Donald Trump has steadfastly settled a number of major legal headaches in the lead-up to his 2024 run.
Other cases are expected to conclude well before 2024.
However, Trump still faces open-ended risks from the Justice Department and Fulton County’s DA.
While he was president, Donald Trump spent four years delaying investigations and lawsuits against him.
In the lead-up to his announcement this month announcing a third presidential run, he cleared many of them away.
Earlier in November, he settled a lawsuit brought way back in September 2015 by protesters who alleged they were beaten up by his security guards outside Trump tower while demonstrating against his racist diatribes against Mexicans.
Between the fall of 2021 and spring of 2022, he went on a settlement sprint.
In September 2021, his company also settled a lawsuit from a hotel management company that purchased Trump’s hotel in Panama, claiming the Trump Organization misrepresented its financial health. A couple of months later, just before Trump was scheduled to sit for a deposition, he settled a case brought by Summer Zervos, who had alleged he sexually assaulted her twice and then defamed her when he called her a liar. And in May, Trump’s company and inaugural committee agreed to pay a $750,000 fine to settle an investigation from Washington, DC Attorney General Karl Racine over misspent money he claimed enriched members of the Trump family.
Trump can also thank judges for handing him several victories.
November 15, 2022 was probably his best day in court in recent memory. In a New York state court case, a judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by his niece Mary Trump, who alleged he and two of his siblings maneuvered to thwart her of her rightful inherited share from the family business empire.
On the same day, another judge, in a New York federal court, dismissed a lawsuit brought by Michael Cohen who alleged the Trump administration targeted him personally to remove him from house arrest and keep him behind bars in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. (Cohen told Insider he’s considering an appeal.)
Some cases involving Trump’s associates, too, are no longer hanging over him.
His longtime friend Tom Barrack was acquitted by a jury in Brooklyn over charges that he illegally acted as a lobbyist for the United Arab Emirates. Prosecutors said they wouldn’t seek charges against his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani following an investigation into whether he illegally acted as a lobbyist to foreign powers, either.
In the loss column, Steve Bannon was found guilty of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the committee investigating the January 6 riot. The Supreme Court this week also cleared the way for a separate House committee to obtain his tax returns, though it’s unclear what will happen to them before Republicans retake the chamber in January.
Some of Trump’s legal headaches he just can’t get rid of, no matter how hard he rages.
Right now, the Trump Organization is on trial in Manhattan on criminal tax fraud charges. The defense, Insider’s Laura Italiano reported, relies on convincing the jury that Trump was just a really generous boss and didn’t keep too close an eye on his company’s financial affairs.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office also hasn’t ruled out the possibility that it would bring charges against Trump personally as part of its investigation into his company’s finances. And Trump is facing a $250 million lawsuit from the New York Attorney General as part of a parallel case alleging he inflated the company’s income to cheat banks and insurers. The attorney general’s office has already convinced a judge to put his company under an independent monitorship, held him in contempt, and forced him and other executives to sit for depositions.
It’s unclear when these cases might go to trial, or if they’ll settle beforehand.
In a Monday court filing, Trump’s lawyers have asked the judge overseeing E. Jean Carroll’s litigation against him, accusing him of sexual assault and defamation, to head to trial by May 2023.
Another lawsuit, brought by plaintiffs who allege the Trump Organization cheated them by pushing a scam multi-level marketing scheme, will likely head to trial in the fall of 2023 if it isn’t settled by then. In a Monday court filing, lawyers for the plaintiffs asked the judge for an October 2023 trial date, “before primary contests and other campaign-related events begin in earnest.”
“Plaintiffs have no desire to interfere with the upcoming campaign, and are mindful that, should the schedule in this case extend into 2024, Defendants likely will, as they have in the past, use the campaign as a basis to seek further delay,” the lawyers wrote.
Trump’s most severe legal problems are also the ones he will have the most difficulty getting rid of.
His biggest threats are from the Justice Department, which opened a criminal investigation into his handling of government records he took with him to Mar-a-Lago. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith, an experienced war crimes and political corruption prosecutor, as special counsel overseeing the probe.
Trump won an early victory by successfully convincing a federal judge he appointed in Florida to bring a “special master” in the case, briefly delaying the government’s ability to use documents it seized from his estate for its investigation. But his lawyers have been embarrassed by the circuit court in appeals related to the case, indicating his legal defenses will have a tough time as the investigation progresses.
