Daily Archives: March 8, 2022

Carey Dunne, center, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance's general counsel, leaves federal court in Manhattan, July 1, 2021. (Jefferson Siegel/The New York Times)

NEW YORK On a late January afternoon, two senior prosecutors stood before the new Manhattan district attorney, hoping to persuade him to criminally charge the former president of the United States.

The prosecutors, Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, detailed their strategy for proving that Donald Trump knew his annual financial statements were works of fiction. Time was running out: The grand jury hearing evidence against Trump was set to expire in the spring. They needed the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, to decide whether to seek charges.

But Bragg and his senior aides, masked and gathered around a conference table on the eighth floor of the district attorneys office in lower Manhattan, had serious doubts. They hammered Pomerantz and Dunne about whether they could show that Trump had intended to break the law by inflating the value of his assets in the annual statements, a necessary element to prove the case.

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The questioning was so intense that as the meeting ended, Dunne, exasperated, used a lawyerly expression that normally refers to a judges fiery questioning:

Wow, this was a really hot bench, Dunne said, according to people with knowledge of the meeting. What Im hearing is you have great concerns.

The meeting, on Jan. 24, started a series of events that brought the investigation of Trump to a sudden halt, and late last month prompted Pomerantz and Dunne to resign. It also represented a drastic shift: Braggs predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., had deliberated for months before deciding to move toward an indictment of Trump. Bragg, not two months into his tenure, reversed that decision.

Bragg has maintained that the three-year inquiry is continuing. But the reversal, for now, has eliminated one of the gravest legal threats facing the former president.

This account of the investigations unraveling, drawn from interviews with more than a dozen people knowledgeable about the events, pulls back a curtain on one of the most consequential prosecutorial decisions in U.S. history. Had the district attorneys office secured an indictment, Trump would have been the first current or former president to be criminally charged.

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Bragg was not the only one to question the strength of the case, the interviews show. Late last year, three career prosecutors in the district attorneys office opted to leave the investigation, uncomfortable with the speed at which it was proceeding and with what they maintained were gaps in the evidence.

Bragg, whose office is conducting the investigation along with lawyers working for New York Attorney General Letitia James, had not taken issue with Dunne and Pomerantz presenting evidence to the grand jury in his first days as district attorney. But as the weeks passed, he developed concerns about the challenge of showing Trumps intent a requirement for proving that he criminally falsified his business records and about the risks of relying on the former presidents onetime fixer, Michael Cohen, as a key witness.

Cohens testimony, the prosecutors leading the investigation argued, could help to establish that Trump was intentionally misleading when he exaggerated the value of his properties. The financial statements Trump submitted to banks to secure loans documents that say Donald J. Trump is responsible for the preparation and fair presentation of the valuations could also support a case.

Bragg was not persuaded. Once he told Pomerantz and Dunne that he was not prepared to authorize charges, they resigned. Explaining the resignation to his team of prosecutors in a meeting a day later, Dunne said he felt he needed to disassociate myself with this decision because I think it was on the wrong side of history.

Bragg has told aides that the inquiry could move forward if a new piece of evidence is unearthed, or if a Trump Organization insider decides to turn on Trump. Other prosecutors in the office saw that as fanciful.

Trump has long denied wrongdoing and has accused Bragg and James, both of whom are Democrats and Black, of carrying out a politically motivated witch hunt and being racists.

Danielle Filson, a spokesperson for Bragg, said the investigation into Trump was continuing under new leadership.

Pomerantz and Dunne declined to comment.

The Brain Trust

Vance and his top deputies were riding high last summer.

They had just announced criminal tax charges against Trumps family business and his longtime finance chief, Allen Weisselberg. The next step for Dunne, Pomerantz and their team was to build a case against Trump himself.

By the fall, a number of the prosecutors assigned to the investigation thought it was likely that Trump had broken the law. Proving it would be another matter.

Concern among the offices career prosecutors about the investigation into the former president came to a head in September at a meeting they sought with Dunne. Dunne offered to have them work only on the pending trial of Weisselberg or leave the Trump team altogether.

Two prosecutors eventually took him up on the latter.

Vance pressed on, and in early November, convened a new special grand jury to start hearing evidence against the former president. Still, he had yet to decide whether to direct the prosecutors to begin a formal grand jury presentation with the goal of seeking charges. As his tenure drew to a close in December, he consulted a group of prominent outside lawyers to help inform what would be his final decision.

The group was referred to internally as the brain trust a handful of former prosecutors that included two senior members of Robert Muellers special counsel inquiry into Trumps 2016 campaign.

