The Trump Investigation(s) Thread

[Dramatist]

This TIME!

This made me laugh a bit.


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[El Guapo]

[Carpet_pissr]

[Pyperkub]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Judge rejects Trump attempt to toss conspiracy lawsuits, finds 'plausible' case former president incited Capitol riot.

This means...something.

An in depth look:

There were three things that jumped out at me from D.C. District Judge Amit Mehta’s decision that lawsuits targeting former president Donald Trump and two extremist organizations could move forward.

That is, three things beyond this remarkable paragraph:

“ … the court concludes that the Complaints establish a plausible §1985(1) conspiracy involving President Trump. That civil conspiracy included the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, [Proud Boys leader Enrique] Tarrio, and others who entered the Capitol on January 6th with the intent to disrupt the Certification of the Electoral College vote through force, intimidation, or threats.”

Before moving forward, it’s very important to qualify those sentences in two ways. The first is that Mehta is not saying that this conspiracy was proved; rather, that it was not implausible that it might be. It’s the difference between going to trial and reaching a verdict. The second important qualifier is that Mehta is describing only a civil conspiracy, in keeping with the nature of the lawsuits (brought by several members of Congress) that he was considering.

[Jaymann]

Fuck. Civil suit is nothingburger.

[malchior]

In 2-3 years they might have a guilty verdict with no damages that he'll be able to spin into some political persecution narrative. Or they'll still be battling over pre-trial motions. Who knows. Seems totally worth it.

[hepcat]

This is like what, the 7th time in 5 years we thought we had him?

At some point we all just have to admit he’s untouchable and move Florida while he’s asleep.

[Unagi]

To be fully honest, I don’t think I ever once thought ‘we got em’

[Pyperkub]

To be fully honest, I don’t think I ever once thought ‘we got em’

Yeah, this won't come until after he has to testify in person, under oath. (tho it is pretty clear that he was less than truthful in his written answers in the Mueller investigation, and nothing happened)

He has been very, very good at dodging that.

[gbasden]

This is like what, the 7th time in 5 years we thought we had him?

At some point we all just have to admit he’s untouchable and move Florida while he’s asleep.

Where's Dexter when we need him?

[Remus West]

This is like what, the 7th time in 5 years we thought we had him?

At some point we all just have to admit he’s untouchable and move Florida while he’s asleep.

[hepcat]

That’s what I was thinking of when I wrote that.

[Remus West]

That’s what I was thinking of when I wrote that.

It’s what I’ve wanted to do since 2000. Hanging Chad my ass.

[pr0ner]

[Carpet_pissr]

Perpetual "open kiss lips" man is totes goin' down now! GIT 'EM!!!!

[Jaymon]

I feel like, at this point, he is a Duke boy, and we are Sherriff Rosco P. Coltrane.

[Skinypupy]

Whelp...

Breaking News: The prosecutors leading the Manhattan district attorney’s inquiry into Donald Trump have resigned. The D.A. is said to have doubts about the case.

[hepcat]

And it's over. Once again he's free and clear.

[Octavious]

Well it looks like his classic stonewalling works very well. We'll get him next time. As that will be this time! I just can't anymore. I just pray he gets hit by a bus in the next 3 years.

[malchior]

Are we surprised? One of first actions is to kibosh a significant and important investigation with the prosecutors immediately resigning? Looking corrupt is usually a bad start for a prosecutor but this is America. Corruption comes with rewards and he will be rewarded. In any case his predecessor was Cy Vance so it isn't like this is a new thing.

[El Guapo]

It's depressing, but in reality the Manhattan D.A. was almost certainly never going to be the office to take on Trump. It's mostly up to Garland, *maybe* the NY AG. And really a world where county DAs start charging current or former presidents criminally is opening up a whole new world of dysfunction, even if Trump deserves it.

Still....he deserves it. I just wish I had more hope that Garland's going to do something.

[malchior]

I mean I don't want to say there is no chance but it feels like there is no chance. Garland is just too much of an institutionalist to take on someone like Trump. Trump is an aberration that demands unconventional approaches to protect us and yet Biden selected someone who was least suited for that role. I think it'll someday be a minor footnote in a long list of missteps. It is just one that irks us right now.

[Hyena]

Anybody else getting a quiet "Wag the Dog" vibe from Trump's buddy Putin suddenly invading a country to distract from his friend's legal woes?

(I'm only 3/4 kidding...)

[malchior]

Putin gives 0 shits about Trump.

