Donald Trump is facing, by some counts, around 20 criminal investigations and civil lawsuits. On August 3rd Mr Trump is expected to be arraigned in a Washington, DC court on criminal charges related to his role in the January 6th, 2021 attack on the Capitol and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. (The former president denied the allegations.) The charges will not be the first to be brought by federal prosecutors against a former president: Mr Trump is already facing a separate federal indictment, for mishandling classified documents, and a criminal indictment, filed by local prosecutors in New York. What are the most prominent inquiries involving Mr. Trump—and how much trouble might he be in?
The attempts to overturn the 2020 election
On August 1st federal prosecutors charged Mr. Trump with four crimes, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an official government proceeding (in this case, the certification of the vote), and conspiracy “against rights” – the right to vote and have your vote counted. The indictment described six unnamed co-conspirators. In announcing the charges against the former president, Jack Smith, an independent special counsel who oversaw the investigation, said the probe into co-conspirators “continues”.
Previously, the most public investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election was an 18-month probe by the House of Representatives’ January 6th committee. The bipartisan committee lacked the power to charge the former president.
Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, is conducting a separate investigation into whether the president and his associates tried to overturn the election results in that state. Georgia law criminalises solicitation of election fraud. Some experts believe that Mr. Trump’s notorious leaked phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which the former president asked him to “find 11,780 votes”, might constitute evidence of that offence.
Lawyers advising Mr Trump also drew up a hare-brained scheme to manufacture a false slate of electors in order to award Georgia’s 16 electoral college votes to Mr Trump. They claimed that this ruse would allow Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s vice president, either to overrule Joe Biden’s narrow win in Georgia or let it be adjudicated by a special vote in the House of Representatives (which would have gone in Mr. Trump’s favour). A grand jury has recommended that Ms. Willis charge more than a dozen people in the scheme, though precisely who was not made public. She is expected to announce a possible indictment by the beginning of September.
The classified-documents probe
On June 9th federal prosecutors unsealed a 37-count indictment against Mr. Trump for mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House and obstructing investigators. The charges include violations of the Espionage Act of 1917, which makes it a crime to hold secret government documents without authorisation. Mr Trump allegedly retained records about America’s nuclear weapons programme and other countries’ military capabilities.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Trump stored numerous boxes containing the material in a ballroom and a shower at his Florida estate, and shared a “plan of attack” prepared for him by the Pentagon with guests who were unauthorised to see it. After the FBI opened an investigation into Mr. Trump’s retention of the documents in March 2022, Mr. Trump allegedly hindered their probe by suggesting that his attorney not “play ball”. Later one of Mr. Trump’s attorneys falsely certified that he had handed over all the material sought by a grand jury. Walt Nauta, an aide to Mr. Trump, was also charged with several crimes.
The investigation is being handled by Jack Smith, a special counsel, and court proceedings will take place in Florida. Merrick Garland, the attorney-general, appointed Mr. Smith to avoid the impression of political bias.
The hush-money probe
In March a grand jury in Manhattan indicted Mr Trump for falsifying business records to hide the payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels (née Stephanie Clifford), a porn actress who says she slept with him in 2006. The case will go to trial in March 2024.
To buy Ms. Clifford’s silence, Michael Cohen, then Mr Trump’s lawyer, paid her $130,000 shortly before the 2016 presidential election. The money came from Mr. Cohen’s pocket, allegedly at his boss’s direction. Later Mr. Trump personally signed cheques to reimburse Mr. Cohen. Those payments were falsely marked as legal expenses by the Trump Organisation, his property firm. Mr. Cohen says that Mr. Trump knew about the misleading records; Mr. Trump denies that as well as the affair with Ms. Daniels, and says that any suggestion of criminal conduct on his part is a “fairy tale”.
The case is far from straightforward. Falsifying business records is a misdemeanour. To treat the allegedly fraudulent record-keeping as a felony, prosecutors must prove that it facilitated another crime: failing to report what was, in effect, a campaign expense. That is an untested legal strategy.
In 2018 Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations related to hush money, as well as tax evasion and served just over a year in prison. Mr. Trump was not charged at the time; the Department of Justice (DOJ) has guidelines that recommend against the indictment of a sitting president.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers will probably argue that Mr. Cohen told his boss that the scheme was legal. Even if convicted the former president is unlikely to go to jail. If charged as a felony, falsifying business records carries a maximum prison sentence of four years, but first-time defendants rarely serve that time.
Fraud and civil liabilities
Mr. Trump also faces probes over his business dealings. Letitia James, New York’s attorney-general, has sued Mr. Trump, three of his children, and his business, the Trump Organisation, for committing “staggering” fraud over a decade. Although Ms. James is not able to bring criminal charges, she is seeking the return of $250m in allegedly ill-gotten gains and to have Mr. Trump permanently barred from running a business in the state. The case goes to trial in October 2023.
Ms. James alleges that Mr. Trump and his subsidiary businesses grossly inflated his net worth and the value of his properties to mislead prospective lenders. In 11 annual statements between 2011 and 2021, government attorneys found 200 instances in which they claim that the value of assets was fraudulently inflated. In 2015 Mr. Trump’s flat was valued as though it were 30,000 square feet (2,787 square metres) when it was in fact around 11,000 square feet. Its purported value was $327m—at a time when only one New York apartment had ever been sold for more than $100m. Mar-a-Lago was valued at $739m on the premise that the land could be developed for flats, though Mr. Trump had previously signed away those rights (and sought an income-tax deduction for doing so). An honest evaluation would have valued the property at a little more than one-tenth of the amount claimed, the attorney-general wrote.
Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer for the Trump Organisation, pleaded guilty in August to unrelated charges of tax fraud. He testified in a separate criminal trial against the company, which was found guilty of dodging taxes on December 6th. The potential penalties stemming from that conviction, at $1.6m, are pocket change for the firm, but the verdict is nonetheless an embarrassment. Prosecutors said Mr Trump—who was not indicted—had been “explicitly sanctioning tax fraud”.
Slow justice
The former president faces numerous other civil lawsuits. In May a jury in Manhattan found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, an author, who accused him of sexually assaulting her 26 years ago. So far, none of the investigations or lawsuits he faces has significantly damaged his standing on the right. He claims to be the victim of a Democratic witch-hunt.
Some Democrats hope that Mr Trump will be in jail by the time of the presidential election in 2024. That is exceptionally unlikely. The pace of criminal investigations can be plodding. Finding an unbiased jury to try a former president would be fiendishly hard. It is almost impossible to imagine a charge against Mr Trump speeding through indictment, trial, conviction and all possible appeals in merely two years. And even if one did, that need not be the end of Mr Trump. In 1920 Eugene Debs, a socialist convicted of sedition, ran for president from his prison cell—in Georgia.
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