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The long arm of the law is closing in on Donald Trump

Published on 68 Comments on The long arm of the law is closing in on Donald Trump

I continue to believe that Donald Trump will get away with everything, but there's no question that his legal position has deteriorated considerably over the past week or so. Here's a review of recent headlines. Enjoy.

68 thoughts on “The long arm of the law is closing in on Donald Trump”

  1. ronp

    You would think the dude and his kids pleading the 5th in the civil trial should make him suffer in the criminal trials, but this is the USA and Fox News has power.

    2. TheMelancholyDonkey

      It's the other way around. Under New York law, taking the 5th can hurt you in your civil trial, but the US Constitution means that it cannot be used against you in a criminal trial.

    3. MindGame

      From what I'm reading, pleading the 5th in civil trials -- in contrast to criminal trials -- can be interpreted as "adverse inference" that confirms the crimes alleged.

      2. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

        As O.D.B. said, "If you wanna die you gotta drink my sperms... Only other way to die is to eat a can of worms!"

    2. bebopman

      He may have an accident at some point. Uh, check that. I mean an “accident.” …. Luckily for him, Putin and his oligarchs are distracted at the moment.

  3. arghasnarg

    Looks like he's going to go through some things.

    I'll be happy if folks (and by 'folks', I mean our meth-addled both-sidesing broken-ass excuse for news orgs) keep a spotlight on his finances.

  6. cld

    Inevitably the conspiracy to create false electors is going fall back on him, bringing subpoenas for him to testify.

    The conspiracy to organize the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers will end with someone in the White House insisting he was only following orders. Orders from who? Well, there's only one guy . . .

    The grift surrounding his DC hotel will inevitably find it's way into court.

    Inevitably some grift involving foreign donations or gifts will turn up, I'm only surprised it hasn't yet.

    And the thousand little swindles the Trump family nickel and dime their way through every single day have to add up to something a prosecutor will see as a pattern he can prove when all the rest of this is documented. At some point he'll die, but the Trump's will be like a pinata that keeps on bursting.

    So, I'm feeling a little more optimistic than Kevin, though it will probably take years.

    1. Jasper_in_Boston

      Per MSNBC, the accounting firm scandal makes the hotel situation very risky for Trump. That deal was between Trump and the US government. But the documents he submitted to secure it are now in question. So very possibly he secured that property via fraud. House Dems are pushing the GSA (or GAO, or whoever's in charge) to look into it, and possibly cancel the lease. Which Trump is now trying to sell. And the loan Trump used to originally purchase the lease is likewise looking dicey: apparently it could be called in for similar reasons (was secured via the use of bullshit financial statements).

      Trump is elevating the implosion of a political and business career to performance art.

      1. HokieAnnie

        The lease agreement is with the GSA who owns the historic old Post Office building, the GSA is the government's landlord for the most part and federal entities lease space from them. THE GAO could be the agency to rule that the GSA totally messed up awarding the lease to him in the first place.

  7. randomworker

    There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

    —Frank Wilhoit

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      Careful! Posting that too many times at Political Animal got Nancy Le Tourneau chucked overboard by those chucklefucks un Dupont Circle.

    2. frankwilhoit

      Thank you for the cite, but if Trump skates, it will not be as a member of a (tacitly) protected group; it will be for the current equivalent of the specious, cowardly, and corrosive rationale that Ford used to justify the Nixon pardon.

      This is why you can't ever let anyone off the hook, because once you start, you are trapped: you have to go on, forever, or until civilization devolves to the point where it doesn't matter any more. (In the immortal words of Ray Magliozzi, "What time is it now?")

  9. camusvsartre

    If Kevin's point is that Trump will never end up in jail, unfortunately that is probably true. I do think that the attacks on his financial holdings combined with the New York cases aimed at showing that his organization engaged in fraud has a good chance of succeeding. He might well be on the verge of bankrupcy, that combined with the report out of the House Jan 6th committee ought to be enough to take him down. In a just world we could get more but we might have to settle for this.

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      The lawsuits against the Trump Organization succeeding should be the point where the GQP can wash their hands of El Jefe, depersoning him like Bush-43 after Obama's First Inaugural, & more than that branding El Jefe as an unrepentant JewYorkCity liberal hedonist cat's paw of Bill Climpton sent to discredit the Republican Party, but after how much they have gone to the mat for him since the January 6th, 2021, March on Washington & the Second Impeachment, how believable will the GQP diavowing El Jefe be? Will even the ur-lamestreamers at the Sulzberger Advertiser & Tiger Meat DC* be fatuous enough to sell the GQP turning a new leaf?

