Trump in the Spotlight
Terry H. Schwadron
Aug. 17, 2022
If you’re playing Trump Tag this week, there have been plenty of developments to show that in combination, state and federal agencies are making full-time work for Donald Trump’s defense team. If you have skipped the details, it seems time to tune in.
At the same time, we’re learning of yet wider efforts by Trump’s Stop the Steal campaign to grab voting machine results and put the validity of our elections more at risk rather than towards the expressed MAGA goal of “vote integrity.”
And through it all, even as President Joe Biden has legislative victories to tout, Trump is making himself the continuing spotlight of news coverage, political conversation and endless speculation on facts yet to be disclosed.
Trump is proving simply remarkable at turning what one might expect as bad legal news into effective new political fund-raising, successful candidate endorsements and verbal magic to invent constantly alternative and changing explanations for what FBI, Justice and investigators reporting finding about him.
Set any notion of Truth aside, and anyone would have to recognize a lively Trump mind for inventiveness arising from his narcissism to cover any cloud in his sky and to blame someone else.
A Lineup of Bad Behavior
The sheer of lineup of legal challenges — and their legal costs — is staggering. To have them all at once is akin to facing a power lineup in baseball.
Yet, there is a seeming inevitability building now towards finding Donald Trump, king of delay and deflection, finally faces some kind of accountability for acts in his personal life, his business life, and his political life.
Whether that “accountability” ends in criminal charges or conviction is still pending.
The most serious cases are in Georgia, where a Fulton County grand jury is honing in on attempts to interfere with the 2020 election, and the well-publicized discovery of classified documents found by FBI agents who “raided” Mar-a-Lago, serving a search warrant to recover boxes and boxes of illegally held documents that Trump’s lawyers had already sworn had been returned to the government.
We learned that Rudy Giuliani, acting as Trump’s lawyer and co-conspirator in attempts to turn a losing vote total in Georgia into a win, has been named a “target” of the grand jury investigation. From all accounts, Giuliani will be squeezed to testify about Trump himself, and seems likely to seek to protect himself with Fifth Amendment pleas to avoid talking. That won’t stop an indictment, of course, and it seems just as likely that the grand jury will point next at Trump himself. The building case is seen as legally strong, discrete, beyond the reach of federal pardons, and abounding in chances to bring down more Trump allies.
In the federal documents investigation, Justice lawyers are asking the court to protect its sources, who may well include someone talking from within Mar-a-Lago. But the reasoning is important: Justice has a spreading investigation underway beyond return of the documents. This case, in which Trump’s fervent imagination is working overtime to devise public defenses, is growing in importance as we realize that none of the explanations seem enough to forestall consideration of an indictment of a former president.
The House Committee investigating Jan. 6 will offer more hearings in September, and it is now public that a grand jury is looking at all that evidence with an eye towards deciding on criminal charges in connection with coordinating, scheming and undercutting the 2020 election confirmation process in Congress.
In New York, Allen Weisselberg, is reported to be weighing a plea deal this week to go to jail for cooking the books for The Trump Organization, even as Trump himself pleaded the Fifth 400 times before authorities examining his company’s conflicting valuations for loans and tax. The actions, if proved, constitute fraud, and Weisselberg’s plea reportedly comes with his silence.
More lawsuits still challenge Trump personally.
It Goes On
Now comes word from The Washington Post that Trump’s lawyers hired a team of computer experts directed by lawyers to copy sensitive data from election systems in Georgia, Michigan, Colorado and Nevada, among others, as part of a secretive effort more organized and more successful than previously reported. This follows discoveries about security breaches in local elections offices that officials sympathetic to Trump’s claims of vote-rigging could undermine election security in the name of protecting it.
The Trump forces have made wild allegations of plots involving the makers of the machines and possible involvement of foreign countries, none of which have been proved. Two manufacturers of the voting machines have pending billion-dollar defamation lawsuits that are pending against individuals and right-leaning sources of the disinformation.
The point is that the discoveries of bad behavior continue. What they have in common is promoting the incorrect conclusion that Trump beat Biden in the last election, and the constant repetition on right-leaning news sites has resulted in wide acceptance of that notion among the MAGA faithful.
As a result, Trump-endorsed candidates, including outspoken election deniers, are sweeping Republican primaries, with Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wy., the latest to face ouster from Congress as a result.
How far all this will go for voters is a live question three months before a congressional election. A few Fox commentators are beginning to distance themselves from Trump, and there is a shadow campaign emerging for a Trump successor to MAGA leadership.
Would Trump supporter vote for an indicted or convicted presidential candidate?
For now, it is mere speculation. Trump Tag says there is a better chance than not that we could see it become a real question.
##