Former President Trump is already facing charges in New York, Florida, and more than likely Georgia, too, by the end of the year. The Left’s full-court legal press again the 2024 GOP frontrunner is underway.
But what about a fourth courtroom battlefront?
Right here in the Garden State?
Anti-Trump publications were running with the idea on Wednesday morning; he’s an excerpt from The Atlantic‘s though experiment on the topic:
“[Jack] Smith appears to have taken a cautious, narrow approach. Even though the indictment describes alleged dissemination and disclosure of national-security secrets, the indictment did not charge Trump with those offenses.
One possible explanation for his decision: venue. The Constitution requires prosecutors to bring charges in the location—or venue—where the alleged criminal conduct took place. Justice Department prosecutors could not necessarily bring charges against Trump in Miami for alleged criminal conduct that occurred in another state, in this case New Jersey. But the absence of such charges in the indictment raises the intriguing possibility of another indictment to come, in a jurisdiction, no less, with a pool of jurors and judges more favorable to the government’s case against Trump.
The government could make a solid argument that Florida is, in fact, an appropriate location to bring the charges for dissemination at Bedminster. “Any offense against the United States begun in one district and completed in another,” according to a congressional statute, may be “prosecuted in any district in which such offense was begun, continued, or completed.” Just last year, the Court of Appeals with jurisdiction over Florida applied that statute in an analogous situation, holding that a defendant charged with storing drugs in Alabama and transporting them to Tennessee for distribution could be prosecuted in Alabama for drug distribution.
But perhaps Smith did not want to count on the Supreme Court to recognize Florida as an appropriate venue. Judges have not issued definitive rulings on how the law of venue applies to the national-security statutes under which Trump has been charged. Plus, any creative law student—or judicial clerk fresh out of law school—could find ways to distinguish the conspiracy to possess and sell drugs in another state from the crime of disclosure of classified information. Smith might have reasoned that the government could lose on the issue of venue for any dissemination charges it tried in a Florida court. And that could potentially be fatal to ever bringing those charges even in the place that’s an obvious venue option: New Jersey.”
The Left’s obsession with New Jersey is about more than finding a favorable jury pool from a blue state; since the assigned federal judge in Florida is a Trump appointee, the ex-president’s enemies are fretting that she could somehow derail the Department of Justice’s Mar-a-Lago-centric case.
This is how you start to think when your TDS reaches the critical, incurable phase.
