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NYC heightens security measures as Trump’s surrender looms; authorities prepare to avoid Capitol riot repeat
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Reuters: New York plans for Trump surrender with barricades, courtroom closings: New York City police have thrown up metal barriers around Trump Tower and blocked roads near Manhattan Criminal Courthouse as they brace for potential protests ahead of Donald Trump’s expected surrender to prosecutors on Tuesday. The former president is due to be arraigned at the courthouse Tuesday afternoon, after his indictment in a grand jury probe over hush money paid to a porn star. He is the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges. Trump describes the probe as a political witch hunt, and top supporters, including Republican lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene, say they will go to New York on Tuesday to protest. The downtown courthouse, home to criminal and supreme courts, will shut down some courtrooms ahead of Trump’s expected appearance, a court official said.
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Washington Post: Trump departs Florida for New York, where he is set to be arraigned Tuesday: A defiant former president Donald Trump departed from Florida on Monday for New York, where he is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday in an investigation that has centered on hush-money payments to adult-film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election to conceal an alleged affair. Trump, the first sitting or former U.S. president to be indicted, flew out of West Palm Beach on his jet emblazoned with his last name around 12:45 p.m. Eastern. “WITCH HUNT, as our once great Country is going to HELL!” Trump said in a social media post shortly before taking off, invoking a familiar phrase he has used to deride multiple legal and legislative investigations into his conduct.Trump plans to spend only about 24 hours in the city that was once his home, arriving at 5th Avenue’s Trump Tower sometime in the afternoon. He has said he will surrender Tuesday morning and then appear in court to be arraigned before Justice Juan Merchan of the New York Supreme Court. Trump has said he will then return to Florida, where he plans to make public remarks from his Mar-a-Lago Club on Tuesday night.
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The Hill: Trump lawyer hopes surrender in Manhattan will be ‘painless and classy’: Attorney Joe Tacopina, who represents former President Trump, said on Sunday that he hopes Trump’s expected surrender to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office for arraignment this week will be “painless and classy.” “Hopefully this will be as painless and classy as possible for a situation like this, which I don’t even know really what brings us here, but that’s a different story,” Tacopina said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” A New York grand jury last week voted to indict the former president for his alleged role in organizing hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, becoming the first sitting or former U.S. president to face criminal charges. Aides to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) said Thursday that they’d reached out to Trump to coordinate his surrender, and he’ll reportedly appear in court on Tuesday for the charges against him to be read aloud.
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Washington Post: Here’s how other democracies have prosecuted political leaders: In a first for the United States, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced Thursday that Donald Trump has been indicted. No American president or former president has ever before been charged with a crime. In a Truth Social post Wednesday morning, Trump, who had been signaling that he anticipated his arrest, said: “This is what happens in Third World countries which, sadly the USA is rapidly becoming!” After news of his indictment broke Thursday, he wrote in a post: “THE USA IS NOW A THIRD WORLD NATION.” It is true that indictments of leaders or former leaders happen mostly in developing countries and authoritarian states, but where the rule of law is enforced, democracies, too, have gone down a road that Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), among others, has described as “un-American.” Here are some examples of democracies that have recently brought criminal charges against their leaders. These countries differ from ours in crucial ways, but aspects of their experience, experts say, hint at what may be in store for the United States.
The hits keep coming at Fox News: Judge determines it willfully lied about the 2020 Election, while allegations of a toxic and chaotic work environment make more headlines
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New York Times: Fox News Suffers Major Setback in Defamation Case: Fox News suffered a significant setback on Friday in its defense against a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit that claims it lied about voter fraud in the 2020 election. A judge in Delaware Superior Court said the case, brought by Dominion Voting Systems, was strong enough to conclude that Fox hosts and guests had repeatedly made false claims about Dominion machines and their supposed role in a fictitious plot to steal the election from President Donald J. Trump. “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding,” Judge Eric M. Davis wrote, demonstrates that it “is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”
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NBC: Former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg calls the network a ‘big corporate machine that destroys people’: Abby Grossberg got off to a flying start at Fox News after she joined the network in 2019 as a senior booking producer for Maria Bartiromo. “We clicked. We hit it off. And our ratings were skyrocketing,” Grossberg said. But over the next four years, as she tried and failed to get a promotion and then switched to working for Tucker Carlson, Grossberg says she ran up against a hyper misogynistic culture in which walls were plastered with photos of Nancy Pelosi in a plunging bathing suit and male staffers openly debated which female politicians they’d rather have sex with.
