Trump, the most accused candidate in history

The fourth indictment against Donald Trump so far this year has just been released, formulated this time by the Atlanta Prosecutor’s Office after a grand jury investigation in relation to the attempt to subvert the electoral result of the elections presidential elections in Georgia in 2020.

The brief that has been made public contains 41 different charges against 19 people, including not only former President Trump, but also his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and a large part of his legal team, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Sydney Powell.

The main accusation is the violation of the Georgia state law against organized crime, which accounts for around 60% of the text. The rest of the charges (for falsification of documents, false statements and writings, incitement to violate his oath by a public official, etc.) derive from the first.

The brief outlines the defendants’ actions to get the Georgia legislature, state canvassing officials, Justice Department officials, and the Vice President of the United States to reject legitimate election results, the creation of “alternative” documents, the attempts to intimidate officials and the theft of computer data.

The Atlanta prosecutor exhaustively collects, in 161 different sections, all the conducts that, in her opinion, were part of the criminal conspiracy to alter the electoral results in Georgia. There is no great news regarding the information that has been published in the last two years, but it is always shocking to see everything that the former president and his co-conspirators carried out between November 2020 and January 2021 to try to annul chronologically. the legitimate count.

It was a coordinated action, with multiple ramifications and zero respect for legality, which is all the more striking if we take into account that a large number of the defendants are lawyers.

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Which of the four charges has the greatest potential to end up with a conviction? From what we have seen so far, the federal indictment in New York against Trump for fraud in the administration of his business group is probably the weakest and the least likely to succeed.

For its part, in the case of the secret documents illegally retained by Donald Trump after his departure from the Presidency at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, there is a paradox: from the evidentiary point of view, it is possibly the case in which the ex-president’s prospects are more worrisome. However, the fact that the federal judge assigned to the case was already showing signs of bias towards the president who appointed her when the entry and search of Trump’s property took place may give him some hope that the case will end in borage water.

The accusation before a federal court in Washington in relation to the attempt to subvert the electoral process of the 2020 presidential elections presents the opposite situation: the probative material is probably less compelling than in the previous case, since it is based more on testimonial evidence than documentaries, but instead Trump has had the misfortune that the federal judge assigned to the matter has already tried several of the assailants to the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and has imposed very severe sentences on them.

Finally, the accusation unveiled in Atlanta presents a very important particularity with respect to the three previous ones: we are dealing with a state and not a federal proceeding, which would mean, in the event of a conviction, that even if Trump won the elections in November of the year that comes, he could not pardon himself for the crimes for which he had been convicted in this procedure, since the power of presidential pardon covers only the scope of federal crimes

At this point, a sensible political party would realize that an ex-president with four indictments and pending trials in 2024 is not the right candidate for that year’s presidential election. But the Republican Party, frightened by the reaction of its own voters in the event that it tried to abandon Trump, has decided to argue against all evidence that the actions of the courts in four different states are the result of a government conspiracy against the former president and not, as seems increasingly likely, the result of his egregious disrespect for the law and the Constitution and his inability to accept the result of a democratic election that he lost in 2020.

In less than two weeks the debates for the Republican primaries will begin and everything seems to indicate that, except for exotic exceptions such as Chris Christie or Mike Pence, the candidates will actually compete for the privilege of being nominated for the vice presidency, paving the way for a coronation. trumpist.

Pedro Soriano is a lawyer and collaborator of Agenda Pública.

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