Change in legal team
The indictment was revealed on the same day that Trump announced a change in his legal team. Trump posted Friday on Truth Social that he would be represented by attorney Todd Blanche and “a firm to be named later.”
Two of Trump’s lawyers, John Rowley and Jim Trusty, removed themselves from the case.
“This morning we tendered our resignations as counsel to President Trump,” the two lawyers said in a statement. “It has been an honor to have spent the last year defending him, and we know he will be vindicated.”
The indictment is the latest legal trouble for Trump as he hopes to return to office after losing a reelection bid to Biden in 2020.
In April, a Manhattan grand jury indicted Trump on state charges of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to an adult film star during his 2016 run for president. He has pleaded not guilty in that case.
This week’s indictment, while a major blow to Trump’s political ambitions, does not bar him from seeking a second term in the White House.
In fact, former federal prosecutor John Malcolm noted, there are no laws that would stop him from running, even if he is convicted.
“There have been people who have run for office from prison cells,” Malcolm said.
In 2002, former Representative Jim Traficant ran for his old congressional seat while serving a prison sentence for corruption.
In 2019, Harold Martin III, a former National Security Agency contractor, was sentenced to nine years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of willful retention of national defense information.
Probe’s beginning
The Justice Department had been investigating Trump since early last year after the National Archives notified the law enforcement agency that the former president had stashed hundreds of sensitive government documents at his Florida resort and had thwarted government efforts to retrieve them.
Jordan Strauss, a former Justice Department official who is a managing director at Kroll, a risk consulting firm, called Trump’s indictment “a remarkable moment in history and the most significant case the DOJ has ever brought.”
Trump’s indictment comes as another special counsel, Robert Hur, investigates Biden’s handling of classified records dating to his time as vice president.
The documents were found last year at Biden’s former Washington office and his home in Delaware.
Biden’s lawyers have said the documents were handed over to government officials as soon as they were found.
Even if Biden were found to have mishandled sensitive records, he would be unlikely to face criminal charges because of a long-standing Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted, Strauss said.
“I think the most likely outcome of the special counsel’s investigation of President Biden is a report that says something like, ‘we would or would not have recommended an indictment were this not the president,’” Strauss said.
Trump complained Friday that Biden has not been charged for his handling of classified documents.
“Biden moved his Boxes all over the place, including to Chinatown and up to his lawyer’s office in Boston,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Why isn’t deranged Jack Smith looking at that?”
Former Vice President Mike Pence also drew scrutiny over his retention of classified documents, but the Justice Department informed him last week that it had closed the investigation and would not charge him.
VOA Justice Correspondent Masood Farivar, Chief National Correspondent Steve Herman, National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin and Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson contributed to this report. Some information came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
Source: VOA
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