Array
A week after the FBI’s unprecedented raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, Democrats and other Trump foes are clamoring for the Department of Justice to go even further and lock ‘em up.
They want criminal charges filed against the former president and his close associates that would lead to their arrests and the banishment of Mr. Trump from future public office.
Legal experts and former prosecutors say it will be up to Attorney General Merrick Garland to decide whether to seek charges against the former president by presenting a case to a grand jury.
Some view the surprise raid on Mr. Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, as an indication Mr. Garland is accelerating a case to charge Mr. Trump for wrongfully taking classified and top secret material from the White House.
“We should know in a matter of days or weeks,” Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor and president of West Coast Trial Lawyers, told The Washington Times. “You don’t wait around months or years if you’re gonna move forward with the prosecution.”
The ant-Trump faction is clamoring for Mr. Garland to prosecute the former president, who some foes believe took the classified documents for nefarious purposes.
SEE ALSO: Trump widens GOP lead after Mar-a-Lago raid: Poll
“DOJ should fully investigate, and charge accountable individuals, up to and including Donald J. Trump,” Rep. Elaine Luria, a Virginia Democrat, said. “In the United States of America, no one is above the law.”
The intense pressure from the Democratic base means Mr. Garland must charge Mr. Trump or leave office, Republican strategist and former top Bush White House aide Scott Jennings said recently on CNN.
“He has to be indicted, or Merrick Garland has to resign,” Mr. Jennings said.
The warrant justifying the Aug. 8 search of Mr. Trump’s residence and offices at the private Mar-a-Lago club, including Melania Trump’s wardrobe closet, cited three statutes the former president may have violated under the Espionage Act, a federal law barring the unauthorized retention of national security information that could benefit a foreign adversary or harm the U.S. All three are felonies.
The warrant referred to a law prohibiting “gathering, transmitting or losing defense information,” which is punishable by a prison sentence of up to ten years.
A second statute listed on the warrant carries a three-year prison sentence for anyone who “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing.”
SEE ALSO: White House outlines victory-lap strategy for Biden bill, eyeing momentum
Anyone convicted of the charge “shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.
