“Special counsel Jack Smith’s final report lays out in no uncertain terms federal prosecutors’ position that Donald Trump — who is set to be inaugurated president in less than a week — would have been convicted on multiple felonies for his alleged efforts to unlawfully overturn the results of the 2020 election, had voters not decided to send him back to the White House in the 2024 election.
That was one of the primary conclusions included in Smith’s final report on his election interference investigation, which the Justice Department released early Tuesday morning after a federal judge, late Monday night, cleared the way for the report’s release.
The report lays out the probe that resulted in Trump being charged in 2023 with four felony counts of undertaking a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 election in an effort to subvert democracy and remain in power. Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges.
The case, as well as Smith’s classified documents case against Trump, was dropped following Trump’s reelection in November due to a longstanding Justice Department policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president.”
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“After conducting interviews with 250 witnesses voluntarily, calling 55 people to testify before the grand jury, executing dozens of subpoenas and search warrants, and sifting through a terabyte of publicly accessible data, Smith’s team concluded they could convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump committed multiple federal crimes when he attempted to overturn the election, the report said.
“The throughline of all of Mr. Trump’s criminal efforts was deceit — knowingly false claims of election fraud — and the evidence shows that Mr. Trump used these lies as a weapon to defeat a federal government function foundational to the United States’ democratic process,” the report said.”
“there are two main reasons Americans tend to overestimate the extent to which crime happens: Media coverage of crime can often overstate trends and sometimes sensationalizes incidents that grab people’s attention. And law-and-order campaigns — the kind of campaigns that Trump ran, for example — are a mainstay of American politics and appear in virtually every election cycle in local, state, and national races.”
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“The United States is, after all, a relatively violent country and has a higher homicide rate than its peers. But while crime is a problem, lawmakers tend to react too quickly to crime trends, often by passing shortsighted tough-on-crime laws that bolster the perception of public safety by, say, putting more cops on the streets, but end up exacerbating the existing flaws of the criminal justice system, including sending poorer and more marginalized people to prison.”
“the Gallup trend shows that since 1993, as violent crime rates have steadily fallen, Americans’ perceptions have shifted based on their partisan affiliation and the occupant of the White House: In 2004, during President George W. Bush’s first term, the 53 percent of respondents who thought crime had risen included 39 percent of Republicans but 67 percent of Democrats. (FBI statistics for that year indicated that both violent and property crime each declined by just over 2 percent in that year.)
On the other hand, Americans in general just seem particularly bad at judging crime trends: In 2014, 63 percent of all respondents told Gallup that crime was up over the previous year, including 57 percent of Democrats and 72 percent of Republicans. Meanwhile, 2014 turned out to be the least violent year in decades.
But Americans’ views on crime and criminal justice, no matter how capricious and ill-informed they may seem, are extremely consequential. After all, while the president likely has very little direct influence on criminal justice trends in your local police precinct, voters have the power to elect prosecutors, who wield tremendous power in deciding who faces prison time and how punitive their sentences could be. And there is evidence that voters’ perceptions of crime affect what kind of prosecutor they’re likely to favor.
“The growth in incarceration rates in the United States over the past 40 years is historically unprecedented and internationally unique,” a 2014 study found. “Local elected officials—including state legislators who enacted sentencing policies and, in many places, judges and prosecutors who decided individual cases—were highly attuned to their constituents’ concerns about crime. Under these conditions, punishment policy moved in a more punitive direction.”
Prosecutors recognize this, as well. In a 2022 draft policy paper, Harvard Ph.D candidate Chika Okafor found that “being in a [district attorney] election year increases total admissions per capita to state prisons and total months sentenced per capita,” meaning that prosecutors are more likely to seek prison time and longer sentences for offenders during election years.”
“his victory virtually guarantees that he will never face serious legal accountability for an avalanche of alleged wrongdoing.”
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“Even the civil cases against him will now face new obstacles. Presidents can, in some circumstances, be subject to civil penalties from private lawsuits, but Trump will surely try to use the cloak of the presidency to avoid paying the hundreds of millions of dollars he owes in judgments for sexual abuse, defamation and corporate fraud.”
“Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked the judge who oversaw his Manhattan hush money trial, which ended in a conviction on 34 felony counts, to throw out the case now that Trump is president-elect.
Dismissing the case is “necessary to avoid unconstitutional impediments to President Trump’s ability to govern,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in a letter to the court made public Tuesday.
In light of Trump’s request, Justice Juan Merchan agreed to pause all proceedings in the case, including a ruling that had been expected Tuesday on whether the Supreme Court’s July decision on presidential immunity requires that Trump’s conviction be tossed.
