Opinion | The Trump Impeachment Is As Much About Politics As It Is About Law

[ad_1]

That crude comparison can be very misleading, however, because as any former prosecutor will tell you, the sentencing process that follows a criminal conviction must be both highly fact-specific and judgment-driven. in comparable cases, insofar as they exist. Many experienced lawyers and legal observers doubt that Trump would actually be sentenced to any prison time if he were convicted in Manhattan, given the unusual nature of the charges, Trump’s unique status as a defendant, and relatively lenient treatment of white people in New York. -collar defendant.

That suggests Trump should be more concerned about federal charges, and no doubt he is, but he has a powerful tool at his disposal that he is currently working to secure: his re-election.

If Trump is re-elected president, there is little question that he will pardon himself no matter how far along the prosecution is at that point. He can also direct his attorney general to dismiss any pending criminal charges and close any open investigations that could implicate him or his associates. This could conceivably be accomplished even if Trump doesn’t have a Senate-confirmed attorney general in place, since he can fire any acting attorney general(s) until he finds someone to do what he wants.

All this means that the federal prosecution of Trumps is inextricably linked to the national political process, and the text of the indictment makes it clear that the special counsel and his team are well aware of the public importance of their work. That is no doubt why they chose to use what prosecutors called a talking point indictment that contained more detail than was strictly required as a legal matter and appeared designed to send a message to the American public about the seriousness of of Trump’s alleged behavior. During his brief public appearance Friday afternoon, Smith had as much to say as he urged everyone to read it in its entirety to understand the scope and gravity of the crimes charged.

For starters, the indictment contains a lengthy string of factual allegations apparently intended to show how irresponsible Trump’s handling of documents has been, complete with photos of boxes of classified documents stored in a bathroom. and how detailed his efforts to stonewall federal investigators were.

The main charges are 31 counts of Trump’s alleged withholding of national defense information, with each count tied to a specific document. That alone appears to reflect a charging strategy designed to place the importance of the material maintained by Trump at the center of the case and public discourse. (There are probably simpler and frankly more lenient ways to prosecute the case, but Smith and his colleagues don’t seem interested in rushing Trump.)

The description of those 31 documents in the indictment also includes classification designations on the documents, which in almost all cases are Secret or Top Secret. The lone exception is an eyebrow-raising item described as an unmarked and [u]dated document on United States military contingency planning. Descriptions of other documents include references to material obtained from intelligence briefings and foreign countries’ military activities and capabilities. The purpose of all these details seems, at least in part, to directly target Trump and his allies’ efforts to reduce the sensitivity of the material he has kept and repeatedly refused to return to the government.

In short, the indictment is both a critical and historic legal document as well as a document with a striking public message embedded in it designed to inform the American people how seriously prosecutors view the alleged -behavior, and how different their view of the situation is from Trump and his political allies are self-righteous about Trump being the victim of persecution at the hands of his political opponents.

Latest Trump Indictment News

Previous Slide Next Slide

There is no way to completely separate politics from law as the case progresses. Trump’s best and simplest defense is to keep running for re-election and to win. Even setting a trial date, a relatively straightforward matter in a typical criminal case, will be complicated by the political calendar as long as Trump remains in the race.

There is another way that this prosecution is unlike any other, and that is that as a former president and current presidential candidate, Trump has a truly unique ability to affect the trial through his public comments ( provided that the presiding judge or his lawyers do not prevail on him to stop talking about the case, which seems unlikely). There is almost no way to insulate a jury from those statements, and all Trump has to do is persuade someone to go on the jury that the case is illegitimate and that person can hang the jury as a result to a mistrial and a major political mess for the Justice Department.

The high profile of Trump’s legal woes in recent years may have made indictment seem inevitable to many in recent weeks, but an indictment is just the beginning of a criminal prosecution that could take many turns in an unusual case. This one is almost as unusual as it is offensive on almost every imaginable dimension. As damaging as the allegations in the impeachment are, we are far from the end of this process, which will now become a central issue in the 2024 campaign. Trump is, in a very real sense, running for his life.

[ad_2]