Facing a barrage of investigations in multiple jurisdictions, from potential fraud and election interference to the role he played in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, former President Donald Trump is desperate to become president again in order to avoid prosecution.
As noted by Associated Press’s reporter Jill Colvin, the rampant probes represent “the most serious legal threat Trump has faced in decades of an often litigious public life. They’re intensifying as a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found Trump’s iron grip on the GOP may be starting to loosen.”
Calvin also noted that Trump’s popularity among Republicans is declining somewhat, reporting that 71 percent say they have a favorable opinion of Trump compared with 78 percent in a September 2020 AP-NORC/USAFacts poll. The same poll found that 44 percent of Republicans do not want Trump to run again.
Despite the legal and political headwinds, however, Trump has no choice but to try to become president again as being in office is the only way he could avoid accountability.
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But as Trump tries to move forward, so do the legal cases against him, Colvin notes in his report.
From the report: On Monday, judges in Georgia approved a request for a special grand jury by the Fulton County prosecutor who has been investigating whether Trump and others broke the law by trying to pressure Georgia officials to throw out President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has said her office received information “indicating a reasonable probability” that the election had been “subject to possible criminal disruptions.”
In New York, state Attorney General Letitia James claimed in a court filing last week that her office uncovered evidence that Trump’s company used “fraudulent or misleading” valuations of its golf clubs, skyscrapers and other property to secure loans and tax benefits. While her lawyers said they hadn’t decided whether to bring a lawsuit in connection with the allegations, they revealed the company overstated the value of land donations made in New York and California on paperwork submitted to the IRS and misreported the size of Trump’s Manhattan penthouse, among other misleading valuations.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has also been working with James’ office on a parallel criminal investigation, which resulted in charges last summer against Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, and its longtime finance chief, Allen Weisselberg.
Meanwhile, in Washington, the Jan. 6 committee investigating the violent insurrection has interviewed hundreds of witnesses, issued dozens of subpoenas and obtained tens of thousands of pages of records, including texts, emails and phone records from people close to Trump, as well as thousands of pages of White House records that Trump fought to shield from public view. Among them: a draft executive order that proposed using Defense Department assets to seize voting machines.
A top Justice Department official said this week that prosecutors are investigating fake certificates sent to the National Archives with made-up slates of electors who wrongly declared Trump the winner in seven states he lost as part of a desperate campaign to subvert the voters’ will. Attorney General Merrick Garland has said the Justice Department remains committed to “holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law, whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy.”
As president, Trump was largely shielded from legal consequences. But no longer.
