Donald Trump was always court meat. Since a first case in 1973 for discriminating against blacks in the rental of their homes, the number of lawsuits against him or his business or collaborators is incalculable. He himself said in 2012 that until then he had given a hundred statements and as many testimonies. But he almost always managed to get away, agree based on money or offload responsibilities to a collaborator.
Never before, however, has the former president faced so many and such diverse judicial investigations against him. For serious crimes and from all sides: criminal and civil, economic and political, for defrauding the treasury of hundreds of millions, for instigating a coup attempt or for hiding secret documents whose disclosure would endanger the security of the country and its spies . And in this context, the week that ends today may mark a change in the fate of the Republican leader, who is beginning to find himself cornered by justice.
According to confessions from his advisers to local media, Trump was surprised by the 222-page lawsuit that New York Attorney General Letitia James filed on Wednesday against him, his three eldest children, as well as against former executives Allen Weisselberg and Jeffrey McConney, and the real estate group The Trump Organization. The state is asking the former president for 250 million dollars in compensation for a gigantic fraud consisting of “inflating” the value of his properties in order to obtain tax and credit advantages: an entire exhibition in “the art of theft”, James called it.
The day after that lawsuit was announced, the result of three years of investigation and with its parallel in a criminal investigation for tax crimes also in New York, Trump suffered a severe and double defeat in the case of the more than 100 secret documents that the FBI he was searched on August 8 at his home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. On the one hand, an appeal court ruled that the Department of Justice and the Attorney General's Office could continue to use the Mar-a-Lago papers in their investigations. The decision revoked the veto that the judge in the case, Aileen Cannon, appointed by Trump, had imposed on the use of the documents by official investigators while the judicial expert appointed in the matter at the request of the former president, also Judge Raymond Dearie, fulfills his mission to review the papers and determine which ones should be excluded from the summary due to secrecy in the relationship between lawyer and client or due to an alleged (and dubious) privilege of the former president
On the other hand, Judge Dearie demanded that Trump's lawyers prove their client's claim that the FBI "planted" evidence; and if they don't prove it, drop the subject. Dearie also warned the lawyers that without palpable evidence he will not accept his boss's assertion that the papers are not secret because he has already declassified them. In this regard, the Republican leader made one of the most ridiculous statements in his history – which is already difficult – by assuring on the Fox network that he could declassify documents “just by saying or thinking about it”.
It is clear that Trump's defense spit up the day that, to delay the investigation of the papers, he requested that said independent expert be appointed to review the material found in the Florida mansion. Immediately, the Prosecutor's Office took advantage of the request to present an appeal where it explained in great detail, and with a devastating photo of the documents found, the enormous seriousness of the facts. The Public Ministry made it clear that it is fully proven that Trump's defense, obviously on his behalf, lied in recent months when they said they had already returned all the classified documents that the FBI, the Prosecutor's Office and the National Archives entity were claiming from them after two previous and reluctant deliveries of part of the loot. That lying denial was a crime of obstruction of justice like the top of a pine tree, the Department of Justice came to say.
That accusation, for now not formalized by filing charges, is perhaps the most tricky against Trump. He competes with the accusations that he can face for his responsibility in the violent attack perpetrated against the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to annul his defeat in the presidential elections, and with the attempts to falsify those elections; especially in the state of Georgia, where the Prosecutor's Office is following an important case on the matter.
The former president insists that he is the victim of a "witch hunt"; he keeps suggesting that he will run for re-election, and appears to maintain majority support from Republicans. In the country, even in the Democratic media, there is a certain skepticism about the possibility that the Prosecutor's Office officially charges Trump and the justice process him: it would be the first time that a former US president was prosecuted and the response would be violent believes the majority of citizens and leaders. But the judicial machinery continues its course. The consequences of him stopping for no reason would be dire.
