voter fraud (which they use interchangeably with election fraud). Perhaps embarrassed by that 1948 citation, their update contains 1,422 stretching back only to 1982, a period in which billions of votes have been cast.
Listen, the left in this country needs to get serious about taking on these people. They mean to reduce the Constitution to a series of conservative preferences and to gut the rest. There is a war on, and not the civil war armed MAGA lunatics thirst for. This one is led by people in ties. It is happening quietly in the states and behind closed doors by Americans in birth certificate only.
Heather Cox Richardson hits some of the lowlights:
Since the 2020 election, Republican-dominated states have passed “election reform” measures that restrict the vote; those efforts are ongoing. On Thursday alone, the Texas Senate advanced a number of new restrictions. In the wake of high turnout among Generation Z Americans, who were born after 1996 and are more racially and ethnically diverse than their elders, care deeply about reproductive and LGBTQ rights, and want the government to do more to address society’s ills, Republican legislatures are singling out the youth vote to hamstring.
That determination to silence younger Americans is playing out today in Tennessee, where a school shooting on March 28 in Nashville killed six people, including three 9-year-olds. The shooting has prompted protesters to demand that the legislature honor the will of the people by addressing gun safety, but instead, Republicans in the legislature have moved to expel three Democratic lawmakers who approached the podium without being recognized to speak—a breach of House rules—and led protesters in chants calling for gun reform. As Republicans decried the breach by Representatives Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and Justin Pearson, protestors in the galleries called out, “Fascists!”
Richardson hears echoes of the backlash to Reconstruction. Today’s MAGA Republicans “reject the principles that underpin democracy, including the ideas of equality before the law and separation of church and state, and instead want to impose Christian rule on the American majority.” And while progressives fuss about Donald Trump, Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, conservative extremists with lower profiles are busily at work on Jim Crow 2.0 and worse.
Their conviction that American “tradition” focuses on patriarchy rather than equality is a dramatic rewriting of our history, and it has led to recent attacks on LGBTQ Americans. In Kansas today, the legislature overrode Democratic governor Laura Kelly’s veto of a bill banning transgender athletes who were assigned male at birth from participating in women’s sports. Kansas is the twentieth state to enact such a policy, and when it goes into effect, it will affect just one youth in the state.
Yesterday, Idaho governor Brad Little signed a law banning gender-affirming care for people under 18, and today Indiana governor Eric Holcomb did the same.
Meanwhile, Republican-dominated states are so determined to ignore the majority they are also trying to make it harder for voters to challenge state laws through ballot initiatives. Alice MIranda Ollstein and Megan Messerly of Politico recently wrote about how, after voters in a number of states overrode abortion bans through ballot initiatives, legislatures in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma are now debating ways to make it harder for voters to get measures on the ballot, sometimes even specifying that abortion-related measures are not eligible for ballot challenges.
They are serious. They take a long view. They are committed. Are we?
Hours after returning to his Palm Beach, Florida compound on Tuesday after indictment in New York, former president Donald Trump no longer appeared chastised. The thirty-four felony charges he faces seemed not to have sunk in. Nor Acting New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan’s warning that he not engage in statements or comments that have the “potential to incite violence, create civil unrest, or jeopardize the safety or well-being of any individuals.”
New York prosecutor Christopher Conroy addressed Trump’s social media outbursts during the arraignment. He told Merchan, “We have significant concern about the potential danger this kind of rhetoric poses to our city, to potential jurors and witnesses, and to the judicial process.”
“This is a request I’m making,” Merchan responded. “I’m not making it an order.” But he would revisit that decision should circumstances require it. So, no immediate gag order on the voluble, attention-seeking former president.
In a typically falsehood-laden speech later that day, Trump told supporters in Florida, “I have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family whose daughter worked for [Vice President] Kamala Harris and now receives money from the Biden-Harris campaign.” Pundits debate whether or not Trump crosssed a line hours after Merchan drew it.
Sources told NBC that within hours, Merchan and his family have received multiple threats. Anyone conscious since the George W. Bush administration could have seen this coming:
One official said “dozens” of threats have recently been directed at Judge Juan Merchan and his chambers but did not give an exact time frame for them.
The other source said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and other top officials in his office continue to receive threats. The threats have been in the form of calls, emails and letters.
The New York police detail assigned to the DA’s office is providing extra security to all affected staff members. Court officers, meanwhile, are boosting security for the judge and the court as a whole as a precaution.
