Speaker 1: Let's contextualize the Trump prison time discussion.
On the one hand, there are headlines about Trump is facing 536 years.
On the other hand, you have individuals who say there is no time in prison coming for
Donald Trump.
My personal opinion, this is now not.
We're not doing legal now.
Now I'm just giving you my personal opinion.
Two weeks ago, I was convinced Trump would get no prison time.
I now think it is very likely Trump will get no prison time.
But that's a bit of a softening.
I am now open to the idea that depending on how this federal trial goes, it's at least
conceivable Trump might end up getting sentenced to some prison time.
Now, let's take my opinion out of it and let's talk about sentencing guidelines and the crimes
that Trump is accused of having committed.
536 years.
Is one of these.
Listen, if you take every crime individually and you look at the maximum possible sentence,
assuming he was convicted of every crime he's charged with that no crimes are consolidated
or grouped together and that he gets the maximum, a consecutive rather than concurrent sentence
for each of those crimes.
That's how you get that top number.
536.
But the more realistic number is far lower.
And I want to explain to you why.
If you look at the crimes that Trump is charged with, he's accused of giving or trying to
give a show, I guess you would say, classified information to people who were not actually
authorized to see that stuff.
There are obstruction charges.
There are all sorts of different charges that are that are here.
And the most he could get for the heaviest charges would be 5 to 20 years per charge.
But the actual prison time would depend on a lot of different factors.
What are the goals of the punishment?
How does this actually go if a trial comes or if a plea deal is accepted or whatever
the case may be?
When judges are to decide how much prison time they will give someone, particularly
when you are talking about these multiple, you know, dozens of counts, federal trials,
there are sentencing guidelines and sentencing guidelines, at least in an ideal world, they're
based on the effects of the crimes that individuals have been convicted of, research data, questions
about recidivism, how victims were affected, the role that the individual played in a crime.
So you might have, like, for example, a crime around someone's death, but depending on the
role of the individual, they might not be charged with murder.
They might be charged with something else.
Okay.
So a lot of different things as well as was this a guilty plea where the person accepted
responsibility?
Did they fight it in a trial and were subsequently found guilty?
All of these different elements are factors, and the guidelines assign a number to each
factor reflecting how serious it is.
And this is includes what are the crimes as well as the circumstances surrounding it.
And you add that all up and it gives you an offense level.
The higher the offense level, the more severe the crime and the circumstances and aggravating
factors and presumably the longer the prison time is going to be.
And so there's an article that tries to sort of look at this.
The article is on the just security website.
It's called How Much Prison Time Does Former President Trump Face Applying U.S. Sentencing
guidelines.
And if you go through it, I'll kind of just like shortcut it for you.
The article adds up everything and gets a total offense level that would signal somewhere
between 253 and 293 months in prison for Donald Trump.
That's 20 to 24 years for an individual who has no previous crimes on their record.
That's like a starting point to get us a ballpark.
This is only an estimate, and many things could change this.
First of all, there could be more charges against Trump or some charges could be consolidated
and eliminated.
Evidence or facts could come forward.
Trump might get sentenced on multiple counts at once.
Trump might only be found guilty or might only plea to certain crimes.
He could be acquitted all together.
Obviously, all of these different factors.
The general idea is if Trump were found guilty.
Of most of the things he's charged with.
Realistically, you would start with a top line sentence of 20 to 24 years.
These are only guidelines.
They're not mandatory.
Judges can choose to go with different prison time based on a lot of other different factors.
And, of course, listen, everything we know about Trump right now is he's not going to
take a plea deal.
He's going to fight this, fight this fight this.
Even when people come to Trump and say, hey, this is your best path forward if it doesn't
have the right optics, Trump rejects it.
I'll give you an example of that later on in the show.
We would probably only see a departure below that at the end of the day.
Is it possible that Trump is convicted of or pleads guilty to something but ends up
with only a symbolic sentence, maybe even a suspended sentence or home confinement?
We're talking about a former president here, and all of those circumstances are 100% possibilities
at this point.
We are only starting to get into this.
And this also doesn't even consider what about the New York indictment?
What about a possible second federal indictment?
What about the possible indictment coming out of Georgia?
If you think about the totality, the seriousness of the crimes in the federal indictment, the
possibility of Trump facing three or four different indictments, it sort of feels like
that could very likely point to some prison time.
At the same time, we're talking about a former president, nearly 80 years old, with a lot
of at least plausible mitigating circumstances, his lawyers could argue, including age and
security issues with Trump serving even a single day.
And so we may end up with some symbolic home confinement.
We are all getting ahead of ourselves.
I believe in law and order.
So I don't want anybody sentenced to anything until they've been found guilty or have pled
guilty to something in a plea deal.
And so I'm not going to get ahead of myself.
This is all hypothetical.