In less than six months, Donald Trump has gone from the lying world leader of the populist ultra-right to the alleged planetary champion of political crime, with the abundant aggravating factor of his status as former president of the United States to aspire to re-election.
The rapid succession of his four imputations; the seriousness of the crimes against democracy that are attributed to him, almost always in the company of others, and his unbelievably outright denial of all the accusations, without nuance, under the argument that some and others start from a conspiracy of the Joe Biden’s “radical left” to instrumentalize the entire judicial apparatus and the FBI against him has favored the view of the four cases as components of a kind of magma with different degrees of incandescence or as a discontinuous cascade but homogeneity of accusations. However, the scope and chances of success of such accusations vary greatly from case to case. And there is consensus among jurists about the various quality of the imputations.
The ‘secret papers’, the most well-armed case
From the first moment, the imputation of obstruction of justice by Trump in the matter of the illegal transfer, concealment, and refusal to return the hundreds of classified papers that he took from the White House to his residence and Mar-a-Lago club appears as the most solid of all. Special prosecutor Jack Smith accompanied this indictment with half a dozen more crimes related to both the central fact of the “deliberate withholding of secret documents” in violation of the Espionage Act, as well as various instrumental acts of witness tampering and false statements And all with a torrent of witnesses and evidence, including video surveillance images, which makes it difficult to imagine escape routes for the ex-president about what he did and the awareness that he was doing it; which also applies to the two workers who will accompany him to the dock, in the trial scheduled for May 20. It is no wonder that when Smith presented his brief in June with a total of 37 charges, to which he would later add three more, he invited everyone to read the full text. Beyond a statement of charges, and as University of Colorado legal rhetoric specialist Derek Kiernan-Johnson points out, the writing is “a great story with enormous persuasive power” to convince the reader of the seriousness of the facts . There is no shortage of ingredients: the surprise that one worker expresses to another when he comes across a pile of secret papers: “I opened the door and found this…” and the other replies: “Oh, no, oh no!”; the photos of confidential ligature boxes in a shower, a bathroom and a stage; the attempts to delete videos of document transfers, Trump’s conversations with his lawyers along the lines of “I don’t want anyone going through my boxes…wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything?”. .. The material is overwhelming.
Focused and careful accusation about the assault on the Capitol
Smith did not charge Trump with sedition in the case of the assault on the Capitol and other actions to reverse his electoral defeat. The apparent loophole marked a notable difference with respect to the expectations raised by the committee that investigated the events in Congress, which recommended that the prosecutor accuse the former president of inciting or aiding insurrection, among other crimes. Instead, Smith focused on the four charges that the court will hear at the hearing set for March 4: fraud in the US, obstruction of official proceedings regarding the process after the November 2020 elections; attempt to obstruct the ratification of the results in the session interrupted by the invasion of the Capitol, and conspiracy against the right to vote. As the former head of the corruption section of the Washington Attorney General’s office, Randall Eliason, emphasized to The Washington Post, the resignation of the charge of insurrection spares the prosecution a difficult debate about whether what Trump did in encouraging that 6 in January the mass to march towards Congress was an incitement to the coup or an act of free expression. Instead, the charges filed and the evidence gathered “will allow prosecutors to present to the jury the broad multi-state plan to nullify the election,” Eliason said. And these are serious crimes punishable by harsh penalties.
Georgia case, significant but with some problem
Prosecutor Fani Willis has just accused Trump and 18 alleged accomplices of mafia extortion to overturn the former president’s electoral defeat in the state. There are 41 positions in total, 13 attributed to the leader. A significant imputation that also includes terrible accounts of threats to election workers. The problem is that the centerpiece, the famous call in which Trump asks election supervisor Brad Raffensperger “to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we have to win the state” presents doubts. Does this call prove an intent to commit fraud? Legal analyst Jonathan Turley of George Washington University doesn’t see it clearly: “There’s a big difference between making unsubstantiated election claims and committing a crime,” he says.
The ‘weakness’ of the bribery charge against Daniels
New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg made history when, in late March, he charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records for bribing porn actress Stormy Daniels in the first indictment of a former US president. The bad thing is that this kind of falsehood is a misdemeanor in New York unless it is connected to a serious one. Bragg suggested that the payments were made to condition the election and constituted an equally serious tax offence. But lawyers of all backgrounds consider it difficult for the trial, scheduled for March 25, to end in a conviction.
Trump has many legal problems… Some more serious than others.