Before they all convened for a meeting on Dec. 9, Dunne and Pomerantz circulated hypothetical opening arguments in advance: one for the prosecution, another for the defense.

The deliberations led prosecutors to simplify the charges they planned to seek to make it easier to win a conviction, and Vance was soon persuaded. Three days later, Dunne sent the team an email announcing that they would proceed. The plan, he said, was to seek charges from the panel in the spring.

Most of the remaining career prosecutors were on board. But that week, a third prosecutor left the investigation into Trump.

Time Is of the Essence

With Vance about to leave office, the investigators attention turned to their future boss.

Bragg first got involved in the district attorneys criminal investigation in the final days of last year. He and his top deputies met with Pomerantz and Dunne over the holidays, appearing eager to get up to speed.

Braggs first priority upon taking office was adopting a new set of policies that essentially reduced the list of crimes for which he would seek jail time. The decision, announced internally in a Jan. 3 memo, prompted a fierce backlash from law enforcement, elected officials and some members of the public.

Dunne emailed Bragg and his team that day, emphasizing the need to make a decision about the Trump case within two weeks. Time is of the essence, Dunne wrote.

Bragg signaled a strong interest in the investigation and committed to adding two prosecutors to the team.

When they met again Jan. 11 to focus on Trumps financial statements, Braggs team asked a number of questions and offered suggestions for how to present a case against Trump to a jury.

Dunne and Pomerantz then resumed their grand jury presentation, questioning Trumps longtime accountant from Mazars USA on Jan. 19 and a real estate valuation expert the next day.

Around that time, Weisselbergs lawyers filed legal papers seeking to dismiss the earlier indictment, a routine filing that nevertheless appeared to raise alarms for Bragg and his team about using Cohen to prosecute Trump. The papers took aim at Cohen, claiming that he was pursuing a vendetta against Weisselberg as revenge for the accountants having testified against him before a federal grand jury in the hush-money case.

It was the next day, Jan. 24, that Pomerantz and Dunne faced the hot bench.

There, Bragg expressed concern about calling Cohen as a witness. He and his aides also emphasized the potential difficulty of proving that Trump had intended to break the law.

Braggs aides agreed that it was wise to stand down.

One Decision, Two Resignations

Pomerantz did not take kindly to the setback. In an email soon after the Jan. 24 meeting, he threatened to resign if Bragg did not make a final decision about the future of the investigation.

He also offered to make a series of presentations about crucial issues in the case in an effort to speed up Braggs decision. Bragg agreed, and Pomerantz and Dunne delivered three presentations beginning early last month. After some of the meetings, Braggs team met behind closed doors without the two prosecutors.

Pomerantz and Dunne had one final chance to sway Bragg in a meeting on Valentines Day. The topic: Which laws had Trump broken?

On the morning of Feb. 22, Bragg notified them of his decision: He did not want to continue the grand jury presentation.

Pomerantz resigned the next day. Bragg asked Dunne to stay, but within hours, he joined Pomerantz in leaving.

Dunne, however, left the door open to a possible return. If Bragg reconsidered his decision, Dunne told colleagues, he would gladly come back.

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How the Manhattan DA's Investigation Into Donald Trump ...

Proclaiming whats going to happen is a popular way to shrug off taking responsibility for helping to determine whats going to happen. And its something weve seen a lot with doomspreading prophecies that Donald Trump is going to run for president or even win in 2024.

One of the assumptions is that Trump will still be alive and competent to run, but the health of this sedentary shouter in his mid-70s, including the after-effects of the Covid-19 he was hospitalised for in 2020, could change.

Look to external issues too, for whatever the condition of his own health, his financial health is under attack, with businesses losing money and some banks refusing to lend to him after the storming of the Capitol.

Its also worth remembering that he lost the popular vote by millions in 2016 and by more millions in 2020; he never had a mandate. The Republicans are clearly gearing up to try to steal an election again, but their chances of winning one with Trump as candidate seem slim. Currently, he is creating conflict within the Republican party with his insistence on controlling it for his own agenda and punishing dissenters.

Another assumption we make when we assess Trumps prospects is that he wont be locked up in 2024, or that his reputation, such as it is, wont be severely damaged even in the eyes of some who voted for him before. Even in the past couple of weeks his standing has shifted significantly. Former attorney general Bill Barr is now speaking up to promote his book about how Trump was clearly advised that his claims of election theft had no basis and that his strategies to overturn the results were illegal. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has woken up people around the world (or at least those who were dozing) to Vladimir Putins malevolence and reminded Americans of how eagerly Trump allied himself with the Russian dictator, personally and politically. Suddenly a lot of Republicans are trying to scurry away from their own pro-Putin record, which may mean distancing themselves from Trump as well. His 2019 withholding of military aid to Ukraine to try to pressure Ukrainian president Zelenskiy into supporting his lies is also being re-examined under the harsh light of this war.

