Many People Are Saying It’s Going to Be a Bad Week for Donald J Trump
On Monday, the January 6th Committee will vote on criminal referrals. On Tuesday, the House Ways & Means Committee will vote on whether to make the former President’s tax returns public. On Wednesday, the Final Report from the J6 Committee will be released. Throughout the week there will be more public knowledge about Department of Justice subpoenas relating to its now fast-tracked election interference investigation. And –last but not least–the Fulton County (Ga) Grand Jury will finalize its recommendations.
The former President is well aware of what’s coming his way. His social media missives are increasingly desperate in tone. In the space of forty minutes on Sunday, he ranted about Democrats, the FBI & Justice Department, and the January 6th Committee, warning of a “dark period” coming soon.
I can’t pretend to think TrumpCult followers will think of anything other than violence when seeing the words Weaponized Thugs and Tyrants must be dealt with.
Remember, when a judge in Florida approved of the release of the affidavit on the Mar-a-Lago raid, Breitbart gave a copy to Trump, who quickly turned around and published the names of the agents who were listed on the documents.
I don’t think he was thinking people should send Christmas Cards to those agents.
So, let’s break down what’s got the man so upset.
The House January 6 Select Committee intends to refer a minimum of three criminal charges against him. They will include “incitement of insurrection, obstruction, and conspiracy to defraud the United States government,” according to The Huffington Post.
Sunday morning on CNN, Rep. Adam Schiff said: “There’s evidence Donald Trump committed criminal offenses in his effort to overturn the 2020 election. He tried to interfere with a joint session. Pressed officials to find votes that didn’t exist. And set a bloodthirsty mob on the Capitol. If that’s not criminal, nothing is.”
Referrals from the committee don’t mean that he will be indicted. Special counsel Jack Smith will decide whether and who to indict. However, such a recommendation may complicate Justice Department decision-making by putting immense public pressure on Smith and, ultimately, Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Plus, an indictment isn’t the same as a guilty verdict. I think one reason Trump’s so triggered by what may be coming is that the overwhelming weight of the evidence will make his usual defense tactics of threats, bluster and bullshit unlikely to be effective.
From NBC News analysis:
A criminal conviction for insurrection could have a blockbuster political impact. Under the 14th Amendment, a conviction of a former federal official for insurrection could bar that person from again holding federal office. While there is no guarantee that this would happen to Trump, it’s worth noting that since the provision has never been applied to a candidate running for president, whether it could bar Trump from running for president in 2024 is an unsettled legal question. On Thursday, House Democrats introduced legislation to bar Trump from holding federal office in the future.
Who gets referred to the Justice Department shouldn’t be the only thing that captures our attention, though. Thompson has said that the committee is looking at “five or six” categories of referrals, which may include agencies that license lawyers and the House Ethics Committee.
With so much to look forward to on Monday, getting people to pay attention to what the committee releases afterward may be difficult, but staying tuned may be well worth it. Thompson told reporters “attachments” to the report will be released on Wednesday.
The House committee will also vote on how to handle Republican members of Congress who defied the committee’s subpoenas. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and four other GOP representatives were asked to testify to the committee about their involvement with Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election: Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama. All five ignored the subpoenas.
Word from the Republican side of the aisle is the moment a new congress is convened the will be veritable blizzard of subpoenas issued in an attempt to intimidate and/or discredit the witnesses likely to be the most damaging. This may be complicated by the standoff currently in progress over leadership; un-formed committees won’t have the technical wherewithal to start a legal process.
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The House Ways and Means Committee’s Tuesday vote on making Trump's tax returns public is, according to what I’m reading, a done deal. There may or may not be damaging information to be had, other than once again confirming that the man is a sleazy operator who overvalued his investments when applying for loans and undervalued them when it came tax time.
As the pace of prosecutions in New York, which has had access to much of this data, tells me, building a bullet proof case against a ‘throw everything at a wall and see what sticks’ defense isn’t as easy as people think it might be. Those lobbyists for rich people dictating tax code to legislators know what they are doing, and there are boobytraps everywhere.
From the New York Times:
The New York Times has also investigated Mr. Trump’s taxes, including obtaining tax-return data in 2020 that covered more than two decades. He paid no federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years that The Times examined; he also reduced his tax bill with questionable measures, including a $72.9 million tax refund that, as of 2020, was the subject of an I.R.S. audit.
Still, the returns the committee has obtained contain more recent data.
The statute known as Section 6103 gives the Ways and Means Committee the authority to request that the I.R.S. turn over any taxpayer’s returns. By law, the committee generally must keep that information confidential, but if the panel votes to report the information to the full House, it would become lawful to make it public, too.
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Wednesday will see the release of the J6 report's appendices and transcripts of over 1,000 witness interviews. While the committee’s conclusions released on Monday are going to generate big headlines, the real nuggets will be buried in the non-public witness testimony and documents obtained via subpoena.
