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(Trends Wide) — The case is the United States of America v. Donald J. Trump.
For the first time in history, the nation is seeking to criminally prosecute a person who was elected to lead it as president.
Trump is due to appear in court in Miami on Tuesday to answer a 37-count indictment alleging he knowingly withheld classified documents after leaving office and refused to return them.
His appearance will be a momentous, and even tragic, moment in the history of a republic that has endured for more than two centuries after being founded on the principle that no leader has absolute power or should be above the laws that apply to him. other citizens.
This Tuesday will be a serious day that could drive even deeper divisions in an already estranged country, especially since Trump supporters have already resorted to violence once in an attempt to override the will of the people after the former president refused to accept defeat in a democratic election.
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, a frequent Republican critic of Trump, criticized the former president on Monday for putting the country through a test he said could have been avoided.
“I’m angry,” said Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate. “The country is going to be in turmoil as a result of one thing. President Trump did not turn over military documents when asked to do so.”
“Why is the country going to have to go through all this heartbreak and uproar?” Romney said.
As traumatic and unprecedented as the federal prosecution of the former president promises to be, it comes as no complete surprise. In some ways, it’s an almost logical coda to a White House term in which Trump trashed the conventions of the Presidency, expressed the belief that he had “total” power in contravention of the Constitution, and was impeached twice.
Trump, who maintains that he has not committed any crime, has not been convicted of any criminal offenses. And there are many things that will still be developed. An indictment typically represents the best possible recitation of the evidence in a case for the prosecution. Witnesses are not cross-examined in a grand jury to prove statements that may help the defendant. And it is not clear if this case will go to trial before the 2024 elections.
But Trump has been running afoul of the law for a long time. He is awaiting trial in another criminal case in Manhattan after pleading not guilty to falsifying business records in a drama that stems from an alleged hush money payment. He is likely to find out by the end of the summer if he will be indicted for trying to overturn President Joe Biden’s election victory in Georgia. Both cases are being brought by local district attorneys and not by the federal government.
Special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the grand jury indictment against Trump in the classified documents case and is also investigating his behavior in the lead up to January 6, 2021, justified his decision by arguing in a rare public appearance last week. that the country had a set of laws and that they apply to everyone.
His indictment, brimming with details about Trump’s disastrously lax handling of classified materials, shocked many administration veterans.
“If he’s (done) something like what the prosecution alleges, and of course the government will have to prove it, then he’s committed very serious crimes,” former Trump national security adviser John Bolton told “Trends Wide This Morning.” this Monday.
“This is a devastating accusation. … I think it should be the end of Donald Trump’s political career.”
Trump will also face one count of conspiracy at his arraignment, so the full title of the indictment is “The United States of America v. Donald J. Trump and Waltine Nauta.” The former president’s personal adviser faces six charges, including several charges related to obstruction and cover-up.
The dilemma of whether or not to impeach Trump
Every judgment also implies a choice. Sometimes the alleged crimes are so serious that ignoring them would risk undermining the rule of law and the fabric of society and democracy. But this impulse must also be weighed against the question of whether national interests are best served by prosecution.
The indictment of a former president, who has already used growing national divisions as a political tool and who has claimed he is the victim of politicized criminal investigations, meant that Smith and Attorney General Merrick Garland faced a dilemma as acute as any prosecutor’s. in the history.
The sensitivity of the issue is multiplied by the fact that the former president is being persecuted by the Justice Department of his successor in the middle of an electoral campaign in which he is trying to reclaim the White House from Biden.
Many Republicans, especially those who represent the Republican Party in the House, exploited this highly unusual circumstance to put up a smokescreen for Trump last week, even before reading the charges against him. And even after the indictment was unsealed, they intensified their attempt to derail the prosecution in a display of hardline partisan politics.
“The idea of equal justice is not playing out here,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican, said Monday, drawing false equivalencies between classified material found in the possession of former Vice Presidents Biden and Mike Pence, who they did not block its return, as Trump is alleged to have done. (The Justice Department has closed its investigation into Pence, while the special counsel’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents is ongoing.)
Most Republicans seem to have calculated that with Trump running the GOP presidential primary front-runner, they have no political choice but to join his searing attacks on the Justice Department. Yet in a notable move Monday, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who is also running for the Republican nomination, lashed out at Trump even as she stuck to her claims that the current Justice Department it was corrupt.
“If this allegation is true, if what he says is really the case, President Trump was incredibly reckless with our national security,” Haley said on Fox News. Her comments made an implicit argument that the former president, for whom she served as his ambassador to the United Nations, should not again be trusted with the custody of the country’s secrets.
Some Republicans also point to the fact that Trump is being charged under the sweeping Espionage Act to try to argue that the charges against him are less serious, since he is not actually being charged with spying or passing classified material to a foreign power. The Espionage Act of 1917, passed during World War I, covers a wide range of offenses related to misconduct surrounding national defense information.
“Donald Trump, they may hate him to death, he is not a spy, he did not commit espionage,” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a loyal Trump supporter, said on ABC Sunday.
And Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, chided Trump’s handling of confidential documents but argued that Smith and Garland had erred by not sufficiently considering whether it was truly in the national interest to prosecute.
“There is no allegation that harm has been done to national security. There is no allegation that he sold it to a foreign power or that it was trafficked to someone else or that anyone had access to it,” Rubio said on “CBS Mornings” on Monday. “And you have to weigh the damage of that, or the lack of it, against the damage that this accusation does to the country.”
What would be lost by giving Trump a pass
However, as painful as a presidential impeachment is for the country, the decision not to impeach Trump for such horrendously careless treatment of classified documents would not only send the message that the powerful are above the law. It would also risk to point out that such arrogant behavior is acceptable, or at least too difficult to process. The consequences of such a decision for the country’s intelligence agencies could be disastrous.
Federal officials are generally very protective of classified material, knowing that even a mistake in handling a document could land them in trouble with the law or land them in jail. Smith’s indictment alleges that Trump stored dozens of documents in a shower, a ballroom and even a bathroom at his heavily traveled Mar-a-Lago vacation home. He also alleges that he showed a highly sensitive military document to several guests at his Bedminster golf club and admitted that he could not declassify it because he was no longer president. Some of the material he had refused to return to the government related to the nuclear capabilities of the United States and other countries.
This startling disregard for the nation’s secrets raises big questions about Trump’s past conduct and appears to reinforce the administration’s decision to resort to a criminal investigation to recover the material.
More broadly, it also raises a question for voters, not courts, to decide: whether Trump should be trusted with such material again as president. It’s a question for the 2024 election, but it could also be settled at trial.
Trump’s behavior appears to represent an extraordinary case of a commander-in-chief and keeper of the nation’s most precious secrets putting his personal motivations, whatever they may be, above the national interest in a breach of public trust.
“Knowing what we know now, plus all the details of the impeachment as this unfolds, is there any question now that Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to America?” asked Valerie Plame, whose facade as CIA official was outed by members of the Bush administration in apparent retaliation for criticism of her Iraq policies by her late husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Plame spoke to Trends Wide’s Jake Tapper last week, adding that “any American who continues to pretend otherwise is simply unrealistic.”
