The master fraudster’s first criminal indictment has been coming for fifty years. It finally arrived with the Manhattan booking and arraignment of the ex-president earlier today.
A very bold and impressive broad-gauged indictment that few, if any legal pundits, saw coming. Yet at the press conference and Q & A following the arraignment District Attorney Alvin Bragg told the world that the 34 felony charges brought against defendant Trump were nothing more than the Manhattan office engaging in its everyday prosecution of “bread and butter” white-collar crimes.
Turns out the payments of hush money to at least two women—misdemeanor offenses—were not really what these indictments were all about. Ergo, there were no misdemeanor charges, only first-degree felonies.
The unsealed indictment of The People of the State of New York against Donald J. Trump accused the former president both before and while he was the 45th POTUS of conspiring to falsify business records, with the intent to defraud and intent to commit other crimes including the repeated violations of campaign election laws and tax laws, by way of aiding and concealing the commission of these offenses by way of the business records of the Trump Organization.
With additional criminal indictments coming to courts in Georgia, Washington, D.C., and possibility elsewhere the Houdini of organized crimes as well as most legal commentators are of the opinions that Trump is or should be most concerned about the stolen documents stored in his country club and home at Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
For example, only hours before his Tuesday arraignment in New York City Trump was ranting about Special Prosecutor Jack Smith — who is investigating both his attempts to overturn the 2020 election on January 6 and to steal classified documents — for “leaking” massive amounts of information about his alleged obstruction of justice to the Washington Post .
I believe that all these cases if prosecuted pose serious threats to the viability of Trump’s presumed GOP candidacy for 2024. At the same time, I also believe the legal case which could bring Trump down in the minds of the American people is a civil one scheduled for trial on April 25, 2023, should it materialize. This lawsuit stems from two lawsuits filed by E. Jean Carroll who had also accused Trump of raping her in the mid-1990s.
The first of these was filed in 2019 when she sued Trump for defamation; the second lawsuit was filed last year because of a recent New York law that allows sexual assault victims to sue years later.
In the most recent case filed in 2022 as reported by The Washington Post, Carroll said Trump “forcibly raped and groped her” and that he “knew he was lying” when he responded to her allegations. Carroll and Trump sought to combine the two legal cases into one, however, District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan rejected the merger.
Instead, Kaplan postponed indefinitely Carroll’s first lawsuit that had been scheduled for April 10, 2023. The second lawsuit scheduled for the end of the month accuses Trump of battery and defaming Carroll and is seeking monetary damages. However, there is a hitch and Trump may once more escape legal accountability for his harmful behavior.
It all depends on the decision of the D.C. Court of Appeals that heard arguments this past January on whether Trump was acting within his job as president when he denied Carrol’s rape allegation:
“Lawyers for the New York-based writer E. Jean Carroll argued that Trump acted as a private citizen when he denied raping Carroll, and therefore can be sued like anyone else. Trump’s lawyers and an attorney for the Justice Department countered that his responses were made as part of his job as president — which would effectively end Carroll’s case against him because of protection government employees have from defamation suits.”
At this point in time, the lawsuit could be dismissed, allowed to proceed, or postponed until a decision is reached. The issue will turn on whether the former president was acting on behalf of his interests or the interests of the presidency of the United States.
Though Carroll was precluded from pressing criminal charges against Trump because of the statute of limitations, Trump set himself up for a second defamation lawsuit when he sounded off publicly after Carroll told her story about Trump allegedly raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in Manhattan.
Not only did Trump respond, as Amanda Marcotte writes, “in his usual way, by accusing Carroll of lying and adding a bunch of insults about her looks,” but he also made what appears to have been threatening statements, such as “people have to be careful, because they are playing with very dangerous territory.”
While Trump makes bullying threats of intimidation and worse to his adversaries all the time, many folks dismiss these as all bluster and buffoonery. As most of us understand, Donald’s bluster can come with very real violent consequences.
However, what most people are not aware of is that in his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, Trump brags about how he used to be an aggressive person who in the second grade gave his music teacher a black eye because he didn’t think the man knew anything about music. Whether true or not, Donny’s parents Fred and Mary Anne sent him off as a young adolescent because of “behavioral issues” to a military academy to complete his primary education where he graduated in 1964.
Although Trump has told the public that he has “absolutely no idea who she is,” there are pictures of Trump, Carroll, and his first wife Ivanka together. By the way Ivanka had also accused her ex-husband of having raped her. As he often does when Trump is accused of sexual assault, and there are more than two dozen women who have claimed that he has done so, he typically claims that these women were “not his type.”
Most interestingly, during the October 2022 disposition for the Carroll case, Trump mistook a picture of Carroll for his second wife, Marla Maples: “That’ Marla, yeah That’s my wife.”
For the most part the press and many legal analysts had dismissed the hush money lawsuit case involving Stormy Daniels as small potatoes. However, after the indictment of 34 felonies today, I think that will largely change more than a little.
As for the upcoming Carroll (or not) lawsuit, I agree with Marcotte who argues that Trump’s abuse of women and his misogyny are not minor matters. These will resonate more with women (and perhaps “woke” men) than some of the other pending cases against Donald Trump. They also represent cases of poetic justice in the sense that these lawsuits are at the front of the line to hold the former president accountable:
“As the protesters in the Women’s March understood, how men treat women tells you a great deal about their character. When Trump entered the White House, one sure thing we all knew about him was that he didn’t believe a woman had a right to say “no” to him. Over the next four years, he proved that this entitled attitude was not limited to sex or women. Trump doesn’t think anyone has a right to say “no” to him. Not the president of Ukraine. Not various public officials he leaned on to break the law. And, ultimately, not the American people.”
Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University, a co-founder of the Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime, and the author of Criminology on Trump (2022) who is currently writing the sequel, Criminalizing a Former President: The Case of Donald Trump and the Missing Struggle for a New Democracy.
1 Comment
Thank you for your excellent writing, Greg. You have encapsulated the persona of Donald Trump extremely well. Your line ‘how men treat women tells you a great deal about their character’ resonated with me. Throughout his life, Trump has been rude, disrespectful and threatening to others, particularly women who he considers property, to be acquired or discarded. with little to no redress. I recall one Republican, whose name I do not recall, admitting that Trump was ‘a terrible person’. While some people are dissecting the charges filed in NY, but we should be confident that there is a very real possibility that additional charges will be forthcoming. Trump’s behaviour and rhetoric has always been base, demeaning and beyond the pale. His attempts to interfere in the 2020 Election are well documented, with a recording of his brazen phone call soliciting votes, to Georgia Secretary of State and Republican, Brad Raffensperger, Trur//
p does not accept NO for an answer. But now the wheels of justice are moving, and numerous other charges are pending against him. Time will tell, but I believe this will be his last stand; it is time.