Other steps have been taken, as well. Online bios of employees at the Manhattan district attorney’s office were recently removed from the DA’s website, according to a source familiar with the matter, because of troubling posts on social media, including Trump’s Truth Social platform.
Court spokesman Lucian Chalfen told reporters Merchan and the court had no comment. But others did (Axios):
“There is no court that would want to impose a gag order on a president of the United States,” J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge and lawyer who advised former Vice President Pence, told Axios.
But “if the former president forces the Manhattan criminal court, the court will have no choice.”
Trump has never been one for prudent silence. He’ll step over the line and step over the next until he forces Merchan’s hand.
Zoom in: Trump’s performance led legal minds to debate when he might cross Merchan’s line in the sand on rhetoric.
“A gag order is used to protect the defendants’ rights to a fair trial and also the government’s rights to a fair trial, so that the potential jurors don’t learn anything about the case that they’re not going to learn in court,” said Mike Scotto, a criminal defense lawyer and former Rackets Bureau Chief for the Manhattan DA.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Trump attorney Todd Blanche explained that Trump’s previous rants on social media were because he was “upset” and “frustrated” by the New York case.
“I don’t share your view that certain language is justified by frustration,” Merchan said.
Trump would use any gag order for fundraising and whine about how persecuted he is. He has spent his life dodging responsibility for his behavior and is not going to take any now. He pleaded not guilty Tuesday to 34 counts of falsifying business records.
Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County, Georgia, prosecutor Fani Willis will be watching closely.
Republicans are suddenly concerned about their anti-abortion zealots ruining everything. And in the process they are proving that abortion politics were always about winning and not about any “principle” that life begins at conception. Now that they are losing and they don’t like it:
The demand for anti-abortion legislation just cost Republicans another crucial race.
Pro-lifers: WE WON. Abortion is not a "constitutional right" anymore! Please stop pushing strict limits on abortion, or there will be no Republicans left.https://t.co/HK2pxV0geY
Sorry Ann, these people live to own the libs and they are not going to give up on banning abortion altogether because that’s what winning is to them. Coulter, of anyone, should understand that.
Dan Pfeiffer with an analysis of what went right in Wisconsin:
With respect to a couple of governors’ races happening later this year, the campaign for the Wisconsin State Supreme Court was the most important election of 2023. Judge Janet Protasiewicz’s victory over MAGA Republican Dan Kelly shifts the ideological balance of the court with dramatic implications for abortion rights, voting rights, and the integrity of the 2024 election. Wisconsin is one of the most gerrymandered states in the nation and a new Supreme Court could re-examine the maps to benefit democracy.
This is a huge win for Democrats. There are no two ways about it. Last night’s victory offers a good snapshot of this moment and provides applicable lessons going forward.
What the Win Says About 2024
Because they happen in a vacuum, elections like this one tend to be over-analyzed with broad conclusions about the state of politics. We should all bring a measure of humility to the analysis of a (relatively) low-turnout election nearly 18 months from the presidential election. This is particularly true in Wisconsin.
In February of 2012, Republican Governor Scott Walker defeated a Democratic-led recall attempt by seven points. Walker’s easy victory was seen by many as a sign of peril for Barack Obama’s reelection in the Badger State. But eight months later, Obama beat Romney by the same seven-point margin. There is little to no predictive value in Protasiewicz’s victory. It doesn’t tell us the odds that Biden will win the state in 2024. There is too much time and too many possible variables to make such a calculation. However, her win increases the likelihood that the true winner of the popular vote in Wisconsin will be the recipient of the state’s electoral votes. Dan Kelly actively participated in the 2020 effort to overturn the election. A victory by Kelly would have meant a State Supreme Court that could have rubberstamped an effort by Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature to overturn a Biden victory.
Trump Remains an Anvil Around Republican Necks
It’s impossible at this juncture to know what — if any — role the news of Trump’s indictment played in the result. Like the midterm, the entire election occurred in a news environment defined by the various investigations into the former President. And once again, a Republican lost an election they should have won by a larger-than-expected margin.
It is telling that Trump did not endorse Kelly in this race. Kelly is a MAGA Republican through and through. Trump endorsed Kelly in his 2020 bid to win a seat on the same court. The Republicans clearly believed that another Trump endorsement would hurt more than it would help. But whether Trump formally endorsed him or not, Kelly was closely associated with Trump and his efforts to steal the 2020 election. Like Herschel Walker, Blake Masters, Kari Lake and the rest, Kelly was easily branded as a MAGA Republican.
