#Podesta Emails

[boycottdivestsanctions]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Judd Legum at Popular Information:

Email communications from individuals associated with the Trump campaign have been hacked by malign actors within the last ten days, Popular Information has confirmed.  On September 18, I was sent a message from "Robert," which contained the cover page of a dossier on Senator JD Vance (R-OH), the Republican vice presidential nominee, dated February 23, 2024. Robert refused to identify himself except to suggest it was the same "Robert" who provided stolen internal Trump campaign materials to Politico, the New York Times, and the Washington Post in July and August. "I thought you must have heard Robert's story," he said. Robert eventually sent me a 271-page Vance dossier, along with similar dossiers on two other potential Donald Trump running mates —  a 382-page document on North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum (R), dated March 2, 2024, and a 550-page document on Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), dated April 1, 2024. All of the dossiers were marked "Privileged & Confidential."

Robert boasted that he had "a lot" of other Trump campaign materials. He sent me a dozen purported emails to and from top Trump campaign staff, including senior advisor Susie Wiles, senior advisor Dan Scavino, and pollster John McLaughlin. The emails covered an 11-month period, from October 2023 to August 2024. 

Robert also sent a 4-page letter, dated September 15, 2024, from an attorney representing Trump to three individuals at the New York Times. The letter has not been made public by either the Trump campaign or the paper. I provided a copy of the letter to Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor, who confirmed its authenticity with someone at the New York Times who had seen it. (Smith has published a piece about the incident on Semafor.)  The legitimacy of the letter proves that the person or people representing themselves as Robert has stolen electronic communications from people associated with the Trump campaign within the last ten days.

Who or what is "Robert"? A threat analysis published by Microsoft on August 9 reported that "[i]n June 2024, Mint Sandstorm—a group run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence unit—sent a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior advisor." On August 10, the Trump campaign said it was the victim of a hack by a foreign actor, citing the Microsoft report.  Three U.S. intelligence agencies have released joint statements, on August 18 and September 19, warning of "Iranian malicious cyber actors" who have obtained "stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign." Iran has denied any role in the hack. Popular Information will not publish or excerpt the Trump campaign materials provided by Robert. The materials are stolen, and publishing the documents would be a violation of privacy and could encourage future criminal acts.  I believe that, in some circumstances, the publication of leaked materials can be justified. The Pentagon Papers, for example, were obtained illegally by Daniel Ellsberg, but the public interest in revealing the truth about the Vietnam War outweighed those concerns. 

[...]

My personal emails were weaponized by the media and the Trump campaign in 2016

In 2016, Russian hackers were able to access years of emails from the personal account of John Podesta, who was serving as Hillary Clinton's campaign chair. I started working for Podesta in 2001, when I was a first-year law student at Georgetown. By the 2016 election, Podesta had been a colleague and friend for 15 years. So the materials obtained by Russian hackers and published by Wikileaks included correspondence between me and Podesta. 

Media organizations, including the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the National Review, and others, isolated a handful of my private emails to Podesta and used them as grist for articles that attacked my integrity and professionalism. I believe these insinuations were unfounded, but I was forced to defend my reputation in the media and with my colleagues at ThinkProgress, where I worked before starting this newsletter.  I was a bit player in this drama, but it is still disturbing to have your private communications stolen by a foreign government and broadcast by major media outlets.  As Popular Information previously reported, outlets like Politico, the Washington Post, and the New York Times produced dozens of unflattering articles and blog posts about Podesta's emails. 

[...]

There were a few tidbits of news buried in Podesta's emails, but no significant scandal. Most of the coverage amounted to little more than voyeurism. A Politico "live blog" of Podesta's stolen emails had more than 50 entries published over three weeks. "All the Juiciest Dirt in The Podesta E-mails, Explained," Vanity Fair headlined a November 3, 2016 article that was representative of the coverage. Unlike the Trump campaign materials from "Robert," Podesta's emails were posted online by Wikileaks. But the media played a critical role in amplifying the material and turning a collection of mostly anodyne emails into an ongoing scandal. The media also did not verify the authenticity of the hacked materials. The Clinton campaign declined to review 50,000 emails and contest or validate each one. The New York Times and others interpreted that as proof that they were all legitimate.  The coverage lasted for weeks because the stolen emails were released by Wikileaks in small batches. Each time a new batch of emails was released, the media swung into action, mining the stolen materials for any morsel that could be used in a story. There appeared to be little concern that both the content and cadence of political coverage at a critical juncture of the election was being dictated by foreign actors. 

