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Former N.Y.P.D. Commissioner Bernard Kerik Interviewed by Jan. 6 Prosecutors

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Former N.Y.P.D. Commissioner Bernard Kerik Interviewed by Jan. 6 Prosecutors

Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel Jack Smith are pressing forward with their investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, asking at least one witness this week about fund-raising efforts by Mr. Trump’s political action committee.

The witness, Bernard B. Kerik, sat for a voluntary interview on Monday with prosecutors in what is known as a proffer session. A former New York City police commissioner, Mr. Kerik was instrumental in helping Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former mayor of New York and one of Mr. Trump’s chief lawyers after the election, investigate claims of fraud in the vote results.

Mr. Kerik’s interview was first reported by Politico.

Among the questions prosecutors asked Mr. Kerik were several related to Mr. Trump’s main postelection fund-raising entity, Save America PAC. The special counsel’s office has been drilling down for months into whether the political action committee raised millions of dollars on claims that there was widespread fraud in the election, but ultimately earmarked the money for things other than investigating those claims.

Mr. Kerik told prosecutors that the team Mr. Giuliani had assembled to look into the allegations of fraud received no money from Save America PAC, even though it was one of the chief groups assigned the task of hunting down evidence that the election had been marred by cheating, Mr. Kerik’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, said on Tuesday.

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Mr. Kerik also told prosecutors that if Save America had provided money to Mr. Giuliani’s team, it might have more accurately vetted the claims of fraud, Mr. Parlatore said.

Proffer sessions are based on an agreement between prosecutors and people who are subjects of criminal investigations. The subjects agree to provide useful information, sometimes to tell their side of events, to stave off potential charges or to avoid testifying under subpoena before a grand jury. In exchange, prosecutors agree not to use those statements against them in future criminal proceedings unless it is determined they were lying.

Mr. Giuliani sat for his own proffer session over two days in June and was asked several questions about a key aspect of Mr. Smith’s investigation: a plan by Mr. Trump and his allies to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in key swing states that were actually won by President Biden. Prosecutors were said have to focused specifically on the role played in that effort by John Eastman, another lawyer who advised Mr. Trump about ways to stay in office after his defeat.

Both Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Eastman appeared as unnamed co-conspirators in the indictment that the special counsel filed against Mr. Trump in Washington this month. The indictment accused the former president of three overlapping conspiracies to defraud the United States, to disrupt the certification of the election at a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, and to deprive people of the right to have their votes counted.

Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is presiding in the case, has set her first hearing in the matter for Friday morning to discuss imposing a protective order regulating how Mr. Trump and his lawyers should handle the voluminous discovery evidence they are about to receive from the government.

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Prosecutors have asked Judge Chutkan to bar Mr. Trump from publicly releasing any of the evidence out of concern that he will seek to try the case in the media before it reaches the courtroom.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have asked for a narrower order, arguing that the restrictions sought by the government infringe on Mr. Trump’s First Amendment rights to discuss the case as he runs for public office.

On Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump’s lawyers filed court papers that also asked Judge Chutkan to exclude the 25 days between Mr. Trump’s arraignment on Aug. 3 and the first status conference in the case on Aug. 28 from what is known as the speedy trial clock.

By law, defendants are supposed to go to trial within 70 days of being charged — unless the judge in the case subtracts time from that period. Mr. Trump’s lawyers urged Judge Chutkan to do so, arguing that the complexity of the proceeding demanded it.

“For a case of this magnitude, it would be impossible for the defense to evaluate the government’s evidence, prepare its own defense and participate in pretrial proceedings, all within the time constraints of the Speedy Trial Act,” the lawyers wrote.

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One of Mr. Trump’s chief legal strategies in both the election interference case and the case related to his handling of classified documents has been to delay going to trial for as long as possible. If he is able to push the trials until after the 2024 election and prevails in the race, he could either seek to pardon himself or have his attorney general simply dismiss the charges.

During Mr. Kerik’s interview on Monday, prosecutors asked about another person indicated as a co-conspirator in Mr. Trump’s indictment: Sidney Powell, a Texas-based lawyer who filed a series of conspiracy-laden lawsuits after the election claiming that voting machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems had been used in plot to flip votes away from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden.

Prosecutors asked Mr. Kerik on what factual basis he believed Ms. Powell had filed her suits and he responded that he was unaware of one.

Prosecutors also asked Mr. Kerik about Phil Waldron, a former Army colonel from Texas who served as a kind of liaison between Ms. Powell and members of Mr. Giuliani’s team. Mr. Smith’s investigators wanted to know how seriously Mr. Kerik and others on the team had vetted Mr. Waldron’s claims that there were mathematical irregularities in the vote results in some key swing states that indicated fraud, Mr. Parlatore said.

