President Joe Biden expanded federal aid for Hawaii on Thursday as deadly wildfires engulfed the island of Maui, and he expressed condolences for the devastation in a call with the state’s governor.  

Biden approved a disaster declaration for Hawaii aimed at spurring resources to allow the island to rebuild, the White House said in a statement after the fire killed at least 36 people as it swept through one resort town.

“The president’s action makes federal funding available to affected individuals in Maui County,” the White House said, although it did not cite a specific amount.

In a call with Hawaii Governor Josh Green, Biden “expressed his deep condolences for the lives lost and vast destruction of land and property,” the White House added.

The declaration will allow affected individuals to apply for grants for temporary housing and home repairs, and allow business owners to apply for programs to recover from the disaster, according to the White House.

Those grants come in addition to current emergency assistance by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the National Guard, the U.S. Coast Guard and other federal agencies, it added.
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The 75th Emmy Awards ceremony is postponed to Jan. 15, the Television Academy and broadcast network Fox said on Thursday, as Hollywood writers and actors strike over labor disputes with major studios.

The Emmys were originally slated to air on Fox on Sept. 18, and nominations for the highest honors in television were announced in July, just before the dual work stoppage was declared.

Hollywood actors last month joined film and television writers who have been on picket lines since May after negotiations between the Writers Guild of America and major studios reached an impasse.

It is the first time that both the writers’ and actors’ unions have gone on strike together since 1960, effectively halting production of scripted television shows and films and impacting businesses across the entertainment world’s orbit.

HBO drama “Succession,” the story of a family’s cutthroat fight for control of a media empire, leads the nominees for television’s Emmy awards alongside fellow HBO show “The Last of Us,” a dystopian videogame adaptation.

Others competing for best drama include HBO’s “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon,” vacation-gone-wrong story “The White Lotus” and Star Wars series “Andor.” Previous nominees “Better Call Saul,” “Yellowjackets” and “The Crown” are also in the mix.

The Emmy Awards will be broadcast live on Fox from the Peacock Theater at LA Live on Jan. 15. The Creative Arts Emmys — a class of awards recognizing technical and similar achievements — will take place on Jan. 6 and 7.

The show will be executive-produced by Jesse Collins, Dionne Harmon and Jeannae Rouzan-Clay of Jesse Collins Entertainment.
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At least 36 people were dead and 271 buildings destroyed as wildfires fueled by high winds ripped through the island of Maui in Hawaii on Aug. 9, 2023.
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Former President Donald Trump’s legal troubles are escalating by the day.  

Trump is facing an unprecedented slate of criminal charges that threatens his political future and, if convicted, could land him in prison. 

Last week, the former president and front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination was indicted in Washington on charges of conspiring to overturn his electoral defeat in 2020, adding to existing criminal cases in New York and Florida. A fourth indictment in Georgia could come any day.  

No American president has ever been criminally charged before, and no one knows what happens if Trump is found guilty.  

The indictments have raised legal and constitutional questions, some of which are easier to answer than others.  

Can Trump run for president if he is convicted? Can he go to prison? Can states keep him off the ballot by requiring that candidates have a clean criminal record? What if Trump is convicted but wins the election? Can he take office and then pardon himself?  

Can Trump run for president if convicted? 

There is near universal agreement on this question: Even if convicted, Trump will face no constitutional barriers to running for the White House.  

The U.S. Constitution has only three requirements for presidential candidates: They must be natural-born American citizens, at least 35 years old, and have lived in the country for at least 14 years. 

Trump meets all three, and most constitutional scholars agree that states can’t impose additional requirements on presidential hopefuls.  

Eugene Mazo, an election law expert and incoming professor at Duquesne University, said that even a candidate with a “mental incapacity” can’t be barred from running “because the Constitution lists all the requirements.” 

“If you want an additional requirement, it has to come through a constitutional amendment,” Mazo said in an interview with VOA.  

In recent years, legislation by states such as California and New Jersey requiring presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns was struck down as unconstitutional, Mazo said.  

