Donald Trump will seek to mount federal investigations and prosecutions of Joe Biden and his family if Trump wins re-election this year, the news site Axios reported.
“Everything you have seen from the Biden Department of Justice you can expect to see from the Trump DoJ,” a source “close to the Trump campaign” was quoted as saying.
Another “Trump ally” said current federal charges against Trump were all the precedent Trump would need to prosecute Biden in turn.
Trump is virtually certain to be the Republican nominee in November and regularly bests Biden in head-to-head polling. Trump is also performing strongly in key swing states.
Trump also faces 44 federal criminal charges: 40 over his retention of classified information and four over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. His other 44 criminal charges are at the state level: 10 over election subversion in Georgia and 34 over hush-money payments in New York.
Should Trump be re-elected, he could dismiss the federal charges or pardon himself. He could not rid himself of the state charges.
New York, Trump’s home state until he moved to Florida after leaving the White House, is also the source of multimillion-dollar penalties in two civil cases – one over tax fraud and one concerning defamation arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.
Despite such unprecedented legal jeopardy – which has generated a trial schedule due to begin next Monday, in the New York hush-money case – Trump strolled to the Republican nomination to face Biden again in November.
Biden was investigated for retaining classified information from his time as vice-president to Barack Obama. Unlike Trump, he co-operated with authorities. Unlike Trump, Biden was not charged.
As president, Trump was impeached twice: first for blackmailing Ukraine for dirt on opponents including Biden and second for inciting the January 6 attack on Congress.
House Republicans have attempted to impeach Biden over alleged corruption involving his son, Hunter Biden, but have seen such efforts descend into farce in a series of chaotic hearings.
Nonetheless, Mike Davis, a former legal aide to Chuck Grassley – an Iowa senator among Republicans embarrassed when a key source of allegations against the Bidens was jailed and linked to Russian intelligence – told Axios the Bidens were guilty of “illegal foreign corruption”.
“The Biden justice department will not do anything about it, so the Trump 47 justice department should,” Davis said, referring to Trump’s status as the 47th president, as well as the 45th, should he win re-election.
Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee who was a manager in Trump’s second impeachment, told Axios: “In saying that they are going to enable Donald Trump’s criminal vengeance campaign, [Republicans] are taking this from a farce to tragedy.”
