Laurence Tribe, professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard University, predicted that former President Donald Trump will face an indictment in Georgia before he is potentially charged with a crime by the Justice Department.
Georgia's Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis early last year launched an investigation into Trump's efforts to overturn President Joe Biden's election victory in her state. Leaked audio showed in January 2021 that Trump, while still serving as president, urged Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to "find" enough votes to flip the election in his favor.
A number of prominent legal experts have alleged that Trump's and his allies' actions in Georgia appear to be a straightforward crime and should result in charges. Willis has sent target letters to multiple Trump allies in recent days as the probe continues, with a grand jury reviewing evidence and issuing subpoenas.
"Even now the proof is there, for example, with respect to strong-arming Raffensperger to steal the votes of Georgia, that's already there," Tribe told CBS News on Wednesday, assessing whether or not there is enough evidence to charge Trump with a crime related to the 2020 election and his efforts to overturn his loss.
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"That's why I expect an indictment from Fani Willis in Fulton County, Georgia, even before an indictment from the Department of Justice," the legal expert said.
Legal expert Laurence Tribe predicted that former President Donald Trump will face an indictment in Georgia. Above, Trump speaks during the Save America rally at the Banks County Dragway on March 26 in Commerce, Georgia.MEGAN VARNER/ GETTY IMAGES
Previously in the interview, Tribe outlined his views on whether the Justice Department would soon bring charges against Trump. He argued that there is substantial proof of crimes but that he wasn't sure there was yet enough evidence to prove wrongdoing "beyond a reasonable doubt."
"There are a few more dots to be connected," he said, referring to the federal probe into the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, and efforts to undermine the last presidential election.
Attorney Norman Eisen, who previously served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Trump's first impeachment, made a similar prediction regarding the Georgia probe in Friday comments to The New York Times and on Twitter. Eisen's remarks came after news broke that Willis had sent so-called "target letters" to several Georgia Republican allies of the former president. The letters warned the GOP officials that they could face indictment.
"I do believe that the great likelihood is that he's heading towards an indictment," Eisen told the Times, referring to Trump. "There is powerful proof of violations of Georgia law in the form of the smoking gun tape of him demanding 11,780 votes, when it is perfectly clear from that tape that he knows those votes do not exist," the legal expert explained.
On Twitter, Eisen shared the news and assessed that Willis is "clearly limbering up to hit Trump as well."
Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing in Georgia as well as in his broader efforts to undermine Biden's 2020 win. The former president continues to insist that the 2020 election was "rigged" or "stolen," contending that all investigations targeting him and his allies are part of a "witch hunt."
Despite Trump's claims, no evidence has emerged corroborating his allegations about the last presidential election. To the contrary, audits and recounts have consistently reaffirmed Trump's loss while a number of top officials from his own administration have said the claims are without merit. More than 60 legal challenges in state and federal courts failed in the wake of the election.
Former Attorney General William Barr, who was widely viewed as one of Trump's most loyal Cabinet members, has said repeatedly that the claims of widespread voter fraud are "bulls**t."
"I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has lost contact with—he's become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff," Barr testified before the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
Newsweek reached out to Trump's press office for comment.
The conventional wisdom about the Jan. 6 committee hearings was that no single revelation was going to change Republican minds about Donald Trump.
What happened instead, a slow drip of negative coverage, may be just as damaging to the former president. Six weeks into the committee’s public hearing schedule, an emerging consensus is forming in Republican Party circles — including in Trump’s orbit — that a significant portion of the rank-and-file may be tiring of the non-stop series of revelations about Trump.
The fatigue is evident in public polling and in focus groups that suggest growing Republican openness to an alternative presidential nominee in 2024. The cumulative effect of the hearings, according to interviews with more than 20 Republican strategists, party officials and pollsters in recent days, has been to at least marginally weaken his support.
“It is definitely kind of this wet drip of, do you really want to debate the 2020 election again? Do you really want to debate what happened on Jan. 6?” said Bob Vander Plaats, the evangelical leader in Iowa who is influential in primary politics in the first-in-the-nation caucus state. “Frankly, I think what I sense a little bit, even among some deep, deep Trump supporters … there’s a certain exhaustion to it.”
