In addition to the criminal charges failed one-term former president Donald Trump could face when Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith completes his investigation of the classified documents Trump had illegally at Mar-a-Lago, a report from The New York Times also suggests that Smith may well indict Trump for wire fraud.
According to The Times, “Led by the special counsel Jack Smith, prosecutors are trying to determine whether Mr. Trump and his aides violated federal wire fraud statutes as they raised as much as $250 million through a political action committee by saying they needed the money to fight to reverse election fraud even though they had been told repeatedly that there was no evidence to back up those fraud claims.”
“In the past several months, prosecutors have issued multiple batches of subpoenas in a wide-ranging effort to understand Save America,” The Times added, “which was set up shortly after the election as Mr. Trump’s main fund-raising entity.”
That led former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner to note during a Saturday appearance on MSNBC, “Wire fraud is the stock and trade of the federal prosecutors. If you use the wires, it’s an old-time term, it used to mean the TV, the radio, the telephone — now it’s the internet — as part of a scheme to defraud others out of their money.”
Kirschner continued, “Those are fairly easy charges to prove. So I have a feeling, you can see a series of wire fraud charges in what I would predict would be the larger charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
Trump has been committing fraud for decades by refusing to pay contractors, attorneys, and employees. But defrauding the United States is a much more serious matter, if only because the DOJ has almost unlimited resources to pursue Donald to the doors of the nearest federal prison.