“President-elect Donald Trump was indicted four times — including two indictments arising out of his failed attempt to steal the 2020 election. One of these indictments even yielded a conviction, albeit on 34 relatively minor charges of falsifying business records.
But the extraordinary protections the American system gives to sitting presidents will ensure that Trump won’t be going to prison. He’s going to the White House instead.”
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“Two of the indictments against Trump are federal, and two were brought by state prosecutors in New York and Georgia. The federal indictments (one about Trump’s role in fomenting the January 6 insurrection, and the other about his handling of classified documents) are the most immediately vulnerable. Once Trump becomes president, he will have full command and control over the US Department of Justice, and can simply order it to drop all the federal charges against him. Once he does, those cases will simply go away.
The White House does have a longstanding norm of non-interference with criminal prosecutions, but this norm is nothing more than that — a voluntary limit that past presidents placed on their own exercise of power in order to prevent politicization of the criminal justice system. As president, Trump is under no constitutional obligation to obey this norm. He nominates the attorney general, and he can fire the head of the Justice Department at any time.”
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“The fate of the state charges against Trump is a little more uncertain, in large part because there’s never been a state indictment of a sitting president before, so there are no legal precedents governing what happens if a state attempts such a prosecution (or, in the case of New York, to impose a serious sentence on a president who was already convicted).
It is highly unlikely that the state prosecutions can move forward, however, at least until Trump leaves office. On the federal level, the Department of Justice has long maintained that it cannot indict a sitting president for a variety of practical reasons: The burden of defending against criminal charges would diminish the president’s ability to do their job, as would the “public stigma and opprobrium occasioned by the initiation of criminal proceedings.” Additionally, if the president were incarcerated, that would make it “physically impossible for the president to carry out his duties.”
There’s little doubt that the current Supreme Court, which recently held that Trump is immune to prosecution for many crimes he committed while in office, would embrace the Justice Department’s reasoning.”
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“These same practical considerations would apply with equal force to a state prosecution of a president, and there’s also one other reason why a constitutional limit on state indictments of the president makes sense. Without such a limit, a state led by the president’s political enemies could potentially bring frivolous criminal charges against that president.”
“There is a “small number of non-detained migrants” who have been convicted of homicide but can’t be sent back to their home countries after serving their time, mostly because the U.S. doesn’t have repatriation agreements with those countries, Nowrasteh says. A 2001 Supreme Court decision bars ICE from indefinitely keeping someone in immigration detention, but “non-detained” people are often still subject to ICE check-ins or electronic monitoring.
Trump is also wrong to claim that these individuals all came to the U.S. under the Biden administration. The list “includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more,” explained the Department of Homeland Security in a Saturday statement, “the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration.””
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“The number of convicted criminals on ICE’s nondetained docket hasn’t grown significantly under President Joe Biden, reported The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler. In August 2016, five months before Trump took office, there were 368,574 on the docket; in June 2021, five months into Biden’s presidency, there were 405,786; and in December 2022, nearly two years into Biden’s presidency, there were 407,983.
As he campaigns ahead of the presidential election next month, Trump has routinely said outrageous, misleading, and false things about immigrants and crime. He often talks about a “migrant crime” wave and claims that it “is taking over America.” Much like his migrant murderers claim, the true picture looks very different. Crime decreased in the cities that received the most migrants through Texas’ Operation Lone Star busing activities, per NBC News. “The most recent significant crime spike in recent years occurred in 2020,” Cato Institute Associate Director of Immigration Studies David J. Bier told Reason in March, “when illegal immigration was historically low until the end of the year.”
Trump paints a terrifying picture of migrants and migration, but the reality is far more nuanced and far less dangerous than he would suggest.”
“The new numbers indicate that the violent crime victimization rate fell slightly in 2023, although the change was not statistically significant. “Findings show that there was an overall decline in the rate of violent victimization over the last three decades, from
1993 to 2023,” BJS Acting Director Kevin M. Scott reports. “While the 2023 rate was higher than those in 2020 and 2021, it was not statistically different from the rate 5 years ago, in 2019.”
That observation is inconvenient for Trump, who wants to blame Harris for rising crime during the Biden administration. Leaving aside the plausibility of assuming that a president, let alone a vice president, has much influence on crime rates, Trump’s thesis relies on the assumption that violent crime is more common now than it was during his administration. But even according to the data source he prefers, the 2023 rate was statistically indistinguishable from the rate in 2019, his second-to-last year in office.”