With his concurrent roles as a criminal defendant and presidential candidate, former president Donald Trump is set to have a busy year.
Trump has now officially been indicted for a third time — and a potential fourth indictment could be coming soon in a separate criminal investigation by a Georgia state prosecutor into his alleged efforts to influence the 2020 election results in the Peach State. Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis signaled that she plans to decide whether to bring charges in the case sometime this month.
That means Trump could face two indictments during the month of the first Republican debate alone. He has not said whether he plans to appear at the debate, which is in just three weeks. He did, however, recently write on Truth Social that the other candidates should debate “so I can see who I MIGHT consider for Vice President!”
On Thursday, Trump is slated to have his first court appearance in the special counsel’s January 6 case, which centers on his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his actions leading up to the January 6 Capitol riot.
The former president has been charged with four counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.
The 45-page indictment alleges that Trump “pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.”
“Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power,” the indictment reads. “So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.”
While it is unclear when a trial could begin in the January 6 case, special counsel Jack Smith said yesterday his office “will seek a speedy trial so our evidence can be tested in court and judged by a jury of citizens.” And, as several legal observers have noted, Smith’s decision to limit the indictment to Trump himself — forgoing, at least for now, the opportunity to pursue Trump’s six unindicted co-conspirators — could be a play to speed up the timeline and secure a conviction before the election.
Trump’s legal team will likely attempt to block efforts to try the former president before the November 2024 election by arguing that an upcoming election would hopelessly bias the jury, as they have in the classified-documents case.
In any event, early 2024, which would be a busy time for any presidential candidate, will be doubly full for Trump, who will face another defamation lawsuit from E. Jean Carroll beginning on January 15 — the day of the Iowa Caucus. Since it’s a civil proceeding, though, Trump won’t be required to attend the trial in-person. He didn’t show up to court the last time Carroll sued him — a suit in which she prevailed, only for Trump to mock her and repeat his defamatory statements about the alleged sexual assault, leading her to file another suit.
Super Tuesday will come weeks later, on March 5, followed shortly thereafter by the start of Trump’s Manhattan hush-money trial on March 25, though Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has said he’d be open to postponing the trial, prompting speculation that Smith may try to bring his January 6 case around then, jumping Bragg in line.
Trump is already facing an indictment with 42 felony counts as a result of special counsel Jack Smith’s separate investigation into the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. The trial in the special counsel’s classified-documents case is set to begin two months later, on May 20, one day before the Kentucky and Oregon primaries.
Before the classified-documents indictment, Trump was indicted in Manhattan on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with a hush-money payment to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.
Each indictment has yielded a polling bump for Trump, though each successive bump has gotten smaller since the initial boost he received from the hush-money indictment.
And while each of Trump’s three indictments has yielded mixed responses from his 2024 opponents, NR’s editors argue this morning that the most recent indictment “shouldn’t stand.”
Now, through a special counsel it appointed for this precise purpose, the Biden Justice Department is attempting to use the criminal process as a do-over for a failed impeachment. In effect, Jack Smith is endeavoring to criminalize protected political speech and flimsy legal theories — when the Supreme Court has repeatedly admonished prosecutors to refrain from creative theories to stretch penal laws to reach misconduct that Congress has not made illegal.
GOP 2024 contender and former vice president Mike Pence said Trump should be disqualified from serving in the office again because he put “himself over the Constitution.”
“Today’s indictment serves as an important reminder: anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States,” Pence tweeted Tuesday. “Our country is more important than one man. Our constitution is more important than any one man’s career. On January 6th, Former President Trump demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution. I chose the Constitution and I always will.”
Prosecutors say Trump urged Pence to help him overturn the election during at least four calls in late 2020 and early 2021. Trump allegedly told Pence he was “too honest” when the vice president pushed back against the idea and said he did not have the authority, the indictment says.
Vivek Ramaswamy came to Trump’s defense on Tuesday, vowing once more that, if he is elected, he would pardon the former president.
“The corrupt federal police just won’t stop until they’ve achieved their mission: eliminate Trump,” he tweeted in a caption over a video statement reacting to the indictment. “This is un-American & I commit to pardoning Trump for this indictment.”
Florida governor Ron DeSantis called for reforms that would allow Americans the right to remove cases from Washington, D.C., to their home districts.
“Washington, DC is a ‘swamp’ and it is unfair to have to stand trial before a jury that is reflective of the swamp mentality,” DeSantis wrote in a post on X after the indictment.
Around NR
• Dominic Pino offers an in-depth review of DeSantis’s new economic-policy plan, arguing that the plan isn’t bad, but it’s too full of “class warfare”:
What’s good for Floridians generally might prove to be a liability for DeSantis politically. Since the state government he inherited already has sensible tax and regulatory policy, all he has to do as Florida’s governor is maintain the status quo, from a conservative perspective. That’s not true of the federal government. . . . His plan is chock-full of class warfare. Rather than a message of hope, it begins, “America is in a state of decline.” The reason for the decline, according to DeSantis, is that economic policy is “driven by the ruling class.”
• Philip Klein says that, while he believes Trump faces long odds in 2024, he would not rule out the possibility that Trump “could pull off another upset”:
Whoever the Republican nominee is will start off with a baseline of about 45 percent of the popular vote and around 200 electoral votes. The campaign will then be decided by about a half dozen states. No doubt, Trump will have a hard time flipping states he lost in 2020, especially in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, where voters have demonstrated they have no patience for “stop the steal” garbage. But a corollary of making the case that “Trump can’t win” is to believe that Biden can’t lose to him. I don’t believe that.
• While the DeSantis campaign is trying to make willingness to prosecute Dr. Anthony Fauci a wedge issue in the primary, Noah Rothman argues that “a Covid reckoning is not in the offing”:
We deserved a fight over the prolonged school closures, the “strategic investments” in congressional pet projects shaken loose by the national emergency, the theatrical mitigation measures, the efforts to encourage neighbors to view one another with suspicion and hostility, and the racial hostility that took root in a landscape suddenly purged of dissenting voices. But we didn’t get it, and the moment has passed.
• Rich Lowry suggests President Biden is “an asset to Trump’s primary campaign and could, through his weakness and ineptitude, end up electing him in 2024”:
Biden is indicting Trump; he’s making Republicans pine for the days when Trump was president; and he’s lackluster in prospective head-to-head polling matchups. All of which is boosting his adversary’s prospects.
• During an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier, DeSantis dismissed criticism from veteran GOP strategist Ed Rollins that he is a “very flawed candidate.” Rollins once chaired the pro-Trump Great America PAC but later served as co-chairman of the Ready for Ron PAC, which supported DeSantis’s entry into the race. However, he told Rolling Stone recently that he is “not involved” in efforts to elect DeSantis now. “When you get into these culture wars the way that he has, the vast majority of people don’t understand what they are.” DeSantis called Rollins’s comments “nonsense” and argued that “standing up for the rights of parents, standing up for the well-being of children, that’s not some ‘culture war.’”
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