The New York Times published at least 199 articles about the stolen emails between the first leak in June 2016 and Election Day. The New York Times Editorial Board wrote that any negative impact their coverage had on the Clinton campaign was Hillary Clinton's fault for not voluntarily releasing the information contained in the stolen emails. "Imagine if months ago, Mrs. Clinton had done her own giant information release," the New York Times Editorial Board wrote on October 22, 2016. "[E]veryone would have long since moved on." The media frenzy over Podesta's emails was actively encouraged by Trump and his campaign. On July 26, 2016, Trump publicly implored Russia to acquire Clinton's internal emails, promising that the media would amplify them. "Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press," Trump said. (It was later revealed that Russia began targeting Clinton campaign officials "on or around" the same day.)  When Wikileaks began posting the emails acquired by Russian hackers, Trump celebrated. He publicly mentioned WikiLeaks 141 times in the month before the election. "WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks," Trump told a crowd in Pennsylvania on October 10, 2016. 

The Trump campaign is being hacked just like how Hillary Clinton’s was in 2016.

[tenth-sentence]

The mass hack of the German Bundestag in 2015 was followed by the email hacks of Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta in the run-up to the 2016 election and the Macron data leaks ahead of the 2017 French presidential election.

"Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists" - Julia Ebner

[the-red-thread-70-w-blog]

Biden refuses to follow the law: Scott Perry

[mariacallous]

The public got a peek into the inner workings of the Trump campaign last week, when the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein did what major news outlets refused to: he published the opposition research dossier on JD Vance’s electoral vulnerabilities that was written by the Trump campaign in the lead-up to the VP announcement.

The dossier, which was obtained in a hack thought to have been perpetrated by Iranian state interests, would have been compiled by Donald Trump’s camp as part of a routine vetting process as the Republican campaign surveilled possible VP picks and assessed their strengths and weaknesses. It is thorough: at 271 pages, it contains a robust and factual accounting of the vice-presidential candidate’s public statements and associations going back years. As such, it offers a unique perspective into how the Trump campaign views the race – and how they understand the controversial man who is now in their No 2 spot.

But the document, a litany of everything the Trump camp thinks is wrong with Vance, is maybe most revealing for what it omits: there is almost nothing about his comments on women, and nothing at all about his extensive, repeated and impassioned hatred for childless women, including the “cat ladies” comment that has been Vance’s stickiest scandal and perhaps his greatest contribution to the campaign thus far. The comments that provoked the ire of thousands of women – including no less influential a figure than Taylor Swift – and turned the race partly into a referendum on the purpose and value of women’s lives were nowhere to be found in the document.

Instead, the dossier was largely focused on comments by Vance that make him vulnerable with an audience of one: that is, his past negative statements about Trump.

The mainstream news organizations that declined to publish this hacked document justified this decision by saying that much of the information was not newsworthy. If this is their standard, it seems to be a new one: in 2016, when Russian-backed hackers obtained emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign, one of the disclosures included risotto cooking tips from campaign chair John Podesta. (He says that adding the liquid slowly helps the rice become creamier, in case you’re interested.) But the Vance dossier is newsworthy, though not because of what it reveals about Vance. What the document says about Vance himself is largely a matter of public record. What is newsworthy, instead, is what the document exposes about the Trump campaign’s priorities.

The dossier concerns many worries that Vance is not conservative enough. It also seems preoccupied with how the Ohio senator has wounded Trump’s ego. The absence of Vance’s extreme gender views from the document suggests that the Trump campaign did not understand his comments on women to even be controversial: they don’t seem to have thought that it would come up.

