This week or next

Special Counsel Smith announces documents indictment in June: Getty Images

It’s coming.  I’m not talking about the Georgia indictment.  That’s coming, too.  I’m talking about Defendant Trump once again making an appearance in a federal courtroom, this time in Washington D.C., for an arraignment under charges that he did a whole bunch of illegal stuff attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which he knew the way he knows his name that he lost.

There has been action on multiple fronts by Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors, and Defendant Trump is panicking.  Last week, he sought an indefinite stay of his prosecution for stealing and mishandling 31 classified documents.  He filed a motion for a continuance of his trial on the charges, citing several issues which even given the identity of the defendant making the motion, are such a stretch of judicial norms, that in the words of a former federal prosecutor quoted by The Hill, “would be laughed out of court in 99 out of 100 courtrooms.” 

But the courtroom in which the motion will be argued on Wednesday is that of Judge Aileen Cannon, she of the anything-to-let-Trump-off-the-hook school of jurisprudence.  After she tried to place a special master between the Department of Justice and the evidence it gathered during the FBI search of Mar a Lago last August, it took not one, but two slap-downs by the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta just to get the classified documents Defendant Trump had squirrelled away back in the hands of the prosecutors for use as evidence in the indictment which they eventually filed in early June.

So, we will learn this week if the weak arguments made by Defendant Trump that his trial should be indefinitely delayed are given credence by Judge Cannon.  Trump argued, essentially, that because he is a candidate for president engaged in the Republican primaries, he is just too busy to be preparing for trial on the 37 charges against him in the documents case, and additionally, the case is so damn complicated by rules involving top secret evidence that he needs a bottomless pool of time to prepare for trail, and moreover, he can’t get a fair trial anyway because he’s a candidate being prosecuted by his rival for the presidency.  If any one of these arguments were to be bought by his favorite Florida judge, it would create a situation unprecedented in American life:  essentially, you can commit any crime you want and get away with it if you just file some paperwork and declare yourself a candidate for president.

But the documents case is only one of Defendant Trump’s worries.  Special Counsel Smith has been making moves all over the country in the fake elector scheme portion of his investigation of Defendant Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election.  Recently, prosecutors for Smith’s office interviewed New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver “to discuss matters” relating to the investigation, according to a spokesperson for Oliver.  Last fall, Smith subpoenaed the office of the New Mexico Secretary of State for any communications, electronic, email, mail or otherwise, that involved Defendant Trump and his allies in the scheme to put forth a slate of fake electors pledged to him, rather than the legitimate winner of the election, Joe Biden. 

New Mexico was one of the battleground states where the scheme was played out. The idea, hatched by John Eastman, one of Defendant Trump’s lawyers, was that slates of fake electors could be formed, backed up by official-looking paperwork that would be filed with the National Archives, and on January 6, 2021, during the certification of electoral ballots by the Congress, the fake slates would be put forth, and there would be a vote in the Congress to delay the certification so the election could somehow be returned to the states for new state certification of state electors by largely Republican-dominated state legislatures, and the election would then be forced into consideration by the House of Representatives, and with voting in that body being tallied by states, and not individual members of Congress, a majority of states controlled by Republicans would hand the election to Defendant Trump.

In March, Special Counsel Smith’s team of prosecutors interviewed Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, who according to CNN, “was asked about issues he encountered while serving as Philadelphia City Commissioner, including how misinformation about widespread voter fraud impacted him and other election officials at the time.” 

It is known that the grand jury in Washington D.C. being overseen by Special Prosecutor Smith issued subpoenas to officials in all seven states where Defendant Trump’s campaign attempted to bring pressure to overturn the election, including running its fake elector scheme:  Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, and Michigan.  Several of the Republican officials who signed fake electoral ballots who have been interviewed by the grand jury or questioned by the FBI are said to be cooperating with Smith’s investigation of Defendant Trump.  Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was interviewed by Smith’s prosecutors and told CNN that the interview was focused on “threats that emerged from various sources,” and misinformation that was fed to election workers.  Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, he of the infamous “find me 11,780 votes” phone call with Defendant Trump in early January of 2021, was also interviewed by Smith’s prosecutors.  Although Raffensperger has not said what the interview was about, it doesn’t take much imagination to take a guess at what the prosecutors wanted to know.

The other witness interviewed at length recently by Smith’s prosecutors was Rudy Giuliani, who did so as part of a proffer agreement with Smith’s office that would immunize him from prosecution for crimes he admitted to being a part of so long as the entirety of his interview was truthful – a tall order given the number of lies Giuliani is known to have told about the election after November 3, 2020.  Giuliani was involved with multiple schemes to overturn the election, from pressuring state legislators and secretaries of state to the fake elector scheme to calling Raffensperger and trying to get him to go along with another scheme to rerun the election in Georgia.  Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who was privy to every meeting held by Defendant Trump in the White House between Nov. 3, 2020 and Jan. 20, 2021, has been interviewed by Smith’s prosecutors on multiple occasions and is known to have testified before the D.C. grand jury.  He knows so much and has been so closed-mouthed about his meetings with Smith’s prosecutors, that aides to Defendant Trump have taken to referring to him as “the traitor” and using a rat emoji to indicate Meadows in texts and emails.

The concentration of effort by the Special Counsel on the fake elector scheme makes a lot of sense when you consider that it has been established that Defendant Trump was involved in multiple meetings in the Oval Office to discuss the scheme with his lawyers Sidney Powell, John Eastman, and Rudy Giuliani, as well as his White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and his chief assistant, Patrick Philbin, both of whom have testified before the grand jury.  Neither Cipollone nor Philbin have talked about their grand jury testimony, which has got to be giving Defendant Trump fits.

That’s a lot of stuff going on while Defendant Trump frets about the 37 felony charges he already faces in the documents case.  And we haven’t even discussed the coming state indictments in Georgia by District Attorney Fani Willis.

It’s coming, and it’s looking more and more like it will happen later this week or next week on the federal level, and there will be more indictments in Georgia from the new grand jury recently empaneled in Georgia.  It’s hot on the golf course out there in Bedminster, New Jersey, but Defendant Trump won’t have to play golf for the kind of body moisture he’s going to be generating in the coming weeks.  It’s called flop sweat, and the dictionary tells us it’s caused by nerves and fear.