Jack Smith, the special counsel for the Department of Justice’s ongoing criminal investigation into the former president Donald Trump, is close to completing the collection of various testimonies.
Smith interviewed nearly all of the staff at Mar-a-Lago including maintenance personnel and housekeepers, according to the Wall Street Journal. According to the report, “Some of Trump’s close associates anticipate his indictment, and are preparing to fundraise from a prosecution,” people in the former President’s circle stated. Conflicts within the Trump Legal Team have led to a key attorney’s departure.
The FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022. They seized numerous boxes of documents that Trump’s team had been negotiating to return to the National Archives. Attorney General Merrick G. Garland, the person who issued the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago argued that Trump had no authority to have these documents in his home.
Smith can either charge Trump directly or refer the matter to Garland. Garland would be the one to decide the final outcome of any potential charges. There is currently no indication that Smith has made a decision.
The indictment of Trump may pose a problem for the Biden administration, as it has been discovered that President Biden possessed classified documents dating back to when he was vice president under the Obama administration. The documents were discovered in his office at the Penn Biden Center and in his garage at his home.
Documents obtained by America First Legal suggest that there was coordination between the Biden White House, the DOJ and Trump’s campaign in order to obtain his records. This could have been used as a pretext to conduct the raid. It is possible that the raid had a political motive and that Biden abused the power of federal government by targeting his political rival.
Leftists have tried to differentiate between the two situations, insisting on Biden’s “full cooperation” with the Justice Department. They also claim that Donald Trump is guilty of obstruction even though he was negotiating with Merrick Garland when a warrant was approved to search Mar-a-Lago.
In January, however, we learned Biden was initially reluctant to allow the Justice Department to search his house and that he only consented to this after Justice Department said it would obtain a warrant, if needed. A special counsel is investigating the circumstances of the classified documents found in Biden’s possession. Biden, as vice president, never had the same authority that Trump did to declassify classified documents.
Many will believe that the DOJ is a weaponized and grossly politicized against Democratic Party opponents if Trump is indicted, but Joe Biden not.
