Targeted by 37 charges including “illegal retention of information relating to national security”, “obstructing justice” and “false testimony”, Donald Trump theoretically risks several decades in prison.
For the first time in the history of the United States, a former president appears in federal court. Donald Trump is accused of having taken at the end of his mandate, in January 2021, confidential documents likely to jeopardize the security of the country and of having kept them without precaution in his luxurious residence in Florida. The 76-year-old billionaire arrived Tuesday, June 13 in court, where he must appear before a judge in the middle of the afternoon (the middle of the evening in France). The magistrate will notify him of the 37 charges against him. After responding to the same formalities as any defendant, he should plead not guilty.
For months, Donald Trump and his supporters have been denouncing a political maneuver aimed at weakening him, as he intends to take over the White House from Joe Biden in 2024. They recall that the current president has also been worried in a case of classified and confidential documents not returned, without having had to answer for them in court. “It is inadmissible for a president to indict the main candidate who opposes him”the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Republican Kevin McCarthy, railed on Friday on Twitter. “Joe Biden kept classified documents for decades”, he argued. But are the cases of the 45th and 46th presidents of the United States really comparable?
Documents obtained by coercion
For Donald Trump, trouble began in February 2022. The National Archives (Nara), responsible for recording presidential activities for history, is alarmed that the outgoing president’s team is reluctant to send them the documents (some of which are confidential). ) which are rightfully theirs. During searches in August, the investigators got their hands on some 300 classified documents, kept illegally, despite requests from the courts.
The case that embarrasses Joe Biden concerns a few dozen documents dating from the time when he was vice-president of Barack Obama, between 2009 and 2017, according to the American press. They were found in November, in the former office of the current president, in Washington, as well as at his personal residence in Wilmington, Delaware. Above all, the circumstances differ: if justice intervened to investigate and then search in order to find the documents kept by Donald Trump, the Biden camp itself informed the Nara after advisers came across boxes containing classified documents, in emptying a former office of the current president at the Penn Biden Centera Washington-based think tank.
A desire to conceal
According to a national security lawyer quoted in January by Business Insider, “Biden’s team did exactly what needed to be done” by contacting the Nara. According to him, it is not uncommon for confidential documents to end up in nature and for the National Archives to be forced to intervene to recover them. According to New York Times, Those close to the Democrat thought that this rule, a pledge of good faith, would save Joe Biden the embarrassment of a further investigation.
This operation ‘transparency’ contrasts with inconsistencies and omissions revealed in Friday’s indictment against Donald Trump (PDF). The ex-president is accused of having voluntarily withheld these confidential documents from justice, with his personal assistant, a certain Waltine Nauta. At the end of May, learning that the courts were asking him for any missing document that might still be at Mar-a-Lago, he mentioned to advisers the possibility of “not playing the game” and wonders: “Wouldn’t it be better to tell them that we don’t have any?”
When federal agents show up at Donald Trump’s house on June 2, members of his legal team send them 38 classified documents. But, according to the indictment, which cites the hearings of relatives of the Republican as well as text messages, boxes have meanwhile been moved and stored elsewhere in the residence.
For former federal prosecutor Robert Mintz, questioned by the Washington Post, “This case is not about the type of documents that were taken away but about what President Trump did while the government was trying to find them.” In this sense, the indictment is “rather very detailed. And it’s overwhelming”, Donald Trump’s former Justice Minister Bill Barr, now very critical, told Fox News.
A defense without legal basis
On the Joe Biden side, we plead thoughtlessness, failing to assume negligence. At Donald Trump, the defense consists in ensuring that the former president had every right to keep these documents at home. And for good reason, he “had declassified”, assured his lawyer Alina Habba. “These are notes, things he has the right to take away”she added. “He said he declassified this material, he can put it wherever he wants, he can treat it however he wants,” added on CNN the chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, Jim Jordan, a close ally of the former real estate magnate.
However, the indictment reveals that Donald Trump was aware of not having declassified the confidential documents in his possession. This is how he is accused of having shown to people without secret-defence clearance, who came to interview him in Florida, “a plan of attack” prepared for him by the Ministry of Defence. “As president, I could have declassified them (…) now I can’t, but they are still secrets”, boasts the former head of state on an audio recording cited by the court document.
For former minister Bill Barr, interviewed on Fox News, “the idea that the president has total authority to decree that any document is personal is ridiculous”. And his defense is a model of bad faith, can we read in The Atlantic. “Trump knew exactly how harmful the discovery of the documents would be and he wanted them destroyed or hidden,” ensures in a chronicle the political journalist David A. Graham. To the 37 charges to which the former president will have to answer, he adds a 38th, certainly inadmissible in court but acerbic: that of having committed “the stupidest crimes imaginable”.
The cases of Donald Trump and Joe Biden therefore diverge on many points. But drawing a parallel between them allows the former president to illustrate his well-rehearsed speech against institutions he considers unjust and illegitimate.as the race for the Republican nomination opens. According to a recent CBS News/YouGov poll, three-quarters of voters likely to vote in the Republican primaries believe the charges against Donald Trump are politically motivated. Carrying such a speech could thus be favorable to him, at a time when he is ahead in the polls of the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, and his former vice-president, Mike Pence.