TITLE: Multiple Trump Witnesses Have Received Significant Financial Benefits From His Businesses, Campaign
https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-criminal-cases-witnesses-financial-benefits
EXCERPT: Nine witnesses in the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump have received significant financial benefits, including large raises from his campaign, severance packages, new jobs, and a grant of shares and cash from Trump’s media company.
The benefits have flowed from Trump’s businesses and campaign committees, according to a ProPublica analysis of public disclosures, court records and securities filings. One campaign aide had his average monthly pay double, from $26,000 to $53,500. Another employee got a $2 million severance package barring him from voluntarily cooperating with law enforcement. And one of the campaign’s top officials had her daughter hired onto the campaign staff, where she is now the fourth-highest-paid employee.
These pay increases and other benefits often came at delicate moments in the legal proceedings against Trump. One aide who was given a plum position on the board of Trump’s social media company, for example, got the seat after he was subpoenaed but before he testified.
Significant changes to a staffer’s work situation, such as bonuses, pay raises, firings or promotions, can be evidence of a crime if they come outside the normal course of business. To prove witness tampering, prosecutors would need to show that perks or punishments were intended to influence testimony.
White-collar defense lawyers say the situation Trump finds himself in — in the dual role of defendant and boss of many of the people who are the primary witnesses to his alleged crimes — is not uncommon. Their standard advice is not to provide any unusual benefits or penalties to such employees. Ideally, decisions about employees slated to give evidence should be made by an independent body such as a board, not the boss who is under investigation.
Even if the perks were not intended to influence witnesses, they could prove troublesome for Trump in any future trials. Prosecutors could point to the benefits to undermine the credibility of those aides on the witness stand.
“It feels very shady, especially as you detect a pattern. … I would worry about it having a corrupt influence,” Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said after hearing from ProPublica about benefits provided to potential Trump witnesses.
But McQuade said these cases are difficult to prove, even if the intent were actually to influence testimony, because savvy defendants don’t explicitly attach strings to the benefits and would more likely be “all wink and a nod, ‘You’re a great, loyal employee, here’s a raise.’”
In response to questions from ProPublica, a Trump campaign official said that any raises or other benefits provided to witnesses were the result of their taking on more work due to the campaign or his legal cases heating up, or because they took on new duties.
The official added that Trump himself isn’t involved in determining how much campaign staffers are paid, and that compensation is entirely delegated to the campaign’s top leaders. “The president is not involved in the decision-making process,” the official said. “I would argue Trump doesn’t know what we’re paid.”
Campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement that “the 2024 Trump campaign is the most well-run and professional operation in political history. Any false assertion that we’re engaging in any type of behavior that may be regarded as tampering is absurd and completely fake.”
TITLE: Trump Campaign Sent Cease-and-Desist Letter to ProPublica Attempting to Stop Their Latest Exposé. It Didn’t Work.
https://www.mediaite.com/trump/trump-campaign-sent-cease-and-desist-letter-to-propublica-attempting-to-stop-their-latest-expose-it-didnt-work/
EXCERPT: The Trump Org and various campaign entities have, of course, denied that any wrongdoing took place, and denied that Trump had knowledge or direct involvement in compensation issues. However, as ProPublica noted, decades of reporting describe the ex-president as micromanaging his underlings and a “repeated theme” of attempts to pressure witnesses involved in the various investigations, civil lawsuits, and criminal prosecutions he’s faced over the years:
ProPublica did not find evidence that Trump personally approved the pay increases or other benefits. But Trump famously keeps close watch over his operations and prides himself on penny-pinching. One former aide compared working for the Trump Organization, his large company, to “a small family business” where every employee “in some sense reports to Mr. Trump.” Former aides have said Trump demands unwavering loyalty from subordinates, even when their duties require independence…
Trump’s former campaign manager and former campaign adviser were convicted on federal witness tampering charges in 2018 and 2019. The campaign adviser had told a witness to “do a ‘Frank Pentangeli,’” referencing a character in “The Godfather Part II” who lies to a Senate committee investigating organized crime. Trump later pardoned both men in the waning days of his presidency. (He did not pardon a co-defendant of the campaign manager who had cooperated with the government.)
During the congressional investigation into the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a former White House staffer testified that she got a call from a colleague the night before an interview with investigators. The colleague told her Trump’s chief of staff “wants me to let you know that he knows you’re loyal and he knows you’ll do the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and the boss.” (A spokesperson for the chief of staff denied that he tried to influence testimony.)
Last year, Trump himself publicly discouraged a witness from testifying in the Georgia case. Trump posted on social media that he had read about a Georgia politician who “will be testifying before the Fulton County Grand Jury. He shouldn’t.”
One witness has said publicly that, when he quit working for Trump in the midst of the classified documents criminal investigation, he was offered golf tournament tickets, a lawyer paid for by Trump and a new job that would have come with a raise. The witness, a valet and manager at Mar-a-Lago, had direct knowledge of the handling of the government documents at the club, the focus of one of the criminal cases against the former president. “I’m sure the boss would love to see you,” the employee, Brian Butler, recalled Trump’s property manager telling him. (The episode was first reported by CNN.)
TITLE: The Most Ridiculous, Right-Wing Supreme Court That Dark Money Could Buy
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/supreme-court-ridiculous-right-wing-dark-money-1235030841/
EXCERPT: Hammering home how corrupt an institution it is, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case seeking to legalize gratuities for politicians. The case involves an Indiana mayor who steered two government contracts to a garbage truck company, which then paid him $13,000. At oral arguments, justices debated whether the $13,000 thank-you payment is too similar to taking a teacher to the Cheesecake Factory to constitute bribery. The high court has consistently narrowed the definition of corruption in recent years, but this case, coming amid the court’s unprecedented ethics controversies, is brazen.
And then there’s the court’s shameless advocacy for Donald Trump, who assembled this monstrosity. In the first case, the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot keep Trump off their ballots under the 14th Amendment, which prohibits insurrectionists from serving in office. The court’s decision to hear the second Trump case — over his facially ridiculous, dangerous claim to having expansive immunity in perpetuity for acts he committed as president — delayed his federal criminal trial for attempting to overturn the 2020 election results and had his team “literally popping champagne,” as a lawyer close to Donald Trump told Rolling Stone at the time.
In the wake of Trump’s New York hush money trial, conservative lawmakers are now calling on the Supreme Court to overturn his criminal conviction. Although the case would first need to go through New York appellate courts, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) argued “the Supreme Court should step in.” Trump similarly wrote on Truth Social, “The United States Supreme Court MUST DECIDE!”
Republicans know the prospect of a second Trump term is too good for the Supreme Court to pass up. Imagine what the justices could accomplish in partnership with Trump and his MAGA devotees, who are obsessed with rolling back reproductive rights, civil rights, and environmental regulations — and, above all, punishing their enemies.