Maybe the Trump campaign is staffed with people, including the apparatchiks who do its vetting, who have so little exposure to feminism (or, perhaps, to women more broadly) that it simply did not occur to them that anyone would find Vance’s ravings about women offensive. Maybe the Trump camp made the calculation – one certainly not exclusive to the political right – that women’s investment in their own rights is partial and unserious, and that they would not be moved by gendered insults to their dignity in anything like meaningful numbers. Maybe they assumed that gender politics is now a man’s game, and that appeals to masculine woundedness and grievance now carry much more sway than appeals to women’s rights do. If this is what they think – that misogyny can be an asset for them but never a liability – it would certainly explain some of their actions.

But the salience of the comments also signals something else that has changed this election: Trump no longer solely sets the terms of the conversation. Trump’s ability to command attention and to dictate the news cycle has noticeably waned this term – think, for instance, of how quickly and decisively each of his not one but two assassination attempts disappeared from the front pages, and how little an impact they seem to have ultimately had on his support. Trump has been unable to get a nickname to stick to Kamala; he has been unsuccessful in his efforts to generate vulgar distractions about her sexual history or the authenticity of her racial identity.

So far, all he has managed to do is spread lurid and racist lies that have made life hell for the residents of Springfield, Ohio. Trump’s vulgarity, his hysterics, his domineering indifference to the truth – all these used to fascinate voters, or at least the national media. But Trump has lost his juice.

Which brings us to the other reason why the dossier may not have contained many of Vance’s most potent vulnerabilities: perhaps Trump’s staff overlooked them because they assumed that they would be able to generate the narrative on their own, assuming that it was they, and they alone, who would dictate what the media covered and what the public cared about. Those days are over. Just ask your local cat lady.

[us-cj]

After reading through some 1,500,000+ emails from the DNC, Clinton, Podesta, Obama, and their Admin, the most important things they exposed is the fact they started wars in the Ukraine and Middle East for financial gain and control. The displaced people of the Middle East, are victims of the Obama /Clinton administration failed foreign policy and the lies of Western Media. The wars they started in Libya, Yemen and Syria were war crimes that we can't ignore. Refugees don't want to come to USA after Obama and HRC betrayed their trust, killed their families and left them homeless. They need food and shelter in their home country, not in Europe or USA. The past leaders of USA owe it to them to stop the wars, rebuild and send them home. Trump had nothing to do with these wars Clinton planned and executed in Libya and Syria, Yemen, etc. Now he is faced with draining that sewer swamp and taking the trash out. So far he was doing a great job of it. Read his presidential orders, understand them, above all Do Not accept what the media tells you, they haven't told us the truth in the last 50 years. - George M Nasif

[aressida]

"Hoping this Julian Assange news brings Pizzagate and Seth Rich back into the conversation. Still lots of people who don’t know about Podesta’s codewords in his Wikileaks emails." - Jordan Sather.

-> https://t.me/jordansather/10484

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Uh oh😳

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò better sleep with BOTH eyes open after he links Hillary to Pizzagate... - Revolver News

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò better sleep with BOTH eyes open after he links Hillary to Pizzagate…

January 10, 2024 

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 8 or so years and don’t know what Pizzagate is, here’s a brief explanation according to the left-wing site Wikipedia:

“Pizzagate” is a conspiracy theory that went viral during the 2016 United States presidential election cycle, falsely claiming that the New York City Police Department had discovered a pedophilia ring linked to members of the Democratic Party while searching through Anthony Weiner’s emails.

The issue with the media and the left’s swift dismissal of the theory as a “conspiracy” is that there does seem to be a grain or two of truth to it. Without getting into too much “pizza,” the truth of the matter is that an alarming number of elites are being apprehended for child pornography and trafficking. Jeffrey Epstein was operating a full-scale pedophile ring, and according to court records, Bill Clinton was allegedly knee-deep in it and preferred his girls “young.”

