The Irish Times view on the Trump indictment: deeper into the legal mire

Former US president Donald Trump is set to appear in a court in Florida on Tuesday following his long-expected indictment by a special prosecutor on charges related to his retention of secret papers from the White House on leaving office.

The indictment includes 37 charges, including wilfully retaining national defence secrets – among them some related to the US nuclear programme – in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and conspiracy to obstruct justice. These are neither the beginning nor the end of Trump’s legal problems. In a civil trial he was recently found liable for sexual abuse, his company has been found guilty of 17 counts of tax fraud and other financial crimes, and he still faces two other possible indictments arising from his effort to overturn his 2020 election defeat and the attack on the Capitol in January 2021.

But indictment in a federal court, a grand jury’s conviction not of guilt but a case to answer, is a groundbreaking moment, a first in US political history of a former president. And it could potentially result in jail time for the presidential candidate. Even if convicted, Trump says he will continue his presidential campaign.

It was Trump’s supporters in 2016 who chanted “Lock her up” at rival Hillary Clinton over security “offences”. As Secretary of State she used her personal mobile phone for work. And it was Trump who pledged then that “I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information … No one will be above the law.” Now he says that his indictment is politically motivated and cites Clinton’s non-prosecution as justification for this stance.

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The indictment is extraordinary. He left the White House with some 13,000 government documents, over 300 of them with classified markings. After returning some of them, he stonewalled and lied about others that were eventually found in Justice Department searches of his home, according to the document. His public defence that he had declassified them without recording the act, and the claim that he can declassify a document “even by thinking about it” – are so nonsensical that reports suggest his lawyers have dissuaded him from testing it in court.

Unwilling ever to admit to wrongdoing, Trump is determined to fight his corner against charges most lawyers see as easily proven, and will not consider the guilty plea. As for the court of public opinion, Trump’s staff, heartened by evidence that a court finding of sexual abuse has done him no harm with voters, have been using the prospect of indictment, and now the indictment itself , as fuel for fundraising.

His Republican rivals for the presidency disgracefully sing his tune, playing to his hard-right constituency, deploring what they too characterise as political persecution.