That means that states can’t keep Trump off the ballot by passing legislation requiring presidential hopefuls to have a clean criminal record, he added.  

The 14th Amendment debate 

While states can’t disqualify presidential candidates on new grounds, there is one caveat to this general rule, said Frank Bowman, emeritus professor of law at the University of Missouri. 

Under the third clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, a person found guilty of “rebellion” or “insurrection” can be barred from running for president, Bowman said.  

The obscure provision was originally designed to prevent members of the rebel Confederacy from holding office following the 1861-65 U.S. Civil War.  The clause remained dormant for more than a century.  

But in recent months, liberal groups such as Mi Familia Vota and Free Speech for People have been pressing states to disqualify Trump under the 14th Amendment. They argue that Trump incited an insurrection against the United States on January 6, 2021, when a group of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory.  

Trump was later impeached for incitement but acquitted by the U.S. Senate. And Bowman noted that none of the current criminal charges against Trump alleges engagement in rebellion or insurrection. 

“Whether these efforts will actually work is debatable, not impossible,” Bowman said in an interview.  

But others see the effort as a long shot.  

“I think that eventually it would get to the Supreme Court and be quickly swatted down.” said Jonathan Turley, a conservative law professor at George Washington University, in a recent interview.  

Can Trump go to prison and campaign from behind bars? 

If convicted, Trump could be sentenced to prison and, theoretically, he could continue to campaign from there. 

“From the perspective of the criminal law, he’s just a guy and, therefore, like any other guy, if he is convicted of a felony, he can be sentenced to prison for whatever term the law provides,” Bowman said.  

No former president has ever been incarcerated, but some presidential candidates have campaigned from behind bars.  

In 1920, Eugene V. Debs, a presidential candidate for the Socialist Party, received almost 1 million votes while serving a sentence for sedition. In 1992, political activist Lyndon LaRouche campaigned for president while in prison for fraud.  

“Can he run a campaign from jail?” Mazo asked rhetorically. “It’s hard, but the answer is, sure.” 

Trump himself has vowed to continue campaigning even if he is convicted.  

“I’ll never leave,” he said in an interview with Politico in June.  

Whether the former president will receive a prison sentence remains uncertain, but Politico recently estimated that he could face up to 641 years if convicted of all charges and given the maximum penalty for each.  

This is a far-fetched scenario, however, as judges rarely impose the maximum penalty on first-time offenders and usually allow sentences to run concurrently.  

The sentencing decision will ultimately rest with the judge, who will weigh various factors such as the severity of the crime, the defendant’s character, and the public interest. 

Some legal experts argue that a judge might spare Trump from prison and instead give him probation or home confinement, if only to avoid the spectacle of a former American president in a prison jumpsuit.  

But others say Trump could face prison time if he is convicted.  

“I think it’d be very hard for any judge, particularly out of the D.C. district, having sent so many of his supporters and minions to prison for essentially acting on his instigation …not to give him time,” Bowman said. 

Could Trump pardon himself? 

Since the waning days of the Trump presidency, experts have fiercely argued the question of a presidential self-pardon.  

The American president can pardon anyone for federal crimes, and some have speculated that Trump may have secretly pardoned himself before leaving office to avoid future prosecution.  

But Turley said he has seen no evidence to that effect.  

“If there were (a secret self-pardon), he would have already made that defense,” Turley said in an interview on Tuesday. 

On the other hand, if Trump were reelected, he could issue himself a pardon, Turley said. “So if these federal trials are held after the election, Trump could pardon himself before any trial occurs, and Jack Smith will never see a jury in either of these cases.”  

Trials in two of the three cases are set for March and May 2024,  but those dates could be pushed back by pretrial motions and other legal maneuvers.  

And the question of a presidential self-pardon remains far from settled. Legal experts such as Bowman have argued that a presidential self-pardon violates the Constitution. No one can be their own judge.  

“Indeed, a presidential self-pardon is antithetical to the language and structure of the Constitution, contrary to the evident intentions of the Founders, and a very real danger to republican government,” Bowman wrote in Just Security in November 2020.  

