Is Donald Trump going to jail? Or is he going to run for president? Why not both! On Monday, FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago, the former commander-in-chief’s current residence. By the end of the week, sources told The Washington Post that among the items removed were classified documents relating to nuclear weapons. It’s possible Trump violated the Espionage Act, as the far-right site Breitbart inadvertently revealed. But if you’re worried that Trump doing time could keep him from the most powerful gig on the planet, guess again.
On Friday’s episode of The Sean Hannity Show, the Fox News host attempted to mollify fears that Trump couldn’t run a third time.
“What do you think the next thing that happens here is, do you think that they would try and indict the former president in the hopes of convicting him and having him in jail at the time of the next election to prevent him from running,” he said. “Because a conviction by the way, constitutionally, would not prevent him from running for office.”
Whether this is true or not, it doesn’t hide the fact that Trump is potentially in deep doo-doo. By dragging classified documents down to the Florida resort in which he now lives, As Marc Elias, the top lawyer in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign pointed out, Trump may have violated U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2071. That law states that anyone “having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”
But Hannity wasn’t moved by that one etiher. “You know, this code that is being cited by Marc Elias and all these other people negates the very enumerated qualifications in the Constitution, and the specific requirements for somebody not to be eligible to run, and that would be impeachment and conviction,” Hannity said. “It doesn’t mention anything about being, you know, maybe not following every single dotted ‘I’ and crossed ‘t’ in the Presidential Records Act of the National Archives Act.”
In any case, good thing Trump’s already used to living in a massive space with lots of strangers.
(Via Raw Story)