Donald Trump is under investigation. Special counsel Jack Smith is investigating both Trump’s efforts to hide classified documents in his Florida resort and his actions in relation to the Jan. 6 insurrection. Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has impaneled a grand jury to hear evidence about Trump paying hush money to adult film actor Stormy Daniels. Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis just finished thanking a special grand jury after it wrapped up listening to testimony concerning Trump’s lies and efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Finally, New York state attorney general Letitia James is continuing a tax fraud inquiry that could result in Trump, and all his trio of little Trumplings—Junior, Eric, and Ivanka—from ever running a business in New York again. Out of all these investigations, James might seem like the most minor threat to Trump. However, the case is taking on an outsized importance, not because of what James is doing during this civil case, but because of what Trump’s legal team is doing.
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As Daily Beast reports, Trump’s attorneys are taking this opportunity to subpoena a lot of people. A lot of people. Many of those people have no connection to the case in New York. These people aren’t being brought in to defend Trump, or to ask them anything connected to the case James is building. They’re being brought in to ask them about “information about other governmental investigations into the Trump Organization in addition to information about the conduct of the OAG investigation.”
Trump is using the New York state case as a tool to pry into all the cases against him.
According to the Daily Beast, these subpoenas are coming to the state court under seal. That makes it hard to determine the names of those who have been subpoenaed or even the number of such requests from Trump’s team. The greatest visibility comes from James and her team fighting many of these subpoenas as “utterly irrelevant” to the case at hand. The AG’s office is accusing Trump’s legal team of “an improper attempt to seek information on separate criminal and regulatory investigations that is not relevant to this proceeding.”
Trump’s team is doing this in New York mostly because this case is simply ahead of the curve. They won’t get the chance to do discovery related to the criminal cases until actual indictments land at Mar-a-Lago. (Dear process servers: Give all paperwork to a woman in a fancy dress, send her into Mar-a-Lago, sit back, and let Trump come to her.)
Trump’s moves are being called a “fishing expedition” and even a “witch hunt.” Any way you spin it, nothing says terrified better than calling in every name you can think of with hopes of asking them, “What has anyone been asking you about me?”
The demands in the subpoenas are sweeping, almost to the point of paranoia.
It’s not paranoia if everyone is about to indict you. And we can only hope that everyone is about to indict him.
In the meantime, hopefully, the judge in the New York case will do something to keep Trump from using that case as a crowbar to pry open ongoing investigations.
Judd Legum is the founder and author of Popular Information, an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism. Judd joins Markos and Kerry to talk about the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News and the recent revelations of behind-the-scenes deceit practiced by everyone from on-air host Tucker Carlson, to the owner of it all, Rupert Murdoch.