About 110 kilometers separate the place of the alleged crime, Donald Trump's mansion in Mar-a-Lago (Palm Beach), from the federal court of justice in Miami, where a grand jury has everything ready to judge him. The crime is not one, but seven federal crimes for the handling of classified documents that Trump allegedly took without permission when he left the White House in 2021 to his lair in Florida, where he held them despite repeated requests from authorities to return them. Those denials led to an FBI search of his home last August.
The special prosecutor Jack Smith, appointed by the Department of Justice, organ of the Administration of Joe Biden, successor of Trump and his presumed opponent again in the 2024 elections, has decided to charge the tycoon after completing his investigations. The gesture is historic: Never before has a former U.S. president been investigated for a federal crime.
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These are the crimes Trump is accused of and the jail sentences they have.
The appointment is next Tuesday in downtown Miami, but the television crews of the big networks were already stationed in front of the courthouse since Thursday, killing the time between connection and connection, sheltered under the white tents of the morning sun and the biblical storm that fell on the city in the afternoon.
Waiting time
The waiting period ended after seven, when Trump dropped the bomb on his social network, Truth, with a message that only he could have written, and that said: "The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my lawyers that I have been indicted, apparently for the hoax of the boxes [of documents], despite the fact that Joe Biden has 1850 boxes at the University of Delaware, additional boxes in Chinatown, D.C., with even more boxes at the University of Pennsylvania, and documents strewn all over the floor of his garage where he parks his Corvette, and which is 'secured' only by a door that is thin paper, and open most of the time."
A couple of hours later, no one before the Miami court ventured to predict what will happen in that place on Tuesday, except that, surely, and for that you do not need to be a fortune teller, it will be a genuine spectacle à la Trump. It is also unclear who will appear, besides the accused. It is known that the grand jury is made up of 23 citizens, who have been reviewing documents and taking testimonies for a month. Also, that their work is scheduled to continue until the big day.
The last time he, as a former president, appeared in court was last April in New York. Then he was indicted on 34 counts of falsehood derived from three payments to hide two scandals (the fattest, for an extramarital affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels) in the 2016 presidential campaign. A New York judge has set March 25, 2014 for the start of the trial.
Trump then called for the protest and ventured that a storm of "death and destruction" was about to break out. Analysts brought up the memory of the attack on the Capitol, but the thing remained in peaceful concentrations of detractors and supporters in the park in front of the Manhattan courthouse, in an overwhelming, yes, media presence, and in the discordant note of a handful of spontaneous in search of their minutes of fame. Impossible to know how things will turn out this time in Miami.
The Justice Department has not yet made public the new allegations against Trump. The information on the seven charges, including conspiracy, obstruction of justice, wilful withholding of national security documents, falsehoods and violations of the Espionage Act, is due to his lawyers.
The news of his indictment was received on Thursday by the former president at his golf club in Bedminster (New Jersey) with, according to sources close to him, "disbelief and sadness", despite the fact that the news had been incubating for days.
After leaving the White House, his refuge has been the extravagant Mar-a-Lago mansion, which in the worst moments since the attack on the Capitol, on January 6, 2021, he did not leave for weeks. It was precisely the news of his indictment in New York that changed his prospects for the 2024 presidential race. Since then, he has stood out in polls among Republican voters as the favorite candidate for the designation of his party with double-digit percentage differences over his most direct competitor, Ron DeSantis, governor of, precisely, Florida. How this new judicial setback will affect their aspirations is now the big question.
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