The Trump Indictments

November 1, 2023
A compendium of charges brought by grand juries and prosecutors against Donald Trump. Four court cases, three prosecutors, 91 criminal charges, possible sentences totaling more than 700 years in prison: Trump has always dealt in superlatives, and those are the staggering numbers, well known to anyone who follows the news--though, as MSNBC host Velshi writes in his introduction, they are so many and so thoroughly laid out "that we risk becoming numb to their monumental importance." There are the payoffs to Stormy Daniels and the cooking of corporate books to hide them, set in New York; those squirreled-away classified documents, bound for trial in Florida; the attempted coup on Jan. 6, which jurors in the District of Columbia will hear; and the tampering with the 2020 election in Georgia. Other suits are likely to follow, since Trump and various co-conspirators allegedly tried to overthrow the electors of Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and other states as well. As Velshi correctly notes, the charges against Trump and his alleged criminal colleagues are exquisitely detailed, ranging from macro level ("during an audio-recorded meeting with a writer, a publisher, and two members of his staff, none of whom possessed a security clearance, TRUMP showed and described a [nuclear] 'plan of attack' that TRUMP said was prepared for him by the Department of Defense and a senior military official...[and] also said, 'as president I could have declassified it' ") to the comparatively micro level, such as Trump's insistence that Georgia voting official Ruby Freeman "was a professional vote scammer and a known political operative" or that "close to 5,000 dead people voted" in Georgia. The text features the thickest of legalese, but it's well worth plowing through as a preview of coming attractions. The courts will decide, but here's the scorecard to follow along at home.

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