- “He actually would have been better off shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue,” one lawyer said of the new federal charges.
Former President Donald Trump has been wriggling out of tight spots and keeping one step ahead of investigators ever since he burst into politics eight years ago.
But so much for all that. He just caught a criminal case that could send him to prison for the rest of his life.
The seven-count indictment brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith represents by far the most serious criminal threat Trump has ever faced, thanks in part to the potent nature of the national security law deployed by Smith’s team in the case. While the details of the indictment will remain officially sealed until he appears in court in Miami on Tuesday, the outlook for Trump in this second case appears grim, former prosecutors said.
“The charges in this case are likely very serious,” said Barbara McQuade, the former top federal prosecutor in Detroit. “If he is convicted, I think he would be sentenced to serious prison time.”
Trump has reportedly been charged with the willful retention of national defense information, false statements and obstruction, Trump’s attorney Jim Trusty told CNN, confirming reporting by other outlets citing U.S. officials.
The willful retention charge represents an alleged violation of the Espionage Act, the sweeping national security law that has been used to target leakers of government secrets including Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a large batch of files about secret U.S. surveillance programs and then fled to Russia. The broad law applies both to actual spies and also to government employees who retain or disseminate documents they’re not supposed to — although Trump has reportedly not been charged with spying.
Trump is also alleged to have broken the Presidential Records Act, according to the Washington Post. That Watergate-era law says that when an administration ends, the president’s records are supposed to be government property.
Trump, of course, has already been charged with another batch of crimes by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, which indicted Trump in April for allegedly falsifying business records. But that case could easily result in no prison time at all, even if Trump is found guilty at trial. The violations alleged by the special counsel’s office, to the contrary, are no joke.
“There are people in jail who’ve done far less than what Trump’s charged with,” former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann told MSNBC.
Boxes on the Beach
Trump’s latest case arises from a year-long wrangle between Trump and the federal government over official records held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. The dispute erupted into public view in August last year when the FBI executed a search warrant of Trump’s property.
A total of about 300 documents marked classified were recovered by the feds at Mar-a-Lago over the course of several months.
Trump himself announced the criminal case against him on Thursday evening.
“It’s election interference at the highest level,” Trump said in a video posted to his Truth Social network. “I’m an innocent man.”
The Espionage Act was used by both Trump and former President Barack Obama to target leakers of government information. Eight people were charged or convicted of leaking national security secrets via the Espionage Act under Obama. Those cases included Chelsea Manning, who was convicted of handing tens of thousands of sensitive military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in a maximum-security barracks at Fort Leavenworth, although Obama commuted Manning’s sentence to roughly seven years.
Trump has raised various arguments in his defense, including that he somehow declassified all the documents before leaving office, although his reasoning has shifted.
CNN reported earlier this month that Smith obtained an audio recording of a summer 2021 in which Trump says he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran — which appears to undercut his argument that he declassified all the files.
Trump is about to find out that defending a national security case is a lot more complicated than fighting a run-of-the-mill white collar case, or even violent crime, said Titus Nichols, a former member of the legal defense team for Reality Winner, the Air Force veteran sentenced to over five years for violating the Espionage Act by leaking a government intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“He actually would have been better off shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue,” Nichols said, referring to Trump’s notorious campaign trail boast that he could shoot someone in broad daylight on a Manhattan street and not lose voters.
The rules require at least some of Trump’s lawyers to have high-level security clearances to review the evidence in the case, said Nichols, now an adjunct professor at University of Georgia School of Law.
Trump and his defense team will have to be careful not spill any government secrets when they talk about the case publicly, Nichols said, or even appear to be on the verge of doing so. Otherwise, Trump’s lawyers could have their security clearances pulled, which would make it hard for them to continue working on the case effectively.
Trump traditionally likes to lash out against law enforcement officials in public. But this case will be wrought with the requirement to retain national security secrets. This will dampen Trump’s ability to speak out about the chase, Nichols said.
“In this case, Trump can’t even be Trump,” Nichols said. “The media is going to have a million questions, and no one will be able to talk about it.”
First published in Vice News, https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bb34/trump-7-counts-indictment-mar-a-lago?utm_source=email&utm_medium=editorial&utm_content=news&utm_campaign=230609