The four criminal investigations into the former president, explained.
Donald Trump is now the first former US president to face criminal charges. He pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree.
This case involves hush money that Trump’s lawyer paid to an alleged former sexual partner. But it’s actually one of four criminal investigations into the former president. The other three investigations focus on his behavior after the 2020 presidential election.
A Georgia team is examining Trump’s efforts to persuade Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” more Trump votes after the votes had been counted and Raffensperger had declared Joe Biden the winner.
Federal special counsel Jack Smith is heading up the other two investigations. One group is looking at the Trump team’s attempts to persuade officials in a handful of states where Biden won not to certify his victory, and instead to claim Trump won the state despite the vote counts.
The other federal investigation is focused on classified documents that Trump brought with him from the White House to his Florida estate after losing the 2020 election. According to reports from the Washington Post and the New York Times, when the FBI searched his estate in August 2022, they found documents related to nuclear weapons, as well as files containing information that could put US informants in the field in danger.
As president, Trump didn’t just say outrageous things; he also acted in unprecedented ways. Now that he’s out of office, investigators in a variety of jurisdictions are trying to figure out if he broke the law, too.
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