Nearly four years after the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol by his supporters, Donald Trump appears to have escaped criminal prosecution, for good. On Monday, November 25, the president-elect scored a decisive legal victory that effectively shields him from a wave of indictments in 2023 in four different cases.
Acknowledging Trump’s return to the White House, Special Counsel Jack Smith has requested the dismissal of two federal investigations: one concerning the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack, and another regarding the illegal handling and retention of hundreds of classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
In a letter to Judge Tanya Chutkan – who promptly approved his request – Smith highlighted “unprecedented circumstances” of an ordinary citizen facing advanced federal investigations who then becomes president. The Special Counsel, constrained by presidential immunity, insists that dropping the charges in no way detracts from the credibility of the investigations, “the gravity of the crimes” at the heart of the indictments. While technically the prosecutions could be reactivated after Trump’s potential second term in 2028, legal experts consider this highly unlikely.
Bias
In August 2023, a grand jury had found that the charges were sufficient to justify indicting Trump, due to his role in an attempt to subvert the peaceful transfer of power after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden. Trump had orchestrated a campaign of misinformation about electoral fraud, pressured justice department officials, and sought to manipulate electoral college certifications (Georgia, Arizona, etc.). Finally, he and his advisers tried to promote alternative lists of electors, attempting in vain to convince Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of results in Congress. The calls for mobilization by his supporters on January 6, 2021, who ended up attacking the police around the Capitol and forcing their way into the building, were the final stage in this conspiracy.
Of all of them, the dossier of classified documents, which Trump took en masse when he left the White House, was undoubtedly the strongest, the most indisputable, and the most solid in terms of evidence and law. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, the video surveillance footage, the communications between the protagonists: everything pointed to a desire to remove classified documents, stored in violation of mandatory security standards, from the National Archives and the police.
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