Even if Trump could pardon himself, it would not extend to state crimes with which Trump has been charged, Turley noted. 
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A Utah man accused of making threats against President Joe Biden was shot and killed by FBI agents hours before the president was expected to land in the state Wednesday, authorities said.

Special agents were trying to serve a warrant on the home of Craig Deleeuw Robertson in Provo, south of Salt Lake City, when the shooting happened at 6:15 a.m., the FBI said in a statement.

Robertson posted online Monday that he had heard Biden was coming to Utah and that he was planning to dig out a camouflage suit and “clean the dust off the m24 sniper rifle,” according to court documents.

In another post, Robertson referred to himself as a “MAGA Trumper,” a reference to former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

The posts indicated he did appear to own a long-range sniper rifle and numerous other weapons, as well as camouflage gear known as a “ghillie suit,” investigators said in court records. Robertson was charged under seal Tuesday with three felony counts, including making threats against the president, court documents show.

Robertson also referenced a “presidential assassination” and made other threats against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and New York Attorney General Letitia James, court documents state.

“The time is right for a presidential assassination or two. First Joe then Kamala!!!” authorities say Robertson wrote in a September 2022 Facebook post included in the filings. No attorney was immediately listed for Robertson in court documents.

No further details were immediately released about the shooting, which is under review by the FBI.

Biden is in the middle of a trip to the Western United States. He spent Wednesday in New Mexico, where he spoke at a factory that will produce wind towers, and is scheduled to fly to Utah later in the day.

On Thursday, he’s expected to visit a Veterans Affairs hospital to talk about the PACT Act, which expanded veterans benefits, and hold a reelection fundraiser.
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In the early days of the United States, a candidate’s charisma did not matter as much in a presidential election. But in the era of electronic and social media, whether a candidate can connect individually with voters can determine whether he or she sits in the Oval Office.

The video generation began with a photogenic Democrat, John F. Kennedy, beating an unglamorous Republican, Richard Nixon, in the 1960 election. Nixon, however, was elected eight years later, defeating the Democratic Party’s nominee, the humdrum Hubert Humphrey.

Political novice Donald Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 is attributed to some degree by political analysts to the Democrat’s failure — despite her experience as first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state — to connect with voters.

“That was my problem with many voters: I skipped the venting and went straight to the solving,” Clinton acknowledged in her book, “What Happened.”

A U.S. presidential candidate’s charisma and the country’s economic performance interact in predicting whether a leader is selected, according to a 2015 academic paper.

The respective approaches of President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Trump, to retail politicking helped each win the U.S. presidency and could give one of them the top job a second time in next year’s election.

After speeches, Biden sometimes works the crowd, posing for selfies and giving hugs.

Then there is Trump’s signature exit with his “thumbs up” gesture, the fist pumps and dance moves to the 1978 disco hit “YMCA.” Trump boasts about his deep connection with his supporters.

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Trump said at a January 2016 campaign rally in the state of Iowa.

Trump has not shot anyone but is facing dozens of felony charges for crimes allegedly committed before, during and after his term in office, a career-killer for any conventional politician on the national stage. Polls, however, show him far ahead of the more than a dozen Republicans challenging him for the 2024 presidential nomination.

For those who study leadership, charisma is more than just being telegenic. Successful politicians excel at messaging.

“You feel like you’re one of them, and they are one of you, right? And so, kind of creating that collective identity, propelling values — all of those things can be done by framing the message, providing the substance and articulating in a way that’s engaging and present,” said Ulrich Jensen of Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs.

Jensen’s recent research demonstrates a connection between the charisma of U.S. governors and constituents following their pleas to mitigate behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic.

By shaking hands, gesturing and repeating signature lines, presidential candidates amplify their messages to the wider world, according to Stephen Farnsworth, director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington.

“The vast majority of people who are looking at these presidential candidates will never meet any of them,” said Farnsworth, a political science professor. “They will simply decide based on what they see on the media, whether this candidate or that candidate appeals to them more.”

