Thread by @SethAbramson

BREAKING NEWS (CNN, on-air): House January 6 Committee “Concerned” Trump May Be Using the Hundreds of Millions He Raised to Overturn the Election to Pay for Lawyers for Those He Doesn’t Want to Testify Before Congress, “Coercing” Them Not to Do So in What May Be Witness Tampering

1/ I think I know what the Committee is referring to—as Trump engaged in the same illegal witness-tampering scheme in the Russia investigation and the Ukraine investigation. What he does is create joint defense agreements with witnesses whose legal interests don’t align with his.

2/ Normally a joint defense agreement only exists between individuals who share a common legal interest, and normally there is no particular association between the lawyers representing the two JDA’d individuals—only between the individuals themselves as to their legal interests.

3/ Because Trump hires a lot of people who rely on him to be their patron not just politically but financially, and because federal litigation is expensive, there are many people Trump has brought into his sphere who cannot afford their own attorneys. He takes advantage of this.

4/ Trump has a very long history of ensuring that all of the people who could testify to his criminal conduct are represented by lawyers who he not only has approved but who are actually connected to him—sometimes literally, in the sense that they are his legal counsel as well.

5/ Without fail, those in Trump’s sphere represented by attorneys who are part of his sphere—and who have entered into joint defense agreements with him at the urging of these attorneys—refuse to give testimony against Trump *even if it would be in their legal interest to do so*.

6/ You are probably now wondering, or should be, whether it is unethical for an attorney to advise someone to enter into a joint defense agreement when it is not in their own legal interest to do so (while having a conflict of interest because of attachment to Trump). Yes—it is.

7/ Add to that unethical conduct these hypotheticals:

▪️ Trump is paying for the witness’s lawyer
▪️ Trump is paying illegally, from funds raised for a different purpose that can’t be used for this one
▪️ Trump tells the witness they lose the lawyer if they testify against him

8/ Then add two more hypotheticals:

▪️ Per the JDA the witness’s lawyer is issuing regular reports to Trump or one of his agents on attorney-client privileged information the witness has given the lawyer
▪️ The lawyer is aware that if he stops doing this, he’ll stop getting paid

9/ If all of this sounds like mafia tactics to you, congratulations, you now understand how Donald Trump—who is a career criminal—operates. He has publicly said that his model for a lawyer is the late Roy Cohn, a disbarred criminal. Trump wants his attorneys to be criminals, too.

10/ In writing the three books of the bestselling Proof trilogy, I encountered repeated instances of Trump directly speaking with people in his circle about their federal cases as he was sharing a lawyer (and JDA) with them. It was obvious witness tampering, and it always worked.

11/ Indeed, the Mueller Report made clear that its outcome would have been dramatically different if investigators had had cooperation from Paul Manafort, who Trump repeatedly tampered with, both directly and indirectly, during the pendency of that federal criminal investigation.

12/ The problem Trump had at that time—because his liquid assets are profoundly limited—is that he didn’t have the money to pay for witnesses’ lawyers or for their silence himself. This is why Manafort was given millions by Trump allies as soon as he left the 2016 Trump campaign.

13/ In fact, Trump is *still* paying off Paul Manafort today. Just a few days ago major media reported that $5 million from Trump’s post-election fund was given to “Event Strategies” to set up the January 6 White House Ellipse event. Paul Manafort is an executive at that company.

14/ All of the money Trump raised after the 2020 presidential election was raised fraudulently from gullible schmucks who were, sadly, the victim of Wire Fraud. None of the money they sent him went to the purposes they were told it would go to, even as Trump got them to pay up...

15/ ...by teasing a 2024 presidential run as an unannounced candidate, which itself was a campaign finance crime. Yet what the $250 million Trump raised through this criminal scheme allowed him to do was pay for the current massive cover-up of the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

16/ What the Committee is saying is that Trump not only authored the largest seditious conspiracy in U.S. history but the largest campaign finance fraud in U.S. history, one of the largest wire fraud scams in U.S. history, and the largest witness tampering scheme in U.S. history.

17/ The concern is that DOJ will do with this evidence what it did with the evidence it received of a similar character during the Mueller investigation: nothing. The scope of Trump’s ex post facto crimes of Obstruction was so vast that the DOJ threw up its hands and walked away.

18/ The difference, of course, is that Trump’s 2017 witness-tampering scheme successfully kept Manafort off the table—so DOJ would’ve had to proceed only with Obstruction charges against Trump (who it couldn’t indict then, because he was president). But matters are different now.

19/ Not only is Trump no longer POTUS and thus eligible for indictment, the witnesses he’s tampering with are also indictable. This makes it much harder for DOJ to ignore the campaign-finance, wire-fraud, witness-tampering, and obstruction crimes that the Committee is uncovering.

20/ Having said this, it’s public knowledge that Trump mysteriously gave a seven-figure donation to a foundation associated with Mark Meadows during the period of time he changed his mind about cooperating with the Committee. DOJ thereafter let Meadows off the hook for Contempt.

21/ I say “Trump gave” money to Meadows, but of course this isn’t accurate. Trump never spends his own money on his crimes. Rather, he’s spending money sent to him by poor grandmothers across the country whose finances have been ravaged by the pandemic.

It’s money from the poor.

22/ The question now is what a House select committee can possibly do in the face of a DOJ that resolutely refuses to apply the laws of the United States as they concern a single man—Donald Trump. And this question is about to get much, much more complicated in the next few days.

23/ As already noted, one of the reasons Trump got away with at least 12 documented federal felonies itemized in the Mueller Report is that he was president, and could only be indicted by Mueller—in Mueller’s mind—with AG say-so. Barr refused to agree to any prosecution of Trump.

24/ It’s against this backdrop, and this announcement by the Committee through its member Zoe Lofgren, that we hear rumors that Donald Trump will announce his 2024 presidential run as early as July 4—which (making a national holiday about himself) would certainly be true to form.

25/ Having twice gotten away with a massive witness-tampering scheme because DOJ wouldn’t indict a sitting president, Trump is now gambling on DOJ cowardice a third time—he believes they won’t indict an announced 2024 GOP presidential contender who is the presumptive frontrunner.

CONCLUSION/ It’s for this reason I say that any vote for a Republican in this fall’s election is a vote for Donald Trump to be president beginning in January 2025.

The GOP is universally backing him for another White House run, in so doing trying to insulate him from indictment.