How Trump Survived Decades of Legal Trouble: Deny, Deflect, Delay, and Don't Put Anything in Writing
From TIME
Nearly fifty years ago, Donald Trump learned the legal strategy that would repeatedly get him out of tight legal jams. It was 1973 and the Justice Department had just filed a civil rights lawsuit against Trump and his father Fred Trump. The complaint alleged that the Trumps and their company, which managed some 14,000 apartments in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, had violated the Fair Housing Act by systematically flagging the applications of Black renters and steering them away from available units. To push back, the Trumps hired the famously combative Roy Cohn—Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the 1950s Red Scare hearings—and sued the Justice Department for $100 million, claiming defamation. The Trumps settled the case two years later, agreeing to a consent decree that included giving a weekly list of vacancies to the New York Urban League. Trump later boasted that he ended up “making a minor settlement without admitting guilt.”
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In all of the ongoing cases, Trump is employing the tried-and-true playbook he first learned all those years ago from Cohn for staying out of prison and staying in business, according to Jennifer Taub, a professor at Western New England University School of Law who has tracked the ways that Trump had evaded accountability for decades. “Here’s what he learned from Roy Cohn: Don’t put things in writing, punch back harder, focus on optics, who cares what the courts say,” says Taub, who is the author of the book, Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime. Those methods have been perhaps most apparent in Trump’s actions in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago search by the FBI, and are likely to emerge again as he defends himself against the latest lawsuit from New York into his business practices, which Trump has called a “politically motivated Witch Hunt.”
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One of Trump’s most far reaching denials is still rattling the foundations of U.S. democracy. On Nov. 7, 2020, when Joe Biden’s tally in the presidential election reached an insurmountable lead, Trump wrote on Twitter, “I WON THIS ELECTION. BY A LOT!” He has stuck to that lie for nearly two years. Trump has refused to back away from this denial even after his supporters violently attacked the Capitol and, now, candidates who openly refute the legitimate results of the 2020 elections are running for office in states that could determine the outcome of the next presidential race. When cornered, Trump’s approach is to deflect, attack others, and distract from what he’s accused of doing, a strategy that often goes hand in hand with his denials.
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In 2016, during Trump’s first presidential campaign, Trump criticized the federal judge handling a lawsuit against his business Trump University, saying Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel was “totally biased” and “unfair.” Trump was campaigning at the time on a promise to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and during an appearance on CNN, Trump said Curiel should recuse himself, arguing “this judge is of Mexican heritage, I’m building a wall.” Trump ended up agreeing to a $25 million settlement in the case.
Last month, four days after the Mar-a-Lago search, Trump compared his predicament, where he kept hundreds of government documents in unsecured personal boxes, to the orderly and conventional process by which former President Barack Obama set up his presidential library. Obama has worked with the National Archives to properly secure the presidential records and make them available for his library in Chicago. But Trump used that allegation as a distraction. “The bigger problem is, what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?” Trump wrote on Aug. 12.
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Trump’s request that a federal judge in Florida name a “special master” to review the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago takes another page from Trump’s playbook: delay the process as much as possible. Judge Aileen Cannon has stalled the Department of Justice’s investigation while another federal judge, Raymond Dearie, reviews what was taken to sift out anything that might be considered protected attorney-client privilege or that Trump could claim shouldn’t be handed over because it is part of internal deliberations while President. In a court filing on Sept. 19, Trump’s legal team asked Dearie to extend the timeline of his review, writing, “we respectfully suggest that all of the deadlines can be extended.” Delaying procedures and investigations has been a common technique of Trump’s, says Taub, the expert on white collar crimes. “If you can just get someone on your side. If you can just delay, you live another day,” Taub says.
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https://time.com/6215419/trump-legal-trouble-key-strategies/
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