Now, this doesn’t prove Pizzagate by any means. However, it certainly lends credibility to certain aspects of the theory that suggest elites are involved in depraved activities concerning children.

The Independent:

Billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein once told one of his victims that Bill Clinton “likes them young”, according to dramatic testimony revealed in court documents unsealed for the very first time.

Dozens of Epstein associates were unmasked on Wednesday after a judge ordered the unsealing of court documents in a now-settled lawsuit brought by abuse victim Virginia Giuffre against Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

Among the hundreds of pages of filings, another victim Johanna Sjoberg spoke about what she knew about Mr Clinton’s ties to Epstein as part of a 2016 deposition that also made allegations against Prince Andrew.

Under sworn testimony, she said that Epstein had told her the former president liked girls “young”.

“[Epstein] said one time that Clinton likes them young, referring to girls,” she testified.

When asked if she knew Mr Clinton was a friend of Epstein, she said: “I knew he had dealings with Bill Clinton. I did not know they were friends until I read the Vanity Fair article about them going to Africa together.”

The Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell case has brought the “Pizzagate” narrative back into the spotlight, and now, with the release of the Epstein files, it has gained even more momentum.

That’s why it comes as no surprise that a video clip has been circulating online featuring Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who openly discusses Pizzagate and doesn’t shy away from naming people like Hillary Clinton and John Podesta.

Now, we always approach this type of thing with a healthy amount of skepticism, but we like to share it with you so you can draw your own conclusions.

The truth is, when it comes to Hillary and her husband, she has earned a notorious reputation for treating Bill’s accusers like second-class citizens and attempting to silence their voices. This is precisely what Juanita Broaddrick, one of Clinton’s rape accusers, says happened to her.

Needless to say, Hillary doesn’t have the most glowing “pro-woman” reputation. So, Archbishop Viganò held nothing back in his “revelations” about Pizzagate and his direct references to Hillary Clinton. Again, there’s no proof of this, but many people have very strong opinions.

And truth be told, it has us a bit worried. Perhaps the archbishop should sleep with both of his eyes open?

We may never fully uncover the truth about Pizzagate, or even the depths of the Epstein case and similar incidents, but it’s essential to encourage people to remain engaged in the conversation and seek out information for themselves. After all, that’s the American way.

They can't outrun hell.

[awesomecooperlove]

CENTER STAGE<

🎥

_The Whites Hats are publicly putting Obama on the center stage for 2024 and and his life corruption and AGENDAS connected to ALL DEEP STATE OPERATIONS< :

>TUCKER Carlson coming after Obama as being gay is a very important operation that WILL discredit the OBAMA'S for their next presidential big run

_but the EXPOSURE of Obama as a gay President WILL lead to DC Elites and EXPOSURE of the intensional WOKE movement involving the United States military and the chain of commands and operations targeting children,/ intentionally weakling the military on[ ds] military operations connected to CCP infiltration

_The Obama hidden gay agenda WILL be uncovered as the world watches and a clear

Gay militarized operations took place to control the media and place prominent positions through Hollywood, media, courts

Banking sectors, the u.s. education systems to indoctrinate the children into being sexualized at a very young age ( placing planned agendas on children's sexuality and orientation/sexual genders is pedophilia)

_The Obama EXPOSURE WILL >COINCIDE< with the EXPOSURE of the Biden laptop which Congress will push into light and connect world banks to Biden family. These same banks will connect JP Morgan and other world banks to pedophilia and their association with EPSTEIN PEDOPHILIA RING AND BLACKMAIL WORLD NETWORKS RINGS.>>>HUMAN TRAFFICKING RINGS

_

_CONNECTED TO[ DS] WORLD MILITARY OPS>

_

_

THE EXPOSURE OF OBAMA IS VITAL and connects deep state MILITARY OPERATIONS protecting pedophilia rings

( [ ds] mil intel. Agencies protect ELITE PEDOPHILIA RINGS due to their own involvement in the human trafficking/ child/ sex trafficking trade)//// >>> EPSTEIN WAS CREATED BY MOSSAD/ FINANCED BY MI6/cia/Rothschild , Rockefellers etc ect AND KEPT HIS MONEY IN CIA OPERATIONAL BANKS AS JP MORGAN AND OTHER WORLD BANKS AS DEUTSCHBANK in Germany and much much much much more....