But for many Republicans, the ongoing, backward-looking call-and-response between the committee and Trump may nevertheless be getting old.
“I think what everybody thought was that the first prime-time hearing was such a non-event that that would continue,” said Randy Evans, a Georgia lawyer who served as Trump’s ambassador to Luxembourg. “But over the course of the hearings, the steadiness, the repetitiveness, has had a corrosive effect. You’d have to be oblivious to the way media works, the way reputations work, the way politics works, to not understand that it’s never the one thing. It’s the accumulation.”
Evans said, “This is all undoubtedly starting to take a toll — how much, I don’t know. But the bigger question is whether it starts to eat through the Teflon. There are some signs that maybe it has. But it’s too early to say right now.”
For more than a year after Trump lost the presidential election, his political durability was not even in question. But the committee hearings appear to have had an effect on Trump’s enormous fundraising operation, which has slowed in recent months. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who may run in 2024, has been gaining on Trump in some polls, including in New Hampshire, the first primary state, where one recent survey had DeSantis statistically tied with Trump among Republican primary voters. Republicans are still poring over a New York Times/Siena College poll last week that showed nearly half of Republican primary voters would rather vote for a Republican other than Trump in 2024.
In a series of focus groups with 2020 Trump supporters from across the country since the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2001, Sarah Longwell, a moderate Republican strategist who became a vocal supporter of Joe Biden in 2020, for more than a year found about half of participants consistently said they wanted Trump to run again. But that number has fallen off since the hearings began, she said.
“We’ve had now three focus groups where zero people have wanted him to run again, and a couple other groups where it’s been like two people,” Longwell said. “Totally different.”
The Trump supporters in her focus groups are still dismissive of the hearings, Longwell said, “and I don’t think people are sitting down and being persuaded” by them.
However, she said, the hearings have “turned the volume up on the Trump baggage.”
“The other thing,” she said, “is I cannot tell you how much these Republican voters want to move on from the conversation of January 6th.”
‘Political Theater’
That’s a far cry from the Republican view of the hearings when they started: Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) derided what he called a “prime-time dud.” Jim Justice, the Republican governor of West Virginia, dismissed them as “political theater.” And Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri called them a “complete waste of time.”
'Wimp': Trump's phone call with Pence on Jan. 6 is detailed in deposition.
One reason that the hearings are resonating now is that even if Republicans don’t agree with the committee’s findings, they read polls. The percentage of Republicans who say Trump misled people about the 2020 election has ticked up since last month, while a majority of Americans say Trump committed a crime. Perhaps most problematic for Trump, 16 percent of Republicans in the Siena College survey said they would vote for someone else in the general election or aren’t sure what they will do in 2024 if Trump is the nominee.
That’s a relatively small segment of the Republican electorate, but a critical one in competitive states that will decide which party controls the White House.
“I think you’re starting to see the impact of the hearings, and just overall his behavior since he lost the election,” said Dick Wadhams, a former Colorado Republican Party chair and longtime party strategist.
“He’s got a hard-core base, and there’s no doubt about that,” said Wadhams. “I voted for him twice, I loved his accomplishments. But I do think he’s compromised himself into a situation where it would be very difficult for him to win another election for president.”
Electability concerns may loom especially large this year for Republicans, who view Biden as a beatable incumbent. His cratering public approval ratings, now hovering below 39 percent, are worse than Trump’s at this point in his presidency. One senior House Republican aide described the resonance of the Jan. 6 committee hearings as in part a product of the contrast they are drawing between “a golden opportunity to win back the White House in 2024 and the only person who might not be able to do it.”
A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Trump has regularly criticized the committee’s work as a partisan exercise. And because most other Republicans view it that way, too, it’s unlikely that many of Trump’s opponents will leverage the committee’s revelations explicitly in the run-up to 2024.
Proxy wars
Still, the Republicans who may run against Trump in 2024 are increasingly breaking with him as the midterm year drags on.