[Carpet_pissr]

Anybody else getting a quiet "Wag the Dog" vibe from Trump's buddy Putin suddenly invading a country to distract from his friend's legal woes?

(I'm only 3/4 kidding...)

What legal woes? He's doing VERY well skating through any accusations/investigations from what I have seen so far. I don't think he needs any outside help.

[Blackhawk]

Putin gives 0 shits about Trump.

He gives a couple of shits (but not many) as long as it's about Trump's ability to throw one of their biggest opponents into chaos. We won't be coming out fighting as long as we're infighting.

[Hyena]

Anybody else getting a quiet "Wag the Dog" vibe from Trump's buddy Putin suddenly invading a country to distract from his friend's legal woes?

(I'm only 3/4 kidding...)

What legal woes? He's doing VERY well skating through any accusations/investigations from what I have seen so far. I don't think he needs any outside help.

Fair enough...

[LordMortis]

Putin gives 0 shits about Trump.

He gives a couple of shits (but not many) as long as it's about Trump's ability to throw one of their biggest opponents into chaos. We won't be coming out fighting as long as we're infighting.

This.

[malchior]

Washington Post

I'd love a non-corruption explanation about this behavior.

Two prosecutors heading the Manhattan district attorney’s criminal probe into Donald Trump’s business dealings have resigned from their positions — frustrated that after their former boss authorized them to seek an indictment against the former president, the new district attorney appeared uninterested, multiple people familiar with the situation said.

Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (D), who declined to seek reelection as district attorney, had told a team led by seasoned litigators Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz to go to a grand jury to begin the process of securing a case against Trump, two people familiar with the situation said. Vance concluded there was enough evidence after a three-year probe to obtain an indictment and conviction, the people said.

The final decision, however, would fall to Vance’s successor, Alvin Bragg (D), who was sworn into office Jan. 1.

To Dunne and Pomerantz, the people familiar with the situation said, Bragg appeared not to be focused on the case, which centers on whether Trump and his business inflated the value of their assets to secure more favorable loans, insurance and tax rates.

One person familiar with the situation said the new prosecutor took weeks to read memos Dunne and Pomerantz had prepared and didn’t meet with them for some time, even though the grand jury’s term was set to expire this spring. When they did meet, Bragg didn’t seem keenly interested, said this person, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations in an ongoing investigation.

Due to the inactivity, members of the grand jury were instructed to stay home on days they were slated to serve, according to one of the people with knowledge of the developments.

[gilraen]

Washington Post

I'd love a non-corruption explanation about this behavior.

Incompetence?

[Carpet_pissr]

New guy wasn't "keenly interested"?

[malchior]

Politico

The boil down here is that this piece is an interesting case that Garland's farming out of Trump misdeeds to local prosecutors has long-term implications. I think this further makes the case that Garland's DOJ is making severe mistakes that have compounded the damage that Barr and others did to the DOJ's reputation. It also makes it easier for other jurisdictions to take on what should be federal matters. Worse as the piece argues at the close, local prosecutors are unreliable. We saw the Manhattan DA prosecution dismissed on a whim with a whiff of corruption to it. Some have said this might not be corrupt but more a realization of claims that NYS white collar law is broken. That however only makes the case for federal action stronger.

Last week, the Manhattan district attorney’s criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump and his financial dealings suffered a major upheaval when the two lead prosecutors handling the investigation abruptly resigned. It appears that Alvin Bragg, the newly elected district attorney who took over for Cy Vance at the start of the year, disputed the prosecutors’ conclusion that there is sufficient evidence at this time to criminally charge Trump with some form of business fraud. Bragg’s belief is not surprising, since, from the start, there were serious legal and evidentiary challenges for the investigation. Last week’s developments in Manhattan do not necessarily mean that Trump is in the clear with the office, but they provide further reason to doubt that he will ultimately be criminally charged.

The most serious implications of the investigation, however, could come from the precedent set by the fact that it even got to this point, thanks to the apparently deliberate forbearance of Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department under President Joe Biden. The Biden administration has effectively localized an issue — criminal accountability for a former president — that could and should have been the responsibility of the federal government. And while Trump might avoid charges as a result, the path is clearer now for politically motivated red-state prosecutors to criminally investigate Biden and other Democratic presidents in the future — regardless of whether they did anything wrong.