Trump and Biden, the Democratic Party’s incumbent president, provide lessons in communication for those seeking to challenge them.

“You have to be genuine,” said Farnsworth. “I think that what you see with both of these men is exactly who they are.”

Perceptions of inauthenticity bedevil the campaign of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who had been considered the most likely Republican candidate to dethrone Trump.

Awkward politicians cannot learn to be authentic, but they can be coached on what to emphasize, Trump’s first White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, told VOA.

“One of the things that sometimes politicians do is, if they get nervous about certain qualities, and so they’re afraid of leaning into them,” said Spicer. “And I think what Trump did was, he just went with his gut a lot more about what he thought and what he believed.”

“I completely agree [authenticity cannot be faked],” said Jensen. “An intuitive premise of charisma is [that] charisma isn’t much without authenticity. So, you can fool people using these tactics. But you can only do it for so long.”

Biden bets on his audiences believing his promises that he is authentic.

“I never, ever tell you anything I don’t mean. I never tell you anything I don’t believe, even when I know it’s not popular,” said Biden as a presidential candidate at Wofford College in South Carolina on Feb. 28, 2020.

“Creating that identification through showing people that you care and you’re willing to listen to their stories is one of the things Biden is known for,” said Jensen. “And what he does well is then reuse and repurpose those stories for the storytelling aspect and his own rhetoric. It’s an incredibly powerful way to help create that identification [with voters].”

Even Spicer is willing to acknowledge “Biden is very good one-on-one with folks,” but he contends Trump “is a little more genuine.”

“For the candidates who aren’t named Donald Trump or Joe Biden, I think the main lesson here is to be who you really are,” said Farnsworth, author of the book, “Presidential Communication and Character.” “If you try to present yourself as something less than fully genuine, the modern media environment detects that, and people see it.”
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Modernist structures designed by African Americans targeted for preservation
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Ohio voters on Tuesday resoundingly rejected a Republican-backed measure that would have made it more difficult to change the state’s constitution, setting up a fall campaign that will become the nation’s latest referendum on abortion rights since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned nationwide protections last year. 

The defeat of Issue 1 keeps in place a simple majority threshold for passing future constitutional amendments. It would have raised that to a 60% supermajority, which supporters said would protect the state’s foundational document from outside interest groups. 

While abortion was not directly on the special election ballot, the result marks the latest setback for Republicans in a conservative-leaning state who favor imposing tough restrictions on the procedure. Ohio Republicans placed the question on the summer ballot in hopes of undercutting a citizen initiative that voters will decide in November that seeks to enshrine abortion rights in the state. 

Dennis Willard, a spokesperson for the opposition campaign One Person One Vote, called Issue 1 a “deceptive power grab” that was intended to diminish the power of the state’s voters. 

“Tonight is a major victory for democracy in Ohio,” Willard told a jubilant crowd at the opposition campaign’s watch party. “The majority still rules in Ohio.” 

A major national group that opposes abortion rights, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, called the result “a sad day for Ohio” while criticizing the outside money that helped the opposition. In fact, both sides relied on national groups and individuals in their campaigns. 

Other states where voters have considered abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court ruling have protected them, including in red states such as Kansas and Kentucky. 

Interest in the special election was intense. Voters cast nearly 700,000 early in-person and mail ballots ahead of Tuesday’s final day of voting, more than twice the number of advance votes in a typical primary election. Early turnout was especially heavy in the Democratic-leaning counties surrounding Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati. 

 

One Person One Vote represented a broad, bipartisan coalition of voting rights, labor, faith and community groups. The group also had as allies four living ex-governors of the state and five former state attorneys general of both parties, who called the proposed change bad public policy. 

In place since 1912, the simple majority standard is a much more surmountable hurdle for Ohioans for Reproductive Rights, the group advancing November’s abortion rights amendment. It would establish “a fundamental right to reproductive freedom” with “reasonable limits.” 