The Exposure of Obama as gay and pushing a military WOKE movement and government aid and financing into Gay Agenda movements through several U.S corporations that were intentionally pushed on children/military and created a 4rth generations warfare between civilians is all connected to TREASON/ PEDOPHILIA/ CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY/ UNITED STATES EXECUTIVE ORDERS pertaining to Foreign interference in ELECTIONS ( tens of Thousands of Government officials . Military personal and people of influence were blackmailed through Gay agenda operations that targeted their computers , phones, Email etc."' X'''' > ( the PATRIOT ACT in the 2000's gave the cia and [ ds] the power to install fake pedophilia blackmail operations programs on millions of U.S. (EU.> world) citizens computers and phones... And they were blackmailed into complying with the oppositional deep state forces....... this was

A large part of 911 inside cia job to create the Patriot act and take control of deep state U.S. interest )////

The military current MILITARY ALLIANCE operations to EXPOSE Obama , U.S. PIZZAGATE. HUNTER LAPTOP, PODESTA. HILLARY EMAILS. >> EPSTEIN<<<

>>>ALL CONNECTED TO PEDOPHILIA RING,

ADRENOCHROME crime syndicate operations ///// and how social media Giants. MSM. Elites/ politicians/ tv personalities as jimmy Kimmel all covered up for the CRIMES OF CENTURY. CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY AND ALL WORKED IN UNISON IN A CIA. GUILDED MILITARY COUP AGAINST DONALD J. TRUMP AND SEVERAL COUNTRIES AND NATIONS ACROSS THE WORLD

__

WE HAVE COME INSIDE A MASSIVE STORM

PATRIOTS///the world is testing EBS through countries and all is Preparing for EVENTS ( they will tell you the EBS is for other reasons or blame Putin or Patriots or something other for coming blackouts...

But remember GAME THEORY OPERATIONS ARE IN PLACE.... it's very important the coming EVENTS that are going to happen

Including massive protest. Riots against the new pandemic/ vaccines/ lockdowns/.....

Subscribe for more:

https://t.me/HoaxExposed

[follow-up-news]

At least three news outlets were leaked confidential material from inside the Donald Trump campaign, including its report vetting JD Vance as a vice presidential candidate. So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what they received. Instead, Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post have written about a potential hack of the campaign and described what they had in broad terms. Their decisions stand in marked contrast to the 2016 presidential campaign, when a Russian hack exposed emails to and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. The website Wikileaks published a trove of these embarrassing missives, and mainstream news organizations covered them avidly.

[dead-twink-storage]

The whole Podesta email thing back in 2016 was probably the most visible and effective display of crushing a political scandal and turning it on your dimwitted opponents.

[boycottdivestsanctions]

[deblala]

WikiLeaks - The Podesta Emails

https://archive.md/ONAHW

[muavenusphoenix]

Thank you ______ ! And thank Beyoncé too 😅😅😅hah jk jk I ain’t scared of her . But uh I will say, check out Ally Carter and Jaguar Wright . They have firsthand witnessing of Bey & Jay Z doing things… a power Couple child predators who sold their souls for control, pinnacle of fame, & fake queen B hive status. Her incredible stage presence and undeniable dance moves made her an idol. But be weary citizens — shed cognitive dissonance & have an open mind that your fav celebrity is on awful crime. In due time, the Truth prevails… Though unfortunately, too many times the news comes out late ~ after the fact. A lot of sickos have died scot free. Such as, Jimmy Savile & friends (British military, politicians, police, & royalty).

