The Long Wait for Justice Upon trump

I wrote earlier this month that my impatience over the handling of donald trump's legal woes - especially into the matter of him stealing hundreds if not thousands of classified documents when he left the White House in 2021 - would hopefully get satisfaction once the Midterms were over and his fate wouldn't affect the decision-making of American voters.

Well, damn the Man. It's pretty much the end of November. We're all still waiting for that hammer to drop.

Even as every day after the votes have been counted, there is more movement towards making trump accountable for all the crimes he's committed in violation of our voting rights and in violation of our national security.

Just this Tuesday before Turkey Day, trump faced a number of legal defeats that all signal his time running out (via Robert Katzberg at Slate):

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument on the federal government’s contention that Judge Aileen Cannon overstepped her authority in limiting the Justice Department’s access to and use of the documents seized earlier this year at Donald Trump’s home in Florida, Mar-a-Lago. Despite the technical nature of the hearing’s dialogue—one that covered, among other things, the nature of interlocutory appeals, the scope of Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, and the limits of equitable jurisdiction—it appears that the government’s position will, at least in part, win the day. Throughout the session, counsel for the former president was unable to satisfactorily respond to skeptical questions from all three panel members. Ignoring the wisdom that one can never predict what a court will do based upon oral argument, it seems that the panel will either rule that Judge Cannon had no jurisdiction to rule on the investigation in the first place, and will vacate all of her prior rulings, or it will severely curtail the review process that she created. In sum, the government had a good day...

If the 11th Circuit does what now seems likely, once the newly appointed special counsel gets up to speed, an indictment of the former president for unlawful possession of the materials found at Mar-a-Lago should quickly follow. The case is both a prosecutorial “slam dunk” and the most effective way to begin prosecuting all matters related to the Jan. 6 riot and the attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

As has been noted by a number of legal observers, the Mar-a-Lago prosecution is much like a simple drug possession case. Donald Trump was in possession of something proscribed by law: not a controlled substance like heroin, but documents that were legally required to remain with the government. The materials in question did not even have to have been classified for their removal to have broken federal law...

Given that there's been already 100 documents deemed classified that shouldn't have been in trump's possession, and trump is facing more than just the Presidential Records Act he violated. Back to Katzberg:

And speaking of the defense, as someone who prosecuted and defended federal white-collar criminal cases for more than four decades, there is none. The ongoing absurdities the former president and his supporters have put forth—whether his undocumented, magical declassification of the top-secret materials; the alleged planting of the documents at his home by the FBI; or any of the other risible claims made—may have provided helpful fodder in the right-wing media, but none of it will help the former president in a court of law.

Everything trump's argued about in social media can't stand in a courtroom under oath. trump nor his lawyers can't prove planted evidence, especially when he's been complaining that the documents in his possession are his to begin with. Gaslighting the media is easy: Gaslighting a judge leads to perjury.

The only rational way trump can get out of his blatant violation of the Presidential Records Act is to argue the law itself is Unconstitutional. trump's only defense is that Executive Privilege extends even to former Presidents, but to do so would grant ex-Presidents powers that would conflict with the authority of the current Chief of State. Would this Far Right Supreme Court even go THAT far to protect trump?

For the Justice Department to dig this long - and fight this hard against trump's delaying tactics via judge-shopping for Cannon's help - it would be folly to not follow through on this case. That trump is at least facing a courtroom for his theft of these documents - at the earliest by 2023, to avoid his presumed Presidential run for 2024 - has to be a settled thing. It's now a question of when (it just better be SOON dammit).

For all that happened this past Tuesday, the Reuters newswire documented more:

The conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court cleared the release of Trump's tax returns to the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee...

The committee in its request invoked a federal law that empowers its chairman to request any person's tax returns from the tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Trump's lawyers have said the committee's real aim is to publicly expose his tax returns and unearth politically damaging information about Trump...

Although Reuters didn't go into the reason(s) why the Ways and Means were looking at trump's taxes, if I recall from other sources it was because the Committee was digging into trump's many violations of the Emoluments Clause. trump had been using his properties to entice and squeeze as much money out of the government (forcing the Secret Service to reside at his hotels at double-billing!) and foreign lobbyists since Day One. It had been this long going after trump on this open grift - delayed either by Republican control of Congress or trump's control of the Justice Department - that only now have the courts cleared this matter.

Problem is, the current Democratic control of Ways and Means is going to end in a month: Republicans won a narrow victory to control the House, and there is no way the MAGA wingnuts running the GOP caucus is going to expose their God-Emperor trump to public scrutiny. If there's anything the current committee can use the tax returns info they now have, they better make it quick before Christmas.

If there's anything else that should get resolved before Christmas, well the New York criminal trial into the Trump Organization got a lot of testimony during the first half of the month, leading up to the prosecution resting their case with the defense resuming matters after Turkey Day (via the Guardian and the AP newswire):

Prosecutors in the Trump Organization’s criminal tax fraud trial rested their case on Monday earlier than expected, pinning hopes for convicting Donald Trump’s company largely on the word of two top executives who cut deals before testifying that they schemed to avoid taxes on company-paid perks.

Allen Weisselberg, the company’s longtime finance chief, and Jeffrey McConney, a senior vice-president and controller, testified for the bulk of the prosecution’s eight-day case, bringing the drama of their own admitted wrongdoing to a trial heavy on numbers, spreadsheets, tax returns and payroll records...

The Trump Organization’s lawyers opened their defense by calling to the witness stand the accountant who handled tax returns and other financial matters for Trump, the Trump Organization and hundreds of Trump entities since the 1980s.

Donald Bender, a partner at Mazars USA LLP, said McConney would call him “numerous times” a week about various tax issues and that he got emails from Weisselberg so often, he even made time to respond while away in the mountains or vacationing in Paris.

Bender said he interacted far less frequently with Trump, his biggest client, attending his 2005 wedding, but otherwise talking to him maybe a couple times a year.

Once Trump became president in 2017, Bender said he would visit him twice a year at the White House so he could sign his tax extensions and returns but those trips ended when the Covid-19 pandemic began.

Trump blamed Bender and Mazars for the company’s troubles, writing on his Truth Social platform last week: “The highly paid accounting firm should have routinely picked these things up – we relied on them. VERY UNFAIR!”

trump's defense is obviously an attempt to dodge accountability for himself, but considering trump himself was the company CEO - had sold himself for years as a great decision-maker and leader - it's kind of hard to tell a jury and the world that he was kept out of the loop for major financial decisions that kept his businesses afloat. Harder still to admit his own business "savvy" didn't clue trump into the many tax dodges happening under his authority.

While trump himself won't face criminal liability here - by a quirk in the law, it's his corporation that's on trial - if the New York legal system can prove guilt here and issue judgment on Trump Organization to where trump can't use it to manage his ongoing cons, this would be a huge victory for holding the corrupt in high office accountable for their sins.

All of this going on while trump jumps into the 2024 Presidential campaign two years early in an obvious attempt to use his status as a "candidate" to avoid any criminal prosecution heading his way. In spite of Attorney General Garland hiring a Special Prosecutor to take over not only the Mar-A-Lago investigation but a multitude of other trump-related investigations as a response.

All we can hope for, all we've been able to hope for since 2015, is the long arc of justice to find trump guilty of the crimes he's openly committed for decades. If justice can be done by the time we're gathered at the Christmas trees to open the presents, please and thank you.

Here's hoping for a festive Saturnalian season.