Once Biden took office last January, and particularly after Garland became attorney general last March, the administration had a serious decision to make. Trump’s financial dealings had been under investigation by the Manhattan DA’s office since 2018, but they also raised serious questions under federal law that had apparently been deliberately ignored while the Justice Department was led by Trump’s attorneys general.

...

More importantly, given the serious legal questions about Trump’s financial dealings, a thorough, even-handed, and well-run federal investigation would have been the most orderly way to resolve Trump’s criminal exposure in this area. The Justice Department is our only nationally representative prosecutorial body. Compared to local prosecutors’ offices, the Justice Department is also more insulated from politics — both as a matter of fact and of broad public perception. As a result, the Justice Department is the best and least volatile way to impose criminal consequences on a former president if they are warranted — a notion that was, until Trump, largely academic.

Instead, Garland appears to have decided to let local prosecutors in New York and Georgia take the lead on investigations that are technically within their jurisdiction but that could and should have been federally led. Garland may have saved himself some political headaches, but in the process, he has tacitly given the green light to every local prosecutor in the country who might want to pursue a president after he or she leaves office — Republican or Democratic, including Biden himself.

It is not hard to see how this precedent could prove problematic in the future. A politically ambitious attorney general in, say, Texas or Florida could try to drum up a way to investigate Biden’s son Hunter, his business dealings and Biden’s own connection to them if prosecutors can identify some jurisdictional hook, however tenuous — something that could be as simple as a witness, a meeting or other communication, or a bank transaction in the state. Of course, an effort like this may very well have happened anyway, but Democrats will be hard pressed to object as a matter of principle or by appealing to the notion that local politicians and prosecutors should, as a general matter, not try to imprison our country’s former leaders.

As with much of Garland’s decision-making in the area of Trump, his choice to let the Manhattan investigation proceed unabated was calculated to avoid political controversy and disruption in the short term. But it discounted the long-term implications. It is bad enough that our country has a robust norm of presidential immunity at the federal level that effectively incentivizes malfeasance by failing to deter it. We now also seem to have a federal void when it comes to post-presidential investigation, which will be taken up by our country’s vast, messy and unpredictable local politics.

[Smoove_B]

How is this even possible (other than the obvious)?

Trump refinanced Trump Tower last month, taking out a $100 million loan. The financing came from a bank whose CEO has contributed to Republican campaigns, including Trump’s

[Isgrimnur]

[Zarathud]

Not a loan I would back, or a bank I would invest in.

[Kraken]

Not a loan I would back, or a bank I would invest in.

But one that should be SWIFTed ASAP.

[malchior]

This really paints Bragg in a terrible light. According to the piece Trump was *weeks* from being indicted until Bragg kiboshed it over worries that there'd be risk it wouldn't lead to a conviction. Whether it is cowardice or corruption this is why faith and trust in our nation is in tatters. The powerful crime with impunity and many of us see it for what it is.

Earlier this month, The Times reported that the investigation unraveled after weeks of escalating disagreement between the veteran prosecutors overseeing the case and the new district attorney. Much of the debate centered on whether the prosecutors could prove that Mr. Trump knowingly falsified the value of his assets on annual financial statements, The Times found, a necessary element to proving the case.

While Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz were confident that the office could demonstrate that the former president had intended to inflate the value of his golf clubs, hotels and office buildings, Mr. Bragg was not. He balked at pursuing an indictment against Mr. Trump, a decision that shut down Mr. Pomerantz’s and Mr. Dunne’s presentation of evidence to a grand jury and prompted their resignations.

Mr. Bragg has said that his office continues to conduct the investigation. For that reason, Mr. Bragg, a former federal prosecutor and deputy New York State attorney general who became district attorney in January, is barred from commenting on its specifics.

Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., had decided in his final days in office to move toward an indictment, leaving Mr. Trump just weeks away from likely criminal charges. Mr. Bragg’s decision seems, for now at least, to have removed one of the greatest legal threats Mr. Trump has ever faced.

The resignation letter cast a harsh light on that decision from the perspective of Mr. Pomerantz, who wrote that he believed there was enough evidence to prove Mr. Trump’s guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“No case is perfect,” Mr. Pomerantz wrote. “Whatever the risks of bringing the case may be, I am convinced that a failure to prosecute will pose much greater risks in terms of public confidence in the fair administration of justice.”

[Carpet_pissr]

Disgusting. Smells like cowardice to me.