Voters in several states have approved ballot questions protecting access to abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, but typically have done so with less than 60% of the vote. AP VoteCast polling last year found that 59% of Ohio voters say abortion should generally be legal. 

The result came in the very type of August special election that Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a candidate for U.S. Senate, had previously testified against as undemocratic because of historically low turnout. Republican lawmakers just last year had voted to mostly eliminate such elections, a law they ignored for this year’s election. 

Voters’ rejection of the proposal marked a rare rebuke for Ohio Republicans, who have held power across every branch of state government for 12 years. 

Ohio Right to Life, the state’s oldest and largest anti-abortion group and a key force behind the special election measure, vowed to continue fighting into the fall. 
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A federal judge presiding over former President Donald Trump’s trial on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election has ordered his attorneys and federal prosecutors to appear in court on Friday for a hearing to help determine how evidence can be used and shared in the case. 

U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan set the hearing for Friday at 10 a.m. ET (1400 GMT), shortly after Trump’s attorneys and members of U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office had clashed over when to schedule the proceeding. 

Prosecutors had said they were available all week, while Trump’s lawyers had asked for a postponement until early next week. 

Prosecutors request protective order

Friday’s hearing comes after Trump’s defense team on Monday opposed a request from prosecutors for Chutkan to impose a protective order to ensure confidential evidence is not shared publicly by Trump, suggesting he could use the information to intimidate witnesses. Trump has pleaded not guilty and called the charges politically motivated. 

Trump’s attorneys said limits would infringe on his right to free speech, protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. 

Trump is not expected to be present in the courtroom on Friday, after Chutkan waived his appearance. 

Typically, defense lawyers do not oppose such protective orders because doing so can delay the government from producing the evidence it intends to use at trial in a process known as discovery.  

Defense tries to slow proceedings

The disagreement between the parties over the hearing date represented the latest effort by Trump’s team to delay or slow legal proceedings. 

It also underscored the logistical challenges that Trump’s team may have as it continues to represent him in two separate federal criminal cases brought by Smith’s office, one in Washington, and the other in Florida, where Trump is charged with retaining highly classified records after leaving the White House and obstructing the government’s efforts to have the records returned. Trump also pleaded not guilty in that case. 

One of Trump’s attorneys, Todd Blanche, will be in federal court in Florida on Thursday for an arraignment, after the government filed a superseding indictment that charged Trump with additional criminal counts and also charged another one of his employees in the case. 

In the joint Washington filing, Trump’s lawyers said Trump wished for both Blanche and his other lawyer John Lauro to be present for the hearing before Chutkan. 
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday granted a request by President Joe Biden’s administration to reinstate – at least for now – a federal regulation aimed at reining in privately made firearms called “ghost guns” that are difficult for law enforcement to trace.

The justices put on hold a July 5 decision by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth, Texas that had blocked the 2022 rule nationwide pending the administration’s appeal.  

The decision was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the court’s three liberal justices to grant the administration’s request. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh dissented from the decision.

O’Connor found that the administration exceeded its authority under a 1968 federal law called the Gun Control Act in implementing the rule relating to ghost guns, firearms that are privately assembled and lack the usual serial numbers required by the federal government.

The rule, issued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to target the rapid proliferation of the homemade weapons, bans “buy build shoot” kits that individuals can get online or at a store without a background check. The kits can be quickly assembled into a working firearm.  

The rule clarified that ghost guns qualify as “firearms” under the Gun Control Act, expanding the definition of a firearm to include parts and kits that may be readily turned into a gun. It required serial numbers and that manufacturers and sellers be licensed. Sellers under the rule also must run background checks on purchasers prior to a sale.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Tuesday found that 70% of Americans support requirements that ghost guns have serial numbers and be produced only by licensed manufacturers. The idea had bipartisan support among respondents, with 80% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans in favor.

There were about 20,000 suspected ghost guns reported in 2021 to the ATF as having been recovered by law enforcement in criminal investigations – a tenfold increase from 2016, according to White House statistics.