If you haven’t watched Jason Whitlock interview Larry Johnson, he recounts a time at a Roca wear photoshoot after party with Bey Z involving kids. Naomi Campbhell was there ..and we all know (well not all, but if your doing your research) that she’s an alleged youth procurer. Which makes me think of N’Oprah.. Look at her track record (horrific South Africa school scandals) & associations with vile predators (John of god, P. diddler, Epstein, Weinstein, etc.)… It’s so sad when victims of SA, turn around and become abusers themselves. Innocent victim no more.

CHILDREN ARE NOT FOR SALE, NOR CAN THEY CONSENT. I could list more names… And more soon, shall come out. Idc it’s time to 🆘 because this Age of Light is exposing the real F’d up unfathomable frights. That is the highly organized network of: grooming, breeding, kidnapping, s*x trafficking, MK ultra enslaving, satanic ritual abuse (SRA), snuffing, cannibalizing adrenochrome, organ harvesting, cloning operations. These evil deeds occur off Earth (yes humans are delicious, energetically & meat fully to certain ETs) as well as off world planets/moons + ships/stations. Facilitated by black ops factions in military.

Back on Earth, there’s a meme going around picturing 3 diff sized boats: diddy is the smallest boat (tip of the iceberg status), middle size is Hanks/Epstein, largest is Podesta / Clinton (deep state) ‼️⚠️ Pizzagate is real, Frazzledrip is real… those wiki emails (that happen to align with FBI’s sheet of p3do lingo & symbols is real. The Finders (FBI) & mk ultra (CIA) are real. Lincoln Nebraska Boys town scandal is real. DUMBs/underground tunnels (containing victims & enabled easy transportation) is real. Laura silsby, Clinton crony tryna kidnap Haitian kids is real….list goes on …and on and on. It’s been since centuries, really, research: Elizabeth bathory, Vlad the impaler, blood libel…

Who?: Government contractors, sordid non profit/charities, diabolical religious leaders, pathetic p3do politicians, deviant doctors, teachers, business execs, royalty, entertainment, media, CPS, corrupt government (local/state/nation/world), police, etc etc… Pervs, who peddle selfish exploits, push for child s3xualization. From various walks of life, working all professions; from the top 1% elitists, to poverty stricken bottom feeders. A very S.A.D. (Spiritual Arrested Development) ubiquitous degenerates’ sickness...

Why do you think the world is so F’d up ? Why do so many Child celebrities lose their mind ? So many whistle blowers & witnesses unalived? It’s time to let the bad times die. Humanity must face, address, and properly penalize all perpetrators ~ on high ~ before we can enter the Golden Age ✴️ Satya Yuga, no lie. For the Vimana Venus fly — trap pin’ dem’ demons a$$es nigh 👺💩

I digress. Apologies for the tangent of triggers. 🤍🙏🧿 #triggerwarning

[the-red-thread-70-w-blog]

Erin Brockovich: This is a nightmare

[mariacallous]

The literally unprecedented indictment against Donald Trump marks an outright dangerous—and politically fraught—moment for the United States and serves as a reminder of the unparalleled level of criminality and conspiracy that surrounded the 2016 election.

It’s easy to look back at the 2016 election as though its outcome was inevitable—that Hillary Clinton was too weak of a candidate, one whose years of high-priced speeches had made her lose touch with the working-class voters of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; that “but her emails” and Jim Comey’s repeated, inappropriate, and misguided meddling in the election turned the tide. But the new indictment of Trump is an important historical corrective, a moment that makes clear how the US, as a country, must reckon with the fact that Trump’s surprise victory was aided by not one but two separate criminal conspiracies.

In the 2016 race’s final push, in an election that came down to incredibly narrow victories in just three states—10,704 voters in Michigan, 46,765 in Pennsylvania, and 22,177 in Wisconsin—and where Trump lost the overall popular vote by some 3 million votes, he was helped along by a massive and wide-ranging official Russian government operation. That effort was funded in part by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is now behind the brutal combat of his Wagner Group mercenary army in Ukraine, which targeted US social media companies and activists on the ground. According to the US Department of Justice’s exhaustive report, in the second arm of the Russian operation, the military intelligence service GRU hacked top Democratic officials, leaked their emails, and shifted the national narrative around Clinton and other Democrats. (Not to mention that this gave rise to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and, arguably, QAnon.) 

