The Trump issue has crime.
Politics is screwed up in the United States. Institutions are put to the test. Democracy comes into question. The situation is unusual even for a country whose former president instigated a coup attempt with an assault on Parliament.
The nation’s Department of Justice and Attorney General yesterday charged former President and re-election candidate Donald Trump with thirty-seven federal criminal charges for seven crimes including conspiracy to obstruct justice, tampering with witnesses, making false statements and deliberate retention of secret documents in violation of the Espionage Act.
This is the case of the Mar-a-Lago papers, that is to say, the appropriation, illegal transfer, concealment and retention of the hundreds of documents which, classified as “top secret”, “secret” or “confidential”, Trump illegally took himself from the White House to his residence in Florida after losing the election to Joe Biden in November 2020.
The former president will have to testify on Tuesday before a judge in Florida, the jurisdiction chosen by the prosecutor after months of investigations by special juries in this state and in Washington DC.
Trump was already charged two months ago with 34 counts of forgery to cover up the bribe to porn actress Stormy Daniels. And a jury convicted him civilly in May of sexual assault and defamation of writer Jean Carroll. But on Thursday night the ultra leader and candidate became the first former US president to face federal criminal charges — far-reaching ones at that, and apparently with a considerable amount of evidence behind them.
In addition to material evidence of the crimes, the public ministry seems to be in a position to prove the guilt or awareness and intentionality of the illicit action of the accused. In fact, in contrast to persistent statements to the effect that he himself had declassified the documents he took home, there is a recording of a meeting made in 2021 where he admitted otherwise. “As president, I could have declassified them, but now I can’t,” says Trump, according to a transcript obtained and broadcast yesterday by CNN. The former president refers to a secret record on an alleged plan to attack Iran.
The impeachment of Trump puts the Republican Party in a bind. Beyond the 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 themselves thorny questions. Is it appropriate to maintain support for an aspirant who in a few months could be convicted and even imprisoned for serious crimes against the country’s institutions? Can the party afford to sustain support for the leader knowing that, most likely, a large proportion of independent and undecided voters will deny him the vote because of the imputations? Because it’s one thing that Trump can win the Republican primaries, for which he currently has a 30-point lead over his most prominent rival, Ron DeSantis, and another that he can beat his Democratic opponent in the presidential primaries, which he already has beat once and now rule the country.
The impeachment against the former president was woven by the special prosecutor Jack Smith, a tough of the Department whom the Attorney General and head of Justice, Merrick Garland, appointed in November to investigate this matter and that of the involvement of Trump in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The former president confirmed on his network, Truth Social, that he had been charged. “I am innocent. It is electoral interference on a large scale. a war The country is going to hell…” he said in a video. What he always says.
It is remarkable that, although much of the case has been instructed in Washington, where Trump would have committed the first crimes when he took the papers from the White House, the prosecutor Smith has finally chosen the jurisdiction of Florida, specifically the Federal District Court in Miami, to present the charges. The choice could have a strategic motivation, since it foresees possible protests from the defense about the location of a territory with a population – and therefore with a possible jury – more democratic and, consequently, more hostile than that of the ‘today conservative southern state.
Trump and his supporters will stand up, stamp their feet and continue to accuse Biden of political revenge and the great evils of history. But the facts are there; it looks like the tests, too.
And the prosecutor doesn’t give a shit. The ex-president, for the moment, for his part, remains unstitched.
