Daily Archives: March 18, 2023

Its Hour Come Round at Last: Trump Indictment Countdown

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Trump says he’s going to be arrested on Tuesday.

This could very well be true. There have been a lot of signals that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is about to indict Trump. Manhattan prosecutors requested meeting with law enforcement to go through the details about how arresting a former president would work.

The former president has around-the-clock Secret Service protection, raising questions about how routine procedures — such as fingerprinting — would work amid a coterie of armed guards and obvious security concerns surrounding an ex-president. Fox News, citing a source, said that Manhattan prosecutors had requested a sit-down Thursday to “discuss logistics for some time next week, which would mean that they are anticipating an indictment next week.” 

I understand that if there is an indictment, Trump’s lawyers would be notified first, before the indictment is made public. S it’s possible Trump has been notified that he will need to surrender, or at least be available to be taken into custody, on Tuesday.

This would indicate that Trump intends to stay and fight rather than flee the country. He seems to believe an indictment will boost his election chances. Ed Kilgore at New York magazine:

Whether an indictment would hurt Trump’s campaign is a separate issue. Trump certainly does not think it would end his reelection bid. In fact, he told the Associated Press that criminal charges wouldn’t deter him in the slightest. “Oh, absolutely, I won’t even think about leaving,” he said this week. “Probably, it’ll enhance my numbers.”

That may sound like just another outlandish Trumpian brag, but it’s actually entirely plausible — in the short term at least. There is no reason to assume that a criminal indictment will change any minds among the MAGA faithful. Trump clearly benefited from both of his congressional impeachments among rank-and-file Republicans. And Trump’s base has been instructed for years that the “deep state,” with its tentacles extending into every branch of government, is determined to remove him from the picture in order to resume its persecution of “patriots” and its globalist destruction of the U.S.

It’s also the case that the Stormy Daniels payoff story is an old one that everybody’s heard. It’s also among the least interesting of the many legal problems Trump is facing now. There are arguments floating around that it’s to Trump’s advantage that this is the case going forward first, because he can so easily claim this is just old fake news, and Alvin Bragg is just grasping at anything to stop Trump from being elected POTUS again. We’ll see. See also Josh Marshall, Does It Matter That the Stormy Case Goes First?

In other news, yesterday a Washington DC district court judge ordered that Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran has to testify to Jack Smith’s investigation. Corcoran can’t claim attorney-client privilege because of the crime-fraud exception.