ВИБОРЧА ГАЗЕТА

Trump Is Indicted — Now What?

The Manhattan district attorney’s indictment of Donald Trump on 34 felony charges and the prospect of more charges to come have injected more uncertainty into the November 2024 race for the White House.

Trump, who has declared himself a candidate for next year’s Republican presidential nomination, was formally charged this week with falsifying New York business records to conceal his role in paying hush money to an adult film actress before the 2016 election. He is also facing potential charges in at least three other cases.

Never before in American history have criminal charges been brought against a former president, much less one who is attempting another run. According to the most recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, even with the indictment Trump is leading the Republican primary field.

Should Trump become the nominee, he will likely face President Joe Biden. Biden won over Trump in 2020.

In the short term, Trump may be benefiting from the controversy. One of the first polls done after the indictment showed Trump surging to his largest-ever lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, 57% to 31% among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. As recently as February, DeSantis was narrowly ahead of Trump by 45% to 41%.

Trump is also leveraging his grievance over the case to rake in funds, $12 million in just one week since the indictment’s announcement, according to his campaign.

Watch related video by Mike O’Sullivan:

However, pollsters say the indictment is unlikely to sway the crucial independent voters that Trump will need in the general election.

“All the polling basically shows [is] a very divided America. You have one America that is very much in favor of the indictment, believes that Trump has been lawless, has not followed the rules,” said Clifford Young, president for U.S. public affairs at Ipsos. “On the flip side, there’s another America, red America, Republican America, that thinks it’s completely, utterly, politically motivated.”

Impact on Republican primary

Since the indictment, Trump has widened his lead over other Republican contenders. According to the Reuters/Ipsos poll, 48% of self-described Republicans said they wanted Trump to be their party’s presidential nominee, up from 44% in a March 14-20 poll.

DeSantis, Trump’s closest rival, was backed by 19%, down from 30% last month. Other likely rivals, including former Vice President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and former ambassador to the United Nations, polled in the single digits.

Aside from former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, those eyeing the Republican nomination have been rushing to defend Trump from the indictment.

“They can’t be critical of the former president because they clearly want his supporters to go with them in the event that Donald Trump can’t or will not run,” political consultant Julie Roginsky told VOA.

Roginsky noted the risk for Republican challengers who voice support while silently hoping Trump will bow out.

“Then essentially they’re anointing him as the next nominee, if they don’t all get together and try to take him down based on these issues,” she said.

Should Trump become bogged down by more legal woes, including those related to allegations of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat in the state of Georgia, and mishandling classified documents at his Florida home after leaving office, more Republican candidates would likely run, said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

But if he survives them, his opponents will push for a smaller field, Sabato told VOA. “It’s the only way you could stop him, if you consolidate support behind one or two candidates.”

Trump vs. Biden

If Trump becomes the Republican nominee, that’s good news for Biden’s reelection prospects because it would galvanize the Democratic base and most independent voters, Sabato said.

“He’s going to generate those votes because they can’t stand the alternative.”

Even if he is not the nominee, Trump’s influence over the Republican base will force other potential nominees to embrace him, possibly making it easier for Biden to beat him or her, Sabato added.

Trump could also split the Republican vote by refusing to support the nominee. In a February radio interview, Trump said that if he were not the party’s pick, his support “would have to depend on who the nominee was.”

Biden has not officially announced that he is running for reelection and will likely do so at a time when he does not have to share the political spotlight with Trump, whom he beat in 2020.

“It’s not like anybody’s gearing up, anybody of consequence is gearing up to run against him. So, he can take his time and doesn’t have to start incurring any expenses of an official campaign at the moment,” Roginsky said.

What if Trump wins?

Trump can be found guilty and still win the election, in which case the country would have a convicted felon as its commander in chief.

“There’s nothing in the Constitution that precludes someone who has been convicted of a crime from being elected president,” said Richard Pierce, a law professor at George Washington University.

There are only three constitutional requirements for the presidency: he or she must be at least 35 years of age, be a natural-born citizen and have lived in the U.S. for at least 14 years.

Experts say if convicted on the New York charges, Trump is unlikely to spend any time behind bars as judges rarely sentence first-time offenders to jail for falsifying business records.

However, other criminal investigations, including the one on his role in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election result, may lead to more serious charges and potential imprisonment.

That would be a “truly unprecedented situation,” Pierce told VOA.

“I don’t know how one could be effective as president of the United States while being in a jail cell,” he said. “But there is nothing in the Constitution that would keep somebody from being president of the United States and being incarcerated at the same time.”

