The Bakersfield Californian

Trump faces peril after decades of scrutiny

BY ERIC TUCKER

WASHINGTON — As a businessman and president, Donald Trump faced a litany of lawsuits and criminal investigations yet emerged from the legal scrutiny time and again with his public and political standing largely intact.

But he’s perhaps never confronted a probe as perilous as the Mar-a-Lago investigation, an inquiry focused on the potential mishandling of top-secret documents. The sense of vulnerability has been heightened in recent weeks not only by the Justice Department’s appointment of a special counsel with a reputation for aggressiveness but also by the removal of a Trump-requested independent arbiter in the case and by judges’ unequivocal rejection of his lawyers’ arguments.

It’s impossible to predict how much longer the investigation will last or whether the Justice Department will take the unprecedented step of indicting a former president and current candidate. But Trump is no longer shielded from prosecution the way he was as president, and some legal experts regard the Mar-a-Lago investigation as centered on more straightforward factual and legal questions than the prior probes he has dealt with.

“Unlike many of these past investigations which involved these complex financial frauds where prosecutors have to explain to a jury why the conduct is even a crime to begin with, here prosecutors won’t have that difficulty, won’t have that challenge to explain what the crime is about” if charges are ultimately filed, said former Justice Department prosecutor Robert Mintz.

One investigative hurdle for the Justice Department was lifted last week when an appeals court panel that included two Trump-appointed judges ended the work of a special master who’d been tasked with an independent review of the thousands of documents seized in the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago. The decision enables prosecutors to use the entire cache of records for their investigation.

In a scorching opinion that reached deep back into history, the court acknowledged that a search of an ex-president’s property is extraordinary but not so extraordinary as to afford him special treatment.

“It’s not often you see cases cited in a court of appeals decisions that were decided in 1794, in the 1800s,” said David Weinstein, a Florida criminal defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor. “These are bedrock principles of law that have long existed that they relied on.”

Of course, investigations are nothing new for Trump, and speculation about his legal jeopardy has been offcourse before.

Last year, state prosecutors in New York indicted Trump’s business, the Trump Organization, and its longtime chief financial officer — but did not charge the former president. In September, the New York attorney general accused Trump of padding his net worth by billions of dollars and misleading banks — but those allegations were made in a lawsuit, not a criminal case.

As president, he was investigated by an earlier special counsel, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, over whether his successful 2016 campaign had illegally colluded with Russia and whether he had tried to obstruct that probe. Mueller ultimately found insufficient evidence to allege a criminal conspiracy between the campaign and Russia and also cited longstanding Justice Department policy that prohibits the indictment of a sitting president.

The obstruction prong of that investigation involved an analysis of constitutional law and the scope of presidential power. But prosecutors in the Mar-aLago probe have largely dismissed the relevance of Trump’s status as a former president, asserting during a court fight over the special master that the classified records he had access to as commander-in-chief don’t still belong to him.

NATION & WORLD

en-us

2022-12-06T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-06T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://bakersfield.pressreader.com/article/281706913713295

Alberta Newspaper Group