Despite talk of Trump being “Teflon Don,” he’s not very good at winning elections. Since Trump’s 2016 victory, Republicans have lost in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, and now 2023. The GOP’s only victory in the last eight years was in Virginia in 2021 when Glenn Youngkin did everything in his power to avoid being seen with or even uttering Trump’s name.
The manner in which Republicans have embraced Trump in the wake of his arrest will likely exacerbate their political problems for the foreseeable future.
The Value of Long-Term Investments and 24/7 Organizing
In the past, this is the sort of election Democrats would lose. We typically build up massive, well-funded political organizations to win elections and then, the day after the race is called, everyone goes home and the money dries up. The campaign offices shut down, the volunteer lists atrophy, and the headquarters is a ghost town. Republicans relied on the grassroots power of local evangelical groups and millions in dark money from outside groups. Therefore, they had less of a drop off for these off-cycle elections.
Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler has built an always-on organizing juggernaut. Wisconsin Democrats never stopped after Governor Tony Evers reelection in November. Ben traveled the country making the case for a steady stream of investments in party infrastructure. He convinced thousands of people to become monthly recurring donors to the party. This means he has a steady stream of revenue and the ability to plan long-term, as opposed to waiting around for a huge surge of money at the end. Late money can mostly only be spent on television ads and has diminishing returns compared to money that comes in much earlier in the cycle.
By raising money via a large grassroots network, the Wisconsin Democrats gave Protasiewicz a big advantage on the air. This often gets lost in political coverage, but TV stations are required by law to give candidates a lower rate on advertising than outside groups like SuperPACs. The Republicans in this race were forced to use outside groups to fund their ads, which means that even though they spent more money, the Protasiewicz campaign ran more ads.
The Wisconsin Democratic Party is a model of what Democrats need in all 50 states and I will sleep better at night knowing that Ben and his team will be on the job in 2024.
It’s a model for the country. Hopefully people elsewhere are paying attention. (I’d put Florida at the top of that list…)
By the way, get a load of the jackass who lost that Supreme Court seat:
Donald Trump’s party is filled with classless, whiny, crybaby, snowflake, losers. pic.twitter.com/lsrwuxCCw8
1. The 34 charges center on how payments to attorney Michael Cohen were recorded — at 34 different times.
The indictment centers on the previously reported effort in 2016 to bury a story alleging an extramarital relationship between Trump and adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. That effort involved a payment of $130,000 to Daniels paid by Michael Cohen, then Trump’s attorney.
A statement of facts released by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg details the prosecutors’ case. Cohen, it alleges, agreed in consultation with Trump and Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg that the attorney should receive $420,000 in reimbursement, a sum including enough for Cohen to offset the increase in federal income tax he would need to pay.
According to the statement, this total was allegedly recorded on a bank statement (suggesting documentary evidence) and agreed to by Trump himself in an Oval Office meeting with Cohen. The sum was then repaid in a series of monthly checks that were allegedly recorded by the Trump Organization as being a monthly retainer for Cohen.
That’s where the 34 charges accrue. There were 11 payments, in each month from February 2017 to December 2017. Each payment was recorded on the check and in ledgers as a retainer payment, despite the alleged lack of a legitimate retainer agreement.
Falsification of business records in the second degree is a misdemeanor charge. If, however, the falsification is meant to cover up some other criminal act, it becomes a felony. That’s what Bragg’s office alleges happened.
2. The grand jury elevated the charges to a felony based on the illegality of the payments.
It’s here that the details of the payments really matter. In its statement of facts, Bragg’s office outlines how Cohen and David Pecker, the former CEO of American Media, Inc. (AMI), allegedly worked with Trump to orchestrate payments to multiple parties. That included Daniels, former Playboy model Karen McDougal (who received a payment of $150,000 from AMI, the publisher of the National Enquirer) and a $30,000 payment from AMI to a Trump Tower doorman that was reported by the New Yorker in 2018.
In the abstract, a company like AMI paying McDougal or the doorman to bury their stories is legal. If they want to sell the rights to a private company, they may do so. But these payments, Bragg’s office alleges, violated the law and, therefore, warranted felony falsification charges.
