This won’t be a very relaxing summer for former President Donald Trump. These months before the presidential primaries begin are often a grueling time for a candidate, but he has the extra layer of stress that comes from having been federally indicted. Namely, several developments in the three weeks since his arraignment threaten to ratchet up the stakes of his legal jeopardy even further.
Special counsel Jack Smith hasn’t been resting on his laurels since he dropped 37 federal charges on Trump. Smith is also probing Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and his reported attempts to overturn the 2020 election results. That effort appears to be homing in on two areas in particular: the effort to have “fake electors” try to cast Electoral College votes for Trump and the fundraising effort that raked in boatloads of cash in the weeks after the election.
Special counsel Jack Smith hasn’t been resting on his laurels since he dropped 37 federal charges on Trump.
According to the House Jan. 6 committee’s investigation, the fake electors plot was part of a convoluted scheme cooked up among some of Trump’s worst advisers. Step one: Slates of electors in states that Trump claimed to have won would try to submit their own Electoral College votes to Congress. This would give Vice President Mike Pence a pretense to claim that the multiple set of ballots required either tossing out the “contested” states’ votes — giving Trump the win over Joe Biden outright — or sending them back to those states. Under a theory that the Supreme Court just shot down, the Republican-controlled state legislatures would then approve of the fake electors and toss the election Trump’s way. According to reports, in recent weeks, several of those Republican “electors” have been called in to testify to a federal grand jury and given limited immunity in exchange.
Smith has begun examining whether the members of Trump’s legal team who coordinated the fake electors scheme “were following specific instructions from Trump or others, and what those instructions were,” The Washington Post recently reported. Key to answering that will be Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who spearheaded those efforts and in recent weeks was interviewed by federal investigators. He was interviewed under a “proffer agreement,” The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, a deal in which “a witness provides information to prosecutors, who in turn promise not to use it against them in potential criminal proceedings unless they determine the witness was untruthful.”
In comparison, the fundraising side of the investigation is much more straightforward. We now know that the Trump campaign commissioned multiple external reports that disproved claims that the election was rigged or stolen. Despite knowing those claims were false, the Trump campaign and related groups raised millions off of them. Many of the email prompts included a claim that the money was needed to help fight the election fraud that didn’t exist, causing prosecutors to examine whether those appeals for money broke federal wire fraud laws.
Meanwhile, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whom Trump implored to “find 11,000 votes” in a January 2021 phone call, sat with Smith’s prosecutors last month. It’s not clear, though, whether Smith has been in touch with another state official Trump was reportedly pressuring over the phone: former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey. The Washington Post reported Sunday that Trump called Ducey in December 2020, “spoke specifically about his shortfall of more than 10,000 votes in Arizona and then espoused a range of false claims that would show he overwhelmingly won the election in the state and encouraged Ducey to study them.”
It can’t be a pleasant to be around Trump as he summers at his Bedminster golf resort in New Jersey. According to The Post, Pence was then tasked with checking in on Ducey to see whether there was any progress on that front, but the newspaper reports that “he did not follow Trump’s directions to pressure the governor.” Pence said Sunday there was “no pressure involved” in his call with Ducey. But Pence hasn’t exactly been keen on providing details about Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, even though he was a target of the mob that stormed the Capitol. All that having been said, the Mar-a-Lago case is also not going great for Trump. Even though a federal grand jury in Miami has already handed up an indictment, since then it has issued more subpoenas related to the investigation, The New York Times reported last week. Whether or not that actually means more charges are to come is up in the air, but it can’t be a great feeling for Trump to know that another shoe could still drop. Nor can he be feeling good about the news that officials at neither the Justice Department nor the National Intelligence Director’s Office can find a “standing order” that Trump has claimed he issued while president to allow him to instantaneously declassify documents. On top of all this, before summer ends, Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis is due to decide whether to press charges against Trump for his attempt to swing the election in Georgia. Oh, and lest we forget, there’s still the fact that he has an indictment in New York City to contend with, too. It can’t be a pleasant to be around Trump as he summers at his Bedminster golf resort in New Jersey. He can at least be grateful that the residence wasn’t searched by the FBI like Mar-a-Lago was, even though the government reportedly pressed for a search warrant to do so. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets a little bit surlier every time he’s in the room where an audio recording captured him shuffling through papers before he showed off classified documents. With both his homes filled with reminders of his troubles, he’ll most likely need to connect with his still-adoring fans on the campaign trail this summer to feel like he’s on vacation.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
