Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy penned a column for the National Review, where he is a contributing editor, stating he believes an indictment of Donald Trump is forthcoming.
Speculation as to the legal fate of the former president has reached a fever pitch since the FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this month. Agents retrieved several boxes of government documents, some of which were classified. Trump was supposed to turn the material over to the National Archives upon leaving office.
Trump maintains all government documents at Mar-a-Lago have been declassified, but that does not appear to be the case. Even if that were true, he was not supposed to have the documents.
According to media reports, Trump attorney Christina Bobb signed a statement to the Department of Justice saying there were no government documents at Trump’s Florida residence. However, that turned out to be false.
“Former president Donald Trump is facing the very serious prospect of being indicted for obstruction of justice and causing false statements to be made to the government,
He pointed to the sworn false statement as being potentially damaging to the former president and said that Trump’s attorneys could end up being “central witnesses” against him:
That the statement itself is patently false does not necessarily mean Bobb was lying when she signed it (if, indeed, she was the one who signed it) — we don’t yet know what information she was given and thus cannot assess whether she was willfully misleading investigators. We can safely assume, however, that (a) the lawyers who conducted the “diligent search” and provided the sworn statement for the grand jury (among other statements the lawyers made that day to the FBI) are subjects of the investigation — and likely to become central witnesses; and (b) the government would argue that Trump made false statements to the FBI and to the grand jury, reasoning that his agents’ statements are attributable to him, and he had to know, when he caused his agents to make these statements, that he was not providing all of the classified documents compelled by the subpoena.
McCarthy said there’s sufficient evidence for potential obstruction of justice charges against Trump.
“For some time, I’ve doubted the notion that the Justice Department is trying to make a case against Trump for mishandling classified information or illegal records retention based on the Mar-a-Lago search,” he said. “But I
McCarthy added that the Department of Justice may not prosecute Trump because it would be politically convenient not to do so.
“Trump’s better hope may be that he is more useful to Democrats as a badly compromised Republican presidential candidate than as a criminal defendant,” he concluded.