Trump is now facing 37 felony charges in the classified documents case, including multiple violations of the Espionage Act, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and scheming to conceal documents from a federal investigation. In addition, he’s facing an additional 34 felony charges in New York for falsifying business records in an attempt to cover up his payments to two women with whom he allegedly had adulterous sexual encounters.
However, there’s a growing sense that all this could be the tip of a very large legal iceberg that still lies ahead. Because while Smith’s investigation into the classified documents case has revealed Trump and assistant Walt Nauta moving boxes of top secret documents into bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago, the election fraud investigation looks as if it could ensnare Trump, his advisers, his legal team, and Republicans at both the state and federal level who all conspired to overturn the government of the United States.
After the 2014 police killing of Laquan McDonald, Chicago officials appointed a commission to study policing in the city. When the commission issued its report two years later, Steve Bogira of the Chicago Reader noticed that the report bore striking similarities to a report issued after the death of Daniel Claiborne, a 70-year-old Black man, also at the hands of police.
Both reports, Bogira noted, found that residents in the city’s minority neighborhoods were frequently subjected to illegal stop and frisks. Both found that Black and Latino residents reported frequent verbal harassment and humiliation from police. Both reports found that police misconduct complaints were almost never sustained, and often weren’t thoroughly investigated. The Claiborne report found a 43-point disparity between the percentage of the city’s population that was Black and the percentage of Black people shot by police. The McDonald report found a 42-point disparity.
Here’s the punchline: the Claiborne report was issued in 1972—43 years before the McDonald report. Over nearly a half century, very little had changed.
