Mounting legal threats to Donald Trump may have appeared ominous before the 2022 congressional elections. They’re nothing compared to what comes next.
Some of the political protections that the former president was enjoying are effectively gone. And the firewall of Republican insulation he expected from the House and Senate appears likely to have some holes in it after an unexpectedly strong showing by Democrats in the midterms.
With the midterm elections in the rearview, federal prosecutors are no longer abiding by an unwritten code to avoid politically sensitive investigative steps before voters go to the polls. An Atlanta-area prosecutor probing Trump’s effort to subvert the 2020 election had also paused most of her potentially explosive steps while Georgia voters were casting ballots.
And the inability of Republicans to deliver massive margins of victory threatens to deprive Trump of the overwhelmingly Republican Congress that he had hoped would wield committee gavels and subpoena power to protect him and torment rivals.
