Thursday Reads: Trump Will Be Indicted Soon in January 6 Case

Good Afternoon!!

The grand jury investigating the January 6 case is meeting today. Donald Trump had the option to explain himself to them; but since he won’t be doing that, he could be indicted today. The grand jury usually meets on Fridays also.

This is from The Independent’s live blog: Trump could be indicted for civil rights law violation as soon as today in Jan 6 grand jury probe.

Donald Trump could be indicted by a grand jury investigating his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the January 6 Capitol riot as early as today.

The Independent learned that a possible indictment could be handed down as soon as Thursday or Friday, charging the former president in his third criminal case.

Mr Trump announced on Tuesday that he had been sent a letter by special prosecutor Jack Smith informing him that he is the “target” of a grand jury investigation.

The target letter cites three statutes under which he could be charged including conspiracy to commit offence or to defraud the United States, deprivation of rights under colour of law and tampering with a witness, victim or informant, multiple outlets reported.

William Russell, a former White House aide who now works for the Trump presidential campaign and spent much of January 6 with the then-president, is scheduled to testify before the grand jury when it meets today.

Analysis from Stephen Collinson at CNN: All eyes on a Washington grand jury amid signs of possible third Trump indictment.

A White House race that figures to be one of the most fraught in history is again in suspended animation as the political world awaits more potential criminal charges the Republican front-runner is expecting from special counsel Jack Smith.

Trump has lost none of his ability to shatter political conventions. Just months ago, the notion that a former president and potential future commander in chief could be indicted was staggering and unprecedented. Now it’s becoming an almost regular occurrence.

Trump has already been charged in Manhattan in a case triggered by a hush money payment to an adult film star, and separately, is facing federal charges related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents he hoarded in Florida. He announced this week that he’d been named as a target of Smith’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and events leading up to the attack on the US Capitol. Receiving such a notification is a procedural step that often leads to an indictment. And he’s waiting to find out whether he’ll be charged in a probe in Georgia over efforts to reverse President Joe Biden’s win there. The ex-president has pleaded not guilty to both indictments and denies wrongdoing in every other case against him.

Trump, his Republican rivals for the 2024 nomination, and much of America will be waiting for any developments out of a grand jury in Washington, DC, that is meeting 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 due to testify for at least the third time. Any indictment in the probe, in the days or weeks to come, would likely emerge from this grand jury – a fact that lends its work great historical significance. Trump indicated that the target letter he received on Sunday gave him four days to take up an option to testify. Legal custom suggests that 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 ex-president – told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday that he was waiting to examine any charges from Smith before forming a judgment. But, given his experience as an ex-prosecutor, Christie suggested that the target letter from Smith was a grave omen.

“I never sent the target letter if I was not completely sure that I had put enough in front of the grand jury for them to return an indictment,” he said on “The Situation Room.”

“My sense is it’ll be a speaking indictment, as we call it in the business, which provides a lot of detail. So, you can really give folks a sense of what the evidence is that backs up the charges.”

CNN reported Wednesday that the ex-president’s legal team was scrambling to find out whether Smith had evidence about Trump’s conduct they didn’t know about. This raises the possibility that any election-related case Smith might bring against Trump may be far broader than his camp may have expected.

There’s more at the link.

UPDATE: Just now, CNN is is reporting that, according to their sources, the “Trump team [is] expecting new indictment any moment.” I’m watching with the sound off, and will update if that happens.

Both The Guardian and The New York Times have articles explaining the Civil Rights charge mentioned in the target letter Trump received from Jack Smith.

Hugh Lowell at The Guardian: Trump under investigation for civil rights conspiracy in January 6 inquiry.

Federal prosecutors investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results have evidence to charge the former president with three crimes, including section 241 of the US legal code that makes it unlawful to conspire to violate civil rights, two people familiar with the matter said.

The potential charges detailed in a target letter sent to Trump by prosecutors from the office of special counsel Jack Smith, who also charged Trump with retaining classified documents last month, was the clearest signal of an imminent indictment.

Prosecutors appear to have evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States based on the target letter, two statutes that the House select committee examining the January 6 Capitol attack issued criminal referrals for last year.

The target letter to Trump identified a previously unconsidered third charge, the sources said. That is section 241 of title 18 of the US code, which makes it unlawful to conspire to threaten or intimidate a person in the “free exercise” of any right or privilege under the “Constitution or laws of the United States”.

The statute, enacted to protect the civil rights of Black voters targeted by white supremacy groups after the US civil war, is unusual because it is typically used by prosecutors in law enforcement misconduct and hate crime prosecutions, though its use has expanded in recent years.

The other two statutes, meanwhile, suggest a core part of the case against Trump is focused on the so-called fake electors scheme and the former president’s efforts to use the fake slates in a conspiracy to stop the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win on 6 January 2021.

The New York Times: Potential Trump Charges Include Civil Rights Law Used in Voting Fraud Cases.