But a conviction could bar Trump from voting for himself. Florida, where he is registered to vote, is one of 11 states with the most restrictive laws regarding voting while incarcerated.
…

DeSantis Clarifies Position on Ukraine War, Calls Putin ‘War Criminal’

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis this week called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” and condemned his invasion of Ukraine, a week after coming under criticism for remarks that seemed to advocate a reduction in U.S. support for Ukrainian forces.

DeSantis, widely expected to announce his candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination later this year, had previously described the war in Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” that did not represent a “vital national interest” of the United States.

The remarks earned him immediate condemnation from many, including multiple long-serving Republicans in Congress, even though support for continued U.S. aid to Ukraine is waning among a significant portion of the Republican electorate.

Claims he was mischaracterized

In an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan scheduled to stream Thursday evening on Fox Nation, DeSantis said his comments — particularly those that seemed to dismiss the war as a territorial dispute — were “mischaracterized.”

Morgan, who previewed the interview in a New York Post column on Wednesday, quoted the Florida governor’s explanation for his comment at length.

“When I asked him specifically if he regretted using the phrase ‘territorial dispute,’ DeSantis replied, ‘Well, I think it’s been mischaracterized. Obviously, Russia invaded [last year] — that was wrong. They invaded Crimea and took that in 2014 — that was wrong.

“ ‘What I’m referring to is where the fighting is going on now, which is that eastern border region Donbas, and then Crimea, and you have a situation where Russia has had that. I don’t think legitimately, but they had. There’s a lot of ethnic Russians there.’”

According to Morgan, DeSantis went on to say why he thinks Russia is not the threat that the Biden administration has portrayed: “I think the larger point is, OK, Russia is not showing the ability to take over Ukraine, to topple the government or certainly to threaten NATO. That’s a good thing.”

The Biden administration has characterized support for Ukraine as forestalling deeper U.S. involvement in a broader conflict.

DeSantis told Morgan he sees it differently: “I just don’t think that’s a sufficient interest for us to escalate more involvement. I would not want to see American troops involved there. But the idea that I think somehow Russia was justified [in invading] — that’s nonsense.”

‘A gas station’ with nuclear weapons

Also in the interview, DeSantis ridiculed Russia’s high dependence on fossil fuel exports and said the country does not have the capacity to act on Putin’s seeming plan to reconstitute the former Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.

“I think he’s got grand ambitions,” DeSantis said of Putin. “I think he’s hostile to the United States, but I think the thing that we’ve seen is he doesn’t have the conventional capability to realize his ambitions. And so, he’s basically a gas station with a bunch of nuclear weapons, and one of the things we could be doing better is utilizing our own energy resources in the U.S.”

DeSantis’ comments were reminiscent of those of the late John McCain, who was a Republican senator and presidential candidate. Famously hawkish on Russia, he once derided the nation as “a gas station masquerading as a country.”

Zelenskyy responds

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in an interview with the editors of The Atlantic magazine, replied to DeSantis last week with an argument that America’s investment in his country’s defense is preventing a broader conflict that could pull in the U.S. and its NATO allies.

“If we will not have enough weapons, that means we will be weak. If we will be weak, they will occupy us,” Zelenskyy said. “If they occupy us, they will be on the borders of Moldova and they will occupy Moldova. When they have occupied Moldova, they will [travel through] Belarus and they will occupy Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

“That’s three Baltic countries which are members of NATO,” he added. “They will occupy them. Of course [the Balts] are brave people, and they will fight. But they are small. And they don’t have nuclear weapons. So they will be attacked by Russians because that is the policy of Russia, to take back all the countries which have been previously part of the Soviet Union.”

Zelenskyy’s assertions aside, many foreign policy experts are dubious about the likelihood of Russia choosing to invade any countries that are under the protection of NATO’s mutual defense agreement.

Difficult politics

DeSantis’ move to clarify his position on Ukraine highlights a difficulty that any Republican presidential candidate is likely to face on the issue because of a deepening divide within the party.

For Republicans, said William A. Galston, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, “finding a tenable path on Ukraine is very difficult, because the party is divided between a traditionalist wing and a populist wing on this issue.”

“The traditionalist view is that the United States, for reasons having to do with both its interests and values, is required to stand up to aggression, such as what Russia has unleashed on Ukraine, and to support indirectly, and in some cases directly, the military effort to oppose it,” Galston told VOA.