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CNN: Fox News banned Trump legal team from air in December 2020, new text message shows: Fox News swiftly banned then-President Donald Trump’s election-denying lawyers from appearing on the right-wing channel in December 2020 after being threatened with a defamation suit, a text message made public on Friday revealed. The message was made public as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ ongoing $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News. The case is likely to proceed to a trial in mid-April. Senior producer Abby Grossberg said in the text message to her boss, TV host Maria Bartiromo, that she had just received a call from Fox News executive David Clark who indicated the right-wing channel had made the decision to ban Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis from air.
In The States
WISCONSIN: Voters decide the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, impacting the future of redistricting and abortion.
- NPR: In a supreme court race like no other, Wisconsin’s political future is up for grabs: An election on Tuesday could change the political trajectory of Wisconsin, a perennial swing state, by flipping the ideological balance of the state Supreme Court for the first time in 15 years. The race comes at a critical time for Wisconsin, with a challenge to the state’s pre-Civil War abortion ban already working its way to the court and legal fights ahead of the next presidential election right around the corner. The stakes of the race go beyond a single issue. Should liberals win control of the court for the first time since 2008, they’re almost certain to hear a challenge to Wisconsin’s Republican-drawn redistricting maps, which have helped cement conservative priorities for more than a decade.
- Washington Post: Expensive court race will decide future of abortion in Wisconsin: Tuesday’s election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court — the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history — has turned into a caustic, ideological brawl that will determine whether liberals or conservatives control the branch of government that will soon decide the fate of the state’s abortion ban. The candidates, political parties and ideological groups have spent more than $30 million on the race, obliterating the record for a judicial election that was established two decades ago in Illinois. Officially nonpartisan, races for the Wisconsin Supreme Court lost their apolitical sheen long ago and the candidates this year are campaigning more like members of Congress than jurists. That’s particularly true for the liberal candidate, Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz, who has touted her support for access to abortion and decried the state’s election maps, which the court could take up, as “rigged.”
NEVADA: Governor introduces sweeping changes to state’s election process: mail-in voting and voter ID.
- KSNV: Lombardo introduces bill to roll back Nevada vote-by-mail, add ID requirements: Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo introduced a bill that would remove the state’s automatic vote-by-mail statutes and require proof of identity to vote, among other changes to elections, though Democratic lawmakers have indicated the measure is a non-starter. The Republican governor is backing Senate Bill 405, which was introduced to the legislature on Monday. The bill would repeal the measure passed in the last legislative session that requires mail-in ballots to be sent to all active registered voters in the state unless they opt out of receiving one. SB 405 would also require that people must provide proof of ID, residency or personal information to vote in person, and to write either the last four digits of their social security number or state-issued ID card number on a mail-in ballot. The Nevada DMV would be able to issue a voter ID card to those who cannot afford a state-issued ID.
TEXAS: Senate approves bill to cancel voters’ registration if they don’t vote for two consecutive federal elections.
- Dallas Morning News: Skipping elections could put Texas voters at risk of being purged from rolls under bill: Texans could be on a “suspense list” if they fail to vote in two consecutive federal elections under a controversial bill a Senate panel approved Thursday. Voter registrars would have to check whether Texans had moved if they skipped casting ballots in that time, according to the proposal. Currently, registrars don’t place someone on such a list, which can lead to registration being canceled, unless a voter registration certificate is returned in the mail. County officials mail the postcard-like document in January of odd-numbered years. Under Brenham GOP Sen. Lois Kolkhorst’s Senate Bill 260, the address-verification process instead would be triggered by a voter’s inactivity.
