Trump’s legal woes, ‘acquitted to indicted’ Washington - Former President Donald Trump faces an array of legal challenges across the United States, ranging from hush money payments during his 2016 campaign to attempts by him and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

As much of the attention focuses on the courthouse in lower Manhattan, investigations from Atlanta to Washington continue to press forward as he seeks to reclaim the presidency.

The vulnerability Trump faces in Washington alone has become clear over the past month. Judges in a succession of sealed rulings have turned aside the Trump team’s efforts to block grand jury testimony from witnesses who were, or still are, close to him and who could conceivably offer direct insight into key events.

The rulings directing advisers and aides to testify don’t suggest that the Justice Department is close to bringing criminal charges, nor do they guarantee that prosecutors can secure testimony valuable to a potential prosecution. But they’re nonetheless a key, closed-door win for the government as it investigates whether classified documents were criminally mishandled at Trump’s Florida home and the possible obstruction of that probe, as well as efforts by Trump and his allies to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“I do think when you’re talking about an attempted insurrection and the kinds of issues that we’re talking about there, there’s going to be a lot of arguments on DOJ’s side” to get the testimony, said Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor and a George Washington University law professor.

Meanwhile, the district attorney in Atlanta is continuing to investigate attempts by Trump and his allies to undo his election loss in Georgia. A special grand jury in February said it believed “one or more witnesses” committed perjury and urged local prosecutors to bring charges.

Trump in that investigation was protected by the power of his office and by Justice Department legal opinions that say a sitting president cannot be indicted. No longer president, Trump has lost that shield, raising the stakes of his criminal exposure.

And as prosecutors have sought to question people close to him — whether to better understand Trump’s state of mind and possible defenses, or to gather potentially damaging testimony — Trump’s lawyers have repeatedly objected, often in vain.

Perhaps the most vivid example came last month when the then-chief judge of the D.C. federal court ordered that Trump’s lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, had to give more grand jury testimony in the Mar-a-Lago investigation. He had invoked attorney-client privilege in an earlier appearance before the grand jury in declining to answer more questions, but prosecutors pressed for more testimony.

They cited what’s known as the crime-fraud exception to attorney client privilege, which allows prosecutors to compel testimony from a lawyer if they can convince a judge that a client was using legal services in furtherance of a crime. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled that Corcoran had to return before the grand jury, and he was in court a week later.

Another instance came last week when a different federal judge, James Boasberg, ruled that former Vice President Mike Pence had to give some testimony in a Justice Department special counsel probe into efforts to undo the election.

The ability of Justice Department prosecutors in multiple instances to convince judges that there’s a basis to secure the testimony is significant to the extent that it shows that “there’s a there there” with respect to the investigations, Eliason said.

But he cautioned from reading too much into it, given that the threshold for prevailing in a fight over executive privilege or attorney-client is lower than the burden needed to win a criminal case at trial.

“It’s a far cry from being able to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in a contested trial,” Eliason said. “It would be quite a leap to go from there and be able to say that they’ve got a criminal case locked up.”
-AP