Trump investigations: Federal Jan. 6 and 2020 election case

A Manhattan jury just found former President Donald Trump guilty on 34 felony counts. The former president is still facing other criminal charges across four jurisdictions — Georgia, Florida, New York, and the District of Columbia — all as he runs for the presidency again.

The cases, involving allegations of attempted election theft, mishandling classified documents, and hush money payments, have grown so sprawling that it’s tough for anyone but the most die-hard political obsessive to follow them in detail.

The criminal charges against former President Donald Trump could have been his downfall. Instead, he’s turned them into an opportunity.

He’s been indicted four times, most recently surrendering on Thursday to Georgia authorities on charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election. Despite that, he continues to enjoy poll numbers that put him in a historically strong position for a nonincumbent to win his party’s nomination, running nearly 40 percentage points, on average, ahead of his closest competitor. Six of his eight Republican opponents on the debate stage Wednesday night indicated that they would support him as the nominee even if he’s convicted in any one of the four cases against him. A big majority of likely Republican primary voters believe the charges are politically motivated; few think he actually tried to overturn the 2020 election.

Even under the best of circumstances, a criminal trial of a former head of state is a fraught exercise. And, for a number of reasons, the four trials of Donald Trump are happening decidedly not under the best circumstances.

Consider the federal judiciary itself, which will oversee at least two of Trump’s trials (and which may also wind up hearing the new charges just filed against Trump in Georgia). Trump filled those courts with judges who range from conservative outliers within the legal profession to outright hacks. And that’s also true of the federal appeals courts that will review many decisions made by federal trial judges in the Trump prosecutions.

During his arraignment in a Washington, DC, federal court Thursday, former President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges against him in the case concerning his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

As the result of an investigation led by Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith, Trump was charged Tuesday with four counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.

Shortly after special counsel Jack Smith unveiled four new criminal charges against former president Donald Trump — all arising out of Trump’s failed efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election — one of Trump’s lawyers revealed one of the legal arguments he plans to use to defend the former president.

“This is an attack on free speech and political advocacy,” Trump attorney John Lauro told CNN Tuesday evening. In a separate appearance on Fox News, Lauro claimed that Trump is being prosecuted for “what he believed in and the policies and the political speech that he carried out as president.”

Former President Donald Trump was indicted for an unprecedented third time on August 1, adding another set of serious federal charges to the mounting legal issues he faces.

Trump was indicted as part of the Department of Justice’s criminal investigation, led by special counsel Jack Smith, into the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. The indictment marks the second time Trump has faced federal charges, and he remains the only president to have been federally indicted.

On the first day of the year 2021, then-President Donald Trump reportedly called his Vice President Mike Pence to abuse him.

Trump was furious that Pence had opposed a lawsuit arguing that the vice president had the power to overturn the 2020 presidential election when Congress certified it on January 6, a degree of authority that Pence had (correctly) concluded he did not possess. When Pence explained his reasoning to Trump, as he had done previously on several other occasions, the president accused Pence of what he presumably saw as a grievous character flaw.

A few weeks ago, while chasing unproven criminal connections between the president and his son, far-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene unintentionally summed up a core principle of liberal democracy: “When evidence and proof of a crime is presented, no prosecution should be denied no matter who the person is.”

Her statement came less than two weeks before the Republican Party’s unofficial leader was indicted Tuesday on four counts in a federal investigation into his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election — an investigation that Republicans have been working hard to discredit as a part of a politically motivated plot to punish President Joe Biden’s main political opponent.