By Kenneth Tiven in Washington DC
This has been a week when legal problems related to losing the election are piling up for former US President Donald Trump, who made his unhappiness clear in an Arizona rally.
Meanwhile, Republicans in the US Senate prevented a vote on a bill that would end much of the voter suppression efforts they support at the state level, which is where elections are conducted in the USA. The defeat was never doubted but Democrats wanted to make their case with hours of raw and emotional arguments about civil rights and how elections are conducted.
The US Supreme Court rejected Trump’s request to withhold 800 pages of his papers regarding January 6 materials sought by the House committee investigating the Capitol insurrection.
In the much discussed matter of real estate fraud, the Attorney General of New York, Letitia James, said on Monday her investigation of Donald Trump’s business affairs, a civil lawsuit, would continue “undeterred”, despite Trump suing to stop it on grounds of political bias, “because no one is above the law, not even someone with the name Trump”.
Court papers filed this week are the most detailed account of how Trump exaggerated the value of assets to get favourable loan terms, or misstated what land was worth to slash its tax burden.
Incidentally, Ivanka Trump, his daughter, has a problem because the investigation had uncovered incriminating information:
“Until January 2017, Ms. Trump was a primary contact for the Trump Organization’s largest lender, Deutsche Bank. In connection with this work, Ms. Trump caused misleading financial statements to be submitted to Deutsche Bank and the federal government.”
The House of Representatives investigating committee issued subpoenas for Rudy Giuliani and several other lawyers who did most of the public complaining about election fraud. They are asked to“to turn over documents by Feb. 1, and to appear for depositions on Feb. 8. Last week it subpoenaed social media giants Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter. It also asked House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to come over for a chat and he told them to pound sand. The others have not indicated their response.
The Supreme Court order said no to lawyers for Trump who wanted the justices to put on hold on a unanimous ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. That ruling rejected his assertions of executive privilege and his request to keep secret roughly 800 pages of his papers. President Biden determined the subpoenaed material could be released to the select committee investigating the attack.
Every lower court judge that has heard the issue agreed that the committee had a right to the records, and that Biden, as the sitting president, was the proper person to judge whether they are protected by executive privilege.
The Committee’s lawyer said, “The Select Committee is investigating a deadly assault on the United States Capitol, the Speaker of the House, the Vice President, and both Chambers of Congress, and a dangerous interruption of Congress’s constitutional duty and the peaceful transfer of power. ” House General Counsel Douglas N. Letter added,“Delay would inflict a serious injury on the Select Committee and the public by interfering with this mandate.”
Biden Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar reminded the court it should not rule for Trump because both the president and Congress have determined the need for the information to be released.
“The Constitution vests the Executive power in the incumbent President, who is best positioned to make those assessments. And President Biden has determined that an assertion of executive privilege over the specific records at issue here is not in the interests of the Nation.”
Not a good week for Trump, who used a rally in Arizona to call all of this a witch-hunt. He took a few minutes to accuse New York State of discriminating against white people regarding Covid treatment: “If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine or if you’re white you don’t get therapeutics … In NY state, if you’re white, you go to the back of the line if you want help.”
This was totally unexpected as no one can find any reference anywhere regarding this. Is it a coincidence that the NY Attorney General James is an African-American woman?
Trump called the violent insurrectionists arrested for storming the Capital “political prisoners.” About 200, of course, have pleaded guilty to crimes committed during the attack. Even more bizarre, Trump bragged about the size of the violent mob during the insurrection. “They talk about the people that walked down to the Capitol. They don’t talk about the size of that crowd,” he said. “I believe it was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken before, and they were there to protest the election.”
Jennifer Rubin, a Washington Post columnist, wrote, ”No reasonable person could hear this and not conclude he is unhinged. And he has been sounding like this for years.” Yet the media largely covered the rally as run-of-the-mill politics.