Analysis | Former President Donald Trump’s tough day at court ended with a double defeat

(CNN) — Donald Trump had a bad day in court this Tuesday, or, more accurately, in the courts.

The former US president suffered a shock defeat at the Supreme Court in his long-running campaign to hide his tax returns. Now they will appear before a committee of the House of Representatives Run by Democrats.

Meanwhile, Republican-appointed appeals court judges have cooled on their latest effort to delay the case Declassified Mar-a-Lago Papers. A New York judge has set an October 2023 trial date for the state’s $250 million fraud lawsuit against Trump, his three children and their organization, which comes just before the Republican presidential primary season. A lingering hangover from his false 2020 fraud claims, Trump ally Sen. Lindsay Graham testified before a grand jury Georgia investigates former president’s alleged election fraud

Given Trump’s massive legal exposure and his habit of using the courts’ deliberative momentum to defer accountability, it’s not unusual for him to have difficulty handling cases simultaneously on the same day.

But Tuesday’s events fully exposed the legal entanglements and risks surrounding him for the first time since he announced his third run for the Republican presidential nomination last week. It will be the first test of whether the courtroom risk he faces on multiple fronts will undermine his ability to mount a credible presidential campaign and discourage Republican primary voters who might consider an alternative candidate.

Several developments on Tuesday, the documents lawsuit and the fact that Trump’s tax returns will soon end up in Democratic hands just weeks before Republicans take control of the House, suggest that two of Trump’s standard legislative strategies are beginning to unravel. First, he said, as a former president, he deserves different treatment under the law than other US citizens. Second, your fallback, fallback, fallback approach may be reaching the limits of its usefulness. However, former President Trump has long managed to keep the scandals that could bring down other politicians at arm’s length. He will surely use new twists in the cases to reinforce the persecution narrative that will be central to his new campaign for the White House.

But Outgoing Arkansas Governor Asa HutchinsonAlso considering a 2024 Republican presidential primary campaign, CNN said Tuesday that new evidence of turmoil surrounding Trump could be a shift for Republican voters.

“It’s dizzying for the public to see this kind of confusion surrounding a presidential candidate,” Hutchinson told CNN’s Brianna Keilar. “To me, it’s very complicated and it reflects all the challenges that come with a Trump candidacy.”

Trump reaches end of road on tax fight

Trump has refused to show his example to the public Tax returns during the campaign The 2016 presidential election was one of the first signs of his determination to break the rules. Thus, the Supreme Court’s decision not to prevent the Internal Revenue Service from turning over its tax documents to the House Ways and Means Committee represents a significant personal and political failure.

The committee’s Democratic leadership says it should decide whether changes to the tax law involve current leaders. Given the power of the CEO to set tax policy, the possibility of hidden conflicts of interest or liability in presidents or underpayments or underpayments can be problematic. The lower court had earlier found that the Commission had a legitimate statutory purpose in looking into the reports. But with Republicans only weeks away from controlling the House, it’s unclear how long Democrats will have to scrutinize the results or make changes to the legislation.

Nor is it certain that the public will see the benefits that Trump has long sought to protect. Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat on the panel, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Tuesday that the documents are subject to privacy protections. But he said the committee was willing to make the documents public and “the pressure of time here creates an additional reason to consider doing so.”

On the merits of the case, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, said the Supreme Court has upheld a fundamental rule. “Since the Magna Carta, the principle of control has been maintained and today is no different. It is beyond politics and the Commission will now implement the oversight we have been demanding for the past three and a half years.

But the top Republican on the panel is Rep. Texas. Kevin Brady warned that by setting aside, the court would set a precedent that no citizen could be safe from a major political party.

“By giving the majority party in both houses of Congress nearly unlimited power to identify and publicize the tax dollars of political opponents—political figures, private citizens or Supreme Court justices—they are opening up a new and dangerous political battlefield where no citizen is safe,” Brady said in a statement.

An interesting aspect is how future Republican presidential candidates will handle their financial records. By releasing them, they could not re-establish the modern tradition of transparency for presidents. They can outrun Trump.

Bad omens for ex-president in appeal of dossier case

Another big disappointment for Trump came in the case of the Mar-a-Lago documents, where key protections the former president received from a trial judge in Florida now appear to be in jeopardy. The Justice Department is investigating the former president for obstruction of justice, criminal misuse of government records and violations of the Espionage Act, which prohibits the unauthorized storage of national security information.

A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals cast doubt on Trump’s arguments about why a third party has the right to review the 22,000 pages of material taken from his resort in Florida. A key question here is whether Trump, as a former president, is entitled to judicial intervention that, if widely accepted, could delay countless routine legal cases involving other Americans.

In an opinion widely noted by legal analysts, the president of the appeals court, Justice William Pryor, cast doubt on Trump’s arguments.

“We should be concerned about the precedent of allowing any criminal matter of a federal criminal investigation to go to a district court, and for a district court to consider this type of petition, exercise equitable jurisdiction (which allows the court to intervene. ) and interfere with the current executive branch investigation,” Pryor told Trump attorney James Trusty. said.

“Other than the fact that it involves a former president, everything else about this is … indistinguishable,” Pryor told trustees during arguments.

Another judge, Britt Grant, reprimanded the trustee for calling the FBI’s search of Trump’s assets “a raid,” as the former president has done several times. “Do you think a raid is the correct term for executing an arrest warrant?” Grant asked. The Trustee apologized for using the “charged word”.

Former Defense Department special counsel Ryan Goodman told CNN’s Burnett that the court could decide to ignore Judge Eileen Cannon, who appointed the special master, which would be a major blow to the former president.

“They would basically say, you shouldn’t have exercised jurisdiction in the first place, Judge Cannon, you shouldn’t have,” Goodman said.

Such a move could significantly speed up the prosecution of the documents after Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special prosecutor last week.

It could also provide an opportunity for clarification to the public, which must now weigh another unprecedented political situation involving Trump. Multiple legal challenges by the former president have delayed both cases, but Tuesday’s case offered signs that each is moving closer to resolution.

— CNN’s Cara Scannell, Caitlin Bolandz, Evan Perez and Tierney Snead contributed to this report.