The final report’s eight chapters that align closely with the evidence the panel unveiled during its public hearings in June and July:
Trump’s effort to sow distrust in the results of the election
Trump’s pressure on state governments or legislatures to overturn victories by Joe Biden
Trump campaign efforts to send pro-Trump electors to Washington from states won by Biden
Trump’s push to deploy the Justice Department in service of his election scheme
The pressure campaign by Trump and his lawyers against then-Vice President Mike Pence
Trump’s effort to summon supporters to Washington who later fueled the Jan. 6 mob
The 187 minutes during which Trump refused to tell rioters to leave the Capitol
An analysis of the attack on the Capitol
But there’s plenty more. Mark Meadows was acting as Trump’s point man for strategy and communications during this period. His text messages, as Talking Points Memo discovered, with 34 (!) members of Congress on the events of January 6th are a goldmine.
From MSNBC:
One of them, Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, asked Meadows to “impose Marshall [sic] law” as a last resort for “saving our Republic” just days before Joe Biden took office. Another, Rep. Brian Babin of Texas, warned just a few days after the election, “When we lose Trump we lose our Republic. Fight like hell and find a way.”
Texts show how Trump campaign manager Jason Miller helped Meadows identify which lawmakers, like Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama — whom Miller identified as a “ringleader” — would help “move real numbers” on Jan. 6. And Miller’s message that Trump was encouraging Republicans to join the “Cruz effort” suggests that Sen. Ted Cruz was even more deeply involved in the bid to overturn 2020 than we previously knew.
Meadows wasn’t in touch with just individual lawmakers and strategists, but also influential movers and shakers in MAGA politics who operate in the shadows. According to the Talking Points Memo, Meadows’ texts include exchanges with the president of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a dark money MAGA group, as it took on a role as “something of a headquarters for members of Congress working to overturn the election.” CPI reportedly hosted meetings for far-right lawmakers, served as a forum for discussing legal strategy and was sought as a place for “objectors” to gather.
It is impossible to ignore the evidence in these texts. Trump had plenty of help from high places as he used disinformation and the mobilization of his base to try to overturn the election results and pull off a coup against his own government.
The assertion that the former president was somehow innocent of actively participating in the events of the day has been used by influential Republicans as they’ve sought to minimize the political damage. It’s clear that he was at the center of everything.
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One of the most clear-cut instances of bad behavior on the part of Trump concerns the phone call made to try and find 11,000+ votes. The Georgia special grand jury investigating efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election has finished hearing witness testimony and is readying its final report.
Ultimately, though, this is –for now– just more negative noise for Donald Trump.
From CNN:
In Georgia, special grand juries are not authorized to issue indictments. The final report serves as a mechanism for the panel to recommend whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should pursue indictments in her election interference investigation. Willis could then go to a regularly empaneled grand jury to seek indictments.
“It’s a significant step, it’s the culmination of work by prosecutors and the special grand jury. But it shouldn’t be taken as any kind of guarantee of a conviction down the road,” said Michael J. Moore, former US attorney for the Middle District of Georgia. “It’s just the beginning.”
Those who might wonder if all these scandals/investigations have had an impact beyond triggering tantrums should check out the Washington Post article about life at Mar-a-Lago these days, where his most important aide mostly rides in his golf cart and brings him diet cokes.
In the two years since he left office, Trump has re-created the conditions of his own freewheeling White House — with all of its chaos, norm flouting and catering to his ego — with little regard for the law. With this behavior, Trump prompted a criminal investigation into his post-presidential handling of classified documents to compound the ongoing one into his and his allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election results — which presents potential legal peril and risks hobbling his nascent bid to be elected president again in 2024.
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Finally a reminder: If Trump’s coup attempt goes unpunished, it will be considered a training exercise. (MSNBC made me famous for five minutes by quoting this sentence from an earlier column.)
Here’s Joyce Vance on the unprecedented nature of all these events:
Trump’s crimes were committed in public. They were not made up. We heard him spew the big lie, and continue to do so long after judge after judge, including his own appointees, concluded he’d lost the election. We watched him tweet and trigger his supporters online and on the Ellipse the morning of January 6, 2021. We know he took classified documents out of secure channels and stored them at Mar-a-Lago after he left office, because he told us so, even as DOJ tried to keep its investigation under the radar. If Trump is prosecuted, it won’t be for his politics, it will be for his crimes.
Nothing happens without there being a first time for it to happen. The fact that a thing is unprecedented doesn’t make it wrong or unnecessary. Here, it’s the very unprecedented nature of the thing that is so compelling. If we are going to prevent another attack on America, Trump should be prosecuted for the crimes there is sufficient evidence to prove. That’s the best way to make sure that the unprecedented doesn’t become the new normal.
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