The ritual is repeated. Activity in the courts intensifies with statements and new evidence, investigators advance and former President Donald Trump prepares the ground and warns that charging him would be an injustice resulting from “political interference” to prevent him from returning to the White House. It is the same aroma as the indictment at the end of March, only this time it is for a potentially more serious case: the classified papers that the former president illegally retained at Mar-A-Lago, his Palm Beach, Florida mansion.
Procedurally, the last relevant step is that the prosecutors have informed Trump’s lawyers that the former president is the subject of the investigation into the handling of the confidential documents that he took from the White House and kept in his mansion.
Not that there was much doubt that Trump was under investigation after the FBI showed up at his home with a search warrant in August of last year, the appointment of a special prosecutor, Jack Smith, to take over the case, and all subsequent procedural steps. But the new notification is an indication that the prosecutor is very likely to file charges against the former president and that the investigation is drawing to a close. In addition, it has been known that there are two grand juries examining the case, one in Washington and one in Miami.
On Monday, Trump’s lawyers met with the special counsel for nearly two hours at the Justice Department. The lawyers were photographed at the entrance and exit, but declined to give details of the meeting. A message from Trump on his social network, however, already gave a clue: “How is it possible that the DOJ [Departamento de Justicia] accuse me, that I have done nothing wrong, when no other president has been accused (…) Only Trump. The greatest witch hunt of all time! wrote in a message on his social network, Truth, all in capital letters in which he launched accusations against Joe Biden, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.
This Wednesday, Trump has returned to the charge with two other messages. “Wow, this is turning out to be the biggest and most vicious case of ELECTION INTERFERENCE in the history of our country.” begins the first, which adds: “They are launching all the bogus investigations against me right in the middle of my campaign, which is unheard of and not supposed to happen!” And then he says that the Department of Justice, the FBI and the prosecutors in New York and Atlanta are: “! FASCISTS ALL!”
Another message came after John Solomon, a journalist close to Trump who acts as his representative, said that the indictment was imminent and had already been communicated to Trump. He has denied it: “No one has told me that I am being charged, and I should not be because I have done NOTHING wrong, but I have assumed for years that I am a target of the DOJ & FBI instrumentalized”, He has written.
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The imputation of the former president would be a qualitative leap in a case that led to the search of his Mar-A-Lago mansion in Palm Beach (Florida). The content of the search warrant already revealed then that the former president was being investigated for possible crimes of obstruction of justice, concealment, removal or willful mutilation of public documents and violations of the espionage law, apparently for the willful retention of security documents. National security. These are crimes that can carry fines or jail sentences.
FBI agents who searched Trump’s mansion found thousands of documents that the former president was improperly retaining there, including a hundred classified with varying degrees of confidentiality. The former president had neglected the requirements to deliver them, which justified the search.
In recent weeks, some other information about the investigation has emerged. The Washington Post revealed that two Trump employees moved boxes of paper in Mar-a-Lago just one day before the Justice Department visited the former president’s residence with the request to collect classified documents, which along with other evidence that the Department has been collecting special prosecutor can buttress the obstruction of justice charge.
Federal prosecutors also obtained a recording of a summer 2021 meeting in which former President Donald Trump acknowledges that he kept a classified Pentagon document on a possible attack on Iran, according to information published by CNN. The recording is incriminating evidence against Donald Trump, who has sometimes claimed that he had declassified all the documents that the Federal Investigation Agency (FBI) found in the search of his Mar-A-Lago mansion in Palm Beach (Florida).
One of Trump’s usual tactics is to try to delay and hamper the investigation with continued judicial appeals. Thanks to one of those resources, a federal judge from Florida, Aileen M. Cannon, appointed by Trump himself shortly before his dismissal, ordered the Department of Justice and the FBI to stop their investigation work with all the documents found in the registry. while a special expert reviewed them.
The objective was to see if they could affect the attorney-client privilege (which protects professional secrecy in the relations of a person being investigated with their lawyers) or the executive privilege (which allows the executive power to deny information about actions in progress to another power, such as the legislative or judicial), even though Trump no longer holds public office.
A court, however, overturned the judge’s decision. She first provisionally lifted last September the blocking of the investigation regarding documents classified as confidential or secret that the FBI seized in early August at the Mar-a-Lago search. Then, he ruled on the merits of the matter, with a sentence that left Judge Cannon in a very bad place: “The law is clear. We cannot make a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the warrant is executed. Nor can we issue a rule that only allows former presidents to do so,” he said. at the end of his 21-page decision.
In addition, the court pointed out that the judge did not have jurisdiction to issue her resolution, which she justified by the extraordinary fact that a search is carried out in the house of a former president. The judges dedicate a corrective to him for this: “It is certainly extraordinary that a judicial order is executed in the residence of a former president, but not in a way that affects our legal analysis or that otherwise gives license to the judiciary to interfere in an ongoing investigation,” said the three judges, two of whom were also appointed by Trump himself. “Creating a special exception here would challenge our nation’s founding principle that our law applies to everyone, regardless of number, wealth, or rank,” they add.
As the investigation into Trump continued, the Justice Department shelved the investigation into classified documents that were improperly taken to his home after Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president, left office. The prosecution informed Pence of the closure of the investigation in a letter dated June 1 in which it assured that no charges would be filed.
At the end of January it emerged that the assistants of Trump’s former vice president discovered a dozen documents with classification marks as secrets in his Indiana home. Pence thus joined Trump himself and the current president, Joe Biden, who also improperly took confidential documents to their private homes. In Biden’s case, as in Trump’s, the Justice Department appointed an attorney general to take over the investigation.
In Pence’s case, it involved “a small number of classified-marked documents that were inadvertently boxed up and transported to the former vice president’s personal home at the end of the last administration,” Pence’s attorney wrote in a dated letter sent to the National Archives, the institution that must guard the documents and records when presidents and vice presidents cease their positions.
Trump, who was convicted in a civil lawsuit for sexual abuse, has other legal fronts open. A New York judge has set for March 25 the trial of the case in which he is accused of 34 charges of falsehood derived from three payments to hide scandals (one of them an extramarital affair with the porn actress Stormy Daniels) in the campaign of the 2016 presidential elections.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is investigating whether he illegally interfered in Georgia’s 2020 election, has said she plans to announce in the coming months whether to press charges. Willis has hinted that the possible indictments will arrive in August. In a letter to the chief judge of the county Superior Court, Ural Glanville, he indicated that he plans for many of his staff to work remotely most days during the first three weeks of August and asked that judges not schedule trials and hearings in person during part of that time for security reasons.
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