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Indicting Trump
AFAIK, there are at least four separate investigations going on that could lead to criminal charges against TFG. In chronological order,
(There are of course lots of other crimes he could be charged with, but AFAIK nobody is currently investigating, most obviously obstructing the Justice Department investigation of his campaign's ties to Russia. See Volume 2 of the Mueller report.)
Of these, #2 and #3 are direct assaults on the American system of government and the peaceful transfer of power, while #4 is a straightforward crime that many people have been charged with in the past. These are all clear, simple stories:
Next to these, #1 seems like a technicality. It's almost certainly not the first time Donald Trump had paid a hooker to keep her mouth shut, and it was probably completely legal until he did it in 2016 while governed by campaign finance laws. Even then, I think he could have done it legally, if he had reported it correctly and paid it from the right account. It's the weakest and hardest to explain of the four cases. And it's likely to be the first indictment to come out. In the entirely possible scenario that he's acquitted, or has the charges reduced to misdemeanors, he and his supporters will predictably use this as evidence that all the criminal charges against him are politically-motivated hit jobs rather than real crimes. In the worst case, that could reduce his chances of conviction on the more serious charges.
If we needed proof that there isn't a vast Democratic-party conspiracy to weaponize the government against Donald Trump, it's this: any competent conspiracy would have led with its strongest suit, not the weakest.
On the other hand, regardless of the order in which indictments are announced, actual trials for all four will be months away, so we don't know in what order they'll be tried.
- paying hush money to Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election;
- soliciting and pressuring Georgia state officials to commit election fraud, and arranging the appointment of an alternate pro-Trump slate of Georgia electors;
- summoning a mob to Capitol Hill in order to prevent or delay Congress's certification of electoral vote results; and
- retaining hundreds of government documents, many of them highly classified and/or national-security-related, after leaving office.
(There are of course lots of other crimes he could be charged with, but AFAIK nobody is currently investigating, most obviously obstructing the Justice Department investigation of his campaign's ties to Russia. See Volume 2 of the Mueller report.)
Of these, #2 and #3 are direct assaults on the American system of government and the peaceful transfer of power, while #4 is a straightforward crime that many people have been charged with in the past. These are all clear, simple stories:
- he lost an election and threatened state officials into saying that he had won it,
- he lost an election and got his supporters to threaten Congress into saying that he had won it,
- he was fired from his job and stole a bunch of his employer's intellectual property on his way out the door.
Next to these, #1 seems like a technicality. It's almost certainly not the first time Donald Trump had paid a hooker to keep her mouth shut, and it was probably completely legal until he did it in 2016 while governed by campaign finance laws. Even then, I think he could have done it legally, if he had reported it correctly and paid it from the right account. It's the weakest and hardest to explain of the four cases. And it's likely to be the first indictment to come out. In the entirely possible scenario that he's acquitted, or has the charges reduced to misdemeanors, he and his supporters will predictably use this as evidence that all the criminal charges against him are politically-motivated hit jobs rather than real crimes. In the worst case, that could reduce his chances of conviction on the more serious charges.
If we needed proof that there isn't a vast Democratic-party conspiracy to weaponize the government against Donald Trump, it's this: any competent conspiracy would have led with its strongest suit, not the weakest.
On the other hand, regardless of the order in which indictments are announced, actual trials for all four will be months away, so we don't know in what order they'll be tried.