Trump’s criminal past is catching up to him at the worst moment politically

After five decades of playing fast and loose with the laws of New York, and a plenary of fraud, deception and corruption, legal appeasement seems to be declining and legal accountability seems to be ramping up as the proverbial hens are finally returning home to roost for the former Houdini of white-collar crime, Donald J. Trump.

First, there was the civil judgment of 5 million dollars awarded to the writer E. Jean Carroll by a federal jury of Trump’s peers. Then there was a second judgment of $83.3 million in damages awarded to Carroll by another jury of Trump’s peers for the additional defamatory statements that he continued to make after the first judgment was rendered for denying that he had sexually assaulted Carroll. And then there was the New York civil fraud decision by Judge Arthur Engoron holding Trump and his sons, Eric and Don, Jr. financially liable to the tune of more than $350 million underscoring “the extent of Trump and the Trump Organization’s white-collar malfeasance.” Last week, Judge Engoron turned down a request by Trump’s lawyers to postpone payment.     

However, in the case of the historic $454 million judgment, “a figure that is growing by more than $100,000 in interest every day,” Trump sought a stay yesterday in opposition to New York law that requires first forking over the entire amount in damages or putting up a cash bond for the same known in the New York civil court system as an “undertaking.”

Trump also had previously done the same thing with the $83.3 million ruling by a jury in the second E. Jean Carroll defamation lawsuit. Neither of these appeals should go anywhere and the clock is still ticking in each case and soon time will be up before Carroll’s attorneys and then the New York attorney general Letitia James can start seizing the former president’s assets and property.

While the Trump image and finances may have taken a huge hit, even draining his cash on hand, Trump was busy blasting the judge’s ruling posting on Truth Social that “This ‘decision’ is a Complete and Total SHAM.” And in another post writing that “The Democratic Club-controlled Judge Engoron has already been reversed four times on this case, a shameful record and he will be reversed again. We cannot let injustice stand and will fight Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized persecution at every step.” 

What often gets lost in the trials of Trump with respect to those judges presiding over his lawsuits is the extent of the assaults they experience even though many of these have been covered by the major news media with respect to both his civil complaints and criminal indictments alike. During much of the trial before Engoron, as the New York Times noted, the judge “contended with repeated anonymous antisemitic attacks on his family and on his law clerk, Allison Greenfield, and with threats to his own life.” In January, Engoron was awakened early one morning to learn that “a bomb squad has been dispatched to his Long Island home” in response to a report that turned out to be a hoax.  

Thus far Trump has been able to turn his legal losses into cash cows. Whether his legal defeats as they accrue will continue to be a fundraising bonanza remains to be seen once Trump has been criminally convicted by a jury of his peers. In the meantime, one day after the New York ruling the indefatigable Trump had launched the gold high top sneaker line. I must say, The Never Surrender High-Tops look very cool and they only cost $399 for both the right and left sneaker combined.  

This new attempt at fundraising by Trump has occurred after he “raised $8.8 million less than [Nikki] Haley’s $11.5 million” in January. This difference in fundraising happened while Trump was also experiencing “a net loss of more than $2.6 million” in money raised versus expenditures spent for the month mostly due to his rising legal bills that approached nearly $3 million last month alone.

With one week before Super Tuesday and Trump’s clinching of the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, and only two weeks before the first in a series of Trump’s four criminal trials is set to begin, the adversarial battle between the rule of law versus the insurgent and anti-democratic revolutionary has only begun intensifying.

Strategically, however, Trump and his lawyers have been most concerned about the January 6 trial materializing before the election and in front of Judge Tanya Chutkan.  So they have been trying to box her out by pitting this case against the classified Mar-a-Lago documents case. As CNN’s Katelyn Polantz reports, “Trump’s lawyers see a major opportunity this week to use his criminal document mishandling case in Florida to create an impasse on his calendar” for the federal judges trying these two criminal cases. 

If SCOTUS has taken up the presidential immunity question with two or more dissents, which I increasingly suspect may be and coupled with the continuing delays by Judge Aileen Cannon in the documents and obstruction of justice case, then it might very well turn out that the upcoming Manhattan criminal trial will be the only one to have occurred before the 2024 presidential election.     

To date, Trump has shown no signs of resignation or incrimination, let alone remorsefulness. Hopefully, after his first criminal conviction occurs in Manhattan in early May, Trump’s bluster will scale back. Before then, however, Trump’s rhetorical narrative of his victimization will only continue to ratchet up. The former president is now comparing himself to Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident and anti-corruption activist who died last weekend in one of Vladimir Putin’s gulags, allegedly of “sudden death syndrome” when only the night before he seemed to be doing as well as could be expected.

