Justice ‘Concerned’ That Bragg’s ‘Flimsy’ Case Could Undermine More Serious Investigations of Trump

Senior officials with the Department of Justice are reportedly “concerned” that the Manhattan prosecutor’s indictment of President Trump is flimsy and will undermine more legally potent probes of the former president regarding the events of January 6, 2021, and Georgia electoral fraud.According to reporting from the New York Times, officials at the justice department are worried that the charges being leveled against Mr. Trump in Manhattan will be conflated in the public’s mind with the January 6 and Georgia probes, making it harder for prosecutors in those investigations to prove their case.“Everything gets merged together, so people sometimes lose the nuance that these are separate investigations conducted by different entities,” a former spokesman for Attorney General Merrick Garland, Anthony Coley, told the Times.Many legal experts who oppose and support Mr. Trump agree that District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case is a relatively weak one, a belief informed by the fact that his predecessor as Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, did not to charge Mr. Trump during his tenure, and that Mr. Bragg initially declined to prosecute the former president for financial fraud, leading to the resignations of two of his top prosecutors.Spectators have speculated that the charges in Manhattan will be “novel” and “flimsy,” as one veteran attorney, James Bopp Jr., told the Sun.While there’s no way to know for sure until the charges and evidence are made public, something that is expected imminently, the case could end up helping Mr. Trump in the court of public opinion if these expectations prove true.Mr. Trump faces two investigations that could be more serious than the charges in Manhattan, one in Georgia related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and one concerning the January 6 attack on the Capitol.In Georgia, the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, could make a decision on charges in the coming months, following an investigation in which a special grand jury heard from more than 75 witnesses, including some of Mr. Trump’s closest advisors.Ms. Willis has said that the investigation uncovered evidence that could support charges for “solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration.”At Washington, D.C., Mr. Trump is facing an investigation led by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was tasked with looking into Mr. Trump’s role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol and the trove of documents found at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago following Mr. Trump’s campaign announcement in November.In the January 6 investigation, Mr. Smith scored a big win earlier this week in compelling Vice President Pence to testify on the events leading up to January 6.There is already evidence that Republicans are moving to conflate the investigations. Senator Graham, on the verge of tears, told Fox News on Thursday that “they’re trying to take cases that nobody else would take.”“They’re trying to smear the guy,” Mr. Graham said. “This is literally legal voodoo.”Whether more Republicans begin to conflate the investigations will become clear in the coming days. However, many observers are already pitching the indictment as an existential threat to the country.“This is probably, I would say, the most threatening thing to our republic since South Carolina fired shots at Fort Sumter at the start of the Civil War,” a former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, told Fox News Thursday.Blagojevich’s term as a Democrat governor was cut short in 2009 when he was impeached, removed from office, convicted, and incarcerated for eight years on federal corruption charges. Despite reports of their frustration with the case in Manhattan, officials at the justice department and the White House have remained silent on the indictment, with President Biden declining to give comment on the topic yesterday.Mr. Trump, for his part, has consistently characterized the investigations into him and his organization as a “witch hunt” and has already begun to blur the lines between investigations.“Prosecutorial misconduct is their new tool,” Mr. Trump said at his first campaign rally, at Waco, Texas. “We’ve had it, but we’ve never had it like this. We must stop them and we must not allow them to go through another election where they have yet another tool in their tool kit.”

Justice ‘Concerned’ That Bragg’s ‘Flimsy’ Case Could Undermine More Serious Investigations of Trump

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