As much has anything, those midterm primaries – coinciding with the Jan. 6 committee hearings – have laid bare the willingness of Republicans in at least some cases to disassociate their adoration for Trump with support for him politically. Trump’s endorsement has pulled Republicans across the line in competitive primaries in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania, but his chosen candidates have flopped in other races, including in Georgia and <a class=" js-tealium-tracking " href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/11/trump-nebraska-primary-takeaways-00031673" target="_blank" data-tracking="mpos=&mid=&lindex=&lcol=">Nebraska.
“The effect of the hearings will be negligible on Trump’s favorable ratings among Republicans,” said Whit Ayres, the longtime Republican pollster. “The ‘Always Trumpers’ and the ‘Maybe Trumpers’ are resolute in their insistence that they are paying no attention whatsoever to the hearings. It’s almost an article of faith among Republicans to say, ‘I am not paying attention to these hearings’.”
However, Ayres said, “The way it translates is that they believe that other candidates will carry less baggage … and that gets reinforced by what seeps into the political water from these hearings.
And as the Jan. 6 committee prepares for another hearing on Thursday, the ongoing focus on Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6 is now in the political waters.
John Thomas, a Republican strategist who works on House campaigns across the country, said that in recent conversations with state party chairs and Republican activists in numerous states, “almost to the T, and I don’t really care what state it’s in, they all say, ‘Love Trump, love his policies, wish he would just be a kingmaker.’ And that’s really a shift, because six months ago, a year ago, it was, ‘Trump’s got to run again, he’s the only one who can fight the swamp, drive the policy agenda.’”
“It’s not Trump hatred,” Thomas added. “It’s Trump fatigue. I think [the Jan. 6 committee hearings] reminds people to the degree that they’re tuning in that, eh, is this that important of an issue? No. But damn … And then Trump goes on his rants and it’s like, ‘We’re tired of it.’”
LMAO, you are such a silly little man. hahaha+2/-1
Author:observer II 7/22/2022 8:32:17 AM
Reply to: 2736389
Does your hatred run to your toes????????????// lol
Trump is guilty of NOTHING.
You liberal lefties are accusing Trump of anything and everything because you are so scared he will run in 2024.
So tell me boys, how mny of your accusations have actually been proven to be true?????????
NADA........NONE.........ZERO..........A BIG FAT DONUT
Get the common theme here.
And yes moderator, I'm posting this because I'm sore Trump lost.........yada yada yada
Refer back to Old Guys post when he explained to you useful idiots that you must look at the policies, not the man behind them.
Trump's ploicies allowed Americans to thrive and live the American dream. Creepy Joes policies have not only destroyed this nation, but has also alienated the majority of their supporters. Stupid is as stupid does!!!!
Just like you clowns blaming Trump for Jan 6th +1/-2
Author:observer II 7/22/2022 3:13:59 PM
Reply to: 2736508
He's on video telling them to peacefully leave.
We all know this latest fabricated scandal is only meant to deflect boden's incompetence and give them false hope of retaining a majority in congress / senate.
It won't work lib, you stooges have played your hand. The American people aren't buying what you're selling anymore.
There is nothing you can do to change the outcome of future elections.
2020 was an eye opener. No one could have imagined such blatant election fraud. But it won't happen again.
Like I've said many time..........YOU CAN'T FIX STUPID.
Your parties arrogance has destroyed itself. You can't piss on people and think they will follow. Except people like you of course. Sorry to be so harsh but your popsts are proof enough.
Nice sparring with you old man. But I've egot work to do.
Biden's incompetence doesn't affect Trump's competence, or lack thereof.+2/-0
Author:TheCrow 7/22/2022 3:24:53 PM
Reply to: 2736511
A million dead Americans.
The sharpest economic contraction since the Great Depression,
Record unemployment.
Jan 22 2020 Trump said:
“We have it totally under control,” Trump told “Squawk Box” co-host Joe Kernen in an interview from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
Oh, and then he was hospitalized with the infection. Ironic ain't it?
