Legal peril for Trump without the power of the presidency
It’s been a week of widening legal troubles for Donald Trump, laying bare the challenges piling up as the former president operates without the protection of the White House.
The bravado that served him well in the political arena is less handy in a legal realm dominated by verifiable evidence, where judges this week have looked askance at his claims and where a fraud investigation that took root when Trump was still president burst into public view in an allegationfilled 222-page state lawsuit.
In politics, “you can say what you want and if people like it, it works. In a legal realm, it’s different,” said Chris Edelson of American University.
That distinction between politics and law was evident in a single 30-hour period this week.
Trump insisted on Fox News in an interview that aired on Thursday that the highly classified government records he had at Mar-a-Lago actually had been declassified, that a president has the power to declassify “even by thinking about it”.
A day earlier, however, an independent arbiter his own lawyers had recommended appeared sceptical when the Trump team declined to present any information to support his claims that the documents had been declassified.
Also on Thursday, Letitia James, the New York State attorney general, accused Trump in a lawsuit of padding his net worth by billions of dollars and habitually misleading banks about the value of assets.
The lawsuit, the culmination of a three-year investigation, also names as defendants three of his adult children and seeks to bar them from ever again running a company in the state. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.
Hours later, three Appeals Court judges — two of them Trump appointees — handed him a startling loss in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.
The court overwhelmingly rejected arguments he was entitled to have the special master do an independent review of the roughly 100 classified documents taken during last month’s FBI search.
Trump is hardly a stranger to courtroom dramas and he has demonstrated a capacity to survive situations that seemed dire. His lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.