America's Talking - Trump Says He Has Been Indicted, Must Appear in Federal Court

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me today, as he does every week, is the Center Square Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief Casey, Casey, we're recording this on Friday, June 9th. Last night, Thursday night, June 8th, former President Donald Trump told the world that he's being indicted again, this time by President Joe Biden's Department of Justice for his handling of classified documents that were found at his Florida home. This is kind of, this is not kind of. This is unprecedented. Sitting president's department of justice, indicting former president and his possibly challenger in the next presidential election. Give us the facts first. Let's start there. Yeah, I mean, you hinted at the facts. So last year, Marlago was rated. That's basically when it became widely known that Trump allegedly had a lot of classified documents in his possession.

Starting point is 00:00:56 on the FBI raid, you know, widely criticized and actually Trump's poll numbers spiked after this. This is the main reason I think that DeSantis, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, that, you know, in second place for the Republican primary, is so far behind Trump. Because the FBI rated Trump, his poll number spiked after that, it made, you know, it kind of like Trump against the system again, which is really kind of the peak Trump messaging in 2015, 2016, it's me against the system. They managed to make it a former president somehow an outsider, a political outsider again, which is pretty hard to do, but they did it. So that was kind of the political impact.

Starting point is 00:01:28 Trump's poll numbers have stayed high since then. He's dominating the Republican primary now. Legally, he's facing some serious charges surrounding this. As a side note, he was also indicted on a state matter by the New York grand jury related to his payments to Stormy Daniels. Basically, the allegation is that he paid off Stormy Daniels for some illicit activity they were involved in and he tried to classify it as a campaign expense. Now, how true those allegations are.

Starting point is 00:01:53 I guess we'll find out in court everything. But that's what's happening there. And that didn't really seem to slow Trump down too much politically. But this one is bigger for a few reasons. One, it's federal indictment. But too, as you said, it's really interesting because this is the Department of Justice run by opposing, not only opposing political party, but a president who's up for re-election prosecuting the frontrunner of the opposite party.

Starting point is 00:02:13 So Trump is far in a way the leading candidate for Republicans most likely to be challenging Biden in less than two years for the presidency. So you got all these things swirling. And that's why there's been so much reaction. to this investigation. So what are the charges? Well, the indictment's not public yet, but it basically comes down to a few things. One, Trump allegedly had all these classified documents that he shouldn't have had. Two, he then after having them kind of made the willful decision to keep having them and not turn them over, which is seen as kind of a separate offense. And then they say that he made some

Starting point is 00:02:45 false statements about it. And then there's talk of that there's some kind of espionage charge in there. Right now they're saying there's seven counts. That's what's being reported. Again, that indictment isn't available to everyone. I'm sure it will be soon enough. So those are kind of, that's what Trump is facing. He's going to turn himself in. It looks like on Tuesday to a federal law enforcement, I guess, on Tuesday in Miami, Florida. So I definitely, you know, that will be the talk of really, I think if you, I started to say this is like the story of the year. In a way, you could say this is like the story of the decade, right, Dan. I mean, a former president being indicted. This has never happened before in American politics. And I think we're going to be talking about this at least, of course,

Starting point is 00:03:23 until the election. But if Trump loses, then we're going to be talking about how maybe this is the reason he lost and is Trump really going to concede when he feels so personally attacked. Is he going to potentially be convicted before the election? There's just a lot of questions here. At least part of the facts of this case are undisputed. Trump does not deny that he had classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home. But what complicates this further, in my mind, is that after the FBI raided his Florida home, Marlago. We found out that President Biden, from his days when he was vice president under former President Barack Obama, had classified documents that he shouldn't have had at a couple of different locations, including his garage. And former vice president Mike Pence, under Trump,

Starting point is 00:04:10 also had classified documents that he shouldn't have had that were found in his possession. And to take it even further, Hillary Clinton, a former Secretary of State, who was hammered during the Obama administration for mishandling classified information on a personal laptop computer, she was never indicted for this. How does the Department of Justice explain that to the American people? Yeah, they have not explained it yet. And that is, I don't think any explanation right now will be adequate. I mean, people are really, really upset about this. To clarify Trump, it has admitted he has documents, but he says because he's president, he had the authority to unilaterally declassify them. So he's saying actually he's innocent because he was president and he had the authority to declassify documents.

Starting point is 00:04:50 that's just a summary of Trump stance. And of course, you brought up Hillary's emails, which just kind of disappeared after the election. It was, I don't think there's investigation. I mean, Pence, I think, you know, what would be the biggest distinction that you could point to if you're DOJ? I think it would be that Trump didn't really cooperate with federal authorities when it came time to hand those documents over. So as soon as they went after Biden, it seems like he was like, oh, here, you can have him back. Hillary allegedly cooperated. I mean, there's, but for Trump, the Federal Archives agency that keeps up with all the things from presidents. and catalogs them. They say they were reaching after Trump for months and months to try to get

Starting point is 00:05:24 these documents. And basically they were stonewalled. And so that's why they eventually handed it over to federal law enforcement. So I think that would be, if you want to get nuanced, I think that's the argument that they would make to defend the fact that they're going after Trump and not others is that they tried to get these documents the right way with Trump and he just refused to hand them over. So many of these federal officials have been on the record as being so politicized, right? So Comey, for instance, right, he used to, you know, one of the leading federal law enforcement officers. He was heavily involved in the Hillary Clinton investigation. He is actively campaigning against Donald Trump right now, going on national television, telling people

Starting point is 00:05:57 how dangerous Trump is, right? We're supposed to believe that a few years ago, he was an impartial federal investigator. Mayor Garland was proposed to us as a kind of unbiased Supreme Court justice, not long ago. But he's been on the record as being highly politicized, and now he's running, you know, dealing on stuff of the DOJ. So I think that's the other side of it is these federal law enforcement officials have not even really pretended to not be anti-Trump in their public statements, which I think in a previous political era, federal law enforcement would have been more careful to be unbiased in the way that Supreme Court justices were. But that doesn't really seem to be the case anymore for federal law enforcement. Republicans were swift in their response

Starting point is 00:06:32 after Trump announced this last night. Again, it was Trump who announced that he's been indicted. It has not, the Department of Justice has not released any details surrounding it. But Republican response last night was pretty swift and pretty harsh. We have a story at the CenterSquare.com or U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, said essentially that the Department of Justice is weaponizing, politicizing its investigative units and going after former President Trump in this case. If nothing else, the Department of Justice does have sort of a cloud over it because of these accusations. What does this mean for the Department of Justice and the FBI going forward? You know, the Twitter files, I think maybe some on the left don't even think the

Starting point is 00:07:11 Twitter files are important, but really proved that both the Department of Homeland Security, so federal law enforcement and the FBI were working with these social media companies and leaning on them and pressuring them to change what posts they had up. Yeah, Casey, we could talk about this all day, but we are out of time. Of course, this story is not going anywhere. I keep up with Casey Harper's and all of the Center Square coverage of this developing story at the CenterSquare.com. For Casey Harper, I'm Dan McKalib.

Starting point is 00:07:38 Please subscribe and thank you for listening.

America's Talking - Trump Says He Has Been Indicted, Must Appear in Federal Court

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