The Justice Department has brought on one of the top national security prosecutors to help the team overseeing the investigation into Donald Trump, the Washington Post reported Sunday.
"National security law experts interviewed ... appear to have amassed evidence in the case that would meet some of the criteria for bringing charges against the former president — an unprecedented action that they said probably would only happen if the Justice Department believes it has an extremely strong case," said the report.
A longtime federal prosecutor from New York City, David Raskin, who served most recently in Kansas City, has been helping with the investigation into Trump and his team, sources told the Post.
"Raskin is considered one of the most accomplished terrorism prosecutors of his generation, having worked on the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was tried in Virginia as a co-conspirator in the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people," the report recalled. "Raskin was also part of the team that prosecuted Ahmed Ghailani in federal court in Manhattan in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa. Ghailani was acquitted of most counts but found guilty of conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property. He is the only Guantánamo Bay detainee to be brought to a U.S. court and tried and convicted. Both Moussaoui and Ghailani received life sentences."
DOJ officials asked Raskin to consult on Jan. 6 cases, but he has shifted to the stolen document scandal, which the Post indicated was a clue that the DOJ is moving forward with possible consequences for Donald Trump and that they're taking the next steps into investigations and possible prosecutions of him.
In a 2015 case, the Justice Department was able to get a guilty plea of a misdemeanor from retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus. Ten years before that there was a case involving national security adviser Samuel "Sandy" Berger, who removed classified documents from the National Archives. He too pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.
There was a case two weeks ago that Raskin worked on that was remarkably similar to Trump's. In that, a former FBI analyst in Kansas City took more than 300 classified documents to her home, including information about al Qaeda. Trump's case involved over 20 boxes of documents, some of which were the top levels of classification. One of the documents included information on French President Emmanuel Macron's love life. Another addressed the Iran missile program and others revealed details about the intelligence-gathering efforts against China.
“There is no other case in history like this,” explained Mary McCord, the former acting assistant attorney general for national security. “This is the former president of the United States. This is someone who was the commander in chief, someone who spent four years being briefed every single day on national security issues. It isn’t like any other case, so the steps prosecutors take aren’t going to look the same as any other case.”