Biden’s administration on July 27 asked the justices to halt O’Connor’s ruling that invalidated a Justice Department restriction on the sale of ghost gun kits while it appeals to the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Alito, who handles emergency matters arising from a group of states including Texas, the next day temporarily blocked O’Connor’s decision to give the justices time to decide how to proceed.  

The administration said that allowing the O’Connor’s ruling to stand would enable an “irreversible flow of large numbers of untraceable ghost guns into our nation’s communities.”

Plaintiffs including various gun owners, parts manufacturers and two gun rights groups – the Firearms Policy Coalition and Second Amendment Foundation – filed suit to block the rule in federal court in Texas. They claimed that the rule violated the Gun Control Act, portraying the policy as a threat to the long history of legal private gunsmithing in the United States.

O’Connor blocked the rule as an overreach, concluding that the congressional definition of a firearm “does not cover weapon parts, or aggregations of weapon parts, regardless of whether the parts may be readily assembled into something that may fire a projectile.” The judge also rejected the administration’s concern that such a ruling would allow felons, minors and others legally prohibited from owning a firearm to easily make one.  

“Even if it is true that such an interpretation creates loopholes that as a policy matter should be avoided,” O’Connor wrote, “it not the role of the judiciary to correct them.”

The United States, with the world’s highest gun ownership rate, remains a nation deeply divided over how to address firearms violence including frequent mass shootings.  

In three major rulings since 2008, the Supreme Court has widened gun rights, including a 2022 decision that declared for the first time that the U.S. Constitution protects an individual’s right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense.
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An Israeli official brushed off on Tuesday the rare U.S. use of the term “terror attack” to condemn the killing of a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank, as two Jewish settlers held as suspects asked a court to release them from police custody.  

With U.S.-sponsored peacemaking stalled for almost a decade, Washington has watched worriedly as West Bank violence spirals, including with settler revenge riots in which many Palestinians, among them U.S. dual nationals, have suffered property damage.  

Israeli police arrested the two settlers over the killing on Friday of a 19-year-old Palestinian near Burqa village in what their lawyers say was a self-defense shooting by one of them at a much larger group of rock-throwers.  

“We strongly condemn yesterday’s terror attack by Israeli extremist settlers,” the U.S. State Department’s Near East Bureau said on Saturday, in its first application of the term in the context of settler violence.  

Police initially accused the settlers of “deliberate or depraved-indifference homicide” with a racist motivation, but a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet argued that culpability for the Burqa death was far from clear.  

“I wouldn’t advise treating the U.S. definition as a precise professional definition. At the end of the day, they are not drawing on intelligence, but on media reports,” said Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, a former counterterrorism chief for Israel’s Shin Bet security service.  

“Everything gets poured into media reports — things that are correct, things that are wrong, tendentious and other things. In the end of the day, what is important as far as we are concerned is what happened there,” he told Israel’s Army Radio.  

Police guard

Jerusalem District Court heard arguments that the suspects — one of whom had been hospitalized, with a police guard, for a head wound — should be freed pending possible prosecution.  

“Their act was to save lives — their lives and others’ lives,” defense lawyer Nati Rom told reporters. “It’s very sad to see them here in court and hopefully they will be released soon.”  

A police spokesperson did not immediately respond.  

Separately, Israeli forces arrested five Palestinians from Burqa in an apparent effort to expand the investigation. They were due to appear before a military court in the West Bank.  

The State Department appeared disinclined on Monday to elaborate on its sharpened censure over the Burqa killing.

“The thinking is that it was a terror attack, and we are concerned about it, and that’s why we called it that,” spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters.

“We have made quite clear our concerns, but I would note that the government of Israel has made an arrest in this case and is seeking to hold the perpetrator accountable, and that’s an appropriate action.” 
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Former President Donald Trump’s legal woes keep getting worse, and they threaten to jeopardize his presidential bid and personal freedom.

Last week, Trump was indicted on four felony counts in connection with his alleged efforts to reverse his election loss to President Joe Biden in 2020.

