Today, Explained - Florida man indicted (again)

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

For the first time in American history, a former president faces federal charges. Vox’s Andrew Prokop explains. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan and Siona Peterous, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Michael Raphael and Cristian Ayala, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All right, let's do this one last time. My name is Donald J. Trump. I was just indicted by a New York prosecutor. And for the past few months, I've been the one and only former president to ever be indicted for crimes. But now I've been indicted by the government that I used to run. A federal indictment that's never happened before. I'm pretty sure you know the rest. I took a bunch of classified documents from the White House

to my big peach house in Florida. The federal government asked for them back, but I sort of refused to cooperate. And then I kind of lied about giving them all back. And then we all just kind of sat around and waited for the charges to drop. Oh, and in the meantime, I told everyone I wanted to be president again

and I'm leading the pack. No big deal. If any of that didn't make sense, they're going to help you wrap your head around it on today, Explained. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves?

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Andrew Prokop, Vox, the former president, has done another unprecedented take it away. So Trump is now the first former president of the United States to be indicted twice, and in this case federally. So here's what he wrote on Truth Social. The corrupt Biden administration has informed my attorneys that I have been indicted seemingly over the boxes hoax, even though Joe Biden has 1,850 boxes at the University of Delaware, additional boxes in Chinatown, D.C., and even more boxes, etc., etc. Talks about Biden's garage, a Corvette, etc., that he has to be at the federal courthouse in Miami on Tuesday at 3 p.m.

Never thought it possible such a thing could happen. He's an innocent man. This is a dark day for the country. We will make America great again. Very sadly, we're a nation in decline. And yet they go after a popular president, a president that got more votes than any sitting president in the history of our country by far, and did much better the second time in the election than the first. And they go after him on a boxes hoax, just like the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax and all of the others.

This has been going on for seven years. And this afternoon, Friday afternoon, the indictment was unsealed for the public. I imagine you've spent some time with the documents. What do we got? It is a lengthy and detailed indictment that alleges that basically when he was out of office, Trump deliberately kept many documents involving military, nuclear, and intelligence secrets. It makes the case he knew full well that a lot of this information was classified. It contains a wealth of evidentiary detail attesting to his intense interest in these documents and in discussions about what to return to the government. And it recounts how Trump allegedly schemed to hide certain of these

documents from his own attorneys and from the government. Now, I skimmed the details of this indictment, Andrew, and saw some pretty shocking things. What most shocked you? There's a pretty damning piece of evidence that Smith's team obtained, which is a voice memo recorded by Trump's own attorney, Evan Corcoran. Traditionally, this stuff would be protected by the attorney-client privilege, but Smith's team argued that this was used in the commission of a crime, which makes it fall under the crime fraud exemption. So the voice memo got

turned over after this was contested in court. A judge sided with Smith's team and the voice memo got turned over to the special counsel. He describes when he first came to meet with Trump that the government has subpoenaed them trying to get these documents back. And according to this attorney, Evan Corcoran, Trump said, I don't want anybody looking.

I don't want anybody looking through my boxes. I really don't, I don't want anybody looking. I don't want anybody looking through my boxes. I really don't. I don't want you looking through my boxes. What happens if we just don't respond at all or don't play ball with them? Wouldn't it be better if we just told them we don't have anything here? Well, look, isn't it better if there are no documents? They go on and he says that Trubb told him a story supposedly about Hillary Clinton's attorney who deleted her 30,000 emails. And Trump said he did a great job. You know what? She didn't get in any trouble because he said that he was the one who deleted them. Basically, hint, hint, maybe if you made some of these documents disappear, that would help me out as well.

Later on, when he did search through some documents, Corcoran says that he was talking to Trump about some classified documents he did find, and Trump, per Corcoran, made a funny motion as though, well, okay, why don't you take them with you to your hotel room, and if there's anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out. And that was the motion that he made. But he didn't say that. It makes it sound like he's somewhat protective of these boxes, Andrew. But there's also images in this indictment of like a box of classified White House documents in what appears to be like

some kind of Mar-a-Lago closet. There's some suit bags in there. There's a Gibson guitar case and a box literally on its side spilling out all over the floor. It really makes it seem like these documents are just everywhere in the Peach Mansion. The indictment traces where the documents moved to. For a while, they were in a ballroom in Mar-a-Lago. They then moved to a business center. Some moved to a bathroom and shower. Then they got put in a storage room. But one of the big things about this indictment is that it describes how Trump would repeatedly request they be sent up to his bedroom. And he would just go through them, apparently, take certain things out, and then send them back to the storage room. He was really into these documents.

