Tripping hazard
Chris Cillizza says the walls are closing in on Trump.
The decision by Mazars further isolates Trump as he faces a series of legal problems. Consider that in addition to James’ investigation, Trump faces the following:
1) The new Manhattan district attorney told CNN in December that he plans to focus on the high-profile probe into Trump’s business practices and may expand the investigative team. As CNN’s Kara Scannell reported at the time: “The investigation, which has been underway for several years, appears to be coming to a head with prosecutors focusing on the accuracy of the Trump Organization’s financial statements when seeking financing, people familiar with the matter have told CNN.”
2) E. Jean Carroll is pursuing a defamation lawsuit in regards to her allegation that Trump raped her in the 1990s.
Three, Mary Trump’s suit is ongoing.
4) Several Democratic lawmakers and police officers are suing Trump for his alleged role in the insurrection of January 6, 2021. And a House select committee continues to look into Trump’s actions tied to that day.
5) In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is looking into Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state. “This is a criminal investigation. We’re not here playing a game,” Willis told CNN recently. “I plan to use the power of the law. We are all citizens.”
It all starts to add up a bit. Six, the DoJ is looking into a scheme to seat fake electors; seven, Michael Cohen is suing; eight –
In addition to all this, there are the ongoing questions surrounding 15 boxes of White House materials that the National Archives had to take back from Trump who had transported the documents to Mar-a-Lago.
Person woman man camera tv.
Bwahahaha! I had totally forgotten about that little episode; thank you for the mid-morning belly laugh.
Same here, I thought of it at random the other day and got a big laugh out of it all over again.
Would be nice, but I’ll believe when I see it. Supposedly the walls have been closing in on him for 4 or 5 years now.
Keith Olbermann did a regular web show on all the things that were going to take Trump out. Maybe 2 years into Trump’s administration Olbermann declared that so many of these were sure things that he was shutting down the show because at least one would spell the end for Trump imminently so he no longer needed to follow the story. And we know how that turned out.
At this point I’d just be happy if the documents violations got him barred from holding federal office.
You’re missing a bunch. The NY Attorney General is perhaps the biggest one, she is going to take the whole family down on the Civil side while the Manhattan DA investigates the criminal side. DC Attorney General just wom a motion to include the Trump Organization in a lawsuit over misuse of inauguration funds. The House Commission on January 6th. And I know I am missing a bunch. Trump is the Lawyers’ Full Employment guarantee. I just hope his attorneys got big retainers up front.
Yeah, missing a bunch. Trump is going to go down on 20 different fronts, easy!
More likely he’ll go down on zero fronts.
Look, I’d like this to be true, but let’s be realistic. All the financial stuff? Trump’s an idiot. He hired people to do all that. If anything is out of order he might have to pay a fine or something, but they’re not going to imprison him when other people did all the documents.
E. Jean Carroll’s story is weird. She says she went into a dressing room with Trump when he asked her to model lingerie but she was going to make him model the lingerie instead. She says if there were camera footage, it might have picked up the wrong angles so her struggle might have just looked “sexy”. She says she was to her own surprise laughing for much of the encounter. Can someone be raped when they voluntarily went into a dressing room with a man to fight over who would wear lingerie, laughed much of the time, and said an outsider might think this all looked sexy? Sure. Is this story apt to be convincing enough to convict Trump? I wouldn’t count on it.
I really wish they’d nail him for the January 6 stuff, but it’s a bunch of gray areas where the moron babbled to a bunch of people that the election was being stolen from him. It’s tough to convict him as a ringleader based on that.
Same with the Georgia stuff. This simpleton called and asked if they could scrounge around and find the votes to put him over the top. Unbecoming of a president? Definitely. Is it going to land him in prison? I doubt it.
Misuse of funds? He’ll pay them back with a fine at worst. “Tak[ing] the whole family down”? OK, great. I’d love to see it, but I doubt I will.
Honestly the document violations may be the best hope, as legally that could get him barred from holding federal office. But who knows if they’ll really enforce that.
Skeletor, I’m with you on this. It’s possible that Trump might end up feeling some financial pain and deep chagrin at being treated so ‘unfairly’. I would be massively surprised and pleased in equal magnitude should he or his kids suffer anything more than that. Actually even that. The worst thing is likely to be either a fine or a shit fight with a lender that will itself get tied up in a legal fight for years. Banks like settling, not the public scrutiny of court cases that might expose their own shonky, unprofessional and venal dealings. It’s possible someone unimportant might go to jail though. Maybe. As for the political stuff. DOJ and Congress love investigations, but it’s very seldom that anyone powerful suffers more than reputational harm.The sort of things trump did should have seen him impeached, which he was. Twice! The GOP belongs to him and people even more racist, ignorant and awful now, if that were possible. I won’t say it’s a low point in US history, because the current episode is still being written and I suspect there are unplumbed depths yet. It’s bad though.
Same here. Whenever people talk about how Trump is going to jail etc. it sounds to me like more of the same kind of thinking that led people to confidently predict that he would never make it past the primaries. Then it was “Ok so he did win the primaries, but he is never going to actually get elected”, “Ok, so he did get elected, but the responsibility of the office and the moderating influence of the mainstream Republican establishment are going to force him to behave”, “Ok, so he is obviously not behaving, but the Mueller investigation will be his downfall”, “Ok, so he got away with that (and every other supposedly career-ending scandal), but he’ll soon be impeached and forced to resign”, “Ok, so the survived the impeachment, but etc.. etc..”.
To be fair, the optimists turned out to be right that he wouldn’t get re-elected (this time!), but even some of the alleged “doomsayers” like Levitsky and Ziblatt underestimated the degree to which the Republican establishment would prove prepared to openly embrace authoritarianism, and with new voter-suppression bills introduced every day, I will not be surprised (depressed, yes, but not surprised) if the next attempt to steal an election succeeds. That there will be such an attempt is pretty much beyond doubt at this point. Even if Trump himself dies tomorrow, Trumpism will be with us for the rest of our lives, and if the Republican party ever manages to
winsteal another election, the Democrats probably won’t get another chance (meaning there won’t be a “next time”)..It doesn’t give me any satisfaction to say any of this btw. As with climate change, or, for that matter, the continued descent of the Left into wokism and gender woo, nothing would please me more than being able to look back in 20 years and say “Boy, was I deluded!”, but it’s the only honest conclusion I’m able to reach from the facts as I currently understand them.