On Tuesday, April 4th, 2023
Donald Trump entered a Manhattan courtroom
and pled not guilty to 34 crimes.
It's one step in a long process that will likely lead
to the first criminal trial of a former US president.
Trump acted in unprecedented ways
and now there is an unprecedented response to how he acted.
Trump lost the 2020 election and left office in January of 2021...
and since then, lawyers have been gathering evidence
in 4 separate criminal investigations.
They are trying to figure out if Trump broke the law...
and if he did, what to do about it.
To understand these 4 different cases
you need to know a little bit
about how criminal investigations in the US work.
In the first phase, investigators gather evidence.
They might interview witnesses, review surveillance footage
comb over financial records or review texts and emails.
They show that evidence to a randomly selected
group of citizens called a grand jury.
The grand jury's job isn't to decide
if anyone is innocent or guilty.
They just listen to the evidence
and basically decide if it makes sense.
If 12 of them think it does, they'll issue an indictment.
Only then can the prosecutor file charges.
The accused can plead guilty, in which case
the whole thing goes straight to sentencing.
If they plead not guilty
then the case goes to trial
and a jury hears the evidence
and has to come to a unanimous decision one way or the other.
Obviously, a simplification
and there's a ton of variations
in different states and jurisdictions, but that's the gist.
So where do things stand with those for Trump investigations?
Let's start with the hush money.
The state of New York has officially charged Trump
with falsifying business records in the first degree.
In its statement of facts, the prosecutors write that
he repeatedly and fraudulently falsified
New York business records to conceal criminal conduct
that hid damaging information from the voting public
during the 2016 presidential election.
This bank statement from Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen
shows that he withdrew funds in October of 2016.
He then used that money to pay an adult film actress
to stay quiet about an affair that she said
she'd had with Donald Trump a few years earlier.
A year later, after Trump had won the presidency
he wrote several checks to reimburse Cohen.
In his accounting records
Trump designated these as payments for legal services
which isn't exactly accurate.
This is some of the evidence that led to Trump's
recent indictment and his not guilty plea.
In order to convict Trump of a felony
the district attorney, Alvin Bragg
he has to prove not just that he falsified these records
in order to cover up the payments
but he has to prove that he did so
in order to advance or cover up some other crime.
But I think that these particular allegations
against Trump are pretty far afield of
the really serious allegations
that justify going after a former president.
You know, the allegation that he tried to steal an election.
“In Georgia, the votes are still being counted.”
“CNN has just projected President-elect Biden the winner in Georgia.”
“I believe that the numbers
that we have presented today are correct.”
There is a phone call between Donald Trump
and Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State of Georgia.
The top elections official in Georgia.
If they magically came up with 11,780 Trump votes
that didn't actually exist
that would have been enough to steal the election in Georgia.
A special grand jury in Georgia has heard the evidence
and recommended multiple indictments.
But we don't know yet if District Attorney Fani Willis
is going to take things further.
The Georgia team isn't the only one trying to figure out if
Trump's behavior after the election broke any laws.
Federal special counsel Jack Smith’s team
is looking into similar questions.
There's been a lot of attention
on this question of fake electors.
The state's electors cast their votes
for whoever won the most votes in their state.
If Biden wins the state, then Biden's electors
win the state and he gets that many electoral votes.
The Trump team wins key swing states.
They tried to assemble slates of alternative electors
even though Biden won the state.
Security wouldn't let them in.
So they signed the document in the basement of the state's
Republican headquarters.
Then sent it off to DC.
Trump's team led similar efforts in six other states where Biden won.
A grand jury in DC has been hearing evidence
in this case for months but they haven't voted yet.
But we appear to be in the closing stages of this.
The same special prosecutor is also looking into
a fourth case against Trump.
“Unprecedented FBI search at the home of...”
[overlapping] “Trump's Mar-a-Lago property...” “...has been raided by the FBI.”
This inventory list from the raid shows that they found
dozens of documents labeled classified, confidential, and top secret.
There's a Washington Post report
last year that some of this involved nuclear documents.
There has been some reporting that some of these
related to intelligence that could have exposed
certain US informants or sources...
and that basically the intelligence community
did consider this really important stuff
that should not have been hanging out at Mar-a-Lago.
Right now, a grand jury in DC is still hearing all this evidence.
As president, Donald Trump didn't just say outrageous things.
He acted in ways that no president ever had before.
Now that he's no longer in office
it's time to figure out if any of that unprecedented behavior
was also illegal.
And if it was
what to do about it.