Imagine, for just a moment, that as former President Donald Trump feels prosecutors getting closer to indicting him on crimes ranging from fraud to money laundering, he gets on a plane and flies to Russia, ostensibly to conduct business.
The actual reason, according to Camila DeChalus of Business Insider, might be more practical: So that Trump can shield himself from prosecution in the United States:
“The day after Trump lands in Moscow on a bright September afternoon, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announces a grand jury has formally indicted the former president on several criminal counts. Vance wants Trump to immediately return. But the US and Russia have no extradition treaty or formal process through which a wanted person is arrested. Since Trump would be on Russian soil in this scenario, he would be under no legal obligation to cooperate with the US government. Trump then could petition Russian President Vladimir Putin for political asylum.”
While such a scenario isn’t very likely (after all, it would preclude Trump from ever returning to the United States or any country that has an extradition treaty with the U.S.), desperate people are known to make rash decisions without thinking through the full array of consequences of their actions.
Would the U.S. let Trump leave? As DeChalus rightly explains, until he’s charged, the former president is free to come and go as he pleases, and he would have a choice from a few nations that don’t have extradition agreements with the United States:
“Nevertheless, Trump, like any other American citizen, is free to leave the US since he hasn’t been charged with a crime … The possibilities of where Trump could hide to avoid prosecution are plenty. There were more than 70 countries that did not have an extradition agreement with the US as of 2020. These countries included China, Belarus, Russia, Saudi Arabia — and Indonesia, where Trump’s company is in the process of constructing new hotels and golf courses.”
It’s also instructive to recall that Trump isn’t just under investigation in New York, though the stakes are highest in the Empire State. But the former president is also facing legal jeopardy in Washington, D.C. for his inaugural campaign’s odd spending at Trump-owned hotels and a prosecutor in Fulton County, Georgia, has also empaneled a grand jury to take a close look at a phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which the former president urged Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn the result in the Peach State.
Will Trump leave the country to avoid being prosecuted? Probably not, but a coward like him is likely to do all sorts of bizarre things as the walls start to close in around him.
