Twice impeached and now twice indicted.
Donald Trump was charged by the Justice Department on Thursday in connection with special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into classified documents stored at Mar–a-Lago. Trump is the first former president to face federal criminal charges.
The seven-count indictment was filed in Federal District Court in Miami, and comes less than three months after Trump was charged in Manhattan following a five-year probe into hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
This is another landmark moment in American history, and as such, I’d be totally remiss not to briefly recapitulate for anyone who hasn’t followed the documents saga closely.
After begrudgingly leaving office, Trump shipped a trove of highly sensitive material to his de facto exile in Florida, and subsequently resisted attempts by the National Archives to have it returned. Eventually, he sent more than a dozen boxes back to the government, some of which contained classified documents. That triggered a DoJ investigation. Trump’s attorneys were subpoenaed in May of last year.
A month later, at Mar–a-Lago, lawyers turned over more documents to investigators, 17 of which were marked “Top Secret.” Trump’s legal team cited a “diligent” search in contending there was nothing else of interest to the government on the premises. Only there was. Because, when the F.B.I. showed up with a search warrant in August, agents found more than 100 additional classified documents.
At that point, the battle was joined. Trump tried to stymie the probe, but ultimately failed. His associates and attorneys were questioned by federal agents and prosecutors, who were in turn castigated by Trump as politically-motivated tormentors.
Fast forward a few months and Trump was charged with, among other things, conspiracy to obstruct and false statements. He should have a relatively friendly audience in Florida compared to the Federal District Court in Washington. Smith’s choice of venue will surely be the subject of intense debate in the days ahead.
Expect Trump’s surrogates in Congress to lament what they’ll characterize as a travesty of justice. Trump is, of course, the clear frontrunner in an increasingly crowded Republican primary field. The race for the GOP ticket now includes Mike Pence, who told CNN that although no one (including himself) has any business storing classified documents at their private residence, he hoped the DoJ wouldn’t ultimately charge his former boss. No such luck.
Trump was already fundraising off his second indictment on Thursday evening. “I’m an innocent man. I’m an innocent person,” he insisted, in a video filmed at Bedminster. It’s “very unfair,” he said, of the new charges. “But that’s the way it is.”
I appreciate the dispassionate 30,000 ft overview. Helps put it into perspective without all the cable news handwringing and outrage
It’s the only viable way to cover the situation at this point. Or at least for me it is. I say plenty about the unfortunate state of American democracy and the decline of civil society in my longer missives and in the monthly letters. I don’t need to litigate it in Trump “updates.” From a purely practical perspective, I have to strike a balance between covering what needs to be covered and differentiating the site from mainstream media outlets. Readers need to know I’m always paying attention, of course (I can’t just not cover a Trump indictment), but at the same time, the site has to be differentiated. My front page can’t just look like every other front page. With stories like this one, FT, Bloomberg and WSJ are basically forced to compete with NYT, WaPo, Politico and so on, which I think is a really difficult situation. Sure, they can do it, but there’s only so much blanket Trump coverage people can read, and it’s not obvious why, if that’s what you wanted, you’d go to FT or BBG to get it.
Yeah, a Republican juror from Florida might favor Trump. On the other hand, he/she might see it as an opportunity to tilt the primary to a local boy named DeSantis.