Trump & The US Justice System: (Part I) Mar-a-Lago Raid
Welcome to this new three-part series, called [Trump & The US Justice System], where we’ll be looking into complicated legal debates on the actions of Donald Trump. Sounds interesting? Alright, let’s dive in.
First off, who is Donald Trump? Donald John Trump is an American politician and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021 and is part of the Republican Party. The former president has gotten accused of multiple misdoings, including stashing classified documents at his residence Mar-a-Lago, located in Palm Beach, Flordia. So, as any sensible investigator would probably do, they looked around the place in a raid. The raid got conducted by the FBI on August 8th, 2022. The FBI, or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is an organization that investigates matters that have aroused suspicion. The FBI says they have found boxes of classified documents they were looking for that Trump allegedly stole from the White House during his time in office. He says that the FBI agents even broke into his safe and that this search was “politically motivated” in an ongoing move by the Democrats (his rival party) to prevent him from running for office in the future.
That is where the complicated matters come in. The FBI also needs a search warrant. This warrant got granted by Judge Bruce Reinhart and has received violent threats since, showing how much attention this move by the federal justice system has caught. However, whatever claims by the FBI get denied by the former president. He says the FBI has been there to plant evidence to convict him in a trial.
Such a search of a former president’s primary residence has not occurred in United States history before, and Trump supporters are outraged and are protesting to defund the FBI. Previously this year, Trump had to return 15 boxes of documents improperly taken from the White House, according to the National Archives and Records Administration.
What’s even stranger about this raid is that if the former president were to get incriminated, he could have more prison time in a law signed by himself! Trump signed this law in 2018 after a fierce campaign against Hillary Clinton in which he called for her to get jailed for mishandling classified material. This law stiffened the penalty for the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents from one year to five years, turning it into a felony offense. The only thing accomplished was potentially giving himself more prison time for mishandling classified information since Hillary didn’t go running for president again. In the end, Trump’s major enemy turned out to be his past self.
So what do you think? Was this FBI search politically motivated, or is Trump hiding something? Would he get incriminated and have a longer sentence? We would have to wait and see. But don’t go yet! Remember to tune in next time in Part II, where we will be looking into more about the US justice system and its ongoing chase to get the former president. That’s the end of this production from the New News Newsminute. Thank you for reading, and subscribe to not miss out on future updates.