Entering the two-year stretch leading up to the 2024 presidential election, former President Donald Trump already has a good share of his lengthy legal docket settled.
Shortly before the November midterm elections, Trump settled a lawsuit with a number of protesters who alleged they were beaten up by the former president's security team outside of Trump Tower in the lead-up to his first presidential run in 2015.
Earlier this month, Trump's legal team lost its effort to shield his confidential tax information from congressional investigators, bringing to a close a years-long saga almost as old as his presidency. Trump's real estate business, the Trump Organization, was found guilty of tax fraud by a New York City court.
And in mid-November, Trump came out on top in a lawsuit brought by his niece, Mary Trump, while other former associates—Tom Barrack, Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani—all saw their cases conclude this year.
All that said, Trump, now in the midst of his third run for president, still has plenty of fight left ahead of him.
Trump still faces the possibility the Manhattan District Attorney's office could bring charges against him personally as part of its investigation into his company's alleged fraud. He also faces the outstanding issue of fighting a $250 million lawsuit from New York State Attorney General, Letitia James, in a case alleging he inflated his company's income in efforts to swindle insurers and banks.
Then there is the matter of a rape allegation by journalist E. Jean Carroll, whose dual sexual assault and defamation case against the former president is scheduled to go to trial this spring.
That's just the start of it. A 2018 lawsuit alleging Trump and his three eldest children accepted secret payments to persuade financially-challenged people to invest in a multi-level marketing scam is likely headed to trial in fall 2023 in an effort to avoid the heat of campaign season in 2024.
Trump is also still working under the shadow of his actions in the final days of his presidency when thousands of his supporters descended on the U.S. Capitol in a violent effort to overturn the result of an election he'd lost by more than 7 million votes.
In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been conducting an extensive investigation into a number of telephone calls Trump and his associates made to Georgia state officials asking them to "find" enough votes to invalidate Joe Biden's narrow victory in the state during the 2020 election. If convicted, the penalties could be grave.
"The allegations are very serious. If indicted and convicted, people are facing prison sentences," Willis said in September.
Trump, meanwhile, has maintained without evidence that the election was systematically "rigged" against him, charging on Truth Social early on Thursday that the FBI was all but directly responsible for his roughly 5-point loss in the election two years ago.
While Trump managed to beat a subpoena by the Jan. 6 Select Committee this week, his biggest challenge likely lies with an ongoing probe by the U.S. Department of Justice into his removal of dozens of classified documents from the White House after his time in Washington, D.C. had ended.
Trump has already lost a battle to employ a third-party reviewer his legal team had picked to evaluate some of the documents involved in that case, while the government has begun preparing a case against him.
Newsweek reached out to Trump's office for comment.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
");jQuery(this).remove()}) jQuery('.start-slider').owlCarousel({loop:!1,margin:10,nav:!0,items:1}).on('changed.owl.carousel',function(event){var currentItem=event.item.index;var totalItems=event.item.count;if(currentItem===0){jQuery('.owl-prev').addClass('disabled')}else{jQuery('.owl-prev').removeClass('disabled')} if(currentItem===totalItems-1){jQuery('.owl-next').addClass('disabled')}else{jQuery('.owl-next').removeClass('disabled')}})}})})
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7r7HWrK6enZtjsLC5jq2prqWgYn9xfpJmo56fkaF6tb7OrpmlnaNifniDj2pwaQ%3D%3D