The Trump thing is a crime.
Politics is contorted in the United States. Its institutions are put to the test. Their democracy is in question. The situation is unusual, even for a country whose former president instigated a coup attempt with an assault on Parliament. The Department of Justice and the Office of the Attorney General of the nation charged former president and candidate for reelection, Donald Trump, with 37 federal criminal charges for seven crimes that include conspiracy to obstruct justice, witness tampering, false statements and willful withholding of secret documents in violation of the Espionage law.
This is the case of the Mar-a-Lago papers, that is, the appropriation, illicit transfer, concealment and retention of the hundreds of documents that, classified with marks of “top secret”, “secret” or “confidential” , Trump illegally took his Florida residence from the White House after losing the election to Joe Biden in November 2020.
The former president must testify on Tuesday before a judge in Florida, a jurisdiction chosen by the prosecutor after months of investigations by special juries in that state and in Washington DC.
Trump was already indicted two months ago with 34 counts of forgery to mask the bribery of porn actress Stormy Daniels. And a jury convicted him civilly in May of sexual assault and defamation of writer Jean Carroll. But, the night before last, the ultra leader and candidate became the first former US president to face federal criminal charges, far-reaching and with the appearance of a considerable amount of evidence behind.
In addition to material evidence of the crimes, the public prosecutor’s office seems to be in a position to prove the fraud or conscience and intent in the illegal action of the accused. And it is that, in contrast to his persistent statements in the sense that he himself had declassified the documents that he took home, there is a recording of a meeting held in 2021 where he acknowledged the opposite. “As president, I could have declassified it, but now I can’t,” Trump says there, according to a transcript obtained and released yesterday by CNN. The former president refers to a secret record about an alleged plan to attack Iran.
The indictment of Trump puts the Republican Party in a bind. Beyond their first and instinctive reactions, which for the moment yesterday were above all closing ranks and counterattacking the Biden government, the formation will have to ask itself tough questions. Is it convenient to maintain support for an applicant who in a few months could be sentenced and even imprisoned for serious crimes against the country’s institutions? Can the party afford to maintain this support for the leader knowing that, most likely, a large part of the independent and undecided voters will deny him the vote because of the accusations? Because it is one thing for Trump to be able to win the Republican primaries, for which he currently has a 30-point lead over his most prominent rival, Ron DeSantis, and another for him to be able to beat the Democratic adversary in the presidential elections, who has already defeated him once. and now rules the country.
The accusation against the former president was brought together by special counsel Jack Smith, a hardline of the Department whom the attorney general and head of Justice, Merrick Garland, appointed in November to investigate this matter and that of Trump’s involvement in the assault on the Capitol in January 6, 2021.
The former president himself confirmed on his network, Truth Social, that he had been charged. “I’m innocent. It is electoral interference at the highest level. A war. The country is going to hell…†he said in a video. What he always says.
It is noteworthy that, having investigated a large part of the case in Washington, where Trump would have committed the first crimes by taking the papers from the White House, prosecutor Smith has finally chosen the jurisdiction of Florida, specifically the Federal District Court in Miami, to file the charges. The election could have a strategic motivation, by preventing possible defense protests over the location of a territory with a population – and, therefore, with a possible jury – more Democratic and, consequently, more hostile than that of the current conservative state. southern.
Trump and his people will fight, kick and continue accusing Biden of political revenge and the great evils of history. But the facts are there; it looks like the tests, too. And the prosecutor does not stitch without a thread. The former president, for the moment, continues for his part torn apart.