Federal prosecutors have introduced a new twist in the Jan. 6 investigation by suggesting in a target letter that they could charge former President Donald J. Trump with violating a civil rights statute that dates back to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The letter to Mr. Trump from the special counsel, Jack Smith, referred to three criminal statutes as part of the grand jury investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss, according to two people with knowledge of its contents. Two of the statutes were familiar from the criminal referral by the House Jan. 6 committee and months of discussion by legal experts: conspiracy to defraud the government and obstruction of an official proceeding.

But the third criminal law cited in the letter was a surprise: Section 241 of Title 18 of the United States Code, which makes it a crime for people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

Congress enacted that statute after the Civil War to provide a tool for federal agents to go after Southern whites, including Ku Klux Klan members, who engaged in terrorism to prevent formerly enslaved African Americans from voting. But in the modern era, it has been used more broadly, including in cases of voting fraud conspiracies….

A series of 20th-century cases upheld application of the law in cases involving alleged tampering with ballot boxes by casting false votes or falsely tabulating votes after the election was over, even if no specific voter could be considered the victim.

In a 1950 opinion by the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, for example, Judge Charles C. Simons wrote of applying Section 241 in a ballot box-stuffing case that the right to an honest count “is a right possessed by each voting elector, and to the extent that the importance of his vote is nullified, wholly or in part, he has been injured in the free exercise of a right or privilege secured to him by the laws and Constitution of the United States.”

In a 1974 Supreme Court opinion upholding the use of Section 241 to charge West Virginians who cast fake votes on a voting machine, Justice Thurgood Marshall cited Judge Simons and added that every voter “has a right under the Constitution to have his vote fairly counted, without its being distorted by fraudulently cast votes.”

The line of 20th-century cases raised the prospect that Mr. Smith and his team could be weighing using that law to cover efforts by Mr. Trump and his associates to flip the outcome of states he lost. Those efforts included the recorded phone conversation in which Mr. Trump tried to bully Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough additional votes to overcome Mr. Biden’s win in that state and promoting a plan to use so-called fake electors — self-appointed slates of pro-Trump electors from states won by Mr. Biden — to help block or delay congressional certification of Mr. Trump’s defeat.

Read more at the NYT.

For a detailed discussion of how the press has until now misunderstood what Special Counsel Jack Smith is up to, see this post by Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel: Trump’s Attack on Black Votes Was There the Whole Time, We Just Didn’t Call It a Crime. 

One more read on the January 6 case by Michael Daly at The Daily Beast: Jan. 6 Rioters Have Bad News for Trump About D.C. Juries.

However Donald Trump fares in the Mar-a-Lago documents case in Florida, he will face a much tougher fight if the target letter he received on Sunday is followed by an indictment for attempting to overthrow the 2020 election.

Those charges would almost certainly be brought in Washington, D.C., where juries have convicted one Jan. 6 defendant after another.

“If I was Donald J. Trump, the last place on Earth I’d want to be tried other than Atlanta, Georgia, is Washington, D.C.,” Samuel Shamansky, attorney for convicted Jan. 6 rioter Dustin Thompson, told The Daily Beast.

Shamansky said he based his opinion partly on pre-trial jury selection and the trial itself, but mostly on speaking with the jury after it returned a guilty verdict. The jurors made it clear that they were deeply offended by the storming of the Capitol.

“The overwhelming sense was this was a personal violation, a personal affront,” Shamansky said. “Folks from outside the D.C. area with an anti-D.C. agenda took over their city and trashed the Capitol building and assaulted their officers, all in the name of a fake stolen election.”

From another defendent:

More insight into what Trump would face in Washington, D.C., comes from attorney Norman Pattis, who represented Joseph Biggs, one of five Proud Boys charged with a seditious conspiracy related to Jan. 6. Pattis told The Daily Beast that more than half of the prospective jurors he interviewed sympathized with the Black Lives Matter movement. Nearly everyone had attended a protest at some time, though not one had been to a ‘Stop the Steal’ rally.

“It is a terrifying panel,” he said. “It took us 12 days to pick a jury and we didn’t like what we had.”

All five Proud Boys were convicted, though the jurors did reject some counts and appear to have taken considerable care in weighing the evidence.

“I’m not saying you can’t get a fair trial there,” Pattis said.

But he did suggest that the nation’s capital is hardly an ideal venue for defendants who rant about “the deep state” and pledge to “drain the swamp.”

“D.C. is a company town and its business is government,” he said.

Pattis figures that Trump would seek a change of venue.

“And it will fail,” Pattis added, citing the current guidelines for such a switch.

I can’t wait for that trial!

I’m going to wrap this up, because I’m really burned out today, and besides, I can’t think of anything else but the coming Trump indictment. This man has done so much damage to this country. I want to see him finally pay the price for his crimes.

Have a nice Thursday, and please feel free to post your thoughts and links on any topic that interests you.