A new report said that if the Department of Justice moves forward to indict former President Donald Trump, the political calendar may decide the timing.
According to Bloomberg, citing sources it called “people familiar,” no indictment — if one is decided upon — would come prior to the November elections.
The report suggests two possible avenues in which the Justice Department could move against Trump — issues related to documents found during the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and Trump’s efforts to push back against the 2020 elections in which he was defeated by President Joe Biden.
An unofficial Justice Department policy bans filing charges within a 60-day period before elections.
Only question now is whether Trump will get a negotiated surrender or is DOJ will do a full tactical style raid, hoping to incite a response. But if you watched that speech and don’t see Trump’s indictment as imminent, then you weren’t paying attention.
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) September 2, 2022
The Bloomberg report, noting that in this case that would be Sept. 10, said that sources claimed this means nothing prior to the Nov. 8 elections is likely.
The Bloomberg report noted that as of this point, it is unclear if any indictment will be sought.
In May, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo stressing the importance of adhering to the precedent concerning pre-election filings or indictments.
Will Trump be indicted?
“Simply put, partisan politics must play no role in the decisions of federal investigators or prosecutors regarding any investigations or criminal charges,” Garland said in the memo.
The department is still in the early stages of investigating whether Trump broke any laws with regard to the classified documents, Jay Bratt, chief of the department’s counterintelligence and export control section, said during a recent court hearing.
.@benshapiro: “The DOJ is very likely to try & push an indictment of Donald Trump at this point… They’re going to wait until after midterm elections to do this, which, of course, means this is going to hover over the midterm elections, which may be the point here.” pic.twitter.com/YNFbOLhNq1
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) September 1, 2022
Writing for National Review, Andrew McCarthy said he expects an indictment will emerge.
“I believe former president Trump is likely to be charged with obstruction of justice and causing false statements to be made to investigators,” he wrote.
McCarthy wrote that based on his research, “It does not appear that those charges would be difficult to prove. Proving them does not involve navigating the same complications that would arise from trying to prove classified-information offenses. Just as critical, they involve conduct that would be very easy for the public to understand, and for which the average person would be indicted.”
An obstruction charge is simple, McCarthy added in a New York Post Op-Ed.
“There would be no need to get into the content of government documents, classified or not. The case would focus on Trump’s allegedly lying about having government records and concealing them. What’s in the documents is beside the point,” he wrote.
“The Justice Department is under immense pressure from the Democratic base to indict Trump, and the jury pool in Washington, D.C., where the government would file any indictment, is intensely anti-Trump. It is thus hard to imagine that Attorney General Merrick Garland will decide against filing charges,” he wrote.
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