Trumpland’s Very Bad Week

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I’m traveling this week, so just a quick summary of the increasing pressure on the former president as we get further into 2022.

Active Grand Juries

There are now four grand juries working on matters related to Donald Trump and the Trump Organization: two in Manhattan and two in Fulton County, GA. One of the grand juries in Manhattan already has indicted the organization itself and its CFO, Allen Weisselberg, on a tax evasion scheme involving free apartments, tuition and other undeclared income. The other Manhattan grand jury is now hearing testimony around a pattern of inflating valuations on Trump properties to defraud banks, insurance companies and the tax authorities. 

The grand juries in Fulton County, Georgia are hearing testimony and conducting investigations into election fraud by Trump and his campaign, with a focus on high-pressure calls to state election officials. Last week, District Attorney Fani Willis asked a judge to convene the second grand jury specifically so it could assist with the investigation. This grand jury won’t have the power to issue indictments, but it can rigorously investigate to more efficiently compel testimony and documents because it will have a judge assigned to it who can issue orders promptly.

While their work can be tedious and time-consuming, grand juries usually wind up indicting. In fact, in Manhattan, by some accounts grand juries issue true bills of indictment around 98 percent of the time. This is why most legal experts believe that some additional criminal charges, including against the former president, will eventually result from one or more of these juries. It’s certainly not guaranteed, but the odds favor it strongly. That said, a former president has never been indicted in America, and this one has the full support and backing of one of the two major political parties. So an indictment isn’t something that can happen lightly, and certainly not without a solid case that would convince a big majority of the country that the charges are deserved.

New York Civil Tax Case

Last week, New York Attorney General Letitia James raised the pressure significantly on the Trumps by moving to compel testimony and documents from Donald, Don, Jr. and Ivanka in the state’s civil tax fraud suit. As part of its motion, James revealed a long list of “significant additional evidence” that pointed to a scheme to regularly falsely state the true value of Trump Properties—a practice that is also under criminal investigation by the Manhattan DA.

A civil tax suit has a lower threshold of proof than a criminal case, and it could result in high penalties as well as forfeitures of ill-gotten gains or even an order stripping the Trump Organization of its right to conduct business in New York. The revelations about false financial statements also might make it very difficult for the Trumps to obtain financing or do business with other companies or lenders.

January 6 Committee

Trump suffered three pieces of bad news recently in his battle with the January 6 Committee and its investigation. 

First, the Supreme Court sided with the Committee on the production of some 734 pages of archived records from the former administration that Trump had sought to withhold on executive privilege grounds. One of those documents is already making headlines: a Draft Executive Order that would have instructed the National Guard to seize voting machines and would have appointed a special counsel to investigate vote fraud—which we know was non-existent on any meaningful level but continues to feed Trump’s Big Lie about a stolen election.

Second, Ivanka Trump was asked to appear for interviews with the Committee, with a publicly released letter from the Committee spelling out a theory of the case to date that is damning on many levels. It’s clear from the letter that the Committee already has key testimony from cooperating witnesses that show the president had schemed to overturn the election results and was derelict in his duties, and likely even outright pleased, with the attack on the Capitol.

Third, the news about alternate slates of state electors appearing on forged documents, completely with fraudulent representations from the signatories, gained further traction as it became clear that Rudy Giuliani, who was Trump’s key outside attorney, coordinated the effort across multiple states. That could amount to a conspiracy to defraud the United States, with Rudy and likely even the former president at the very heart of it.

The Committee intends to hold public hearings in the earlier half of 2022 to let the American public know what it has learned and to have witnesses come forward and testify publicly. This is making several GOP leaders lose their cool; Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, even warned Committee members that they could be jailed if and when the House changes over to GOP hands. 

Threatening the use of political power to jail your opponents for conducting a bipartisan investigation—one that is supported by a majority of Americans—is a textbook authoritarian move. This demonstrates how far formerly “mainstream” Republican leaders have moved to the right. But even a Republican-led House won’t have the power to jail its political adversaries without the assistance of the Justice Department, which will remain part of a Democratic administration until at least 2025. Still, it shows how much higher the stakes have grown, how poisonous the rhetoric has become, and how wide the chasm has grown between the parties.