Legal experts are growing increasingly certain that Donald Trump will face criminal charges over his stashing of thousands of pages of presidential records at Mar-a-Lago.
What erupted into the national conversation with a stunning raid of the president’s home last month is now a bogged-down legal battle between Mr Trump’s lawyers, the Department of Justice and a special master appointed at the request of the former president.
But as with many investigations in recent years, the FBI’s probe of Mr Trump has resulted in a steady stream of leaks to the media which have painted a picture of a probe that those in the know say is likely already past the stage of proving wrongdoing. The question now is whether the Justice Department decides the case is worth prosecuting, not the strength of the case itself.
That was the conclusion that Andrew Weissman, a former Justice Department attorney assigned to work with Robert Mueller’s office of the special counsel during the Trump-Russia investigation.
Mr Weissman pointed to the latest leaks from the probe: A Washington Post story indicating that one of Mr Trump’s aides had testified to the FBI about moving boxes of documents on the former president’s orders.
“Between this [...] and the testimony of Alex Cannon (to name just two recent developments) Trump’s MAL goose is cooked. As I have oft said, the issue is no longer the proof, but DOJ’s will,” tweeted Mr Weissman.
George Conway, a conservative attorney who supported Mr Trump’s impeachment despite his wife’s service as his 2016 campaign manager, agreed.
“It’s like a US attorney trying to bring a big mob case against the five families and trying to connect it up to the boss, and all of a sudden, they get the call from the NYPD saying ‘Hey, the big boss, the capo, is loading jewelry on a truck at Kennedy Airport. That’s what happened here. He’s caught red-handed,” Mr Conway quipped on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Thursday.
The newest development revealing that Mr Trump personally directed the placement of the boxes of documents, as well as another leak regarding a refusal by Mr Trump’s attorney earlier this year to tell the federal government that all boxes had been returned, adds a new layer of potential criminality centred around the actions of the former president himself. It will be near-impossible for his legal team to insist that Mr Trump was not the one ultimately in control of these documents with that testimony having been made.
That instruction to Mr Trump’s attorney, which we now know would have involved lying to the government, “suggests an effort to hide the documents from the federal government,” wrote one federal prosecutor.
“This evidence is an aggravating factor that could weigh in favor of charging Trump,” tweeted Renato Mariotti.
The ex-president has loudly insisted that he did nothing wrong and that any classified materials at Mar-a-Lago were in face declassified by his order — though notably his lawyers have been unwilling to make that same claim on the record.
Mr Trump continues to host campaign-style rallies around the country and loudly insists that the FBI and DoJ have been hopelessly politicised and weaponised against him by Joe Biden.