Jack Smith, the special counsel in this case, mostly lurking in the shadows for months, not to be heard from. And today he spoke. What did he say, Andrew? Good afternoon. It's pretty bare-bones, straight man kind of statement that, you know, laws protecting national defense information are important and we need to enforce them. We're not acting politically. We're just upholding the rule of law. Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States, and they must be enforced. And what are the charges? So Trump ended up being charged with 37 counts, which

involved a series of different statutes. Many of them are about unauthorized retention of defense information under the Espionage Act. Then there is conspiring to obstruct justice, withholding government documents, scheming to conceal information from a grand jury, and causing false statements to be made to the government. Do we have any idea what kind of jail time this would carry? Some of these documents are at pretty high classification levels and would come with pretty serious penalties, but I think it's probably too early to speculate on that. It very much depends on how the trial plays out, who the judge is. And Trump appears to have gotten some very good news for himself there,

because the judge who it seems has been assigned to the case is Eileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who made some very favorable decisions for him in previous legal wrangling about this case. I'm thinking this is all beginning to sound vaguely familiar to our listeners, Andrew, but could you remind us of the details of this investigation? Could we go back to square one? So it starts essentially when Trump leaves office in January 2021. He has a bunch of documents shipped to Mar-a-Lago. And apparently these were original documents. And so the National Archives, which is in charge of keeping track of government documents, noticed that some of these things were missing. So a lengthy back and forth ensued with the archives reaching out to Trump saying, hey, we're wondering where those documents are.

And that Trump, you know, stonewalling them, slow walking, talks about returning them. He gave back some documents, they thought. And then once we're now in January 2022, they receive some of those documents. They notice that a whole lot of them are classified, which is a potential law breaking, first of all. And they still think there's a lot more missing that he's holding back. Still.

So at that point, the National Archives says, all right, we need to get the Justice Department and the FBI involved because, you know, we're heading towards criminal territory here if we're not already there. So then DOJ and the FBI, this dance begins again, this back and forth saying, hey, we really need those documents back. They issue a subpoena. It's legally obligated of you, Mr. Former President, to give those documents back. Then they even come to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump's team and they insist, oh, hey, OK, we found some more documents that were classified, but that's it. There's no more. And all of the documents we have are non-classified, and Trump just wants to keep them, and they're in this room,

but you got nothing else to worry about now because we did a diligent search, and there's no more classified documents. They still didn't believe him, and they launched that famous FBI search of Mar-a-Lago in August of last year. In his written statement, Trump said the agents, quote, even broke into my safe, which Trump sources say is located in his office at Mar-a-Lago. Sources say the FBI remained at the property for most of the day. And lo and behold, they found more than 100 more classified documents. So at this point, we're talking about, like,

not only charges about illegally holding classified information, we're also talking about potential charges of obstructing the investigation because of his conduct throughout this whole thing. But it's this whole back and forth you alluded to that distinguishes this classified documents investigation from, say, that of the current presidents that the former president alluded to in his Truth Social post? Yes. So it became a little political problem for the Biden administration when toward the end of last year, some Biden attorneys say they were clearing out an office and they found some classified documents there, too. Department of Justice was immediately notified.

And the lawyers arranged for the Department of Justice to take possession of the document. And then this would be from the time of the Obama administration when Biden was vice president. They did some more searches at Biden's residence. They found some more documents. But, you know, they returned everything. The FBI eventually searched as well in a consensual search. And by the way, my Corvette's in a locked garage. Okay. So it's not like you're sitting out in the street. I think there are a few potential differences, though, again,

we're still missing a lot of details on both cases. One is the lack of a prolonged stonewalling process. Like as far as we know, as soon as Biden's team found this, they handed the documents back. I think there is probably from the reporting seems to be pointing toward the idea that this stuff was just kind of accidentally packed in boxes at the end of the Obama administration for Biden, and that no one was even like looking at it. And for Trump, it's a bit of a different situation. There's been talk of him talking about the documents, like moving about the documents, specifically wanting to keep them from the government. There's more of an attempt to hide something, it seems.

The former president, Andrew, has had months to mount his defense in the public eye. What has he said? One is that as the president, he had total declassification authority, and that he had already declassified all this stuff. He just hadn't written it down. If you're the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it's declassified, even by thinking about it. So, like, you know, he had said, these are declassified, and therefore he did not commit a crime. And then there's been another defense which is like, oh, he didn't know that these were still classified. A problem recently arose for that defense when we learned that there is a recording of Trump from 2021. He's talking to some people who are researching the book of his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

And he told people in the room, quote, as president, I could have declassified, but now I can't. We'll note that goes completely against what the former president has been saying publicly. So all of that is problematic for the legal defense that, you know, he thought this was all declassified or that he had already declassified it. Sad. Very sad. The former president, obviously not the only Republican who wants the big job in 2024. There's a bunch of people running. Are they responding to this big news?

Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, said that Trump should quit the race now that he's been indicted. And I've had that consistent view while I've been governor for eight years, calling on people very close to me to resign once they were indicted. But then, of course, you have some of the people who are closing ranks behind him, defending this as a deep state overreach. Ron DeSantis has generally taken that line. Vivek Ramaswamy promised to actually pardon Trump if he was elected president. We have two standards of justice, one for BLM rioters in Antifa, another one for peaceful January 6th protesters, one for Chelsea Manning, another one for Julian Assange. Guess what? Now you have one for Joe Biden, who violates the same laws about document retention and classified documents,

and then one for President Trump. And actually, there's deep questions, legal questions. How about the current president, Andrew? This is Joe Biden's Department of Justice, and Joe Biden is the former president's chief competition here. What has the Biden administration have to say about this? Well, Biden has said that he does not interfere with these decisions in the Justice Department. He's never tried to interfere, and he has nothing to do with it. In an implied contrast to his predecessor, Donald Trump, who very regularly opined on and tried to order the Justice Department to investigate certain people and do certain things. More with Andrew Prokop when we're back on Today Explained comes from Aura.

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Today, Explain is back with Andrew Prokop. Former President Donald Trump is facing federal charges. The federal part is unprecedented, but the charges part is not. Andrew, Trump has already been charged. I believe we spoke to you about it. So back in April, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced a 34-count indictment of Trump related to hush money payments that he had helped arrange to Stormy Daniels back during the 2016 campaign. The 45th president of the United States pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts

of falsifying business records in the first degree. According to the indictment, the 34 counts were part of an elaborate scheme to conceal crimes that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election. We're still in the pretrial wrangling of that New York case, but there has been a trial date set for March 25th, 2024.

Mark your calendars, but that could also be moved. And there's also something going on in Georgia, if I'm not mistaken. The Fulton County District Attorney, Fannie Willis, is investigating Trump for his attempt to swing the outcome of the election in Georgia, a state that Joe Biden won. The DA's investigation is vast, from a Rudy Giuliani-led legislative hearing focused on false statements about the election. This election was a sham. To Trump's infamous call to the Georgia Secretary of State. Trump, of course, famously was taped talking to Georgia's Republican Secretary of State, telling him that he just wants him to find the exact number of votes he needed to pass Biden.

So, look, all I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state. You know, Willis is investigating whether Trump's behavior amounted to criminal conduct in Georgia. Okay, so we've got New York, we've got federal Florida, we've got Georgia.

Did we miss anything? Well, the big one, the biggest one perhaps, is the federal investigation of Trump. Of course. For trying to stay in office and overturn the outcome of the 2020 election. That is also being carried out by special counsel Jack Smith that is based in Washington, D.C. And we have no sense of when the indictments might be coming from from the Georgia investigation and this January 6th investigation. Well, Georgia, we do. The district attorney has told apparently local officials that they need to be prepared for a big indictment in August.

But as far as the federal election case, we have no idea. Can any of this impede him becoming president of the United States again, Andrew? The short answer, I believe, is no. There are various theories floating about the they could have convicted him and banned him from holding future office. But they chose not to. And I think that was the best shot. And all of the other legal theories about how he could be disqualified aren't going to work. Very unfair. other legal theories about how he could be disqualified aren't going to work. Very unfair.

Of course, there's also the question of whether he could be in prison by the time of the election. That seems far-fetched to me, too. But theoretically, if Trump was in prison while he's supposed to be sworn into the presidency, that would certainly be a very interesting, unprecedented situation that the best legal minds of our time would have to figure out what to deal with. There's a lot of gleeful anticipation for that possibility on the left. And there's a lot of people on the right lamenting the state of the Justice Department and the Biden administration's oversight of these investigations right now. How's American democracy doing in the midst of all these investigations, Andrew? You know, I felt better about American democracy after the 2022 midterms. There was a,

seemed to be a penalty for candidates who were running on election denial or election overturning positions. But, you know, there is this kind of nihilism that I think is a little dangerous and that this may only heighten that mindset if they see the man they view as their champion facing serious possibility of prison time. And Trump is calling this election interference, to use a term that has often been applied to the Russian government or even to what he himself tried to do. They are going to feel that, as he's saying, that he's being pursued by a political witch hunt and that, like, they will further lose faith in whatever faith they still had in traditional American institutions. And I do worry about kind of where this apocalyptic mindset, this despair and rage against institutions does lead on the right. Me too, Andrew. Andrew Prokop writes about the political news of the day at Vox.com.

Our show today was produced by Miles Bryan and Siona Petros. It was edited by Matthew Collette. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard. It was mixed and mastered by Michael Rayfield with help from Christian Ayala. I'm Sean Ramos from, and this is Today Explained. explained. you