Laurence Tribe – Trump Must be Charged with Espionage and Obstruction in Washington D.C.

Harvard Law’s Laurence H. Tribe, writing for the online National Defense and security forum Just Security along with Philip Lacovara and Dennis Aftergut, reminds us that drumpf’s all-star lineup of corrupt judges in Florida and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, many of who he appointed for the sole purpose of getting him out of hot water when the nation inevitably learned of his crimes, should not be a factor in the DOJ’s prosecution of der Gropinfuhrer for his theft of Nation Security secrets, but that The Superior Court of the District of Columbia, the venue with jurisdiction over Washington D.C., where the crime actually occurred, should be where drumpf is indicted and tried.

Conscious of the purview of the site for which they write, Tribe and his co-authors first make the point that National Security has been put at extreme risk by Trump’s actions and that any indictment should happen ASAP, with no regard for the DOJ’s unwritten rule that no legal action be undertaken within 60 days of an election.

A position with which I heartily concur.

They next turn to the venue where the indictments should originate:

“As to where to indict, put simply, what started in Washington should stay in Washington. To lay and even some legal observers, it may seem counterintuitive to try a case outside of Florida, where the court-approved search of Mar-a-Lago transpired and where Trump had improperly stashed documents containing some of the country’s most sensitive national security secrets. However, while the case could be indicted in Florida, that option is a non-starter for any responsible federal prosecutor, for reasons we discuss in a moment.

The Sixth Amendment requires that a criminal defendant be tried “by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.” Under the statute implementing that requirement, a federal criminal case may properly be tried in any jurisdiction where any part of the offense occurred, or where a continuing offense began, even if completed elsewhere.“

Tribe & Co. then turn to the issue of what should be charged, the first and most obvious being theft of government records.

They then address the GOP elephant in the room… espionage…

“Then there is the Espionage Act, which is also punishable by 10 years in prison and which criminalizes the willful failure to return defense-related information to an appropriate government official. Beginning even before January 20, 2021, the Acting Archivist of the United States sent communications from Washington asking for those records to be returned, and Trump’s White House Counsel Pat Cipollone agreed that Trump needed to return them before his term ended. After Trump absconded with the documents, the grand jury subpoena demanded that all of them be returned to the courthouse located in downtown Washington DC. Succinctly stated, Trump’s violation of that statute has its roots in the nation’s capital.“

But both theft of records and espionage (believe it or not) carry a maximum punishment of ten years imprisonment.

The big enchilada on the plate is obstruction –

“Yet for multiple reasons, it is particularly enticing for prosecutors to charge this crime. Obstruction offends them and undermines the entire system of accountability under the law. Indeed, the 20-year maximum sentence for the offense — double the penalty for violating the Espionage Act — reflects the outrage that the criminal code manifests in condemning attacks on the administration of justice.

Further, as the country learned from Richard Nixon’s failed Watergate conspiracy, proof of a cover-up is extremely useful in establishing criminal intent to do wrong with respect to the underlying crime.“

20 years> 10.

At this point there is little doubt that Trump committed all of these offenses and he should be charged in a court that has jurisdiction over the scene of his crimes against all of the people of the United States, the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.