A distinguished group of former Department of Justice officials, former federal prosecutors, law professors and legal scholars have combined their talents and created a 186-page "Model Prosecution Memo" that lays out their proposed path to indict and convict former President Donald Trump of six federal crimes.
Writing for Above the Law, Andrew Weissmann, Ryan Goodman, Joyce Vance, Norman L. Eisen, Fred Wertheimer, Siven Watt, E. Danya Perry, Joshua Stanton and Joshua Kolb, stated that, based on what is already publicly known about the sensitive government documents that the former president took with him to Mar-a-Lago after his election loss — and his refusal to hand them over — there is already a solid enough case for a conviction.
The entire document (which can be read here or below) makes the case that the former president can be charged with:
Mishandling of Government Documents
1. Retention of National Defense Information (18 U.S.C. § 793(e))
2. Concealing Government Records (18 U.S.C. § 2071)
3. Conversion of Government Property (18 U.S.C. § 641)
Obstruction, Contempt, False Information
1. Obstruction of Justice (18 U.S.C. § 1519)
2. Criminal Contempt (18 U.S.C. § 402)
3. False Statements to Federal Investigators (18 U.S.C. § 1001)
They wrote, "There is sufficient evidence to obtain and sustain a conviction here, if the information gleaned from government filings and statements and voluminous public reporting is accurate. Indeed, the DOJ is likely now, or shortly will be, internally circulating a pros memo of its own saying so. That DOJ memo will, however, be highly confidential, in part because it will contain information derived through the grand jury and attorney work product. Since it will not be publicly available, we offer this analysis."
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As part of the memo, they stated, "....the discussion starts with Trump’s resistance to the Government’s attempts to recover the documents. We recount the more than one-and-a-half-year effort on the part of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Justice Department to recover the documents. Those efforts culminated in the FBI’s recovery of approximately 13,000 documents, including information on some of the nation’s most sensitive national defense programs, pursuant to a court-authorized search warrant for Mar-a-Lago (MAL)."
In their conclusion, they suggested, "The Department’s own precedent makes clear that charging Trump would be to treat him comparably to others who engaged in similar criminal behavior, often with far fewer aggravating factors than the former president. Based on the publicly available information to date, a powerful case exists for charging Trump under the federal criminal statutes discussed in this memorandum."
You can read the memo below:
