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Former president Donald Trump is currently facing 91 criminal charges in four different jurisdictions — Georgia, Florida, New York, and the District of Columbia. Two of these indictments — Special Prosecutor Jack Smith's in D.C. and District Attorney Fani Willis's Fulton County, Georgia — take up Trump's and his co-conspirators efforts to steal the 2020 election, efforts that culminated with the insurrection on January 6. In this episode, Matt and Sam try to make sense of them and weigh the possible risks and rewards of "breaking the seal" and criminally charging a former president. In particular, they give closes readings to the two January 6-related indictments and discuss what they reveal about the deranged efforts Trump and his team made to overturn the election and a Republican Party that seemed to mostly go along with it, along with some of the problems with the RICO statute Trump and others are being charged under in Georgia. And of course, these indictments came down just as we're entering presidential election season — how will Trump's legal problems effect the 2024 race?
Sources:
Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman, "The Trump Jan. 6 Indictment, Annotated," NYT, Aug 1, 2023
Alan Feuer, et al, "The Trump Georgia Indictment, Annotated," NYT, Aug 15, 2023
Charlie Savage, "The Four Trump Criminal Cases: Strengths and Weaknesses," NYT, Aug 28, 2023
James Risen, "In Trump’s Georgia Indictment, a Tale of Two Election Workers," The Intercept, Aug 17, 2023
Rick Rojas and Sean Keenan, "Dozens of ‘Cop City’ Activists Are Indicted on Racketeering Charges," NYT, Sept 5, 2023
Laurence Tribe, "Anatomy of a Fraud," Just Security, Aug 8, 2023
Matthew Sitman, "Will Be Wild," Dissent, Spring 2023
Damon Linker, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Trump?" Notes from the Middleground, July 18, 2022
On the merits, this country has to have a way of dealing with the problem of a person like Trump for trying to steal an election that they didn't win. Because the kind of consequentialist argument about the prosecutions is like, "Okay, well, if we break the seal and allow that former presidents should be indicted by their successors, that's a bad thing." But let's take the consequentialist argument on the other side. If somebody can do what Trump did, why not every time a Republican loses an election, or even a very disreputable Democrat, do the same thing, and just say, you know, because these prosecutions failed, or these indictments didn't ever take place in a world where they didn't, there really isn't any punishment for a president who tries to keep power against the will of the people. And so why not that endless cycle? I mean, the consequentialist argument has to go both ways, and I think something has to happen for future Republicans or future Democrats not to think, "Well, if I lose, I can do the Trump route." You know, Trump didn't succeed in winning the election, but he did succeed in keeping his movement. He did succeed in keeping people dedicated to him enough that he is the presumptive nominee for the next election. Yes, I mean, we aren't an unprecedented and unique situation because something unprecedented actually happened, right? Like something like January 6 and the efforts Trump made to overturn the election. It's like, Trump's the person who put us in this unprecedented moment, not some prosecutor in Georgia, not Jack Smith, we're in this scenario because of Trump and Trump alone. And people always say, "We need a political solution to this problem." And that's true. Fundamentally, I've said it myself. I've said it in print. But what that really would have entailed is more Republicans voting to impeach Trump after January 6, which would have barred him from running for office again. That was the political solution, and the problem we're facing now is that one of our two main parties, which controls the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court, has decided you actually can try to steal an election, and that's not an impeachable offense. [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music)
Matt and Sam read the Trump indictments and weigh the risks and rewards of criminally charging a former president. (Subscribe on Patreon to hear the rest!)