“The populist wing of the party is taking the position that this fight is none of our business, and more generally, that the interests of the United States are best served by staying out of foreign entanglements, particularly military entanglements, to the greatest extent possible,” he said.

At the moment, the divide is most visible when comparing the positions of the party’s two leading presidential candidates with those of its foreign policy veterans in Congress.

Both former President Donald Trump and DeSantis have expressed doubts about whether it is in U.S. interests to continue supporting Ukraine. In a recent Monmouth University poll, the two men received 80% of support — 44% for Trump and 36% for DeSantis — when prospective GOP voters were asked whom they support for the party’s presidential nomination.

In Congress, though, prominent Republican voices have offered unwavering support for Ukraine.

“I think the majority opinion among Senate Republicans is that the United States has a vital national security interest there in stopping Russian aggression,” John Thune, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, told reporters last week.
…

House Republicans Demand Documents About US Exit From Afghanistan

Republican House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul is demanding that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken provide documents on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. McCaul said the ‘catastrophic’ exit from Afghanistan emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. Cindy Saine reports.
…

Prosecutor Rejects Republicans’ Demand He Hand Over Documents in Trump Investigation

The New York City prosecutor on Thursday rejected a demand by congressional Republican lawmakers that he hand over documents linked to his investigation of former President Donald Trump’s $130,000 hush money payment to a porn star ahead of the 2016 election to buy her silence about an affair she claims to have had with Trump.

The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg assailed the request earlier this week by three committee chairmen in the House of Representatives as “an unlawful incursion into New York’s sovereignty.” The three lawmakers — Jim Jordan, James Comer and Bryan Steil — had called Bragg’s investigation of Trump an “unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority.”

Bragg’s general counsel, Leslie Dubeck, told the lawmakers that their letter “only came after Donald Trump created a false expectation that he would be arrested [Tuesday] and his lawyers reportedly urged you to intervene. Neither fact is a legitimate basis for congressional inquiry.”

“If a grand jury brings charges against Donald Trump, the DA’s Office will have an obligation, as in every case, to provide a significant amount of discovery from its files to the defendant so that he may prepare a defense,” Dubeck wrote.

The Republican committee chairmen had told Bragg, “You are reportedly about to engage in an unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority: the indictment of a former president of the United States. This indictment comes after years of your office searching for a basis — any basis — on which to bring charges.”

Lawmakers refer to case as ‘zombie’

On Thursday, Jordan, an Ohio congressman, demanded testimony and documents from Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, two former New York prosecutors who had been leading the Trump case before quitting last year when Bragg appeared to have abandoned the Trump investigation.

“Last year, you resigned from the office over Bragg’s initial reluctance to move forward with charges, shaming Bragg in your resignation letter — which was subsequently leaked — into bringing charges,” Jordan wrote in the letter to Pomerantz. “It now appears that your efforts to shame Bragg have worked as he is reportedly resurrecting a so-called ‘zombie’ case against President Trump using a tenuous and untested legal theory.”

Trump has not been charged in the case, although the grand jury investigation is continuing.

Bragg has been bringing witnesses before the 23-member grand jury to testify about the payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, hush money to silence her for what she alleges was a one-night affair with Trump in 2006 at a hotel where Trump was attending a golf tournament. Trump has long denied the affair.

Probe focuses on payment 

The investigation centers in part on details of the payment made to Daniels and whether the transaction amounts to a criminal offense. If charged, Trump would be the first-ever U.S. president indicted in a criminal case.

Trump’s one-time lawyer and political fixer Michael Cohen wrote her a check out of his personal funds and then was reimbursed by Trump, who recorded it as a business expense for legal fees to Cohen on the ledgers of the Trump Organization, his real estate business, rather than recorded as a campaign expense related to his successful 2016 run for the presidency.

Cohen served more than a year in prison for his role in the payment and other offenses. He since has turned into a sharp Trump critic and grand jury witness against him.

Trump announced his intention to seek the 2024 Republican presidential nomination months ago and says he would keep campaigning even if he is charged with a criminal offense. Numerous national polls show him as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, although several other Republicans have either announced their own candidacies or said they are seriously considering a race against Trump.

Trump had regularly lambasted the New York investigation as a political witch-hunt and called Bragg, who is Black, a “racist.”

Trump was impeached twice during his presidency, once in 2019 over his conduct demanding Ukraine investigate then candidate Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 presidential election, and again in 2021 over the attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters. He was acquitted by the Senate both times.

Some material in this report came from The Associated Press.
…