I feel Prettyman, oh so Prettyman
I'm enjoying some time with family, so it's a bit of an abbreviated newsletter this week. There's news from Michigan and Wisconsin down below. And… a BIT of indictment news from Washington. Seriously, a former president hearing charges read for using multiple conspiracies to attempt to overturn the 2020 election could be the first chapter of the most important trial in modern history. After long days of tracking events, I had a chat with VICE News' Greg Walters, who was at yesterday's arraignment of Donald Trump at the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse in DC. We talked about where we go from here with all the charges and expected charges.
(BTW, Greg and I joined VICE's Twitch stream yesterday to talk about the latest charges. Check it out!)
Hey man, it's been a busy day. Is this a good time?
Sure, as long as you don't mind that I'm chopping eggplant while we talk. I've barely eaten all day.
Absolutely, chop! So, I saw you writing on Twitter that Donald Trump was rather slouchy in this latest appearance.
Yeah, he seems to be getting increasingly slouchy. This is just not Trump's happy place. He has a different persona during his arraignments than he does in the rest of his Trumpy life. We've been watching this guy since 2015 and his public persona is extremely well known. But he's not like that in these arraignments. He's slouchy, he's folding his hands intensely in a sort of white knuckle death grip. He's looking around the room, he's monosyllabic, he doesn't know whether to stand up or sit down when he speaks.
He's not in his golden place.
That's a good way to put it. He's just not in his calm mind, if he has one.
I saw that a bunch of DC District judges watched from the back row of the courtroom.
Yeah we spotted Chief Judge Boasberg in the back.
And Judge Amy Berman Jackson was there, and Judge Randy Moss too. Also several police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 came out. It was clearly a big day at the office!
Jack Smith was there, of course. Also, this is interesting: Evan Corcoran, the lawyer who is a prominent witness and was forced to answer questions in the grand jury investigation of the Mar-a-Lago, appeared with Trump's entourage. All this after Trump tried to bamboozle him about giving back classified documents! It's hard to say what's going through Corcoran's mind, but he seems to still be showing up to the indictments as a member of Team Trump in some kind of good standing.
Everyone's been looking at the six co-conspirators, but the one name that's just glaringly absent from the indictment, and could be conspicuously absent in Fulton County in a couple weeks, is Mark Meadows. He's the guy you're very loudly not hearing about.
That's right. That is fueling a lot of speculation that Mark Meadows may have flipped, which is a big deal, because it's gonna be a big deal in Georgia. It's unlikely that he would have flipped in one of these cases and not the other.
He was a central player in Trump's attempts to reverse his electoral defeat in November, December, January 2020-21. And yet he was nowhere in the indictment. It's not for sure, but we're expecting in Atlanta for Fani Willis to plausibly cast a wider net and indict some of these same people who feature as unindicted co-conspirators in the Jack Smith case. If that happens, and if Meadows is not charged, that's something close to confirmation that he is either cooperating or that the prosecutors feel he is a very likely valuable cooperator.
Yeah, if, say Giuliani, Eastman, Chesebro, Trump, and a cast of fake electors in Georgia get charged, and Mark Meadows doesn't…
It just doesn't seem like Meadows would be able to keep dancing through the raindrops without getting wet here. It would tell us a lot.
You were pointing me earlier today toward this statement from the Sheriff of Fulton County, who said Trump gets no special treatment whatsoever in Fulton County if he's arrested and booked there. And the procedures for criminal defendants in Fulton County can be pretty stark.
I saw Sheriff Patrick Labat at an event during the midterms and he struck me as the kind of guy who's unlikely to be restrained and care very much about the visuals of an arraignment. That matters because he's the person in charge of the booking and, like, saying that we're going to see a mug shot this next time.
And criminal defendants in Fulton County are processed at 901 Rice St, which is a notorious jailhouse scene.
Yeah, you gotta wonder if the local authorities are gonna want to bring attention to 901 Rice. It's a vexed criminal complex, which I've been to. It just gets a lot of press for being a very terrible place where lots of people wait for a long time before even being charged with crime, because there's such a big backup in cases. Trump's lawyers point out the big backlog in local cases while the DA is going after the former president. So I can see why the authorities might not want to go there.
Speaking of big backlogs, they're running out of slots to schedule all the criminal and civil trials Trump is facing, if they're going to happen before the election. Did you see that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg said on WNYC that he'd be open to delaying the Stormy Daniels payoff trial if someone else, like in DC, Atlanta, or Florida needs to go first?
Yeah, and he did point out that that's technically up to the judge to schedule cases. But Bragg could play a role in objecting or helping along a request to delay. But he made it clear that he wasn't going to fight that. And that's important, in part because one of the really key points about this hearing today, and the trial, is whether it can proceed to a verdict before the election.
This was a big part of the dynamic for the pre-arraignment days for Walt Nauta in the Mar-a-Lago case. And did you see that the Special Counsel has made a motion saying Stanley Woodward has a conflict of interest in representing both Nauta and Trump? They're requesting a hearing on it, and I've been wondering for a long time how a lawyer can rep both Donald Trump and Walt Nauta when those two clients' best interests clearly have to diverge.
Right. It makes me wonder, first of all, whether Trump and Nauta might have been baiting the DOJ into taking this off ramp to have this argument, which, again, could burn time. But also, it's a sign that DOJ is still hoping Nauta will flip. Because one of the best reasons to switch lawyers for two different defendants is to try to get one of them to flip on the other.
Hey, Woodward represented Cassidy Hutchinson before she got rid of him and talked to the Jan. 6 committee (and the Special Counsel). And he also represented Yuscil Taveras, Employee #4 in the Mar-a-Lago case, until he switched lawyers and decided to tell the truth about being ordered to erase surveillance servers!
Another plausible way to look at this case, if you are a defendant, is that your best way forward is to stay in Trump's good graces because the case against you is so strong, you're toast no matter what. And what you really want is a guy in the White House with the pardon power, and he still likes you, because you stood strong.
If either of these cases does get pushed out past the election, maybe all the sudden it becomes easier to flip some of the co-defendants who have been holding out to see if Trump wins. If he loses, that could be sort of a domino effect. Again, pure speculation on my side, but something to watch.
Alright man, enjoy the eggplant stir fry.
It's going to be way too garlicky. I have to burn the taste of all this justice out of my mouth.
We're at seven-eight charges and counting for Trump. Sign your friends up for Breaking the Vote!
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