The Legal Walls are Closing in on Donald Trump

With each passing year the Conservative Political Action Conference ("CPAC") has increasingly become a gathering of batshit crazies that given the GOP's embrace of QAnon will likely be even more untethered from objective reality than in the past.  It goes without saying that Christofascists and white Christian nationalists will be at the event in large numbers. Now, CNN is reporting that Donald Trump will address the coven of extremists next Sunday. Interestingly, Mike Pence has reportedly declined an invitation to speak at the conference. It will be Trump's first public address - supposedly about the future of the GOP and conservatism - since fleeing Washington. Odds are Trump will not stay on message and a plethora of lies and whining of victimhood will be on display.   All of this is a distraction from the widening investigations surrounding Trump in New York State (the Manhattan DA investigating Trump is pictured at left) and now Georgia. The stakes for Trump are very high - mortgage and bank fraud convictions could put him in prison for the rest of life and, with his spawn of Satan children might become caught in the widening net.   A piece in Vanity Fair looks at situation Trump could be facing without the shield of the presidency to fend off prosecutors.  Here are excerpts:

There has been so much understandable attention recently on Donald Trump’s corrupt efforts to undermine democracy that it’s easy to overlook all the corruption he engaged in before he railed against the election results and incited a violent insurrection. Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance didn’t forget, though, and has been ramping up his probe into the former president’s tax and financial affairs—most notably, perhaps, through the hiring of a former prosecutor who helped bring down the head of the notorious Gambino crime family in the 1990s.

Vance earlier this month hired Mark Pomerantz, known for his successful prosecutions against John Gotti and other organized crime leaders. The addition, reported Thursday by the New York Times, may reflect the escalating case against Trump, and is perhaps a sign of trouble for the shady ex-president—particularly considering the mob-buster has already interviewed his former fixer, Michael Cohen. “I think Cohen may be more valuable than people are giving him credit for,” former Vance deputy Daniel Alonso told Reuters, which reported Pomerantz’s Thursday interview with the ex-Trump attorney.

Vance has not outwardly accused Trump, his family, or his business of wrongdoing, nor has he said if he will ultimately bring charges or not. But his probe has continuously expanded since he launched it in 2018; originally focused on hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal that were coordinated by Cohen, the investigation has since grown to examine the Trump Organization, potential tax fraud, and other Trump financial matters.

[W]ith a deep understanding of Trump’s practices, and the main hit on his [Cohen’s] credibility stemming from his work with him, he could be a threat to the former president. “I don’t think that calling Cohen a perjurer ends the story,” as Alonso told Reuters, “because that opens the door to the explanation of why he perjured himself.”

Trump, whose use of murky and outright fraudulent tax practices have been well-documented, has never truly been held accountable for anything in his life—and it’s far from clear that Vance will be the one to finally do so.

But Trump is now a private citizen, and Vance’s investigation is just one of several legal challenges looming over him, including one into his business by New York Attorney General Leticia James and another by Georgia prosecutors into his audacious pressure campaign to undermine the state’s election results. (My colleague Bess Levin recently walked through several lawsuits and investigations.) The political system may have proven incapable of punishing Trump—but with the steady drumbeat of investigations, we may soon find out if the same is true of the legal system.

Personally, I want to see Trump and his children particularly Trump, Jr., in prison.