[malchior]

Yup. I think it is way more cowardice than corruption. Bragg has a disastrous start to his term. Google Day One memo if you want to dig in. The guy is politically injured. It doesn't seem a stretch considering his very rocky start that he felt a need to kibosh this. He might have calculated that he couldn't afford to get caught up in what would be a momentous shit storm weighed against his personal ambitions. I get that at a human level but he ran for the position knowing this was coming.

The full text of Pomerantz's letter is worth a read. He hits all the right notes discussing the impact of killing the investigation. Decisions like this are killing our trust in civic institutions.

Dear Alvin,

I write to tender my resignation as a Special Assistant District Attorney and to explain my reasons for resigning.

As you know from our recent conversations and presentations, I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations of the Penal Law in connection with the preparation and use of his annual Statements of Financial Condition. His financial statements were false, and he has a long history of fabricating information relating to his personal finances and lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties, and many others, including the American people. The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes — he did.

In late 2021, then-District Attorney Cyrus Vance directed a thorough review of the facts and law relating to Mr. Trump’s financial statements. Mr. Vance had been intimately involved in our investigation, attending grand jury presentations, sitting in on certain witness interviews, and receiving regular reports about the progress of the investigation. He concluded that the facts warranted prosecution, and he directed the team to present evidence to a grand jury and to seek an indictment of Mr. Trump and other defendants as soon as reasonably possible.

This work was underway when you took office as District Attorney. You have devoted significant time and energy to understanding the evidence we have accumulated with respect to the Trump financial statements, as well as the applicable law. You have reached the decision not to go forward with the grand jury presentation and not to seek criminal charges at the present time. The investigation has been suspended indefinitely. Of course, that is your decision to make. I do not question your authority to make it, and I accept that you have made it sincerely. However, a decision made in good faith may nevertheless be wrong. I believe that your decision not to prosecute Donald Trump now, and on the existing record, is misguided and completely contrary to the public interest. I therefore cannot continue in my current position.

In my view, the public interest warrants the criminal prosecution of Mr. Trump, and such a prosecution should be brought without any further delay. Because of the complexity of the facts, the refusal of Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization to cooperate with our investigation, and their affirmative steps to frustrate our ability to follow the facts, this investigation has already consumed a great deal of time. As to Mr. Trump, the great bulk of the evidence relates to his management of the Trump Organization before he became President of the United States. These facts are already dated, and our ability to establish what happened may erode with the further passage of time. Many of the salient facts have been made public in proceedings brought by the Office of the Attorney General, and the public has rightly inquired about the pace of our investigation. Most importantly, the further passage of time will raise additional questions about the failure to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his criminal conduct.

To the extent you have raised issues as to the legal and factual sufficiency of our case and the likelihood that a prosecution would succeed, I and others have advised you that we have evidence sufficient to establish Mr. Trump’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and we believe that the prosecution would prevail if charges were brought and the matter were tried to an impartial jury. No case is perfect. Whatever the risks of bringing the case may be, I am convinced that a failure to prosecute will pose much greater risks in terms of public confidence in the fair administration of justice. As I have suggested to you, respect for the rule of law, and the need to reinforce the bedrock proposition that “no man is above the law,” require that this prosecution be brought even if a conviction is not certain.

I also do not believe that suspending the investigation pending future developments will lead to a stronger case or dispel your reluctance to bring charges. No events are likely to occur that will alter the nature of the case or dramatically change the quality or quantity of the evidence available to the prosecution. There are always additional facts to be pursued. But the investigative team that has been working on this matter for many months does not believe that it makes law enforcement sense to postpone a prosecution in the hope that additional evidence will somehow emerge. On the contrary, I and others believe that your decision not to authorize prosecution now will doom any future prospects that Mr. Trump will be prosecuted for the criminal conduct we have been investigating.

I fear that your decision means that Mr. Trump will not be held fully accountable for his crimes. I have worked too hard as a lawyer, and for too long, now to become a passive participant in what I believe to be a grave failure of justice. I therefore resign from my position as a Special Assistant District Attorney, effective immediately.

[malchior]

There is word the Manhattan DA is sending evidence back to people who turned it over in the Trump probe. Yet they also claim the investigation is continuing and there is a "robust team" working on it. This swings back into dirty and away from cowardice for me. If he didn't think it was strong then speak up. Instead he is lying. Some of the candidates for NY Governor are actually promising to fire him if elected. In any case, we have a strong indicator that this country has a fundamental justice problem and isn't hard to believe there will be consequences to the entirety of our society as we fall further into rampant elite lawlessness.