It’s a different week but a similar story for Donald Trump.
He’s due back in New York on Thursday under a dark legal cloud to answer more questions about his conduct, a week after becoming the first ex-president to be charged with a crime.
Last week, Trump pleaded not guilty in a case arising from a hush money payment to an adult film star. He’s expected back in the city where he made his name to give a deposition in a separate civil case alleging that he and three of his adult children falsified Trump Organization accounts in a years-long fraud to enrich themselves.
The two trips encapsulate the converging legal battles that are putting Trump’s time-honored strategy of delay, denial and distraction to its ultimate test.
The barrage of legal jeopardy doesn’t mean the ex-president is guilty of anything, and he denies wrongdoing in all cases. But it shows that at least Trump – as well as some of those most involved in amplifying his election fraud misinformation after the 2020 election – may be forced to answer for conduct that critics and political opponents have long argued flies in the face of the law, truth and decency.
It’s possible that the charmed life of the real estate magnate turned reality star turned twice-impeached ex-president may be about to be doused in a cold shower of reality. But Trump is not walking into this dark legal storm meekly. His lawyers fired off new filings and digressions in some of the many cases against him Wednesday, and his allies in the Republican House majority stepped up their efforts to shield him.
Trump’s lawyers, for example, are asking a judge to delay for one month a civil sexual assault and defamation trial brought by former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll, which was slated to begin later this month. His team wants a “cooling off period” following his indictment in the Manhattan case for falsifying business records, arguing that jurors would have those charges “top of mind” when they are called.
Remarkably, these cases may not be the most serious legal jeopardy bearing down on Trump. He is waiting to find out whether he will be indicted in special counsel probes into his hoarding of classified documents and his behavior leading up to the US Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. And Trump and supporters involved in the democracy-damaging chicanery following the 2020 election still don’t know whether they will be charged in yet another investigation, this one in Georgia, over his attempt to find just enough votes to try to steal President Joe Biden’s victory in the swing state.
This is an extraordinary tsunami of credible legal threats to confront one person – let alone someone who was once charged by the Constitution with taking “care that the laws be faithfully executed.” The incredible personal and legal pressure on Trump also poses the question of how he can fully concentrate on the all-consuming effort of running a presidential campaign. Being a defendant in multiple legal cases would mean that court dates, not campaign rallies, dictate much of his schedule.
Trump is not alone in staring down a legal imbroglio.
Thursday is the first day of jury selection in the Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, which could feature testimony from Fox anchors and media baron Rupert Murdoch. Dominion, a voting technology company, says the right-wing network trashed its reputation when its top talent promoted false claims that Dominion machines rigged the 2020 election. In the run-up to the trial, Fox has faced severe embarrassment following the release of text messages that showed some of its most famous opinion hosts scoffing at Trump’s claims, which they nevertheless promoted on air, and top executives warning that telling the truth to viewers would be bad for business. Dominion must prove that Fox acted with actual malice in promoting the falsehoods in order to win damages from the network.
The case, which CNN legal analyst Eli Honig this week predicted would turn into a “full-blown legal and journalistic disaster” for Fox, took another ominous turn on Wednesday when a judge sanctioned the conservative network over the possible withholding of evidence and said he plans to appoint an outside attorney to investigate.
“I’m very uncomfortable right now,” Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis said on Wednesday after rebuking the network’s lawyers from the bench. Fox denies wrongdoing in both the issue raised by the judge and in the broader case, arguing that it was simply covering Trump’s allegations of election fraud and that a verdict against it would infringe press freedom.
Trump’s trip back to New York on Thursday follows a deposition he gave Attorney General Letitia James’ office last year before the suit against him and the Trump Organization was filed, in which he cited his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in response to more than 400 questions. His position is more nuanced now since in a civil case, if a defendant takes the Fifth, a jury can make an “adverse inference” against them.
The former president reacted to the suit filed by James, a Democrat, in the same way that he responds to any accusation of wrongdoing – by accusing legal authorities of pursuing a political vendetta against him.
Similarly, he has responded to his indictment in Manhattan by accusing District Attorney Alvin Bragg, also a Democrat, of seeking to prevent him reclaiming the White House in his 2024 campaign. In an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox on Tuesday, the ex-president said he would never drop out of the presidential race if he was convicted and claimed his foes were using the “old Soviet process” to convict him of crimes he said he didn’t commit.
Trump’s classic tactic of trying to delay accountability was also on display Wednesday when lawyer Joe Tacopina asked the judge overseeing the Carroll lawsuit to delay the trial until the end of May. Tacopina warned that intense media coverage of Trump’s arraignment last week could taint the jury pool. “To be sure, President Trump is a persistent subject of media coverage. But the present situation is unique because, as stated above, the recent coverage pertains to alleged sexual misconduct, the same issue at the heart of this litigation,” Tacopina wrote to Judge Lewis Kaplan.
But Carroll’s lawyers said Trump’s request had no merit and a delay of a month would do nothing to cool press interest in the trial. “And in all events, Trump is exceptionally ill-suited to complain about fairness when he has instigated (and sought to benefit from) so much of the very coverage about which he now complains,” Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Carroll, wrote to the judge.
Trump has denied sexually assaulting Carroll, who alleges Trump raped her in a New York department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. She first sued Trump for defamation in 2019 after he denied the rape and alleged she made the claim to boost sales of her book.
The ex-president, who has long been known for using the court system to pursue his personal and political goals, unveiled yet another legal front on Wednesday by announcing a $500 million lawsuit alleging that Michel Cohen breached his contract as his former personal attorney.
The move raised immediate suspicions that Trump was seeking to intimidate or silence Cohen, who testified before the Manhattan grand jury and is likely to be a key witness in Bragg’s prosecution. Prosecutors allege that Trump tried to hide hush money payments to adult actress Stormy Daniels to avoid harming his 2016 campaign.
CNN legal analyst Karen Friedman Agnifilo said on “Erin Burnett OutFront” on Wednesday that Trump appeared to be trying to get around the judge’s warning that the matter should not be tried in the court of public opinion. “The timing is suspect, the claims are suspect, and I also don’t logistically see how this is going to work,” Agnifilo, a former chief assistant district attorney in Manhattan, said.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, meanwhile, stepped up his apparent effort to thwart Bragg’s investigation – or at least to discredit Bragg in the eyes of voters – in the latest move from Trump’s allies to fight the case in public before it ever reaches the courtroom. The Ohio Republican announced a slate of witnesses for a field hearing of his committee in New York on Monday as he attempts to make a case that Bragg went after Trump for political reasons.
Accountability may be coming for Trump. But he’s going to do everything he can to thwart it. Anything else would be out of character.
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