Then there was the separate criminal conspiracy that was the subject of today’s new indictment in New York: the plot in the final weeks of the 2016 election by Trump’s campaign, Trump family fixer Michael Cohen, and the National Enquirer to pay hush money to bury stories of two of the candidate’s affairs, including infamously one with porn star Stormy Daniels. 

While it may seem like news of such an affair would have ended up being a nothingburger amid the campaign’s final weeks, it’s worth remembering the specific context that Cohen and the Trump orbit faced in those finals hours of the campaign. They were performing a fraught and knife’s-edge balancing act to hold onto support from conservatives and evangelicals in the wake of the devastating Access Hollywood tape, a moment where vice presidential nominee Mike Pence seriously considered throwing in the towel himself. The follow-on of more non-family-values-friendly stories might well have begun an unrecoverable spiral. (It’s also worth remembering the still-suspicious interplay of these two threads: how, on a single Friday in October 2016, US intelligence leaders announced publicly for the first time that Russia was behind the election meddling, the Washington Post scooped the existence of the lewd Access Hollywood tape, and then, hours later, Wikileaks began dumping a fresh set of stolen emails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.)

The new criminal case related to that second Stormy Daniels conspiracy, brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, also is a reminder of the historic mistake by the US Justice Department to not pursue its own charges against Trump in the same matter. This was a mind-boggling abdication of responsibility given that the Justice Department—in the midst of Donald Trump’s own presidency, no less!—prosecuted Cohen for the same conspiracy, naming Trump in the charges against Cohen as “Individual 1” and, according to a new book by Elie Honig, outlined in a draft indictment Trump’s personal direction and involvement in the case.

According to the book by Honig, himself a former prosecutor, the Southern District of New York ultimately decided to drop any case against Trump after the president left office in January 2021 because, in part, they figured that bigger, more serious investigations were ahead stemming from the January 6 insurrection, which “made the campaign finance violations seem somehow trivial and outdated by comparison.” It was then, and stands now, a serious miscalculation, one that will currently contribute to the democratically untenable “Ford Principle” that presidents stand outside the law both while in office and after. 

Of course, it’s here that we come to what a fraught moment, politically and for American democracy, the historically novel indictment of a former president presents for us in the weeks and months ahead: The true test for Donald Trump and our country is not this particular case but whatever might come next. The New York charges might be the start of multiple criminal cases that would burden Trump even as he begins his phoenix-like presidential reelection bid.

There are signs that Georgia’s Fulton County district attorney is weighing “imminent” charges against Trump, potentially as part of a larger conspiracy, for his well-documented efforts to overturn the state’s election results in 2020. Meanwhile, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith is zeroing in on potential charges surrounding Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection and related election-meddling schemes, as well as Trump’s attempts to purloin and retain classified documents in Mar-a-Lago after his presidency. Just in recent days, in the classified documents case, a federal judge ruled that there was evidence of a crime that would allow Smith to pierce normal attorney-client privilege and force one of Trump’s lawyers to testify amid evidence that the lawyer participated in that potential crime.

The specter of these indictments has made Trump fire up his always-overheated rhetoric, threatening “death and destruction” if he’s indicted, posting a photo of Bragg and Trump holding a baseball bat, and generally sashaying around the country like a mafioso saying, “Nice country you have here, shame if something happened to it.” His opening campaign rally last weekend came in Waco, Texas, amid the 30th anniversary of a 51-day federal siege of a religious cult after the largest shoot-out in US law enforcement history—one that left four ATF agents dead and, following the horrific fiery end of the siege, more than 80 members of the Branch Davidian sect dead too. The event helped inspire the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City just two days later by a white supremacist, far-right extremist. 

It’s hard not to read Trump’s rally as anything less than a call to arms for his supporters amid the government’s moves against him.

For now, though, the country will wait—and wonder whether the next shoe to drop is more criminal charges or the beginnings of more Trump-inspired violence.