Trump Indictment ( includes NY AG and Fed documents case ) (2 Viewers)

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    SteveSBrickNJ

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    Former President D. Trump has been indicted by a New York Grand Jury. There will be much to talk about on this topic because this is just the first step in a lengthy process.
    Possibly it is worthy of its own thread here rather than posting about Trump's indictment in already existing threads? :unsure:
    *
    This 3/31/23 story might get the ball rolling....
    *
     
    The political world is watching closely to see if and when Donald Trump is indicted — again.
    Trump announced on social media last week that he’d received a “target” letter in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into efforts to overturn the election. Such letters are often precursors to criminal charges, as was the case recently in Smith’s separate investigation into Trump’s alleged failure to return classified documents after leaving the White House.

    A new criminal indictment would be Trump’s third, after the federal classified-documents charges last month and the hush money case brought in Manhattan in April.
    While we don’t know for sure that charges are coming or when they might land, here are a few things to watch for if they do.

    1. What are the charges?​

    This is obviously the most significant aspect, as it would set the stage for everything that lies ahead.

    While Smith’s investigation has often been given the “Jan. 6” shorthand, it’s important to note that there is plenty of evidence he’s not just investigating actions related to the Capitol riot that day. Charges could relate to a much broader conspiracy to overturn the election — which contributed to that day’s events but was distinct from it.

    The House select Jan. 6 committee cited four potential crimes, including obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the government, when it referred Trump to the Department of Justice after concluding its own investigation last year. We don’t know whether Smith has these or other statutes in mind, but it’s worth reviewing them as a starting point.

    The first one, obstruction of an official proceeding, has been used extensively against Jan. 6 defendants, and it basically amounts to disrupting Congress’s certification of electoral college votes. Precisely how that might pertain to Trump is the big question. It’s readily apparent how rioters who have been charged with this offense disrupted the day’s events. With Trump, it’s possible he could be accused of having fomented the riot or having proactively failed to halt it once it began.

    Conspiracy to defraud the government means obstructing a governmental function by deceitful or dishonest means. That sounds similar to the above, but it could include other efforts, such as pressuring officials in states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania, as well as lying about widespread voter fraud.

    The Jan. 6 committee included two other statutes in its referral: inciting or aiding an insurrection, and conspiracy to make a false statement. And some have raised the prospect of Trump’s being charged under a Civil War-era law making it a crime to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” who exercises or enjoys a protected right — in this case, voting.

    A major question is how big Smith might go with his charges. Charging Trump with some kind of conspiracy would mean laying out Trump’s broader plot and how it allegedly ran afoul of the law, including things like the “fake elector” plot.

    But again, Smith has given no public signals about the specific crimes he plans to charge, so for now, we will have to wait and see.

    2. Is there new information in the indictment?

    While an indictment is much-anticipated, it’s also true that we’ve already learned plenty about the efforts to overturn the election. The Jan. 6 committee held several public hearings, and it wound up producing an 800-page report and releasing transcripts of witness interviews.

    But especially if the indictment does include conspiracy charges, it seems possible we’ll learn quite a bit more.

    We know that Smith’s investigation has obtained interviews from key witnesses the Jan. 6 committee did not interview — some witnesses fought testifying, while criticizing the committee for being too partisan — such as former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former vice president Mike Pence. That committee also faced a time crunch, needing to release its final report before Republicans took over the House and shut it down. Smith has had at least eight months to probe and build upon what we learned then — and on the Department of Justice’s own investigation, launched in April 2022............



     
    I saw today where more witnesses are still going before the grand jury. I don’t know if they were reporting someone they just now found out testified in the past or if it was someone new today. But if he’s still calling witnesses, then we might not be that close to an indictment.
     
    (CNN) — Special counsel Jack Smith has charged a third defendant, Carlos De Oliveira, in the Trump Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, according to court files.

    Former President Donald Trump and his aide, Walt Nauta, were previously charged last month. Both have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

    De Oliveira was the maintenance worker who helped Nauta move boxes of classified documents around Mar-a-Lago after the Justice Department first subpoenaed Trump for classified documents last May.

    CNN has previously reported that surveillance footage turned over to the Justice Department showed Nauta and De Oliveira, moving document boxes around the resort, including into a storage room just before Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran searched it for classified documents…….


     
    Evidently there is testimony that Trump asked someone to erase the hard drive that had security footage. This is certainly ironic considering the bleating he and his idiot supporters did about Clinton “bleaching” her hard drive (with no proof that actually happened).

    🤡🤪

     
     
    (CNN) — Special counsel Jack Smith has charged a third defendant, Carlos De Oliveira, in the Trump Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, according to court files.

    Former President Donald Trump and his aide, Walt Nauta, were previously charged last month. Both have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

    De Oliveira was the maintenance worker who helped Nauta move boxes of classified documents around Mar-a-Lago after the Justice Department first subpoenaed Trump for classified documents last May.

    CNN has previously reported that surveillance footage turned over to the Justice Department showed Nauta and De Oliveira, moving document boxes around the resort, including into a storage room just before Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran searched it for classified documents…….




    He hires the best people.


    LOL.

    its all unravelling before him.
     
    In early June, the federal government made public a 49-page indictment targeting former president Donald Trump. Trump and his staffer Waltine “Walt” Nauta face dozens of charges related to Trump’s possession of material he took to his home at Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House, including a number of documents marked as classified.


    While certainly not proof of Trump’s guilt of criminal conduct, the indictment nonetheless contained multiple photos and detailed conversations suggesting that Trump had documents and intended to keep them.

    Previously, of course, the Justice Department had released a photo of documents marked as classified arrayed on the distinctive carpet of the Mar-a-Lago Club.


    And yet new polling from Marquette Law School indicates that half of Republicans don’t believe he had any such documents at his home.

    As soon as you read those words, you are likely to experience a cascade of assumptions.

    Among the first is that this is probably to some extent insincere. Many Republicans probably believe that Trump had those documents at his house but also understand that the formal position of Trump and his allies is that this is all contrived, so their response to the poll reflects that rhetorical position more than their actual beliefs.


    But, of course, there’s also the impulse to accept Trump’s explanation for what was found: that, as president, he had the power to declassify any material and that he’d done so.


    This is a belief that is undermined significantly in three ways. First, that Trump himself was recorded talking about how he was in possession of a document that was still classified.

    Second, his varying invocations of this idea of a blanket declassification were neither memorialized with the government nor consistent across his presentations.

    And, third, some of the documents the government said it recovered at Mar-a-Lago dealt with nuclear arms and were therefore not ones he had the sole authority to declassify…….

     

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