Bragg explained the two predicates for that argument in a news conference on Tuesday afternoon.
“The first is New York state election law, which makes it a crime to conspire to promote a candidacy by unlawful means,” he said. “I further indicated a number of unlawful means, including additional false statements, including statements that were planned to be made to tax authorities. I also noted the federal election-law cap on contribution limits.”
The state charge, as The Washington Post wrote in January, appears to focus on a statute that makes it illegal to “conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.”
The federal crime is less vague. If the payments were intended to keep negative stories from coming out before the 2016 election, then the payments were political spending. And if they were political spending from a candidate or an agent of the candidate’s campaign, they are subject to contribution limits and reporting requirements. These payments, obviously, weren’t reported. The legal question, then, centers on whether the payments were aimed at influencing the election.
The statement of facts gets at that. It notes that while Trump was never charged with either a state or federal crime, Cohen pleaded guilty to charges related to both the McDougal and Daniels payments. It also notes that AMI admitted to federal prosecutors that it participated in an effort to influence the election by making its payments.
That said, this is relatively novel terrain. Perhaps with that in mind, the documents make an effort to demonstrate why state or federal charges could have been filed.
On April 4, former president Donald Trump surrendered himself for his arraignment and pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. (Video: Blair Guild, Michael Cadenhead/The Washington Post)
3. Prosecutors allege evidence explicitly demonstrating that Trump knew the payments were focused on the election.
Cohen had previously implicated Trump in the effort when he offered his guilty plea, but, since there were never charges filed against Trump, there was no evidence presented to prove that Trump knew that the intent was to boost his 2016 bid. One of the most telling aspects of the statement of facts — arguments that will need to be proved in court — is that it ties Trump into all of these.
For example, it was understood that Cohen (identified as “Lawyer A”) dragged his feet in paying Daniels (“Woman 2”) after her story was conveyed to Trump’s team by AMI. The document released Tuesday links that to Trump.
“The Defendant directed Lawyer A to delay making a payment to Woman 2 as long as possible,” it reads. “He instructed Lawyer A that if they could delay the payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public.”
At another point, it references a conversation Trump and Cohen had about buying the McDougal story from AMI. That conversation was recorded and published in 2018 and made obvious that Trump’s electoral viability was a focus.
4. Trump allegedly thanked David Pecker for aiding his campaign.
It’s been understood for some time that Pecker and AMI aimed to help Trump’s campaign. The statement of facts published on Tuesday begins in August 2015, the point at which Pecker reportedly first reached out to Trump and Cohen about his willingness to buy and bury negative stories.
Newly revealed in the court documents is an allegation that Trump acknowledged Pecker’s efforts.
“Between Election Day and Inauguration Day, during the period of the Defendant’s transition to his role as President, the Defendant met with the AMI CEO privately in Trump Tower in Manhattan,” the statement of facts alleges. “The Defendant thanked the AMI CEO for handling the stories of the Doorman and Woman 1, and invited the AMI CEO to the Inauguration. In the summer of 2017, the Defendant invited the AMI CEO to the White House for a dinner to thank him for his help during the campaign.”
This presumably came from Pecker himself, who testified before the grand jury that indicted Trump. It reinforces the idea that Trump understood the payments to be related to the campaign.
5. In court, Trump was warned about his public comments on the case.
At the arraignment itself, lawyers and New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan discussed Trump’s public rhetoric about the case, which has already included enthusiastic disparagement of the criminal charges and Bragg.
“Please refrain from making statements that are likely to incite violence or civil unrest …” Merchan said, “making comments that have potential to incite violence, create civil unrest or jeopardize the state or well-being of any individuals.”
No gag order was put in place but there is relevant precedent from Trump’s circle. In 2019, a federal judge barred Trump ally Roger Stone from social media after he posted incendiary attacks as he was facing trial.
Will these charges hold up? Who knows. It’s a risky strategy. But other people have been tried for filing false financial documents and there’s no reason that Tump should be treated any differently. We know what he did and it theoretically could have given him the election.
Recall Nate Silver’s data which showed that every time the two campaigns in 2016 were the subject of some new scandal (Access Hollywood, Comey letter about the Weiner laptop) their poll numbers dipped temporarily. There is plenty of evidence that if Comeys letter had come earlier, Clinton would have been able to recover and probably would have won the electoral college. Therefore, if this scandal had hit at the right time in the campaign it could have made the difference.