- KLTV: Sen. Halls’ bill eliminating countywide polls passes committee: The Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs passed a bill regarding countywide polls to the senate floor on Thursday. SB 990 was presented to the committee on Monday, where it was discussed and left pending until Thursday. The bill, written by Sen. Bob Hall (R-Edgewood), would eliminate countywide polling places, which are polls where county residents may vote regardless of precinct. This bill would restrict voting location to the voter’s precinct, rather than allowing them to vote in designated polls across the county. The bill passed the committee with a vote of eight ayes and two nays. It will be reported favorably to the full senate, and is left pending at this time.
What Experts Are Saying
Laurence Tribe, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School: “‘It’s the failure to indict Mr. Trump simply because he was once the president that would say we were well on the way to becoming a banana republic,’ said Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University legal scholar who taught Barack Obama and advised his presidential campaign and administration. ‘Those who fear that indicting a former president would say that U.S. democracy is in trouble have it exactly backwards and upside-down.’” The Washington Post
Timothy Snyder, historian at Yale University: “‘Living in a ‘Big Lie’ is being a fascist.’ ‘Saying that I have an alternative truth for you, an alternative reality where you can live, saying that politics is all about naming the enemy and taking revenge, that is basically a fascist reality that we’re talking about and I think one of the things that people who care about democracy need to be able to do is to remember some of the legacies of the 20th century.’” MSNBC transcript excerpts via Newsweek
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor at New York University: “[Italian leader Benito Mussolini is] extremely important for understanding today because he was a prime minister of a democracy for three years. Then he declared dictatorship because he needed to escape an investigation that was for corruption and murder that was gonna bring him down—also very relevant today. So there are evolutions in these things. What January 6 did was radicalize the party. Today, they’re consumed with a cover-up of their crimes; everything they’re doing is meant to cover up their crimes. It also showed them the possibilities of violence. The last point I want to make here is when a party is morphing into a party that’s going to support autocracy, you can look at who is leaving the party or forced to leave and who’s coming in. You have Oath Keepers and Proud Boys; you have George Santos; you have, again, people who participated in January 6 who are being encouraged to run for office.” The New Republic
Daniel Bessner, a professor at the University of Washington: “I don’t think you need the identification of fascists to say that democracy is in trouble. More importantly, it actually occludes what are profoundly American traditions: Militaristic racism, xenophobia, and violent obsession with incarcerating minorities were not fascist inventions. You don’t actually need the foreign term “fascist” to understand what happened in the U.S. or its history. So for both analytical and political reasons, I don’t think it’s especially useful.” The New Republic
Headlines
The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections
Rolling Stone: MAGA Extremists Can’t Decide Why They Hate the Trump Indictment
Slate: What Trump Hopes Will Happen in New York on Tuesday
Intelligencer: Trump Supporters in Manhattan Are Outnumbered by Reporters
Trump Investigations
New York Times: Trump Flourishes in the Glare of His Indictment
Washington Post: What to know about the Trump-E. Jean Carroll case set for an April trial
CNN: Inside the long and winding road to Trump’s historic indictment
The Hill: Bragg warns GOP effort to oversee ongoing Trump case is ‘dangerous usurpation’
Forbes: More Trump Legal Trouble: Feds Reportedly Find New Evidence In Mar-A-Lago Case As Trump Faces N.Y. Charges
January 6 And The 2020 Election
WBUR Boston: Ex-Boston officer charged with assaulting cop in Jan. 6 riot
New York Times: Inside the F.B.I.’s Jan. 6 Investigation of the Proud Boys
Forbes: ‘QAnon Shaman’ Jacob Chansley Released Early From Prison After Jan. 6 Conviction
Washington Post: FBI informant testifies at Proud Boys sedition trial — for the defense
ABC: Washington state man pleads guilty in Jan. 6 insurrection
Opinion
Washington Post: Trump ceded the moral high ground on presidential indictments long ago
The Hill: After Trump indictment we need leaders to stand up for America: Where is Gerald Ford when we need him?
Los Angeles Times: Trump’s indictment is a historic first. Here’s why more are likely to follow
The Hill: Will Republicans ever say ‘Enough!’ to Trump’s violent language?
In the States
Hobbs News-Sun: Gov. Lujan Grisham signs New Mexico Voting Rights Act into law
Highland County Press: Voting rights orgs demand funding for photo ID education efforts
Washington Post: Youngkin’s actions put the brakes on voting rights for former felons