Additionally, Trump is facing many criminal charges, from allegations of financial dirty dealing by the Trump Organization in New York (Trump has called the various probes into the business politically motivated), to an investigation into whether Trump and his allies subverted election results in Georgia, where Trump claims election fraud took place. Just last week, the January 6 committee laid out a series of potential charges against the ex-president, including conspiracy to defraud the American people and obstructing an official proceeding of Congress. Trumps domestic status seems to be shifting rapidly. He is also facing so many lawsuits that both CNN and NBC published indexes of the cases. Last month news broke that Trump had left the White House with classified documents, which he claimed he had a right to take to his home. That could be a felony, though how much appetite the Biden administration has for jailing a former president remains to be seen.

Among the large array of civil charges Trump faces are E Jean Carrolls allegations of defamation over his insult-laden denial that he raped her (he has responded that he was simply responding in the line of official duties) and former consigliere Michael Cohens case that his return to prison was triggered by Trump after Cohen released a revealing memoir. There are also suits holding Trump responsible for the January 6 insurrection both from members of Congress, and two policemen injured in the mayhem. In February the courts ruled that these civil suits can go forward, and Trump lacks the immunity that would protect him from them. Trump has initiated lawsuits of his own, but a great many have been dismissed, although he is still suing his niece, Mary Trump, for disclosing tax information about him. She in turn is suing him and two of his siblings, alleging that they defrauded her out of much of her inheritance (which they deny).

Though the 14th amendment of the US constitution should ban all insurrectionists from running for elected office, it seems unlikely to be applied to 21st-century candidates the way it was to former Confederates. But still, the Georgia and New York charges are serious. All of which is to say that the road from early 2022 to late 2024 is bumpy for Trump. Popular opinion is fickle; George W Bush is Trumps age and clearly a permanent has-been. Even Barack Obama, at 60, has strolled offstage.

But even if Trump is not indisputably in the running, Trumpism is running rampant, and its a force to contend with in political races across the US. Trump was a super-spreader of his brand of amoral self-interest that tramples fact, truth, law and rights. The man himself is sulking in his private club in Florida enduring effectual exile from New York, Washington and Twitter but to a degree, his work is done. He has got an already corrupt political party to embrace his tactics and values. The brazen lies of prominent figures in the party show that theyve abandoned all ethics and standards, and will happily violate the oaths they took to uphold the constitution. Viral Trumpism has already merged with conspiracy theories such as QAnon, with anti-vaccine cults, with white supremacists and neo-fascists, and with the gun-fetishising groups that continue to have an ominous presence in public life.

I sometimes think of the American right as a pot on the boil; whats inside is concentrating as it shrinks. The Republican party has been losing membership for years: a Gallup poll earlier this month reports that 24% of eligible voters are registered Republican, a steady decline over the past 15 years.Thats a reminder that news stories revealing that a majority of Republicans believe something could actually mean that only a small minority of Americans do.

There have been high-profile defections and general atrophy in the age of Trump. Thats the shrinking. But then theres the concentration that renders those who remain more furious, more closed-minded, more ready to jump on any bandwagon that looks as if it leads to power, and even more rigidly committed to an increasingly rightwing agenda, even though or maybe because that means minority rule.

For progressives, Republican desperation is a good sign, in its way. A popular party doesnt have to suppress votes and steal elections. A party aligned with the will of the people doesnt need to lie and cheat. Trumpism seems like a last gasp, a desperate last chance to hang on to whats slipping away. The old Soviet-satellite aphorism You can cut down the flowers but you cant stop the spring applies nicely.

The future of this country is white-minority. Yet the Republican party has done its best to alienate everybody else, while the rising majority of Americans support reproductive rights, climate action and many economic justice measures. The long-term progressive future of the United States seems almost inevitable. But with Trumpism still a force, the short-term future is alarming and unpredictable, and the damage may be lasting; whether its the prevention of climate action or the infliction of literal and financial violence on poor and marginalised people.

Enemies of authoritarianism and white supremacy have their work cut out, but the task is clear and straightforward: to protect the democratic process, upholding voting rights and free and fair elections, to try to win those elections for progressive candidates, and to articulate and defend the values behind those objectives.

