Indicted Again
A rundown of the latest indictment against former President Donald Trump
Former President Donald Trump was indicted Thursday on the following charges:
31 Counts of: Willful retention of national defense information
3 Counts of: Withholding or concealing documents in a federal investigation
2 Counts of: False statements
1 Count: Conspiracy to obstruct justice
A link to the unsealed indictment is at the end of this article.
These are the most serious crimes that Trump has been indicted with so far. This follows the indictment in New York where Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree and Trump being found liable of sexual abuse in a civil trial brought by E. Jean Carroll.
Trump was ordered to pay E. Jean Carroll $5 million and he will begin trial in New York on March 25th of next year.
Federal felony charges are required by the Constitution to use a grand jury to determine if there is merit to charging a person with a crime.
What is a Grand Jury?
A grand jury is typically composed of 23 impartial individuals. Prosecutors call witnesses and present evidence to the grand jury who then vote in private on if there was sufficient evidence to charge an individual with a crime.
All of the proceedings for a Grand Jury are sealed. This is to protect the jury and to protect the individual/s who might be charged with a crime.
The entire purpose of a grand jury is to ensure that innocent people are not harassed by unfounded prosecution involving serious crimes. If a grand jury does not find that there is sufficient evidence of a crime, then no prosecution will happen.
In this case, the grand jury did find that there was sufficient evidence, at which point Trump was indicted. This means that Trump was officially notified that he is going to face trial for the charges mentioned above and he has received the initial court date which is Tuesday June 13th.
It is important to remember that an indictment does not equal guilt. Trump is still innocent unless he is proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Why is Trump being charged?
A question some people are asking is if Biden, Clinton (both of them), Pence, and several others have all had classified documents in their residences, why is Trump the only one being charged?
To start with, Trump isn’t being charged simply because he had classified documents in multiple houses, even with the fact that he stored them in bathrooms, ballrooms, and took such poor care of them that some boxes were spilled open on the floor.
It isn’t just that Trump had some classified information, he had extremely sensitive documents related to America’s national security including military information and nuclear secrets.
These documents discuss potential vulnerabilities in both the United States national defense as well as our allies. Some documents included information on potential attacks on enemy nations. This is where the 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information stem from.
It is still unlikely that Trump would have been charged with holding these documents if he had returned them when asked and had been truthful throughout the process. That is where the other charges come in.
Trump long denied having the documents. Then when the documents were requested to be returned, Trump only returned part of the stash he had while claiming it was all of them.
He then stonewalled returning the remaining documents, showed the classified documents to people unauthorized to see them, and he conspired with others, including his own lawyer, to move and hide the documents from the government.
Those were the issues that led to the deeper investigation and is why the other politicians, who returned their documents and had less important documents, have not been charged with crimes. Even still, others did face investigations, such as Hillary Clinton, but the investigations did not lead to prosecution.
The evidence in this case looks to be compelling. Trump is on tape discussing having documents he admits are classified and admits he didn’t declassify them while President. He goes on to discuss showing these classified documents, including military maps, to multiple people.
Due to allegedly conspiring with one of his lawyers in a crime, the justice department was able to get all of those lawyers notes and recordings, a rare occurrence in any trial and a powerful source of information for the prosecution.
Two additional lawyers for Donald Trump resigned after the second indictment was made. While this does not directly infer guilt on behalf of Trump, the difficulty in retaining lawyers does not bode well for Trump while he is facing multiple trials at once. It is also becoming increasingly harder for Trump to find new lawyers willing to work with him.
Trump still faces another potential indictment in Georgia around the charges of election interference in the 2020 election.
Republican Reaction
Despite being found guilty in a civil trial, facing two trials with serious charges, and having a possible third trial on the horizon, Trump remains the front runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
Many centrist Republicans have remained quiet since the second indictment. A couple of them made neutral statements about allowing due process to play out and Trump being innocent until proven guilty.
Far right Republicans, including Trump’s most loyal MAGA politicians, have released statements attempting to undermine the American judicial system and the court of law. Two sitting politicians have even made statements that have gone as far as calling this a war against Republicans and declaring there will be an eye for an eye.
These are inflamed statements being made because Trump was indicted. It shouldn’t be hard to foresee how much worse these statements can become, or even that violence will break out, if Trump is found guilty of any crimes.
America should never support or defend such extreme positions. It doesn’t matter whether the person being charged is Republican, Democrat, or Independent. It doesn’t matter if they are a personal friend or a foe. Democracy fails when due process is undermined, when our judicial system is attacked for doing its job.
No one is above the law and all Americans have a constitutional right to a fair trial. That is a bedrock of our nation that must be protected in the face of intimidation and outright fascism.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0.pdf