Trump is Targeted to Be Arrested Again

Former President Donald J. Trump said that he had received a target letter indicating that he was the subject of an investigation in connection with the events leading up to the Capitol attack.

“Deranged Jack Smith” (according to the nickname Trump gave him) sent Mr. Trump a letter informing him he was a “TARGET of the January 6th Grand Jury” investigation, Mr. Trump said in a post on his social media platform.

Such a letter “Almost always means an Arrest and Indictment,” wrote Mr. Trump, whose campaign is rooted in accusations of political persecution and a promise to purge the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation of personnel he sees as hostile to him and his agenda.

Just hours after Mr. Trump disclosed his receipt of the target letter, the Michigan attorney general announced felony state charges against 16 people for their involvement in an attempt to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory in the state by convening a slate of pro-Trump electors.

Two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche and Christopher M. Kise, briefly mentioned the new target letter at a pretrial hearing in Florida on the case of the documents.

While Mr. Kise and Mr. Blanche gave no details about what the letter said, they used it to argue that Mr. Trump was essentially being besieged by prosecutors and that the trial in the classified documents case should be delayed until after the 2024 election.

Earlier, the authorities had seized the cellphones of Mr. Eastman, a legal architect of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, and Jeffrey Clark, a lawyer whom Mr. Trump had tried to install as the acting attorney general.

It is not clear what specific charges Mr. Smith and his prosecutors might be considering, but they appear to have assembled evidence about an array of tactics that Mr. Trump and his allies used to try to stave off his election defeat.

Those efforts included assembling slates of so-called fake electors from swing states that Mr. Trump lost; pressuring state officials to block or delay Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victories; seeking to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to impede congressional certification of the Electoral College outcome; raising money based on false claims of election fraud; and rallying supporters to come to Washington and march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

It also remains unknown whether others might be charged along with Mr. Trump.

Several of his closest allies during his efforts to remain in office, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was serving as his personal lawyer, and John Eastman, who promoted the idea that Mr. Pence could keep Congress from certifying Mr. Biden’s victory, said through their lawyers that they had not received target letters.

[Source: NY Times, Qiew News]