“the notion that Biden or Garland was somehow determined to prosecute Trump relies on a serious distortion of the public record. Indeed, that record vexed some observers, including me, who repeatedly expressed frustration over how the two men seemed to be going out of their way for most of the first two years of the administration to avoid investigating and potentially prosecuting Trump.
What changed?
The best explanation at the moment — the one that most neatly fits the available facts and a robust body of credible reporting — is that the work of the Jan. 6 select committee spurred the Justice Department to action.
The committee’s investigation uncovered new and important information that was impossible to ignore, and their hearings last summer generated intense and legitimate political and public pressure on DOJ and Garland. Ultimately, it appears that they no longer had a choice but to shift course”
…
“As the hearings unfolded, there was testimony from former Attorney General Bill Barr, Trump 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien and other Trump administration officials and campaign advisers indicating that Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election even as he began his monthslong campaign to overturn the results. There was firsthand testimony about the legally baseless effort to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to throw the election to Trump that featured White House lawyers and Pence advisers. There was also a hearing, among others, devoted to Trump’s personal efforts to pressure — or threaten — state officials to swing their election results to him.
Given the one-sided nature of the committee’s presentation, there were reasons to question whether all of the testimony provided the full picture of the underlying events. Still, it quickly became apparent that the committee had exposed some glaring shortcomings at the Justice Department. A series of stories last summer in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported that senior officials at the Justice Department were not aware of critical evidence that the committee had obtained, and in fact had been trying to avoid directly confronting Trump and his potential criminal liability. Meanwhile, some of us were complaining (again) that the department seemed to be falling short of its duty to the country, and members of the media and the public began asking much harder questions about the department’s actions — or lack thereof.”
“The Enforcement Acts, one of which was known also as the Ku Klux Klan Act, given its prime target, criminalized widespread attempts by former Confederates to deny Black Southerners their right to vote, to have their votes counted and hold office — rights they enjoyed under the Reconstruction Act of 1867, the 14th Amendment and soon, the 15th Amendment. Coming at a time when American democracy teetered on the edge, these laws gave teeth to the federal government’s insistence that no eligible voter could be denied the right to vote and have his vote counted. (At the time, only men could exercise the franchise.) The laws were a direct response to Southern Democrats’ efforts to abrogate the practical effects of the Civil War and nullify Black political participation and representation.
Today, American democracy stands once again at a crossroads. The refusal of many Republican officeholders to accept the outcome of a free and fair election, and Trump’s outright appeal to fraud and violence in an effort to overturn that election, are precisely the kinds of antidemocratic practices the Enforcement Acts were intended to criminalize and punish.”
…
“In the days to come, Trumps’ defenders may claim that the 1870 Enforcement Act is antiquated and obsolete or, as the National Review argued, irrelevant to the case in hand.
In fact, as the Washington Post recently documented, while the act was precipitated by Klan violence in the 1860s, throughout the 20th century and even in more recent times, “Section 241 has also been used to prosecute a wider range of election subversion, including threatening or intimidating voters, impersonating voters, destroying ballots and preventing the official count of ballots.” That includes its use to prosecute white people who terrorized civil rights volunteers during the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi and in cases involving election interference in states like Oklahoma, Tennessee and Kentucky. In other words, it is hardly what legal observers call a “strange law,” or a law still on the books but no longer relevant or enforceable.
Moreover, the acts of which Trump stands accused of committing are precisely what the Enforcement Act was intended to combat. Nullifying the votes of citizens. Fraudulently submitting fake elector slates. Attempting to intimidate state officials into falsifying returns. Bullying a vice president into discarding the official election count. And yes, inciting violence in the furtherance of overturning a free and fair election.
Our system presumes that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty. It is now incumbent upon the Department of Justice to make its case. But the shameful events of late 2020 and early 2021 only reinforce the lasting relevance and importance of the 1870 Enforcement Act, a law constructed to meet challenges that, a century and a half later, still hang over America’s fragile democracy.”
“Maurice Jimmerson has been behind bars for 10 years but hasn’t been convicted of a crime. Due to a series of bureaucratic holdups, Jimmerson has been held in a Dougherty County, Georgia, jail since he was charged with murder in 2013—a crime for which two of his codefendants have already been acquitted. Making matters worse, Jimmerson recently spent eight months without any lawyer at all.
After local journalists uncovered Jimmerson’s case in April, an Atlanta criminal defense attorney stepped in to represent Jimmerson pro bono—and he’s motioned to dismiss the charges altogether.”
“”The government tried for over a year, quietly and with respect, to get them back, which was essential that they do, and he jerked them around,” Barr said. Trump remained recalcitrant even when he faced a federal subpoena seeking all the documents with classification markings stored at Mar-a-Lago.
“He didn’t raise any legal arguments,” Barr noted. Instead, according to the indictment, “he engaged in a course of deceitful conduct” aimed at hiding records covered by the subpoena. “If those allegations are true,” Barr said, Trump’s conduct was “outrageous” and “a clear crime.”
Barr called the evidence supporting the charges against Trump, which include obstruction of justice and willful retention of national defense information, “very strong,” noting that much of it “comes from his own lawyers.” Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran’s notes, for example, indicate that his client was inclined to defy the subpoena.
Consistent with that impression, Trump had boxes moved out of a Mar-a-Lago storage room before Corcoran could search them for relevant documents. Barr said he also believes Trump lied to the Justice Department by averring that he had fully complied with the subpoena—another crime listed in the indictment.”
“There is nothing inherently illegal about accepting money from foreign interests if you are a private citizen and your dad is a famous, powerful person. But you do have to pay taxes on it. And according to the New York Times, a federal inquiry into whether Hunter had properly paid his taxes began back during the Obama administration. Then, in 2018, the tax inquiry became a broader federal criminal investigation into Hunter.”
…
“In 2018, during a period in which Hunter has admitted to having a serious drug addiction (he wrote a book about it), he bought a gun. In connection with that purchase, he filled out a federal form and attested that he was not a drug user. The gun became an issue when his sister-in-law became concerned he might harm himself and threw it in an outdoor trash can, where it was discovered and reported to police. Texts from his laptop make clear he was not particularly stable at the time, but no one was hurt.”
“An indictment is a document that lays out crimes a grand jury — a group of 16 to 23 people selected at random — believes someone committed. Trump’s announcement on Thursday means at least 12 members of a federal grand jury were convinced, given the evidence provided by the Justice Department, that there is probable cause Trump committed a federal crime and should face a trial if prosecutors continue to pursue the case.
The decision to indict doesn’t necessarily indicate guilt on Trump’s part; his innocence or guilt will be decided at a trial. It also doesn’t stop him from running for president.”
…
“The indictment says that Trump then “endeavored to obstruct the FBI and grand jury investigations” into his retention of the documents and to “conceal” that he had done so by directing his staff to move the documents around his properties, and by proposing that his attorneys lie about him having the documents. Trump also is accused of having suggested hiding or destroying them, at one point telling his lawyers, “Well look isn’t it better if there are no documents?””
“An indictment..alleges that Trump, with the help of his body man Walt Nauta, flouted a subpoena requiring him to surrender highly sensitive documents that he kept in unsecured locations at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida — and that the men concealed this from federal officials as well as Trump’s own attorneys. The documents allegedly contained national defense information, including plans to attack an unidentified foreign country, and US nuclear weapons capabilities.”