DDonald Trump’s lawyers have a lot to do. Your client has now been charged by three prosecutors in four courts with a total of 91 criminal offenses. If the four grand juries find him guilty on all counts, the Republican could face hundreds of years in prison. Nobody expects that. Experienced judicial observers doubt that a former president approaching 80 could actually end up in prison.
The New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg alone accuses Trump of falsifying business documents in 34 counts. The core issue is whether Trump should have declared hush money to the porn actress Stormy Daniels as a campaign expense in 2016.
The accusations of the special investigator Jack Smith in the so-called document case before a federal court in Miami add up to 40 criminal offenses. This includes the violation of the espionage law in 32 cases, because after the end of his term in office, Trump took just as many secret documents with military reference from the White House to his golf club Mar-a-Lago in Florida and did not release them even on request. The other eight charges relate to obstructing the investigation, including the recently filed allegation that Trump ordered the destruction of surveillance videos in Mar-a-Lago.
In terms of the number of criminal offenses, the second federal indictment, on the other hand, looks slim: According to Prosecutor Smith, by systematically trying to convert Joe Biden’s election victory into a Trump victory, Trump committed four crimes: conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of public affairs Proceedings and conspiracy to do so and conspiracy to violate civil rights, namely the right of every voter to have their vote counted. All four felonies had the same charges, giving Smith nearly four times the chance of a conviction. However, he refrained from accusing Trump of inciting riots, i.e. “storming the Capitol”. He has not yet charged the six alleged co-conspirators either. Both would have made the process more complicated.
The shakiest accusation: payment of hush money to a porn star
Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis takes a much more ambitious approach. The core of the allegations are the same as those in Smith’s “6th January”, but Willis has decided on the big cutlery: She has accused Trump and 18 other suspects of a total of 41 crimes in one fell swoop and accuses them of having formed a “criminal organization”. The underlying law was created for the fight against the mafia. Willis now has to prove to the defendants that they not only conspired ad hoc, but continuously ran a “criminal enterprise”. Many lawyers are skeptical.
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