WASHINGTON,
DC —
Should
Donald Trump be prosecuted for his efforts to overturn the results of
the 2020 US election?
اضافة اعلان
The question, laden with consequences, hangs
over Washington following the conclusion of a series of hearings by the House
panel probing the attack on the US Capitol.
And with the 76-year-old Trump hinting at a
new White House run in 2024, it has taken on added urgency.
The weighty decision to potentially bring
charges against the former president rests essentially with one man: Attorney
General Merrick Garland.
Here is a look at some of the possible
charges — and political fallout — should the 69-year-old Garland pursue an
indictment of Trump:
The
potential charges
During
eight televised public hearings, the House committee presented a roadmap for
the head of the Justice Department to potentially follow.
Trump knew he lost the election — his
advisors told him so and his legal challenges went nowhere — but he continued
to insist it was “stolen” by Democrat Joe Biden.
Trump pressured election officials in Georgia
to “find” the votes he needed to win and tried to strong-arm then vice
president Mike Pence into not certifying the election results at the January 6
meeting of Congress.
Trump summoned his supporters to Washington,
telling them in a fiery speech near the White House to “fight like hell”.
He then sat back for three hours and watched
on TV as his loyal backers violently attacked the Capitol in a bid to block
congressional certification of Biden’s victory.
As for specific crimes, legal analysts said
that Trump could face at least two charges: “conspiracy to defraud the
US” for
seeking to overturn the election results and “obstruction of an official
proceeding” for the Capitol attack.
Obstruction of an official proceeding has
been the charge most often used against the hundreds of Trump supporters
arrested for breaching the Capitol.
The
political fallout
Besides
the legal ramifications, an unprecedented prosecution of a former chief
executive would likely cause a political earthquake in a volatile country
already starkly divided along partisan Democratic and Republican lines.
“Indicting a past and possible future
political adversary of the current president would be a cataclysmic event from
which the nation would not soon recover,” said Jack Goldsmith, who served as an
assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration.
“It would be seen by many as politicized
retribution,” Goldsmith said in a New York Times op-ed, threatening to “further
inflame our already blazing partisan acrimony.”
Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative
National Review, said prosecuting the former president would be a “catastrophic
misstep by Trump’s enemies” that could even wind up giving him a boost
politically.
“Our institutions aren’t in robust health and
are ill-equipped to withstand the intense turbulence that would result from
prosecuting the political champion of millions of people,” Lowry wrote in
Politico. “The case would presumably drag on for years.”
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor,
argued that not holding Trump accountable would be equally harmful.
“I certainly recognize that indicting a
former president would generate lots of social heat, perhaps violence,” Tribe
said. “But not indicting him would invite another violent insurrection.”
The
attorney general
Garland,
the attorney general, has been asked frequently about his intentions but has
been careful not to tip his hand.
He said recently the January 6 probe is the
“most important” Justice Department investigation ever and it has to “get this
right.”
“We have to hold accountable every person who
is criminally responsible for trying to overturn a legitimate election,”
Garland said, emphasizing that “no person is above the law.”
A former prosecutor and judge, Garland was
appointed attorney general by Biden after being famously deprived of a seat on
the Supreme Court by the Republican-controlled Senate in 2016.
Garland has a reputation for being cautious
and scrupulously fair, leading to speculation he may appoint a special
prosecutor to handle Trump’s legal case to avoid any perception of conflict of
interest.
Tribe, Garland’s former professor at Harvard,
said he believes the attorney general will ultimately indict Trump.
“He said he’d go to the top if that’s where
the evidence points and that’s certainly where it’s pointing now,” Tribe told
CNN. “I do think the odds are he will be indicted.”
The
Trump defense
Trump,
who was impeached by the House for the January 6 insurrection but acquitted by
the Senate, has spent weeks railing against what he calls a partisan “Kangaroo
Court”.
In a 12-page statement released in mid-June,
Trump said the House committee was “making a mockery of justice.”
“They have refused to allow their political
opponents to participate in this process, and have excluded all exculpatory
witnesses, and anyone who so easily points out the flaws in their story,” he
said.
“Democrats created the narrative of January
6th to detract from the much larger and more important truth that the 2020
Election was Rigged and Stolen,” he said.
William Banks, a law professor at Syracuse
University, said prosecutors would be required to prove not only that Trump was
“guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but that he had an intention to violate the
law.
“Not just that he obstructed the
congressional proceeding by making it virtually impossible to count the votes
and certify the election, but that’s what he intended to do,” Banks said.
Trump’s lawyers, he said, could counter that narrative by
casting him as a “patriot who truly believed that the election had been stolen
from him and he was trying to save the country.”
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