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After Donald Trumpprivate residence of his Palm Beach club was raided by the FBI, his defenders immediately jumped to point out how unprecedented the feds had to search the home of a former US president. And it’s true – it was definitely unprecedented! Although not because, as Trump’s stooges have claimed, the whole thing is some kind of politically motivated witch hunt. Rather, no president in history has been as corrupt as Donald Trump—including the one who was forced to resign in disgrace. Even before the FBI came knocking, the 45th president was up to his neck in legal trouble; in fact, it’s probably gotten to the point where you can’t even keep up with all the criminal investigations, civil cases, and other reasons Trump’s lawyers have to just move to Mar-a-Lago so they can brief him daily during at breakfast : all the ways he’s screwed.
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy for the rest of the public to follow, and you might find yourself confused between, say, the New York Attorney General’s investigation into the Trump Organization and the Manhattan District Attorney’s criminal investigation, the latter of which is expected to lead to an admission of guilt by the company’s longtime CFO, Alan Weiselberg. You may also struggle to keep track of the topics of the various federal investigations, which range from Trump’s plot to overturn the election to Trump’s decision to take classified government documents into his home.
That’s why, as a public service, we’ve put together this handy guide.
The investigation of classified documents
Although you probably don’t need a reminder, on August 8, 2022, the FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s residence at his for-profit club in Florida, where they removed 11 boxes of classified documents, including some marked top secret. Trump’s defenders lost their minds over this, insisting that the government should have simply subpoenaed him or simply asked him politely to return what wasn’t his to keep. Of course, that’s exactly what the feds initially tried to do. Back in January, the National Archives had removed 15 boxes of documents from Mar-a-Lago, including those of the most classified kind. A few months later, the Justice Department, believing that Trump had not actually turned over everything he was supposed to, issued a subpoena for the additional documents. In June, a lawyer for the former president said in a written statement that all classified material had been returned to the government. Which, of course, turned out to be a lie, hence the need for the attack.
Then, after a judge unsealed the search warrant, we learned that the government wasn’t looking for West Wing tchotchkes and stolen office supplies, but rather had good reason to believe the 45th president had engaged in obstruction of justice. mishandling government documents, and violated the Espionage Act. The evening before the order was to be unsealed, The The Washington Post reported that “classified documents related to nuclear weapons were among the items sought by FBI agents in the search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence.” The New York Times revealed this week that the FBI interviewed Trump’s White House counsel and deputy general counsel about the documents. While it’s unclear what will happen next, an indictment is clearly a strong possibility. If convicted of violating the laws cited in the order, Trump could go to prison for decades.
Naturally, he insisted that he had done nothing wrong and that people take classified documents all the time.
The Justice Department’s criminal investigation of January 6 and the plot to overturn the election
With all the uproar surrounding the raid on Trump’s home and the revelation that he refused to turn over top-secret documents related to serious national security matters, it’s easy to forget that Trump tried extremely hard to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election d., and when that failed, instigated a violent uprising that left many dead. But he did! In July, we learned that according to The Washington Post, The Justice Department was investigating Trump’s actions as part of its criminal investigation, and that prosecutors questioning witnesses before a grand jury asked “hours of detailed questions about meetings Trump had in December 2020 and January 2021; his campaign to pressure on [Mike] Pence to annul the election; and what instructions Trump gave his lawyers and advisers about voter fraud and sending voters back to the states.
Crucial witnesses we know of so far include Pence’s former chief of staff Mark Short and its former general counsel Greg Jacob, both have significant insight into Trump’s plot to overturn the election. (Earlier this month, in what ABC News called a “dramatic escalation in the Justice Department’s investigation” into the plot to overturn the 2020 election and the ensuing unrest, the department called Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House adviser, who attended several meetings in the run-up to Jan. 6 in which the former president and his thugs discussed how to keep Trump in power. Cipollone also knew about Trump’s desire to confiscate the voting machines, which he described as “a terrible idea for the country,” “not how we do things in the United States,” and something the administration had no “legal authority” to do.)
While Trump — you guessed it — maintains he’s done nothing wrong, his lawyers are reportedly “planning criminal charges.” According to rolling stone fear of prosecution has intensified after the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified publicly before the committee on Jan. 6, at which point she told the panel that Trump had been informed that some of his supporters who had gathered in D.C. on the day of the riot were armed, but asked to be admitted, to hear his “Stop the Steal” speech anyway; that Trump assaulted a Secret Service agent after being told he could not go to the Capitol alone; and that the 45th president apparently believed that Vice President Pence “deserved” the chants calling for his hanging.
Georgia Criminal Investigation
Remember when, as part of his plot to overturn the election, Trump called the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and demanded that Raffensperger “find” him the necessary number of votes to win joe biden, saying, “I just want to find 11,780 votes” before threatening the local official for denying his request? Fulton County District Attorney Fanny Willis is investigating this and more, empaneling a special grand jury to hear evidence and potentially bring charges. On Monday, a lawyer for Rudy Giuliani said he had been informed that the former mayor turned Trump lawyer was a target of the investigation, while the longtime Trump defender lindsey graham, who called Raffensperger in November 2020 to ask if he had the authority to drop mail-in ballots in certain counties, was ordered by a judge to testify before a grand jury. Speaking of New York Times, lawyer Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee on Trump’s first impeachment, said he thought the Giuliani news was extremely bad for Trump. “There’s no way Giuliani is a target of the prosecutor’s investigation and Trump isn’t,” Eisen said.
We probably don’t need to tell you that Trump swears he did nothing wrong here after describing his call to Raffensperger as absolutely “PERFECT” in May.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s criminal case against the Trump Organization et al.
In February, Trump received a rare bit of good news on the legal front when the veteran prosecutors leading the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into the former president’s business practices abruptly resigned, reportedly because their new boss, Alvin Bragg, had doubts whether to take the case to court. Of course, according to one of these lawyers, Mark Pomeranz, this should not be taken as a sign that Trump did not engage in criminal activity, as Pomeranz believes he certainly did, writing in his resignation letter that the former president was “guilty of multiple felonies” and that it is a serious “failure of justice” not to hold him accountable. (In his letter to Bragg, Pomeranz added that “no case is perfect,” saying that fear of losing a trial is not a good reason to drop a criminal charge.)
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