This was his third indictment in more than four months — one state and two federal. In all, the former president faces 78 criminal charges.

A fourth indictment is widely expected later this month in the southern U.S. state of Georgia, where a local prosecutor has been investigating Trump and his allies for election meddling in the state.

If convicted of all charges in the three indictments and given the maximum penalty, Trump could face up to 641 years in prison, according to a Politico calculation.

A conviction is not a given, however, and legal experts say the former president could avoid jail time by negotiating plea deals with prosecutors and appealing the verdicts.  

Trump has pleaded not guilty in all three cases and termed the charges “election interference” designed to hurt his presidential run.

His legal troubles have not dented his dominance as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. But with at least two criminal trials looming next year, the criminal cases will likely cast a long shadow over the presidential race, as well as the news headlines. 

Here is a look at where the cases stand.

Hush money payment

This case, announced in March, made Trump the first and only former American president to be charged with crimes.

On March 30, a Manhattan grand jury indicted him on 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with paying off an adult film star in 2016.

In an unprecedented scene, Trump surrendered to authorities five days later and was arraigned in a Manhattan courthouse.

Trump’s lawyers sought to move the case from New York state court to federal court, arguing that his alleged conduct in the case was related to his official duties as president.

But in July, a federal judge rejected the argument, setting the stage for a trial in a state court.

The trial is scheduled for March 25, 2024.

Classified documents

This case, brought by special counsel Jack Smith, marked the first federal indictment of an American president, sitting or former.

The case grew out of Smith’s monthslong investigation of Trump’s handling of government secrets after he left the White House in January 2021.

On June 8, a grand jury in Miami indicted Trump on 37 felony counts, including 31 counts of illegally retaining national defense information, and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice. Trump’s valet, Walt Nauta, was also charged. Trump was arraigned on June 13.

In late July, prosecutors unveiled three additional charges and added another co-defendant to the case — Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker Carlos De Oliveira. 

Among the new charges, Trump and his two aides are accused of asking another employee to “delete security camera footage at the Mar-a-Lago Club to prevent the footage from being provided to a federal grand jury.”

Trump has pleaded not guilty to the new charges. 

The trial in the case is set to begin May 20, 2024, in Fort Pierce, Florida. 

The trial date, set by the presiding judge, Aileen Cannon, was a compromise between a request by prosecutors to schedule the trial for December and Trump’s request to put it off until after the presidential election. 

2020 election 

In what many see as the most damning indictment against Trump, this federal case is focused on the former president’s alleged efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election.  

Last week, Smith issued a four-count indictment, charging Trump with three conspiracy counts and one obstruction count in connection with the scheme.

The indictment stemmed from the Justice Department’s massive investigation of the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump’s supporters.

On August 3, the former president appeared in Washington, D.C., before a federal magistrate judge, who gave prosecutors one week to propose a trial date.

The first hearing in the case before the presiding judge, Tanya Chutkan, has been set for August 28.

After his arraignment, Trump complained on his Truth Social platform that he can’t get a fair trial in Washington, a Democratic-leaning city. 

A judge would have to approve a change of venue request, and it remains unclear if it will be granted.

Georgia election interference 

Trump could face criminal charges in Fulton County, Georgia, where District Attorney Fani Willis has been probing attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn the outcome of the presidential election. 

A special grand jury examined the state case and issued a report in January recommending criminal charges. 

Willis said she’ll announce charging decisions by mid-August.  

More than a dozen people have been notified by Willis’ office that they are under investigation, suggesting some or all of them could face charges.  

Implications for presidential bid

Although the outcome of the charges remains uncertain, there is a consensus among legal experts that even if convicted, Trump can still run for president. 

The U.S. Constitution sets forth three key requirements for presidential candidates: they must be natural-born American citizens, at least 35 years old and residents of the United States for no less than 14 years.  However, the Constitution is silent on the question of criminal records or convictions of candidates. 

That means Trump could run for president as a convicted felon or even from behind bars, as Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party presidential candidate, did more than a century ago.
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