Trump is treading water, but this is how resistance to Trumpism works, and how it can prevail if enough people work at it hard enough.

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Donald Trumps power is fading: Trumpism is the clear and present danger now - The Guardian

When former President Donald Trump summoned then U.S. Attorney General William Barr in early December, he says he knew it wasn't going to be a pleasant meeting and thought Trump was going to fire him.

"I told my assistant as I left the office she may have to pack up for me because often he would tell you not to come back," Barr told "CBS Mornings."

When he entered the Oval Office, Barr said the conversation quickly turned into a back and forth between Barr and Trump about the former president's allegations of widespread fraud.

During that conversation, Barr said Trump got "madder and madder" so Barr said that he could resign if Trump was not happy about his work.

"I said, 'look, Mr. President, I know you're unhappy with me. I'm happy to tender my resignation.' Boom, he hit the desk, and said, accepted," Barr recalled. "As I was pulling out of the White House, two of his lawyers came and pounded on the window, government lawyers, and said, 'The president doesn't want you to leave.'"

This is just one of several events that Barr details in his new book, "One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General," which went on sale on Tuesday.

Barr said after that encounter, he reluctantly stayed although he knew his relationship with Trump had deteriorated.

"I didn't leave then because I wanted to see how this was playing out and I thought I could continue to look at these claims and make sure that people understood that most of, well, what was being presented simply wasn't true," he said.

When asked if he would vote for Trump if runs for office in 2024, Barr said he would support the Republican candidate even if it is Trump.

"I would not work with him, if I was faced with that choice," he said. "I hope I'm not faced with that choice. I don't think the party will go back in that direction."

Barr's resignation was official in December 2020. He has not spoken to Trump since then and said he wouldn't particularly want to have another conversation.

"You don't have a conversation [with him]. You mostly listen," he said.

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Former Attorney General William Barr says Trump got "madder and madder" when challenged on unfounded allegations of election fraud - CBS...

Former President Donald Trump suggested again this weekend that he was likely to make another White House run in 2024, according to a speech to Republican donors obtained by The Washington Post.

I wonder who that might be, he quipped Saturday about the next potential GOP presidential nominee, with the Post reporting that the crowd responded by chanting his name.

Trump spoke at length in the New Orleans Four Seasons hotel, reiterating false claims that he won in 2020. Bipartisan local, state and federal officials, even Trump-appointed judges and Trumps own attorney general and Department of Homeland Security leaders, say there was no widespread fraud or irregularities impacting the race won by President Joe Biden.

Weve already won two presidential elections, Trump claimed without presenting evidence of a second victory. And now I feel obligated that we have to really look strongly at doing it again. We are looking at it very, very strongly. We have to do it. We have to do it.

Trumps comments mirrored those from his speech a few weeks ago at the the Conservative Political Action Conference.

On November 2024, they will find out like never before, Trump told the Orlando crowd last month. We did it twice and well do it again, were going to be doing it again a third time.

Biden has faced dwindled approval ratings since taking office in 2021, with the COVID-19 pandemic, Afghanistan withdrawal and rising inflation often cited by pollsters as leading concerns among voters.

The White House points to millions of jobs gained over the last year and Bidens signature of a bipartisan infrastructure package, a bill that should see at least $9 billion go toward Massachusetts infrastructure projects.

Bidens approval rating may have seen a bounce since his State of the Union address last week, with NPR reporting that a strong majority of Americans, including Republicans, support his tough sanctions on Russia over President Vladimir Putins unprovoked attack on Ukraine.

Amid the run up to the 2022 midterms, Trump on Saturday continued his practice of roasting several establishment Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, whom he painted as insufficiently loyal to him.

Were doing great as a party, he argued. The Republican Party is now a fighting party. We are now a winning party. We are never going back to what it was before. It was heading in the wrong direction.

The former president also weighed in on Russias attack on Ukraine, a former Soviet republic thats been independent since 1991.

According to the Post, Trump joked that the U.S. should place Chinese flags on its F-22 planes and bomb the s*** out of Russia.

And then we say, China did it, we didnt do it, China did it, and then they start fighting with each other and we sit back and watch, he added.

The crowd of about 250 donors laughed, the Post reported.

Trump, who in 2007 wrote to Putin to congratulate him for being named TIME Magazines Man of the Year I am a big fan of yours! Trump wrote claimed the Kremlin leader would not have invaded his sovereign neighbor if he still sat in the White House.

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We have to do it, former President Donald Trump says of potential 2024 White House run - MassLive.com