January 15, 2023

Why Trump remains in more legal trouble than Biden

 Independent - Nick Akerman, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the Watergate special counsel probe in the 1970s and as an assistant US attorney in the Southern District of New York, told The Independent in a phone interview that Mr Hur will face two nearly insurmountable hurdles in his way if he were to choose to pursue his investigation with an eye towards an indictment against Mr Biden.

The first, he said, is establishing that the president had any criminal intent in keeping the Obama-era records in unauthorised locations.Mr Akerman compared the known facts about the Biden documents to what is known about how Mr Trump came to have the more than 100 separate classified documents FBI agents found during the 8 August search of his Palm Beach, Florida home. He pointed out that the FBI search followed nearly a year and a half of negotiations between the ex-president and the government he once led, including the issuing of a grand jury subpoena compelling Mr Trump to return the classified records....

Mr Akerman said there’s another, even more immovable roadblock that Mr Hur would face should he attempt to pursue charges against the president — notwithstanding a decades-old Department of Justice policy which states that a sitting chief executive cannot be indicted by the government he leads.That roadblock is a separate piece of the federal criminal code, known as Section 3282, which states that “no person shall be prosecuted, tried, or punished” for any non-capital crime unless charges are brought within five years of the crime being committed.

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