The frenetic attempt made by former US President Donald Trump to dismiss with utter disdain his indictment by a federal grand jury on charges related to classified documents seized from his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago is not surprising. More than 300 classified documents were recovered during an FBI search in August 2022 over a year after Trump had left the White House. He had declared two months before the seizure he had no such documents in his possession. This is itself a violation of a law that states such declaration makes one liable for prosecution if it is found to be a lie.
Trump was indicted on seven charges and he himself confirmed it in a statement while protesting his innocence. In his typical style, Trump said the “corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been indicted.” He declared himself to be “an innocent man” and then complained about President Joe Biden’s own possession of classified documents, which is the subject of another investigation.
A 37-count indictment accuses him of keeping highly sensitive documents, including files about US military plans and nuclear programmes and the identity of US spies working in different countries, in a ballroom, a bathroom and even a shower in his estate. Legal experts say that the criminal charges against him could lead to substantial prison time if he is convicted.
Yet, Trump appears unfazed. Instead, he goes on his presidential campaign for the 2024 election with renewed vigour projecting himself as a victim of political vendetta by his rivals, the Democrats, led by President Biden.
When Trump left office in January 2021, he was supposed to hand over all presidential records, which are considered federal property.
It is illegal for federal officials, including former presidents, to remove or keep classified documents at an unauthorised location. But just months after Trump left the White House, the US National Archives realised some records were missing.
These included some of Trump’s correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un and a letter former president Barack Obama left for Trump when he left office. In August 2022, the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property, seizing a further 11,000 documents, some of which were marked as classified or top secret, material that could cause “exceptionally grave” damage to US national security.
Trump’s response to these disclosures and seizures has been repeated denial of wrongdoing. He made the unbelievable plea that he never thought such an investigation could be done to a former US President, implying he assumed he was above the law. In fact, Trump’s conduct has been characterised by such disregard of the process of law for which he could exhort his supporters to try and overturn the presidential election results that saw him defeated in 2020. His other acts of business and sexual misdemeanour have also come into question, for some of which he has already been indicted.
The question is how Trump could afford to be so undaunted and almost jubilant after having been indicted. It might be that Trump hopes his indictment would result in increase of his popularity among Republican supporters. The polarisation of American voters between white supremacists and liberal democrats is to become even sharper as he is set to play the victim card.
The US laws are such that even if he is convicted and sent to prison, Trump can still contest the presidential polls. In 1920, socialist candidate Eugene Debs ran for President despite having been convicted of the Espionage Act, while in the 1990s Lyndon LaRouche, convicted of fraud, ran for presidency.
Trump seems to be banking on the support he enjoys among Republican voters which he calculates would increase if he could convince voters that President Biden is trying to prevent him from winning the election by abusing the legal process. He has already taken the plea that no one told him he could not keep the documents and that he had declassified those documents before taking them to his estate, though there is no evidence that he had declassified them.
It is to be seen whether Biden can match Trump’s propaganda blitzkrieg which seems to be more froth than substance.