      *POLITICO.

        1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

          I mean, he donated to her first US Senate campaign & she & Bill attended the Knauss-Trump nuptials, but we already knew that. More importantly, the GQP already knew that, including the "Hillary Clinton killed Vince Foster" AM radio listening crowd that gravitated to El Jefe early on, & it didn't matter.

          I think it would take tying El Jefe's botched assassination of the Iranian general to Hillary -- "another Benghazi!" -- or other foreign policy failure to prove El Jefe was irredeemably one in the same as That Woman. Would also prove Sarandon right. (Green-Brown Coalition unlocked?)

    2. Mitch Guthman

      It’s hard to know, partly because his situation is so opaque. But also because the lenders have no real desire to call his loans. With DB, there’s undoubtedly pressure from the German government to avoid an embarrassing situation and, apparently, the bank may not be able to call his loans even if he defaults because what seems to be massive irregularities (even illegalities) in the granting of the loans.

      The other lenders probably won’t want to be in the middle of a MAGA firestorm or suffer reprisals from Republicans in Congress and probably from Trump loyalists in the executive branch whom Biden has failed to purge.

      Similarly, even though the democrats in congress have written a letter to the GSA, there’s strong institutional pressures to let Trump seek the property, make his profit, and then let the questions about how he got the lease and was able to keep it during his presidency just fade away.

  10. standyck

    Trump is going to need some smart lawyers working for him. The problem is, if I'm a smart lawyer, why would I risk my career working for Trump? Especially if his creditors start bailing.

    2. J. Frank Parnell

      Trump is well known as a dead beat that doesn't pay his bills. One of the reasons he left New York is that no one would work for him. At this point a "smart Trump lawyer" is an oxymoron.

    3. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      Maybe he can be his own attorney, like Stewart Rhoades.

      Remember: while El Jefe isn't a lawyer, he is smart. Good genes. His uncle taught physics at Harvard.

  11. akapneogy

    As Trump says, all this is a witch hunt. Only Trump could have given 'witch hunt' a good name. Also, all this would be moot if Trump were still president. Powerful incentive for inciting the insurrection.

  12. Citizen Lehew

    All jokes aside, what’s up with this guy? There are literally 100 different scandals swirling around him that would at minimum destroy anyone else’s career, and in many cases land them in jail. But he’s just untouchable.

    I’m not remotely religious, but seriously, is this dude the Antichrist? He’s like the Prince of Lies, cloaked in a Satanic shield from all accountability, lording over his demonic army all sporting their MAGA cap marks of the beast. Any chance we could run John Constantine in 2024?

  13. Jasper_in_Boston

    Maybe he'll get nervous and flee the country to escape arrest, if it comes to it. I wouldn't put it past him to run for the presidency again while battling criminal charges (and I wouldn't put it past the GOP to nominate him). Heck, nothing in the constitution prevents him from running for the White House even if he's in actual prison.

    But I doubt even the GOP would nominate someone who's actually fled the USA for a gilded cage in Russia or Saudi Arabia.

    2. mrobertson21

      The problem remains that he becomes *more* electable with each legal problem he encounters. Remember, this is a President that admitted on national tv (!) to leveraging military aid in exchange for a positive Yelp review from Zelensky. And that wasn’t even the biggest scandal of that year!

    1. Mitch Guthman

      It looks like the IRS has been giving Trump a free ride for decades. His returns have supposedly been under audit for decades and it wouldn’t surprise me if this was actually true. Based on what’s been coming out from the NYT and these different investigations, it’s almost certain that his tax returns are a cesspool of lies and fraud. But nobody wants to be on the hook for affirmatively giving Trump a pass, just as nobody was to be responsible for igniting a career ending MAGA firestorm.

      And, as is probably the case with Trump’s lenders, previous timidity has developed over time into outright complicity. If you remember from the 2016 election, it’s very likely that Trump’s current fortune is built on a combination of massive money laundering and the biggest tax fraud in history. Both of which the IRS gave gave him a pass even though the fraud should’ve been easily caught (or, worse, he has been able to walk away from massive tax fraud because someone in the IRS sold him a get out of jail free card). Either way, it seems likely that the IRS has no desire to open the can of worms, so they’re not going to ever go after him.

