In less than six months, Donald Trump has gone from being a lying world leader of the populist far-right to being the presumed planetary champion of political crime, with the considerable aggravation of his status as former president of the United States who aspires to re-election.
The quick succession of his four accusations; the seriousness of the crimes against democracy that are attributed to him, almost always in the company of others, and his unbelievable outright denial of all the accusations, without nuances, arguing that both are part of a conspiracy of the "left radical” of Joe Biden to instrumentalize the entire judicial apparatus and the FBI against him has favored the vision of the four cases as components of a kind of magma with different degrees of incandescence or as a discontinuous but homogeneous cascade of accusations. However, the scope and chances of success of such prosecutions vary greatly from case to case. And there is consensus among jurists about the diverse quality of the accusations.
The 'secret papers', the best-armed case
From the outset, Trump's charge of obstruction of justice in the matter of wrongful transfer, concealment, and refusal to return the hundreds of classified papers he took from the White House to his residence and club in Mar-a -Lago appears as the most solid of all. Special prosecutor Jack Smith accompanied that accusation with half a dozen other crimes referring both to the central fact of the "deliberate withholding of secret documents" in violation of the Espionage Act, as well as to different instrumental acts of witness tampering and false statements. . And all with a torrent of testimonies and evidence, including video surveillance images, which makes it difficult to imagine escape routes for the ex-president about what he did and the knowledge that he was doing it; which also applies to the two employees who will accompany him in the defendants' dock, in a trial scheduled for May 20. It is not surprising that when Smith presented his brief in June with a total of 37 charges, to which he would later add another three, he invited "everyone" to read the full text. And it is that, beyond a statement of charges, and as the specialist in legal rhetoric from the University of Colorado Derek Kiernan-Johnson points out, the letter is "a great story with enormous persuasive power" to convince the reader of the seriousness of the facts. Ingredients are not lacking: the surprise that an employee expresses to the other when coming across a stack of secret papers: "I opened the door and found this...", to which the other responds: "Oh, no, oh no!" ; the photos of boxes of confidential files in a shower, a bathroom and a stage; the attempts to delete videos of document transfers, Trump's conversations with his lawyers, such as "I don't want anyone going through my boxes... wouldn't it be better if we just told them we don't have anything?"... The material is overwhelming.
Focused and cautious accusation on the assault on the Capitol
Smith did not charge Trump with sedition in the case of the assault on the Capitol and other actions to reverse his electoral defeat. The apparent gap marked a notorious difference with respect to the expectations raised by the committee that investigated the events in Congress, which recommended that the prosecutor accuse the former president of instigating or aiding the insurrection, among other crimes. Instead, Smith focused on the four charges that the court will see at the hearing set for March 4: fraud against the United States, obstruction of official procedure regarding the process subsequent to the November 2020 votes; attempted obstruction of the ratification of the results in the session interrupted by the invasion of the Capitol, and conspiracy against the right to vote. As the former head of the Corruption section of the Washington Prosecutor's Office, Randall Eliason, stressed in The Washington Post, the resignation of the charge of insurrection prevents the public prosecution from a difficult debate on whether what Trump did when encouraging that January 6 the mass to march towards the Congress was an incitement to the coup or an act of free expression. Instead, the charges filed and the evidence gathered "will allow prosecutors to present to the jury the sweeping, multi-state plan to nullify the election," he told Eliason. And these are serious crimes punishable with harsh penalties.
Georgia case, showy but with some problem
Prosecutor Fani Willis has just accused Trump and 18 alleged accomplices of mafia extortion to annul the former president's electoral defeat in the state. There are 41 charges in total, 13 of them attributed to the leader. A colorful indictment that also includes gruesome accounts of threats to poll workers. The problem is that the centerpiece, the famous call in which Trump asks election supervisor Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we have to win the state" raises doubts. Does that call prove an intent to commit fraud? Legal analyst Jonathan Turley of George Washington University isn't sure: “There's a big difference between making unsubstantiated electoral claims and committing a crime,” he says.
The 'weakness' of the bribery charge against Daniels
New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg made history when, at the end of March, he accused Trump of 34 counts of falsifying business records to bribe the porn actress Stormy Daniels in the first indictment against a former US president. The bad thing is that this guy Forgery is a misdemeanor in New York unless it is linked to a felony. Bragg suggested that the payments were made to condition the elections and constituted an equally serious tax violation. But jurists of all walks of life consider it difficult for the trial, scheduled for March 25, to end in conviction.
Trump has many legal problems... Some more serious than others.
