Donald Trump Faces Major Legal Threats As He Launches 2024 Campaign; His Election-Denier Followers Were Rejected By Voters Last Week, But The Threat Continues
President Joe Biden said before the midterm elections that democracy was on the ballot.
It was and democracy won.
The clearest and most important example of this involved the Republican election deniers running for Secretary of State. As the officials responsible for state elections, they would have been in position to rig future elections for Republican candidates.
This likely was the gravest threat to fair and honest elections we faced in last week’s elections.
But voters saw the threat and defeated every election denier running for Secretary of State, except in the solidly red state of Indiana. This included Republican candidates in such presidential battlegrounds as Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Minnesota.
Republican election deniers were also defeated for Governor in the presidential battleground states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. (The Governor in Pennsylvania appoints the Secretary of State.)
Losing Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who has yet to concede and continues to sow doubt about Arizona’s election last week, has been ground zero for election deniers across the country.
Tim Michels, Wisconsin’s Republican gubernatorial candidate who lost last week, summed up the aim of election deniers when he outrageously asserted during the campaign that if he was elected his party “will never lose another election” in the state.
The election-deniers’ movement, however, is not gone nor is the threat they pose.
Meanwhile, former President Trump, who created the movement and is its continuing leader, has announced his third run for President, while still singing his Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Trump continues to do all he can to rally the election-denier movement. And, Trump followers stand ready to attack the results of the 2024 presidential election if a Democrat wins, regardless of the actual vote count.
But, as Trump rolled out his 2024 campaign, the current legal threats facing him were powerfully documented in two new major reports that detail the potential criminal activities in which Trump has engaged.
This week, Just Security published a 169-page report that concludes that a strong basis exists to indict former President Trump for crimes dealing with the classified national security documents he removed from the White House and stored at Mar-a-Lago.
The extensively researched report examines potential charges against Trump stemming from both his improper taking of classified and other government documents and his efforts to obstruct the DOJ investigation of his actions.
The report, based on publicly available information, was prepared by a team of former federal prosecutors, defense attorneys, and other legal experts. (Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer and Counsel Don Simon served as co-authors, along with: Andrew Weissmann, Ryan Goodman, Joyce Vance, Norman Eisen, E. Danya Perry, Siven Watt, Joshua Stanton, and Alexander K. Parachini.)
“Our exhaustive analysis of all prior prosecutions brought under the same criminal statute that most directly applies to Trump shows how difficult it will be for the Justice Department to decline to issue an indictment here,” Goodman, a co-author of the report, said. “Trump’s conduct is indeed much worse than most of those prior cases and involves a host of aggravating factors that one seldom sees in cases brought under the Espionage Act’s retention clause.”
Eisen, a co-author of the report, noted: “If anyone else had handled even a single highly classified document in this way, they would be subject to investigation and likely prosecution. Donald Trump mishandled a huge volume of them. No wonder that prosecutors seem to be closing in.”
That Trump is a former President and now a declared 2024 presidential candidate is and must be treated as irrelevant by Attorney General Merrick Garland in deciding whether or not to indict Trump. Garland must base his decision on the facts and the law, and the standards he has repeatedly stated that “upholding the rule of law means applying the law evenly, without fear or favor.”
In other words, according to the study, this case must be evaluated for prosecution like any other case with similar evidence would be, without regard to the fact that the case is focused on the conduct of a former President and now a presidential candidate.
Also this week, Brookings released an updated in-depth report that concludes that former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia leaves him at substantial risk of criminal prosecution in Fulton County, Georgia.
Trump’s actions prompted a criminal investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. A special purpose grand jury was announced in January and the fact-finding phase of the investigation is expected to finish by the end of this year.
At the Justice Department, another criminal investigation has been long underway into whether Trump engaged in criminal activity in leading the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and regarding the circumstances surrounding the January 6 violent insurrectionist attack on the Capitol.
These investigations must not be deterred and must follow the facts wherever they lead.
If, as has often been said, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, then eternal vigilance is demanded in the months and years ahead to ensure that the anti-democracy forces in our country are permanently defeated.
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This op-ed is adapted from a piece in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter that comes out each Thursday. Read this week’s newsletter here. And, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.
