Trump's ‘Get-out-of-jail-free Card’?
Former president could follow the path taken by Vice President Spiro Agnew
Legal experts — even many Republicans — have said that the federal indictment against Donald Trump for his handling of classified and sensitive documents is serious and fairly air-tight.
The 37 felony counts could well land the former president in prison for the rest of his life.
The allegations are so damning — and backed up by his own words — that Trump's rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination are being asked whether they would consider pardoning Trump.
Yet, a pardon is not the former president's only possible “get-out-of-jail card,” according to one prominent TV news host.
One has only to look at the outcome of charges against a previous Republican in the White House to see the potential “out” for Trump in this case, said MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.
“So, who knows what’s gonna happen? But if this is as strong a case as the indictment makes it look, right, and that’s the prosecution's best-case, it will get challenged in court, it will be an adversarial process, we will see how strong the defense is. But if the indictment is that strong and the Justice Department is going to treat this as a like case compared to other people who have been charged under the Espionage Act for mishandling classified information, then he is looking at jail time,” Maddow said. “And what would Donald Trump do to avoid jail time? I guess, I literally suppose, that he would do anything.
“And if it’s going to come to him avoiding jail time, now that this indictment exists, he’s either going to have to win in court. Defending yourself against these charges by saying, ‘Yes I did it,’ is not a great defense. So how else can you avoid jail time? Well, you can plea in exchange for lenience. And we’ve seen lots of people, including Reality Winner, a very high-profile case, plead in exchange for lenience and still get jail time,” she added, referring to the American U.S. Air Force veteran and former translator who went to prison for an unauthorized release of government information to the media after she leaked an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
Maddow went back to the example of President Richard Nixon's first vice president who pleaded “no-contest” to a charge related to his public corruption from his time in Maryland politics.
“What can he offer prosecutors other than his confession, his cooperation? I mean, this is a crime he can only commit because he was in high public office,” Maddow said of Trump. “Spiro Agnew used that as a get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s not just that he was vice president, it was that prosecutors assumed that he was about to become president because Nixon was teetering, they were right.
“In order to keep Agnew out, they traded him essentially jail time for his resignation. I’m not saying that’s what the [Justice Department] should agree to. I’m not saying that’s what Trump should try for or his defense should offer it. I’m not even saying it would be good or bad for the country,” added Maddow, who produced the podcast Bagman to tell the Agnew story. “I’m just saying, the one other time we’ve dealt with this as a country, that’s how we did it.”
Coming up with such a deal could be difficult to come up with because it would have to cover all of the potential prosecutions of Trump, including those related to election interference and his role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection, Maddow said.
“Well, I had Ron Liebman, who was one of the prosecutors of Agnew, on the show with me Monday night, and he said, ‘Listen, it would have to be a global non-prosecution agreement.’ And with this many pending investigations and charges against him, that would be hard. But nothing about this is easy.
“Again, I don’t know that this is going to happen, I don’t know that it should, but I think we should get real about the fact that the only other time it’s happened, that was the most important card on the table,” she said.
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