Consider This from NPR - January 6, Election Interference Could Be Focus of New Trump Indictments

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

It's easy to lose track of the seriousness of the legal cases involving Donald Trump, in part because there are just so many.This week the former president and current presidential candidate said he received a letter informing him he is a target in Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation of the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Such a letter often precedes an indictment. And a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, may soon consider an election interference case there that could lead to yet another indictment of Trump.We hear about both cases in this episode.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward. It's easy to lose track of the seriousness of the legal cases involving former President Donald Trump, in part because there are just so many. Another day, another looming indictment for Donald J. Trump. This is your monthly Trump indictment. All right, well, how are Republicans in Congress reacting to the news that Donald Trump could be indicted again? You're probably used to it.

That was the reaction after Donald Trump announced this week that he received a letter from special counsel Jack Smith. Smith had already brought federal charges against Trump for allegedly possessing classified documents and stonewalling the federal government's attempts to get them back. This new letter notified Trump that he is a target in another investigation, the one looking into the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol and the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In the face of the most recent news, many Republicans returned to familiar talking points. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy suggested it was a political prosecution. President Trump went up in the polls and was actually surpassing President Biden for re-election. So what do they do now? Weaponize government to go after their number one opponent.

But there were signs of a slight change in tone. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who's running against Trump for the 2024 nomination, said he hoped Trump wasn't indicted. But at a campaign stop Tuesday, he also said this about Trump's actions on January 6th. I think it was shown how he was in the White House and didn't do anything while things were going on. He should have come out more forcefully. Of course that. Another opponent, Trump's former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, told Fox News that it was time to move past the former president and his legal drama. It's going to keep on going. I mean, the rest of this primary election is going to be in reference to Trump.

It's going to be about lawsuits. It's going to be about legal fees. It's going to be about judges. And it's just going to continue to be a further and further distraction. And it can be a challenge to keep up with the legal swirl around Trump. For example, the very day he announced that Target letter, Trump's lawyers were in federal court in Miami for a pretrial hearing in the Documents case. And earlier this summer, he was indicted on state charges in New York related to hush money payments. Here's how Maryland Democratic Congressman Steny Hoyer summed it up.

Former President Trump has done repeatedly things that call upon law enforcement at every level to look at what he's done because so much of it is questionable at best and illegal at worst. Consider this. This week's alleged target letter is one block in a tower of legal trouble for the former president. We'll talk to a former prosecutor about what that letter means and how it fits into the raft of open cases involving Trump. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's Wednesday, July 19th.

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Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. It's Consider This from NPR. There's a lot we don't know about the letter Trump says he received from special counsel Jack Smith. Trump says it informs him that he is a target of the investigation into the attack at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But its contents have not been made public, and we only know about its alleged existence because Trump posted about it on his site, Truth Social. To help sort out what

this letter might signify, NPR's Leila Fadl spoke with former prosecutor Robert Mintz. So why did the Justice Department send this letter to Trump? What would it mean? Well, to give you some perspective, the U.S. Attorney's Manual identifies three categories of persons in connection with a federal criminal investigation. If they're identified as a witness, it means you're not going to be charged in the case. It's sort of like you're standing on a street corner, there's a car accident, and the police want to know whether the light was yellow or red

when the car entered the intersection. Then there's something called a subject category, and that means you may be indicted. It means prosecutors are looking at your conduct. They're not saying you did anything wrong, but they're also not saying that you may not have committed a crime. But a target letter is something wholly different. That really is defined as when the grand jury or the prosecutor have substantial evidence linking you to criminal activity, and the prosecutor views you as a putative defendant, which essentially means

the only thing standing between you and an indictment is a grand jury who has to vote in favor of the indictment. And when prosecutors present an indictment to a grand jury, they almost always return the indictment. So would a letter like this indicate which aspects of the investigation the Justice Department would be pursuing with regard to Trump? I mean, this mentioned both Jan 6th and the 2020 election. So does that mean he's a target for both? Well, it's hard to say. I mean, we haven't seen the letter itself. It usually identifies some federal criminal charges that the government believes that the putative defendant may have violated. But the letter is sent really for a number of reasons. It's sent to prompt plea

discussions in some cases. It gives the defense counsel one last shot to try to convince the government not to bring charges against their client. But it also allows the target of the investigation the opportunity to testify before the grand jury directly to try to convince them not to return an indictment against them. In this case, I do not think we would expect to see former President Trump take advantage of that opportunity and appear before the grand jury. He didn't do it in the Mar-a-Lago case. And defense counsel generally counsel against their clients testifying before the grand jury because anything they say in that grand jury testimony can later be used against him in a criminal trial.

