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The Lawfare Podcast: A Big Day in Trump Accountability

Benjamin Wittes, Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, Jen Patja
Wednesday, July 19, 2023, 8:00 AM
What do we know about the apparently forthcoming new case against Donald Trump? And what happened in the courtroom when Judge Cannon faced her first hearing as the presiding judge in the Mar-a-Lago case?

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It was a big day in the legal travails of Donald Trump. We awoke this morning to news from the former president himself that he had received another target letter from special counsel Jack Smith, this time from the Jan. 6 grand jury. An indictment seems to be imminent. Incoming Lawfare Legal Fellow Anna Bower spent the day in federal court in Fort Pierce, where Judge Aileen Cannon was hearing the first major status conference of the Mar-a-Lago case. And just as Anna was coming out of court, the Attorney General of Michigan announced that she had brought cases against several fake electors from the 2020 election in that state.

Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Anna and with Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff for a live taping of The Lawfare Podcast to go over it all. What do we know about the apparently forthcoming new case against Donald Trump? What do we know about the fake electors case in Michigan? And what happened in the courtroom when Judge Cannon faced her first hearing as the presiding judge in the Mar-a-Lago case?


Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.
Anna Bower is a senior editor at Lawfare. Anna holds a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Cambridge and a Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School. She joined Lawfare as a recipient of Harvard’s Sumner M. Redstone Fellowship in Public Service. Prior to law school, Anna worked as a judicial assistant for a Superior Court judge in the Northeastern Judicial Circuit of Georgia. She also previously worked as a Fulbright Fellow at Anadolu University in Eskişehir, Turkey. A native of Georgia, Anna is based in Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
Roger Parloff is a journalist based in Washington, D.C. For 12 years, he was the main legal correspondent at Fortune Magazine. His work has also been published in ProPublica, The New York Times, New York, NewYorker.com, Yahoo Finance, Air Mail, IEEE Spectrum, Inside, Legal Affairs, Brill’s Content, and others. An attorney who no longer practices, he is the author of "Triple Jeopardy," a book about an Arizona death penalty case. He is a senior editor at Lawfare.
Jen Patja is the editor and producer of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.

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