CNN
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The biggest question about the 2024 presidential campaign so far is whether voters or juries will get to deliver the first verdict on Donald Trump.
A White House race considered one of the most tense in history is once again in suspended animation as the political world awaits more potential criminal charges than the Republican front-runner expects from special counsel Jack Smith.
Trump has lost none of his ability to break political conventions. Just a few months ago, the idea that a former president and potential future commander-in-chief could be indicted was surprising and unprecedented. Now it is becoming almost commonplace.
Trump has already been indicted in Manhattan in a case sparked by a hush money payment to an adult film star, and separately faces federal charges related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents he obtained from Florida. He announced this week that he had been named as a target of Smith’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and the events leading up to the attack on the US Capitol. Receiving this notification is a procedural step that often leads to an indictment. And he is waiting to find out if he will be charged in an investigation in Georgia over efforts to reverse President Joe Biden’s victory there. The former president has pleaded not guilty to both charges and denies wrongdoing in all other cases against him.
Trump, his Republican rivals for the 2024 nomination and much of America will be waiting for any news from a grand jury in Washington, DC, which is expected to convene on Thursday. Two sources told CNN that Will Russell, a former special assistant to Trump in the White House who has continued to work for him, is set to testify for at least a third time. Any indictments in the investigation, in the coming days or weeks, will likely come from this grand jury, a fact that gives his work great historical significance. Trump indicated that the destination letter he received Sunday gave him four days to take the option to testify. Legal custom suggests any indictment could come at any time after that.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, one of the rare Trump rivals who has openly criticized the former president, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday that he expected to look into Smith’s charges before forming a trial. But given his experience as a former prosecutor, Christie suggested Smith’s target letter was a dire omen.
“I never sent the target letter if I wasn’t completely sure I had put enough in front of the grand jury for an indictment to come back,” he told “The Situation Room.”
“My sense is that it’s going to be an oral indictment, as we call it in the business, that provides a lot of detail. So you can really give people a sense of what the evidence is that supports the charges.”
CNN reported Wednesday that the former president’s legal team was scrambling to find out whether Smith had evidence about Trump’s conduct that they didn’t know about. That raises the possibility that any election-related case Smith might bring against Trump will be much broader than his camp might have hoped.
Various media, including The Wall Street Journal, reported Wednesday that the destination letter cites three statutes under which he could be charged with disenfranchisement; conspiracy to commit a crime or defraud the United States; and tamper with a token. The Department of Justice is known to be looking into possible violations of the law surrounding the conspiracy and obstruction of Congress process on January 6, 2021, which is part of the witness tampering law, CNN previously reported.
Trump has long used the court system to delay accountability by exhausting all available legal options. But Wednesday had more setbacks in some of the other cases against him. First, a federal judge denied his request for a civil new trial in the E. Jean Carroll case, finding that a jury that found he abused and defamed Carroll did not reach a “grossly erroneous result “. The jury had awarded Carroll $5 million in damages. (Trump’s lawyers said they are appealing all decisions against him in the case.)
In another blow to the former president, another federal judge on Wednesday denied his effort to move the New York indictment, which accused him of falsifying business records in connection with the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels , in federal court. Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled that the payments had nothing to do with Trump’s former presidential duties. “Whatever the standard, and whether it’s high or low, Trump doesn’t meet it,” the judge said.
As Smith’s investigation into the fallout from the 2020 election appears to be reaching a tipping point, details have been emerging about its far-reaching scope. Smith and his prosecutors have spoken with officials in several swing states where Trump and his aides allegedly tried to push to change the election results. Sources have suggested the special counsel is also interested in an ultimately unsuccessful bogus elector scheme designed to potentially defy the will of voters by awarding electoral votes to Trump instead of Biden. Influential figures in Trump’s inner circle, including son-in-law Jared Kushner, former aide Hope Hicks and former Vice President Mike Pence, have testified before the grand jury, CNN reported.
The work of the House Select Committee’s January 6 investigation suggested the wide range of possibilities for Smith after he collected a wealth of evidence about Trump’s conduct and presented it to the public last year.
“There are a lot of things he could be charged with, it’s a matter of choosing,” CNN legal analyst Karen Friedman Agnifilo said Wednesday. Reinforcing this point, CNN reported that federal prosecutors looking into the alleged scheme to overturn the election have subpoenaed all of the security videos from Atlanta’s State Farm Arena around Election Day. This could be related to false claims by Trump and his campaign that poll workers there were counting bogus mail-in ballots.
While Trump waits to learn his fate in that investigation, he is already caught up in Smith’s other investigation: the withholding of national defense information. During a hearing in Florida on Tuesday, the judge presiding over the case suggested Smith’s request for a December trial was premature. But she did not tip her hand on whether she was swayed by the Trump team’s argument that the trial should wait until after the 2024 election because he is a candidate. Smith has strongly objected to the idea that Trump is too busy to stand trial or wouldn’t get a fair trial just because he’s running for president. Some lawyers have warned that accepting his request to delay the trial would mean that a former president would have more deference in the judicial system than any other citizen, thus challenging the principle that everyone is equal before the law.
The flurry of indictments and possible new charges against Trump, however, raise the question of how he can focus on the demands of a full presidential campaign while preparing for multiple trials. He already has a court date for the Manhattan case in March, which falls in the middle of the primary season.
For now, however, Trump has been able to use his legal troubles to boost his campaign’s fundraising. A CNN analysis of itemized donations (those over $200) to his campaign shows that his daily contributions in the first six months of this year increased after the earlier news of the indictment.
It was always clear that a presidential election involving a reckoning over the legal and political consequences of Trump’s presidency — and his claims that the last presidential race was stolen — would cause national trauma.
Much of this is engineered by Trump. After all, he has built his 2024 campaign on the idea that he is an innocent victim of political persecution intended to keep him out of the White House. It’s a narrative that GOP voters seem to be buying. Trump’s power can be seen in the way his main opponents have been reluctant to take advantage of his extraordinary flurry of legal problems and in the way his congressional allies attack the Justice Department.
One of Trump’s Republican rivals further fueled a combustible political atmosphere Wednesday. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told “The Shawn Ryan Show” that it was “possible” his campaign could face interference from the Justice Department or the FBI when asked if he was concerned . “I think there should be some accountability for how these prosecutors exercise power, especially if they’re doing it for political reasons,” he added. DeSantis did not provide any evidence of his opinion that he might be vulnerable to the investigation.
In any normal political world, a candidate facing multiple indictments would see his hopes for high office dashed. But American politics has rarely known normalcy since Trump glided up his golden elevator in his namesake New York skyscraper to join the campaign trail in 2016. And former Rep. Fred Upton, R-Michigan, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday that the maelstrom of legal problems would not derail Trump’s bid for the Republican nomination. “I don’t think it moves the needle at all,” Upton said. “In terms of where the voters are, especially the base, Trump is using that to raise more money. He’s stronger than ever.”
“He’s taken all the wind out of the room for any of a dozen other candidates. They can’t make a breakthrough.”