So Trump says this kind of target letter always means arrest and indictment, and it sounds like you generally agree with that. Yeah, that's absolutely right. If you get a target letter, it's almost certain that you're going to be indicted at some point. The question is simply a matter of when. Now, you said a letter like this has to be backed up by a lot of evidence. I mean, what does this say about what the Justice Department might have? Well, it certainly means that the prosecutor believes, in this case, the special counsel, Jack Smith, believes that he has probable cause that a crime has been committed. And I think the fact that there is a target letter gives us some indication that it's obviously related to

the January 6th events. But beyond that, we don't know what the charges will be. We also don't know whether others may also be charged in connection with the same alleged crime here, although it appears that nobody else has received a target letter. So we're just going to have to wait and see who else, if anybody else, is charged along with former President Trump. Now, this isn't the only legal case that Trump is dealing with. The investigations by Special Counsel Jack Smith also produced the indictment on charges that Trump kept and then hid classified documents at his Florida estate. Trump's lawyers asked the judge yesterday to delay those proceedings. Do prosecutors at the Justice Department typically collaborate with one another or take any cues from the other investigations involving Trump? Well, they should cooperate with one another and they should try to coordinate this because obviously a defendant could only face one criminal charge at a time.

And so it will be up to the Department of Justice to make a decision as to which of the federal cases they want to pursue first with regard to some of the state charges like the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and if state charges are brought in Georgia in connection with alleged interference with the election down there, that's something that is really left up to the opportunity for federal and state prosecutors to try to work together, although there are no set rules

as to how that exactly is going to work. So that is really left up to the discretion of the various prosecutors and whether or not they can work together and decide which case is going to be tried first. In the few seconds we have left, special counsel Jack Smith was just appointed in November. From a prosecutor's standpoint, how quick does this inquiry feel? Well, it's moving along fairly quickly, but then again, it really has to. This is a race against the political clock with the upcoming primaries and the upcoming election. And so I think Jack Smith is moving as quickly as he can here.

This is an area with January 6th and with the documents case where a lot of evidence was out there. And I think he had the opportunity to move very swiftly to bring these charges. That's NPR's Leila Fadal speaking with former prosecutor Robert Mintz. Next, we're going to dig into those potential state charges in Georgia that Mintz mentioned. Whether charges are ultimately filed depends on what happens in a secure room inside the Fulton County Courthouse. That's where sometime soon a grand jury will consider an election interference case that could lead to yet another indictment of Trump. WABE's Sam Gringliss is covering the investigation from Atlanta and spoke with my colleague Elsa Chang about it. OK, so catch us up here.

Remind us exactly what Georgia prosecutors have been investigating. OK, Fulton prosecutors have spent over two years probing efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. You might remember that phone call Trump made to Georgia's Secretary of State asking him to find votes to beat Joe Biden. Prosecutors have also been investigating a plan to submit fake electors, like in Michigan. The district attorney here, Fannie Willis, has suggested she'll ask a grand jury for indictments in August and has told law enforcement to prepare for a significant public reaction. Well, August, it's right around the corner. Tell us how this grand jury process works. Elsa, I was in the room when this grand jury got selected and the pool included an artist, a teacher, a firefighter. Unlike a trial jury,

there weren't questions about biases or opinions, just the first people up who are qualified to serve. Let me play you Judge Robert McBurney explaining the job. The test right now isn't guilt or innocence because you are making a very narrow decision whether there's probable cause to believe that the person named in the indictment committed the crime or crimes that are set forth in that indictment. If just 12 of the 23 jurors believe that standard is met, the case moves to a trial. And when that indictment becomes public, the jurors' names will be listed on the page. Wait, really? The grand jurors' names are public? Yep. Georgia Code lays out how indictments look,

including a line for grand juror names. But you can imagine how jurors in a gang case or, say, an indictment of a former president might worry about their safety. The head of the Prosecuting Attorneys Council told me there's no set mechanism or precedent for concealing grand jurors' names. So I asked former DeKalb District Attorney Gwen Keys Fleming why the names are public. We do not live in a society where the police and prosecutors get to make unilateral decisions to move forward with charges. That's why the grand jury system was set up. The system does not work without the participation of ordinary residents of the county.

She says transparency is a big part of that. So the public can trust the integrity of the process. And that might be especially important in a case like this one. Well, how does the Fulton County probe fit in with all the other investigations going on right now that are focused on Trump and all the fallout from 2020? Right. As you said, Trump may be facing three other indictments. So I asked former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance whether these developments dull the significance of Fulton County's investigation. If by losing steam, we mean, does the press have less interest or is it less in the public eye?

Well, maybe. But these prosecutions have merit individually and they have merit collectively. And Elsa, all these prosecutions are coming to a head as Trump remains the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. That's WABE's Sam Greenglass speaking with my colleague Elsa Chang. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.