The central question hanging over Trump's legal cases: From the Politics Desk
By Laura Jarrett
In the midst of a high-stakes argument at the Supreme Court this week, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked the lawyer for former President Donald Trump a piercing question: “If there’s no threat of criminal prosecution, what prevents the president from just doing whatever he wants?”
It’s a question that lingers over not only Trump’s criminal case in Washington — where a grand jury indicted him for attempting to overturn the 2020 election — but also in New York, where prosecutors are asking a judge to hold him in criminal contempt, because they argue he’s attacking potential trial witnesses.
Trump is under a court-imposed gag order that directs him not to comment on anyone who might testify at the trial, but he continues to post about witnesses online and hold forth in the hallways of the courthouse railing against his former fixer turned state’s witness.
So what’s a judge to do when faced with a defendant who also happens to be the presumptive GOP nominee for president? If the judge imposes a fine, as prosecutors have urged him to do, will the defendant stop? And if not, then what? In court this week the prosecution argued that Trump appears to be “angling” for incarceration — presumably to gain martyrdom status with his political base.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/central-hanging-over-trump-legal-233000788.html
