Donald Trump’s legal web has grown more tangled than ever. The former president is facing 91 criminal charges across four different jurisdictions — Georgia, Florida, New York, and the District of Columbia. He has two trial dates set for 2024 so far. And all this is unfolding as he runs for the presidency again.
The cases — involving attempted election theft, mishandling classified documents, and hush money payments — have grown so sprawling that it’s tough for anyone but the most diehard political obsessive to follow them in detail.
But in some, the stakes — for our democracy and for Trump personally — are higher than others.
The two prosecutions about Trump’s efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory (in DC and Georgia) both come with the possibility of serious criminal penalties. They also have enormous implications for the future of American elections, and for whether Trump or someone like him will respect the results next time around.
The classified documents prosecution, in Florida, is also significant in that it involves sensitive intelligence material. However, prosecutors have presented no evidence that this sensitive material leaked out from Trump’s possession. The prosecution is mainly about his efforts to defy the government’s demands that he return the documents.
Then, in the New York case, Trump is charged with falsifying business records related to hush money payments he’d made. The core violation here is, basically, that the Trump Organization logged these payments improperly as “legal expenses.” This is not the highest-stakes issue in the world.
It’s all a lot to keep track of, so in this guide, we’ll walk through the charges and potential sentences in each prosecution in more detail, and we’ve ranked the indictments in order of importance based on the stakes and potential implications of each case.
1) Federal 2020 election case (District of Columbia)
How important is this indictment? Very important. As…
Read the full article here