Former US president Donald Trump is accruing indictments with the same accelerating intensity of a film franchise that must up the ante in each instalment. He announced via his Truth Social platform in that familiar style — in and out of caps, lightening-quick asides, a jazz trumpeter’s approach to punctuation — that he has received a letter from special counsel Jack Smith informing him that he’s now subject to a grand jury investigation.
Trump wrote that Smith “sent a letter (again, it was Sunday night!) stating that I am a TARGET of the January 6th Grand Jury investigation”.
If this is true, it’s the big one, the headliner. Following his warm-up indictments — one over a $130,000 hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential election campaign, and then another for mishandling classified documents (he has pleaded not guilty in both cases) — he may finally be facing charges relating to the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.
On January 6 2021, after months of unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud after Joe Biden’s victory in the election, Trump’s supporters stormed Washington’s Capitol. Officials have testified during the inquiry into the near-coup that during his final months in office, Trump pressured them to discredit the election result.
And yet, somehow, there’s almost certainly still more to come. Trump might also be charged in Georgia. On Monday, the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously rejected a bid by Trump to block the state’s investigation into whether he and his allies attempted to illegally meddle with the 2020 election there. Trump’s extremely on-brand recorded phone call urging a senior election official to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s statewide victory will be investigated.
Incidentally, it’s not just boxes upon boxes of classified government documents that Trump is apparently holding on to at his Mar-a-Lago estate, according to Haaretz. The Israeli newspaper reports that national treasures belonging to Israel are “stranded” at Trump’s Florida club — though it’s not clear how they got there, or whether Trump even knows where they are. They were lent to the US for a brief exhibition in Washington in 2019 and got stuck thanks to the pandemic. Senior Israeli officials have tried to retrieve the antiquities and have so far been unsuccessful.
None of this has changed the assessment that Trump is still the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. He has not been subjected to the handcuffing and mugshot that would usually take place before court appearances, partly as an attempt to deny him the iconography this would provide his presidential bid. His team has mocked up a mugshot anyway and put it on a T-shirt to raise campaign funds. He raised millions off the back of his two previous indictments.
Which is just as well for him. As The New York Times reports, Trump’s advisers have said they believe his best way of avoiding jail time is to win the election.
With additional reporting from AAP.
