The walls are closing: Trump reels from week of political setbacks | Donald Trump

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The last time Donald Trump heard such hammer blows, it was from the Mar-a-Lago arrangements that they displeased the former president. But even that sound didn’t ring in his ears like the previous weeks outbreak of bad news believed by some to have pushed a criminal indictment one step closer.

There hasn’t been a week in the year since Trump left the White House that has been as dramatic, or for him as potentially catastrophic, as it has just recently.

These include a rebuke from the Supreme Court on documents related to the Jan. 6 insurgency in which Trump incited; news that the congressional committee investigating the riot is already closing in on Trump’s inner circle; evidence from the New York attorney general of alleged tax fraud; and, perhaps most damaging of all, a request from a Georgia prosecutor for a grand jury in his investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

The week ended with the leak of a document showing that Trump even considered using the military in his attempts to reverse Joe Bidens ’victory.

It all left the former president a lot to think about.

He’s Teflon Don, he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and survive it, his supporters will support him no matter what happens, but I’m even more thinking that the walls are close this year, he said by Kimberley Wehle, a respected legal analyst and professor of law at the University of Baltimore.

The most immediate thing was the grand jury in Georgia because there was audio he was trying to get [secretary of state] Brad Raffensperger to seek votes. Under Georgia election laws as I read them possibly a crime.

The threatening question is whether Trump will be indicted along with 11 others so far for seditious conspiracy [over the 6 January Capitol attack]. To me, that’s the biggest incident the justice department believes they have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of an agreement, a meeting of minds to overthrow a legitimate election.

And that there are a lot of high-level people looped here, including potentially Donald Trump himself, and of course he’s not president, so he’s no longer immune from persecution.

It is the Justice Department’s investigation into the deadly attack on the Capitol, which is parallel but separate from the January 6 House committee, that poses the most legal risk for Trump. Some believe the sedition charges for members of the Oath Keepers militia indicate that the inquiry has shifted into higher gear.

We need to think of the January 6 committee as getting information to voters before NovemberKimberley Wehle

Others, most recently Preet Bharara, former district attorney for New York’s southern district, asked why it appears that members of Trumps internal guard, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows, are not yet asked.

It’s not just a possibility that they tried to interview, you know, a dozen top people in and around the White House like [6 January] the committee has [because] they scream like stuck pigs when people approach them, Bharara told The New Abnormal podcast, a Daily Beast podcast.

Strangely enough all of this testimony was allowed to be collected, all of these documents were subpoenaed and compiled, and it looks like they didn’t do any of these interviews. There are some lower level people who break through the doors to the Capitol, but I don’t think those people will give it a straight line to Trump.

At an extraordinary press conference earlier this month, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, did not mention Trump’s name but sought to reassure critics of his investigation.

The justice department remains committed to accountability to all offenders on January 6, to any degree, under the law, whether they were present on that day or otherwise criminally liable for attack our democracy, he said in a cautious statement.

The goals of the House committee are easier to imagine and more likely in the immediate term to cause political damage to Trump as he contemplates another run in the White House.

Thursday’s request for testimony from his daughter Ivanka, a former White House adviser, brings the investigation to the heart of Trump’s inner circle. Trump’s actions are also set to be explored at primetime TV hearings that Jamie Raskin, a Democratic committee member, has promised to tear down the roof of the House.

The panel also achieved a major victory on Wednesday when the supreme court ended Trump’s efforts to protect more than 700 pages of White House records. The wealth of documents includes a draft executive order directing the Department of Defense to seize the voting machines, and appointing a special adviser to view the election, in support of Trump’s big lie that the election was stolen. .

Merrick Garland speaks to the Department of Justice. Photo: Getty Images

The documents don’t die, they don’t lie, Wehle said. A witness might say, Oh, I don’t remember, and dance around it. Documents are not available. Second, the documents will lead more people to discuss what happened, including Ivanka Trump.

Trump himself hasn’t usually been quiet about his week of recessions, with the exception of two statements attacking Fani Willis, the Democratic district attorney for Fulton county, Georgia, for asking a grand jury to help with his investigation. in his interference in the election.

People who seek crime are prosecuted and people who commit crimes are protected, he said. This is not the American way.

For Wehle, the weeks of progress are important not only for Trump but for the midterm elections in November in which Republicans are expected to withdraw from Congress.

We should think of the Jan. 6 committee as getting information from voters before November about sitting members who could be re -elected, he said.

The question is not so much whether Trump is indicted, but who in a seat of power in the U.S. Congress is potentially involved in this conspiracy.

Honestly, if American democracy is to be saved from single party minority leadership, November is absolutely crucial.

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