Trump faces setbacks in other probes as NY case proceeds

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump faces the most urgent legal challenge of his life this week in New York, where he’s set to be arraigned Tuesday on charges arising from hush money payments during his 2016 campaign. The vulnerability Trump faces in Washington alone has become clear over the past month, as judges in a succession of sealed rulings have turned aside the Trump team’s efforts to block grand jury testimony from witnesses — including from his own lawyer and his former vice president — who were or still are close to him and who could conceivably offer direct insight into key events. Perhaps the most vivid example came last month when the then-chief judge of the D.C. federal court ordered that Trump’s lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, had to give more grand jury testimony in the Mar-a-Lago investigation. The decision rejected the Trump team’s objections on executive privilege grounds, though Boasberg did give Pence a victory by accepting his lawyers’ arguments that, for constitutional reasons, he could not be questioned about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as Republican Pence was presiding over a joint session of Congress to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on this story but responded to the ruling in the Pence matter in a statement saying that the Justice Department “is continuously stepping far outside the standard norms in attempting to destroy the long accepted, long held, Constitutionally based standards of attorney-client privilege and executive privilege.” Other former Trump aides, including Stephen Miller and former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, have also recently been ordered by a judge to offer testimony despite Trump team objections of executive privilege.