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We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning

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We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning

Today would have been the first Monday of New York City’s congestion pricing plan. Before it was halted by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the plan was designed to rein in some of the nation’s worst traffic while raising a billion dollars for the subway every year, one toll at a time.

A year’s worth of tolls is hard to picture. But what about a day’s worth? What about an hour’s?

To understand how the plan could have worked, we went to the edges of the tolling zone during the first rush hour that the fees would have kicked in.

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Here’s what we saw:

Video by Noah Throop/The New York Times; animation by Ruru Kuo/The New York Times

You probably wouldn’t have seen every one of those cars if the program had been allowed to proceed. That’s because officials said the fees would have discouraged some drivers from crossing into the tolled zone, leading to an estimated 17 percent reduction in traffic. (It’s also Monday on a holiday week.)

The above video was just at one crossing point, on Lexington Avenue. We sent 27 people to count vehicles manually at four bridges, four tunnels and nine streets where cars entered the business district. In total, we counted 22,252 cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Monday.

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We wanted to see how the dense flow of traffic into the central business district would have generated money in real time.

Though we can’t know that dollar amount precisely, we can hazard a guess. Congestion pricing was commonly referred to as a $15-per-car toll, but it wasn’t so simple. There were going to be smaller fees for taxi trips, credits for the tunnels, heftier charges for trucks and buses, and a number of exemptions.

To try to account for all that fee variance, we used estimates from the firm Replica, which models traffic data, on who enters the business district, as well as records from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city agencies. We also made a few assumptions where data wasn’t available. We then came up with a ballpark figure for how much the city might have generated in an hour at those toll points.

The total? About $200,000 in tolls for that hour.

Note: The Trinity Place exit from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which would have been tolled, is closed at this hour.

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It’s far from a perfect guess. Our vehicle total is definitely an undercount: We counted only the major entrances — bridges, tunnels and 60th Street — which means we missed all the cars that entered the zone by exiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive or the West Side Highway.

And our translation into a dollar number is rough. Among many other choices we had to make, we assumed all drivers had E-ZPass — saving them a big surcharge — and we couldn’t distinguish between transit buses and charter buses, so we gave all buses an exemption.

But it does give you a rough sense of scale: It’s a lot of cars, and a lot of money. Over the course of a typical day, hundreds of thousands of vehicles stream into the Manhattan central business district through various crossings.

Trips into tolling district, per Replica estimates

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Queens-Midtown Tunnel 50,600
Lincoln Tunnel 49,200
Williamsburg Bridge 27,900
Manhattan Bridge 24,000
Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel 23,100
Queensboro Bridge 21,700
Brooklyn Bridge 17,100
Holland Tunnel 15,400
All other entrances 118,000
Total 347,000

Note: Data counts estimated entrances on a weekday in spring 2023. Source: Replica.

The tolling infrastructure that was installed for the program cost roughly half a billion dollars.

The M.T.A. had planned to use the congestion pricing revenue estimates to secure $15 billion in financing for subway upgrades. Many of those improvement plans have now been suspended.

Methodology

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We stationed as many as five counters at some bridges and tunnels to ensure that we counted only cars that directly entered the tolling zone, not those that would have continued onto non-tolled routes.

Our count also excluded certain exempt vehicles like emergency vehicles.

We used estimates of the traffic into the district to make a best guess at how many of each kind of vehicle entered the zone. Most of our estimates came from the traffic data firm Replica, which uses a variety of data sources, including phone location, credit card and census data, to model transportation patterns. Replica estimated that around 58 percent of trips into the central business district on a weekday in spring 2023 were made by private vehicles, 35 percent by taxis or other for-hire vehicles (Uber and Lyft) and the remainder by commercial vehicles.

We also used data on trucks, buses, for-hire vehicles and motorcycles from the M.T.A., the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the Department of Transportation.

For simplicity, we assumed all vehicles would be equally likely to enter the zone from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. as they would be in any other hour. We could not account for the other trips that a for-hire vehicle might make once within the tolled zone, only the initial crossing. And we did not include the discount to drivers who make under $50,000, because it would kick in only after 10 trips in a calendar month.

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Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024

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Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024

-
Jury Deliberation Re-charge
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
-
PART: 59
Χ
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
4909
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 30, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR., ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
GEDALIA STERN, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates, RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter

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Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024

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Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024

SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
PART: 59
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
4815
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
X
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 29, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE
PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR.,
ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates,
RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter

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