“”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.”
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“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.”
“None of those figures ignored a subpoena to turn over classified material concerning highly sensitive matters of national security and then sought to conceal it from federal officials and their own attorneys, as is alleged of Trump. And in fact, history suggests that if Trump complied with that request, as some of his peers did, prosecutors may not have pressed charges.
The case against Trump is not so much about the fact that he retained documents he had no right to keep — but that he allegedly did so knowingly and brazenly defying the federal government while putting US interests at risk. That puts Trump in a class of his own.”
“As part of the case against Rhodes, prosecutors emphasized that the Oath Keepers repeatedly urged the blocking of the election certification, brought small arms to the DC area, and planned to defend Trump’s election claims with violence if necessary. Rhodes’s defense has said the Oath Keepers were only in DC to protect prominent Trump supporters attending the “Stop the Steal” rally.”
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“Thus far, multiple members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys have been convicted of seditious conspiracy, and will face their respective sentencings later this year. So far, courts have sentenced more than 500 people involved in the insurrection, and the longest sentence, of 14 years, had previously gone to a person who attacked police officers with pepper spray and a chair.”
“Donald Trump claimed he never asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary to reverse Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in that state. Trump also said he had “the absolute right” to do whatever he wanted with presidential documents when he left the White House in January 2021. Both of those statements are false, and both go to the heart of potential criminal charges against the former president.
In a notorious phone conversation with Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, Trump pressed him to validate one bogus election-fraud claim after another. Among other things, Trump mentioned “300,000 fake ballots” that “were dropped mysteriously into the rolls”; asserted that “dead people voted, and I think the number is close to 5,000”; said election workers counted Biden votes “three times” and took “18,000 ballots” out of “suitcases or trunks”; and cited a “rumor” that “they shredded ballots in Fulton County.”
Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel, Ryan Germany, patiently refuted these allegations, saying there was no evidence to support them and no reason to believe that Biden had not in fact won Georgia’s electoral votes. Trump was unfazed. He insisted that all of the alleged irregularities amounted to “many, many times the 11,779 margin” by which Biden had won. “All I want to do is this,” he said. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”
Trump was frustrated by the resistance from Raffensperger and Germany. “Why don’t you want to find this, Ryan?” he asked. “What’s wrong with you?” Addressing Raffensperger, he asked, “Why wouldn’t you want to find the right answer, Brad, instead of keep saying that the numbers are right? ‘Cause those numbers are so wrong.”
If Raffensperger refused to “find the right answer,” Trump implied, he could face criminal charges. The conspirators who supposedly stole the election for Biden had committed crimes, he said, and “it is more illegal for you than it is for them because you know what they did and you’re not reporting it….That’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.””
“The FAIR Act sets a higher bar for seizing private property, but still allows for civil forfeiture in the absence of a criminal conviction. The legislation requires:
“If the Government’s theory of forfeiture is that the property was used to commit or facilitate the commission of a criminal offense, or was involved in the commission of a criminal offense, the Government shall establish, by clear and convincing evidence, that…there was a substantial connection between the property and the offense; and the owner of any interest in the seized property—(i) used the property with intent to facilitate the offense; or knowingly consented or was willfully blind to the use of the property by another in connection with the offense.”
The bill requires that seizures be conducted in court rather than through administrative processes and also guarantees legal representation for federal forfeiture targets.
The FAIR Act isn’t a perfect bill. Many reformers will object that forfeiture should require the criminal conviction of the person whose money and property is being taken. Draining somebody’s bank account and nabbing their car keys may not be as dramatic as throwing them in a prison cell, but it’s a harsh punishment all the same and should require full due process. Still, some improvement is better than none for a practice that has largely served as an exercise in legalized highway robbery.”
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“”Police abuse of civil asset forfeiture laws has shaken our nation’s conscience. Civil forfeiture allows police to seize — and then keep or sell — any property they allege is involved in a crime,” the ACLU points out in a summary of the practice. “Owners need not ever be arrested or convicted of a crime for their cash, cars, or even real estate to be taken away permanently by the government.””
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“”Civil asset forfeiture—which allows the government to take property supposedly linked to crime without charging, let alone convicting, the owner—exploded after Congress started letting law enforcement agencies keep the loot in the mid-1980s,” Reason’s Jacob Sullum wrote in 2015. “Many states followed the federal government’s example, giving police and prosecutors a financial interest in forfeiture by awarding them anywhere from 45 percent to 100 percent of the money it generated.”
That empowered a powerful bloc supporting the status quo at the state and federal level, and it’s not shy about calling out opponents. In Missouri, supporters of forfeiture reform were labeled “anti-police and soft on the war on drugs,” St. Louis Public Radio reported in 2019. That was enough to scare away many lawmakers who traditionally defer to cops and prosecutors.”
“Cops have long partnered with dogs, claiming they help keep officers safe. But a study published in January suggests that police do just as well without canine colleagues.
In 2020, Salt Lake City suspended the use of police K9 units after The Salt Lake Tribune published body camera footage of an officer ordering his dog to bite a 36-year-old black man who was on his knees with his hands in the air. That abrupt policy shift gave researchers at the University of South Carolina, the University of Utah, and Clemson University a chance to test claims about the benefits of police dogs.
Police say dogs help find hidden suspects, deter resistance, protect officers, intimidate potentially violent crowds, and improve public relations. But the researchers, who reported their findings in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, found that the “sudden suspension of K9 apprehension was not associated with a statistical increase in officer or suspect injury, or suspect resistance, during felony arrests.” The authors concluded that restricting or eliminating police K9s is “unlikely to impact aggregate officer or suspect safety negatively.””