As the 2024 race heats up, the elephant in the room remains a variety of criminal investigations hanging over Donald Trump’s head.
A DOJ-appointed special counsel is currently probing the former president over January 6th and his possession of documents at Mar-a-Lago that the government alleges were classified. Meanwhile, Democrats in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office have resurrected their formerly shuttered criminal investigation involving supposed tax crimes. Past that, there’s also a pursuit of Trump going on in Georgia over the 2020 election, though that seemed to hit a snag recently when the foreperson of the grand jury turned out to be an insane person.
So what exactly will Trump do if he’s hit with one or more indictments? According to James Rosen, who spoke to the former president at CPAC, he won’t be dropping out of the presidential race.
Maggie Haberman is right that this is uncharted territory, but not in the way she means it. This is uncharted territory in that the weaponization of government to go after a presidential candidate over things that are so obviously not criminal is largely unprecedented.
The idea that Trump is legally liable for January 6th is farcical given there has been zero evidence presented showing he knew what was going to happen or asked people to enter the Capitol Building. Further, he pointedly told people to remain peaceful in their protests. Even the ridiculous January 6th Committee was reduced to whimpering about Trump not magically stopping the riot, having to concede there was no foreplanning.
Meanwhile, the cases against Trump in New York and Georgia are incredibly weak. The former was such a cluster that the far-left DA shut the investigation down for months until it was revived due to what was obviously partisan pressure. Their plan is to try to flip a Trump associate they failed to flip the first time around. And the Georgia investigation? There’s appears to be nothing there, as demonstrated by the grand jury foreperson’s hilarious media tour that left even liberals reeling at how little credibility remained.
Ironically, the best case against Trump is probably that he illegally possessed classified documents. Unfortunately for the DOJ, they are now faced with Joe Biden unquestionably illegally possessing classified documents. Are they really going to indict Trump while doing nothing to Biden? At least the former president claims he declassified what he had, a power that Biden didn’t have as vice president.
Given everything I’ve just laid out, it only makes sense that Trump wouldn’t drop out of the race if he’s indicted. To do so would only encourage more weaponization of the legal system for political gain.
With that said, there is the question of whether the DOJ or these other entities would try to secure a conviction before the 2024 election. The timeline is tight, and I’d think indictments would need to happen before the summer for that to work. We’ll see how it all plays out.