Special counsel avoids possible legal battle by moving Trump case to Miami
The decision to charge former President Donald J. Trump in Florida in the classified documents investigation eliminates a significant risk to the politically charged case: a potentially thorny legal battle over where the charges should have been filed, former federal prosecutors said.
For months, prosecutors in Washington had used a grand jury to question witnesses and hear evidence before abruptly deciding to press charges in Florida that included at least one violation of the espionage law, obstruction and false statements.
Dennis M. Fitzpatrick, a former prosecutor who handled national security cases in Virginia, said the publicized charges appear to be related to crimes that took place in Florida and not Washington, where the FBI and Justice Department handled the investigation.
The treasure trove of classified documents was stored at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Florida, where agents and prosecutors were issued a search warrant last year by a federal judge to retrieve them.
Prosecutors also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump ordered someone to move the documents or wanted to hide some of them at the resort after the Justice Department issued a subpoena for their return.
It’s not clear where Mar-a-Lago employees or Trump aides were suspected of making false statements to the FBI, but if it were in Florida, that would be the right place to charge them, former prosecutors said .
“If a prosecutor thinks he has a strong case, the goal becomes to protect the lawsuit by taking legal issues off the table,” Fitzpatrick said. “Location in DC would have been a legal battle.”
The decision to indict Mr. Trump in Florida also means prosecutors could lose the advantage of taking a case to a potentially more liberal jury in Washington. (Mr. Trump received 4 percent of the vote in the District of Columbia in the 2016 presidential election, and 5 percent in 2020.) Prosecutors in Miami could face a more skeptical jury because of Mr. Trump’s popularity. Trump in that state.
Juries in Washington have swiftly convicted rioters incited by Mr Trump in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. While there were doubts that prosecutors would win complex cases accusing members of the far-right groups the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys of seditious conspiracy, a law rarely tested, Washington juries have not acquitted a single January 6 defendant.
Brandon L. Van Grack, a former federal prosecutor who also worked on complex cases involving national security and classified material, wrote in a legal publication last year that there were many reasons to bring the case to Washington.
He said the judges are more familiar with cases involving classified information and the espionage law, and that the Washington jury “appears to be less deferential to” Mr Trump.
But in an interview, Mr. Van Grack said Jack Smith, the Special Prosecutor, must have thought there was a real risk in taking a case in Washington and that the case should be brought in Florida for sound legal reasons.
“There is a constitutional right to be charged at the location where the crime took place and Jack Smith looked at the facts cold and hard and determined that the location was appropriate in Florida,” Mr Van Grack said.