Appearance of former President Donald Trump before the federal court of Miami on charges of mishandling secret documents deepened America’s political division but set a precedent for the rule of law, analysts say.
Trump pleaded not guilty Tuesday to 37 federal charges. The country’s divisions were visible outside the court, where supporters and detractors of the former president expressed their positions and moments of visible tension were reported.
“We are not at a moment where we would expect our country to be. One of the implications we’ve seen is how this makes us see,” said University of Chicago political science professor Susan Stokes.
Stokes and other experts from the house of high studies analyzed this Wednesday in an online panel the implications that the case of Trump, embroiled in several legal battlesleaves the US and the image that the country reflects before the world.
“The line of thinking is that if the former chief executives are prosecuted, that means we are becoming more like a banana republic or a third world country,” Stokes said.
The professor explained that in cases like Peru, “where most of the former presidents of the last decades have been prosecuteds”, such prosecutions are not “categorized” as political vendetta and “tend to lead to a guilty finding.”
In this context, from Latin America the US is being watched. “We have encouraged compliance with the law in other countries and it would be hypocritical in the eyes of many if we were not applying the rule of law,” Stokes said.
Trump faces other legal challenges
In addition to the 37 federal charges for mishandling classified documents after his departure from the White House, which include Espionage Act offenses that could carry up to 10 years in jail, Trump faces other legal challenges.
Last April, the former president had to appear in court in ManhattanNew York, where he pleaded not guilty to 34 state charges related to misusing campaign funds to pay an adult film star while running for president in the 2016 election.
In photos: Trump appears in Miami for the case of possession of classified documentation
Former United States President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty Tuesday in a Miami court to 37 federal charges for alleged mishandling of classified documents.
Months later, a jury found him responsible for sexually abusing a former journalist more than three decades ago and ordered him to pay $5 million to the victim.
Special counsel Jack Smith, who leads the investigation into the classified documentsalso investigates Trump’s efforts to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential elections and retain power after his defeat, in addition to his involvement in the events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when he was attacked by supporters of the former president who were seeking stop Biden’s confirmation as president-elect.
The former president has the dubious record of being the first US president to go through two impeachment processes, in addition to becoming the first former president of the country who has had to appear before a state and then a federal court.
Despite this, and contrary to what traditionally happens, Trump’s popularity among his electoral base grows with each accusation. His supporters repeat Trump’s arguments that he is the subject of a “witch hunt” by the Biden administration.
Members of his party have been quick to defend him, including his former contender for the 2016 Republican nomination, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.
Upon learning of the accusation in Manhattan, Cruz assured last March that the process against Trump was a mirror of “banana republics” and that this situation was a “blow to the United States.”
Similarly, Florida Senator Marco Rubio charged the Justice Department, accusing it of trying to imprison “not only a former president, but the main opponent of the current president in the 2024 elections,” in which Trump is emerging as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
“The damage that this is already causing to our country far exceeds the damage (if any) of what they allege in the indictment,” said Rubio, one of the main critics of the former secretary of state and former Democratic presidential candidate. , Hillary Clinton, after it was discovered that she used unsecured servers for her work emails when she was in charge of the State Department.
On that occasion, Ruby denounced to the FBI for not prosecuting Clinton for mishandling classified documents.
According to Prosecutor Smith’s investigation, Trump took hundreds of classified documents with him, carelessly stored them in his personal residences, and refused to turn them over even at the request of proper authorities.
In this regard, Professor Stokes remarked that “what is expected” of electoral democracies is that they “eliminate” people who “will commit crimes in office”.
Differences with the Biden case
In the weeks leading up to the impeachment, Trump escalated his damning rhetoric, accusing the DOJ without evidence of wanting to “go after him” and pointing to the alleged double standards in not impeaching President Joe Biden on the same grounds.
Biden, the leading Democratic candidate in the 2024 election, is being investigated in a separate proceeding for classified records dating back to his time as vice president under Barack Obama, and which They were found in a former office of the president in Washington and at his home in Delaware.
Biden’s defense has stressed that the documents were turned over to government officials as soon as they were found.
In cases like that of Biden and Trump, in relation to confidential documents, “the fundamental difference is that Trump did not deliver them when the government asked him to,” the experts said.
“It’s different if someone says there are a bunch of boxes of files somewhere and among them some things that happened to be classified without knowing it, but I think the prosecution presents a very persuasive case in the case of Trump, which he knew.” said US legal history expert Alison LaCroix.
LaCroix added that the perception that “the prosecution is the end of the legal process” when there is yet to go to trial before a federal grand jury made up of citizens of Florida is wrong.
US polarized at an “unprecedented” moment
Despite being the first time that a former US president has been prosecuted by federal justice, “the fact that Donald Trump’s alleged actions are unprecedented does not mean that all of us in the nation lack legal and constitutional precedents to evaluate those acts,” LaCroix said.
The expert pointed to cases such as Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal, in which a Court established that a president, even from his position, is not immune to federal subpoenas in the midst of criminal proceedings.
In his case, the challenge against him occurred in relation to some audio tapes that he had installed to record his conversations in the White House and that Nixon refused to make public.
Another case noted by LaCroix was that of Bill Clinton, in which a court decided that a president, “even while serving” as such, “can be sued for damages in federal court.” The lawsuit against the then-president was brought by Paula Jones, who alleged that she had been the victim of unseemly sexual advances made by Clinton.
“I think we see in these cases that the president’s claims with special protections or elevated standards are being rejected,” LaCroix said.
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