“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION!” 

The anti-American and pro-Russian narrative in conjunction with Putin’s slow death murder of Navalny which coincided with the ongoing Munich Security Conference has also resonated with Fox News, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and other GOP sycophants, not to mention that of anti-democratic and U.S. propagandist Tucker Carlson who only days before the killing had been “interviewing Putin and celebrating Russia’s superiority to America in a series of embarrassing videos about Moscow supermarkets and subways.”  

It is most fitting if not poetic justice that after so many decades of habitual lawlessness that Trump’s first criminal trial will be occurring in a New York courthouse on what used to be the former president’s home turf. It is also most appropriate that if (or when) criminally convicted for the first time that it will be for tax fraud one of Trump’s specialties. 

This is yet another opportunity for Americans without the benefit of a televised trial to focus in on the sociopathic behavior of Trump. The trial will also provide a window into what is rapidly becoming an almost seamless transition away from the former president’s willful or intentional civil lawlessness to his willful or intentional criminal lawlessness as these normative violations of Trump’s are indivisibly transactional from his daily modus operandi of moving through the worlds of business, law, and politics.  

As David Corn has written, the hush-money porn-star case may not be among Trump’s greatest crimes, but it may very well be his Trumpiest replete with “phoniness, dishonesty, hypocrisy, and corruption.” 

Many folks, legal and non-legal, have played down the significance or importance of Trump’s first criminal indictment compared to the three others involving his attempted thefts of the 2020 election or his stealing of classified documents. Nevertheless, this case is about 34 felonies for what are essentially white-collar “bread and butter” criminality.Most importantly, the payments of hush money to at least two women which are misdemeanor offenses are not what the forthcoming criminal trial is really even about as there were no misdemeanor charges brought forth in the case only first-degree felonies.

In the tradition of Trump’s decades-long legacy of deception, lying, and fraud, the Manhattan case is about falsifying business records with the intent to defraud and to commit other crimes including the repeated violations of both campaign election and tax laws. As is often Trump’s M.O., he and the Trump Organization have tried their best to conceal the commission of these and other offenses by way of their fraudulent keeping of business records.

Trump almost always has no legal defenses for his lawlessness other than to deny that what he has done was illegal, should not otherwise be considered a crime in the first place, or if a violation of the law has indeed occurred, then he is not the one responsible for it and should not be held accountable. 

As most everyone knows, Trump and his legal teams will raise every type of viable and nonviable motion they can think of to invalidate and/or delay his trials from commencing. Moreover, he and his lawyers will always raise every type of appeal after Trump has been found civilly liable or criminally guilty to avoid and/or postpone accountability for as long as possible.  

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True to form, Trump’s attorneys tried to knock down Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s 34 felony counts “to misdemeanors by looking at a U.S. Supreme Court decision in a decades-old hate crime case.” They had also tried to use similar arguments to remove this case from state to federal court that failed but which was very useful as a delay tactic. 

In late May 2023, one week after Judge Juan Merchan had established with Trump by video the terms of his “protective order” effectively establishing the rules around Trump’s abilities to inappropriately share publicly or otherwise discovered evidence, Trump’s attorneys were busy filing a motion seeking to have the judge recuse himself from the Manhattan case for alleged “conflicts” and that getting an “impartial” judge was “vital to stop this travesty of justice.” 

Seven weeks earlier Trump had lashed out and attacked Judge Merchan as he often does with most judges presiding over his lawsuits. Trump had posted on Truth Social that Merchan had “railroaded” former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg who had served time at Rikers Island after he had pled guilty to four tax fraud charges. Trump also maintained: “The Judge ‘assigned to my Witch Hunt Case, a ‘Case’ that has NEVER BEEN CHARGED BEFORE, HATES ME…and was handpicked by Bragg & the Prosecutors.”

On Monday, Alvin Bragg asked Judge Merchan to bar Trump from “‘making or directing others to make’ statements about witnesses concerning their role in the case,” and “commenting on prosecutors on the case – other than Mr. Bragg himself – as well as court staff members.” Lastly, Bragg’s gag order request asked that Trump be barred from publicly revealing the identities of any of the jurors.

Meanwhile, as we all are getting ready for Trump’s first criminal trial, one of his co-defendants and team of legal attorneys involved in a separate case, the Georgia RICO case, were also trying their best to remove District Attorney Fani Willis for misconduct allegations in the Trump election case. Although the standards for disqualification due to a conflict of interest was not met according to Professor Richard Painter and former Ethics Czar for the Bush II administration, Painter has urged in an opinion piece in The Atlantic that Willis should recuse herself. All of which, at least temporarily, has distracted attention away from the most important RICO case in U.S. history.