Pedro González
Journalist
The fact that former US President Donald Trump is accused of violating seven federal laws and faces 37 separate charges is undoubtedly the most important political news in the United States. It is the first time this has happened when, in addition, the indictee aspires to reoccupy the White House.
No sooner had the charges against Trump by the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, become known than he shot up again in the polls among the motley crowd of Republican Party primary candidates. Trump accumulates almost 50% of voting intentions, or more than all his other rivals combined, including his former vice-president, Mike Pence (5%), and the current governor of Florida, Ron de Santis (12%).
The Democratic Party is trying hard to remind the public that no one is above the law, while President Joe Biden’s entourage categorically denies that any instructions have been given to the judiciary in relation to Trump. The latter has accentuated his usual victimhood, declaring himself to be the object of a relentless persecution to remove him from the race for the presidency, and in turn accuses the current occupant of the White House of having in his possession, scattered in various places, classified documents as top secret as his own.
It is worth clarifying that the Espionage Act, in its chapter on the unauthorised retention of National Defence information, exhaustively defines all the documents that cannot be in the possession of unauthorised persons. In Trump’s case, and once he returned to normal citizen status after leaving the White House, such documents must be turned over to the National Archives, whether they are deeds, code books, signal books, sketches, photographs or photographic negatives, blueprints, maps, models, instruments, apparatus, notes, or information relating to national defence, “which information the holder has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign nation”.
This law does not presuppose a hypothetical intention to handle such information for spurious purposes, much less to provide it to an enemy power, the mere fact of having it in an unauthorised place is a sufficient condition for a court to convict. The discovery of the numerous boxes containing these secret and top-secret documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, coupled with the FBI’s unheeded requests to make them available to the National Archives, make for an indictment of enormous gravity, all the more so as prosecutor Smith’s team asserts that Trump, and his personal aide and longtime confidant Walt Nauta, also charged, tried to conceal the documents from federal investigators.
Trump’s court appearance in Miami, scheduled for Tuesday 13 June, will begin to outline the contours of the case, which in one way or another will have an impact on the long election campaign. From then on, both the candidates and the Republican Party itself will have to take a position on the possibility that a tried and presumably convicted Trump will once again become the most powerful man in the United States and leader of the world, at least in the West. It is an unprecedented possibility, but one that the US Constitution does not prohibit, that a citizen in his circumstances, even convicted but elected by the majority of his fellow citizens, could become the nation’s chief magistrate.
This situation is all the more unusual in that the most extremist wing of the Republican Party has neither been deactivated nor has its many supporters among the citizenry shown any signs of fading. It is true that justice is taking its course and the first convictions have already been handed down for the assault on the Capitol, an action in which Trump’s impetus seems to have been evident. The result is that the country is not only divided but deeply fractured, and this episode may contribute to widening the rift even further.
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