The New Yorker:

His campaign is careening, his poll numbers are slipping, and, after something of a summer lull, he is due for several confrontations in court.

By Amy Davidson Sorkin

On August 7th, as thousands of people gathered at an airfield in Michigan to see Vice-President Kamala Harris and her just-announced running mate, Governor Tim Walz, Donald Trump signed paperwork notifying the federal government that he would be suing the Department of Justice for a hundred million dollars. Trump wants the money because, he claims, a Federal Bureau of Investigation search of Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home, in 2022, was “highly offensive”—and part of a malicious “political scheme” engineered by Attorney General Merrick Garland and the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray. The claim doesn’t make much sense. The F.B.I. had a warrant to look for White House documents marked as classified (and found plenty of them), and, while the resulting case has now been dismissed by Judge Aileen Cannon, her reasons had to do with the appointment of the special counsel, Jack Smith, which occurred months after the search. It took a few days for the hundred-million-dollar filing to become known. Trump may have been too busy spreading the falsehood that a photo of Harris’s airfield rally had been faked by A.I. He didn’t believe that her crowd could possibly be so big.

Amid the spectacle of Trump’s careening campaign—the declaration that President Joe Biden had been removed in “a coup”; a running mate, J. D. Vance, who disparaged childless women; Trump’s complaint that a Time magazine cover illustration of Harris was unfair because it made her look like his wife, Melania—it can be hard to focus on his personal legal problems. But Trump hasn’t forgotten about them, and neither have his lawyers or the prosecutors pursuing him. After something of a summer lull, Trump is due for several confrontations in court, just in time for the last, frenetic stretch of the campaign.

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