      1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

        Can't lockup a confidential FBI informant for tax fraud. We lose out on his access to the bigger fish if that happens.

      2. KenSchulz

        Even more depressing, the fraud reportedly began with Fred overpaying Donald’s company for toilet paper, before the latter acquired a cult following. Hardly any doubt that many other tax-cheat multimillionaires get similar kid-glove treatment.

        1. Mitch Guthman

          The question suggests its own answer. I think it’s extremely unlikely that the IRS would go after Donald Trump because it would mean airing its own dirty laundry. No matter how or when it started, at this point I think the IRS is as interested in keeping anything bad in Trump’s tax returns hidden as he is.

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      The Old South's Real King, dying on the Throne of Elvis.

      Maralago as the new Graceland actually seems right.

  18. J. Frank Parnell

    Constant repetition worked against Hillary and her buttery emails; it just might work against Trump where we have the advantage that the crimes are real.

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      15 boxes of classified material at Maralago... but at least they were analog, not digital.

      El Jefe Maximo did nothing wrong in his mishandling of government documents... & it was nothing like Shrillary's wanton disregard for information security with her homebrew server. (Which sounds like the methlab of IT.)

      1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

        & those who do have the stomach to be Jefesco, like Jim Trafficant, Fast Willie Jefferson, John Edwards, & Anthony Weiner, are drummed out of the party lamestream, & possibly jailed.

  19. eannie

    The only good all this will do is make him less and less appealing to the Republican and independent factions…by 2023 his brand will be unpopular. I don’t think he runs again. Otherwise..he’ll never get knicked for anything. Waste of time reporting on it every minute of the day.

    1. KenSchulz

      His brand is already unpopular - he lost the popular vote in 2016 by over two million, and lost by over seven million in 2020. I don’t see anything happening to reverse that trend. He’s got a core of rabid support, which GOP Covidiocy is differentially killing off.

  20. MindGame

    If he is allowed to get away with it all, it's only a matter of time until he (or someone more intelligent and competent) does it again.

  21. skeptonomist

    Cult figures have a way of falling out of popularity, although there may always be a hard core of followers. A lot of people follow along just because other people are doing it, not because they really admire the leader or agree with everything he does. Unfortunately Trump could be replaced by a different cult leader who would likely be more competent in getting right-wing things done.

    1. SecondLook

      Unfortunately Trump could be replaced by a different cult leader who would likely be more competent in getting right-wing things done.

      Or less competent. Peron and Evita in Argentina is an example of a political cult whose successors were far less capable.
      There is an old joke among historians about political dynasties - the first generation is talented, the second is mediocre, the third drools.

      Now founding a new political party on the ashes of the old? Well, that is how the Republican party came into being during the 1850's.
      The Democratic Party has bee evolutionary, morphing over time into being quite exigently different.

      1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

        I have heard the same of inherited wealth.

        Just look at the Koch family, from Fred, Sr., to David, Charles, & William, to William's son.

  22. Vog46

    I think the headline I saw today said it best: Trump is going to die from a thousand legal/financial cuts.

    I think Mitch has it right. Trump[ will NOT go to jail for what he has done. However if conspiracy is proven that may change things a bit. BUT because of his presidency he will have wide latitude to cop a plea deal. DB will NOT call in his loans but won't let him off the hook either. His "saving grace" is that his real estate holdings have increased in value (Not as high as he states they are) so he SHOULD be able to sell off the bulk of them to pay creditors.
    His KIDS on the other hand may all end up in jail. They will get out AFTER Trump senior sells everything to pay off his debts. Then he will die and the kids will be relegated to extreme grifting (Unless the Kushners bail them out) when they get out of jail.
    Personally? I think Trump is done as a business man. He will attempt to help the Saudis start a PGA tour over there but it just won't be enough income for him. If he stays there he will get assassinated over there.
    But when it comes to the charges? The tax evasion, the money laundering all can be squared away by being former president. The conspiracy to commit those crimes might be something different and if they get RICO charges included? That would be worse case for him
    But no matter what he has wide leeway.
    His fall from grace will be very painful for his supporters to watch, or even believe

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