'Pushing the envelope': Legal experts say Trump’s rants 'test the limits' of his pre-trial release

16 August 2023

Donald Trump's legal woes continued to grow in mid-August, when Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis announced that the former president and 18 of his allies had been indicted on state criminal charges in connection with their efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. All of the defendants must surrender by noon on Friday, August 25, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and pro-Trump attorneys Sidney Powell, John C. Eastman, Jenna Ellis and Rudy Giuliani (who was a federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York before being elected mayor of New York City in 1993).

Willis' case marks the fourth criminal indictment that Trump is facing, and he has been railing against the federal and state prosecutors he is up against — including Willis, special counsel Jack Smith and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. — as well as some of the judges assigned to the cases. Tanya S. Chutkan, the Barack Obama-appointed federal judge assigned to Smith's federal 2020 election case, has cautioned Trump against making "inflammatory statements" that might be construed as an effort to intimidate witnesses.

In an article published by the New York Times on August 16, reporters Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan and Alan Feuer stress that Trump has "tested" Chutkan's warning with some of the messages he has been posting on his Truth Social platform.

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"After eight years of pushing back at a number of institutions in the United States," they report, "Mr. Trump is now probing the limits of what the criminal justice system will tolerate and the lines that Judge Chutkan sought to lay out about what he can — and cannot — say about the election interference case she is overseeing. He has waged a similarly defiant campaign against others involved in criminal cases against him, denouncing Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two federal indictments against him, as 'deranged'; casting Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, GA, as 'corrupt'; and even singling out witnesses."

Some attorneys, according to the Times journalists, believe that if a defendant other than Trump were publicly attacking prosecutors and judges in this way, their pre-trial release would be revoked.

Former Manhattan prosecutor Karen Agnifilo, now a legal analyst for CNN, told the Times, "He is absolutely, in my view, testing the judge and testing the limits, almost daring and taunting her."

Similarly, Duke University law professor Samuel W. Buell told the Times that Trump has been "walking the line" with his comments and continues to "push the envelope."

Ty Cobb, a former Trump Administration lawyer, acknowledged that Trump lacks self-control.

The attorney told the Times, "The problem he has is anybody — testifying truthfully or not — who could ding him slightly or take him on frontally, is an adversary who has to be demolished…. He doesn't understand anything about the propriety of how to live a life. He's at war perpetually — 24/7."

The New York Times' full report is available at this link (subscription required).

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