Smith is also overseeing a separate criminal investigation into efforts to keep Trump in power despite losing the 2020 election. Trump faces a series of lawsuits from members of Congress as well as Capitol Police officers injured during the January 6 riot that seek to hold him responsible for the day’s chaos. While the House of Representatives’ January 6 panel is scheduled to wrap up before Republicans retake it in January, the legal cases have no end in sight.
Trump’s efforts to stay in power despite the will of American voters have also drawn scrutiny in Georgia. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been overseeing a thorough probe into his calls to state officials asking them to “find” votes in his favor and invalidate now-President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
Willis has been fighting court battles to force figures in Trump’s orbit to sit for depositions in her investigations and is said to consider bringing indictments as soon as December.
Read the original article on Business Insider
If you were too tuckered from the ‘itis to follow along in the latest developments in Kanye West’s presidential bid, you might have missed the rapper turned political hopeful’s series of (un)official campaign videos released on Thanksgiving Day.
Matthew, 28, would get all of his loans forgiven under the program, but he predicts the Supreme Court will overturn it.
The former judge and federal prosecutor pointed to Gov. Ron DeSantis' initiative to recruit police officers by providing $5,000 signing bonuses.
Trump recently hosted Kanye West at a controversial dinner at Mar-a-Lago along with white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
“So I help a seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black,” Trump wrote Saturday, offering “very much needed ‘advice.’”
Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) on Sunday said Congress does not need to pass “Democrat bills” when it comes to Ukraine funding, indicating that a GOP-led House would provide the country “only what they need” while advocating for accountability over spending on the war. Turner told ABC’s “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz that he personally told…
Former President Donald Trump distanced himself Friday from a pre-Thanksgiving dinner at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West,
Justice Amy Coney Barrett's Christian faith and alleged ties to the group People of Praise are again called into question before the Supreme Court is set to hear an LGBTQ-related case.
Sean McVay was spotted rubbing his jaw on the sideline after the hit.
The extended Senate campaign in Georgia between the Democratic incumbent, Raphael Warnock, and his Republican challenger, football legend Herschel Walker, has grown increasingly bitter as their Dec. 6 runoff nears. With Democrats already assured a Senate majority, it’s a striking contrast from two years ago, when the state's twin runoffs were mostly about which party would control the chamber in Washington. “Herschel Walker ain’t serious,” Warnock told supporters recently in central Georgia, saying that Walker “majors in lying” and fumbles the basics of public policy.
A 23-year-old Chicago woman with a concealed-carry permit shot a would-be carjacker in the head as he attempted to get in her car in Calumet Heights at 2 a.m. last Wednesday.
With the ongoing war with Ukraine, Russia's biggest tech company wants to move out of the country. Russia has recently targeted basic infrastructures in Ukraine through a wave of air strikes, causing severe damage in the country. Often referred to as "Russia's Google," Yandex is Russia's most prominent internet company, widely popular for its search browser and ride-hailing apps. Its Dutch-based parent company, Yandex N.V., now wants out of Russia because of the potential negative impact of the
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s daughter made a public appearance again, this time with missile scientists and more honorific titles as her father’s “most beloved” or “precious” child. The daughter, believed to be Kim’s second child named Ju Ae and about 9 or 10 years old, was first unveiled to the outside world last weekend in state media photos showing her observing the North’s intercontinental ballistic missile launch the previous day with her parents and other older officials. On Sunday, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency mentioned her for the second time, saying she and Kim took group photos with scientists, officials and others involved in what it called the test-launch of its Hwasong-17 ICBM.
“I think it’s a big challenge [and] another reason Republicans are looking in a different direction in 2024," Pence's former chief of staff Marc Short said.
As a recession approaches, more Americans are financially falling behind.
"Donald Trump decides that a good strategy would be to attack the prosecutor's spouse," Glenn Kirschner commented.
Whole Foods will stop selling Maine lobsters following environmental groups' concern over the fishing industry's effect on North Atlantic right whales.
ANDRI TAMBUNANA long-awaited Thanksgiving feast turned into an unimaginable nightmare for one New Mexico family after out-of-town relatives arrived to find the host “dismembered and disemboweled.”Family members of Karlan and Connie Denio are now left struggling to make sense of how the planned holiday ended with him under arrest for her murder.The day had seemed to be going exactly as planned while relatives made their way to the couple’s home in Albuquerque on Thursday afternoon, with Connie De
Nina Jankowicz, who briefly headed the Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board, is now registered as a foreign agent, according to documents.
The former president bought his luxury Boeing 757 private jet in 2011 and decked it out with gold-plated seatbelts and the Trump family crest.