Don’t Let Trump Fool You, He Was Never Exonerated
His re-election doesn’t change the damning evidence of his crimes.
DONALD TRUMP IS TRYING TO rewrite his history as a criminal defendant.
A few days ago on Meet the Press, the president-elect said he’d been exonerated in the cases against him. “I’ve won these cases. I’ve won every one, and the rest are in the process of being won,” he declared.
Then, on Wednesday, Trump celebrated the resignation—which he had overtly encouraged—of FBI Director Christopher Wray. He claimed that under Wray, “the FBI illegally raided my home, without cause,” and “worked diligently on illegally impeaching and indicting me.”
These are lies, and Republicans are working with Trump to spread them. They want the public to believe that the feds are the bad guys, that Trump has been vindicated, and that the proper remedy for his persecution is for officials like Wray to step aside. But Trump hasn’t been vindicated. His record in court accurately reflects his corruption: thirty-four convictions in one case, four guilty pleas from co-defendants in another, two unfinished prosecutions—including the document-retention case that involved the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago home—and zero acquittals.
The snow job about Trump’s exoneration is actually three overlapping arguments. The first one is that he was cleared by courts before the election. Trump has been saying this for months. “We won the big case in Florida. We’re winning them all,” he told a crowd in September. At a rally in October, he proclaimed, “I was exonerated and fully exonerated.”
The second argument is that the election itself was a referendum on his guilt. “The American electorate was the ultimate jury, and they soundly rejected the Democrat lawfare against President Trump,” said Steve Cortes, an adviser to Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns. Jonathan Turley, a Fox News legal analyst, called Trump’s re-election “the largest effective jury verdict in history.”
The third argument is that Trump was vindicated in late November when Special Counsel Jack Smith asked courts to dismiss the two federal cases against him. Smith surrendered because “the American people essentially found President Trump innocent,” said Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, which supports the former president. Corey Lewandowski, a longtime Trump adviser, argued that if Trump were guilty,
Jack Smith would continue to go after him. But the reality is that Jack Smith’s trial and his charges against Donald Trump were a complete sham, just as they have been in the state of New York. And so what we saw in Florida, now in Washington, D.C, and in New York, is the vindication that Donald Trump did nothing wrong.
All of this is revisionist garbage.
Let’s start with the case in New York. A jury found Trump guilty of 34 felonies in a scheme to falsify business records. There’s a legitimate debate about whether the statute of limitations was properly applied. But Trump’s crimes were thoroughly documented.
The second indictment, prepared by Smith and returned by a grand jury in Florida, outlined Trump’s subterfuge to hide classified files from the government. Unlike Joe Biden, Mike Pence, and other politicians who improperly took home classified documents, Trump conspired to obstruct recovery of the documents. The indictment detailed a bizarre scheme in which, among other things, Trump (a) directed an aide to conceal boxes sought by the FBI and then (b) orchestrated an attempt to delete subpoenaed security camera footage that might expose the concealment of the boxes. This pattern of deceit is why the FBI showed up at Mar-a-Lago with a warrant. Contrary to Trump’s lies, the bureau’s search wasn’t illegal, and it wasn’t without cause.
The third indictment, prepared by Smith and returned by a grand jury in Washington, D.C., charged Trump with fraud and other crimes related to his plot to overturn the 2020 election. Records and witness testimony showed that Trump had personally pressured federal and state officials to manipulate the vote count, to authorize fake electors, or to declare the election invalid.
Smith’s filings in the D.C. case detailed numerous incriminating statements. When Justice Department officials told Trump that his allegations of fraud were false, he replied: “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” And when Pence explained that as vice president he had no constitutional authority to block the counting of electoral votes, Trump told him, “You’re too honest.”
The fourth indictment, prepared by a district attorney in Atlanta and returned by a Georgia grand jury, repeated much of the evidence in the D.C. indictment. But it added details about Trump’s role in the fake-electors scheme, including his attempts to pressure officials in Georgia and Pennsylvania to overturn Biden’s legitimate win in their states.
In each of these cases, the evidence against Trump met the standard applied by a grand jury: probable cause. In New York, the evidence yielded multiple convictions. In Georgia, it has produced four guilty pleas from Trump’s co-defendants. The D.C. and Florida cases haven’t reached trial.
SO WHAT’S THE LEGAL BASIS for Republican claims that Trump has been exonerated?
The first basis, ostensibly, is the Supreme Court’s ruling on July 1 that as a former president, he’s “entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” That ruling forced Smith to revise the D.C. indictment. But as Justice Amy Coney Barrett, one of Trump’s own appointees, noted in her concurring opinion, immunity-based arguments against indictments of a president present “no challenge whatsoever to the merits of the charge” and are “separable from” the defendant’s “guilt or innocence.”
The second ostensible basis is Judge Aileen Cannon’s July 15 dismissal of the documents case in Florida. Trump says he won this dismissal because the Presidential Records Act entitled him to keep any document he wanted.
But Cannon actually rejected that argument when Trump raised it as grounds to throw out the case before trial. Instead, she based the dismissal on a procedural argument: that Smith hadn’t been properly appointed. She called this a “threshold question,” which meant it didn’t address the facts of the case. And her ruling was so contrary to precedent that it was probably on its way to being overturned when the election intervened.
The third ostensible basis for claiming exoneration is Smith’s motions, submitted on November 25, to dismiss the D.C. and Florida cases. But as Smith explained, those motions were based on “the Constitution’s prohibition on federal indictment and prosecution of a sitting President”—which, under Justice Department guidelines, meant that his prosecutions of Trump had to be “dismissed before the defendant is inaugurated.” Smith noted that this rule did “not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Government stands fully behind.”
Smith formally requested that his cases against Trump be dismissed “without prejudice,” which meant they could be filed again once Trump leaves office. The courts accepted that stipulation. In fact, the judge in the D.C. case, in granting Smith’s request, repeated the phrase “without prejudice” six times.
In the Florida case, Smith also specified that the prosecution of Trump’s co-defendants would “continue because, unlike defendant Trump, no principle of temporary immunity applies to them.” Presumably, Trump’s attorney general will drop the case against them. But that will be an abuse of power by Trump, not a concession of error by Smith.
In sum, the number of cases in which Trump has prevailed on the merits is zero. He has escaped accountability not by discrediting the charges against him but by winning an election. And Wray’s resignation isn’t an admission of malfeasance at the FBI. It’s an acknowledgment that Trump was about to fire him.
Republicans don’t want to admit any of this. They want you to believe that voters are the ultimate jury and that by re-electing Trump, they issued the definitive judgment on his prosecutions.
That’s not how it works. Trump won the election because he’s good at lying and manipulating people. In court, it’s harder to get away with that, because judges demand evidence and enforce rules. That’s why Trump lost nearly all his legal challenges to the 2020 election. And it’s why he got convicted in New York.
Republicans want to erase that history. They’re going to lie to you, again and again, about what happened in Trump’s criminal cases. And they’re going to pretend that his re-election vindicated his smears against everyone who prosecuted, convicted, or testified against him.
Don’t let them get away with it.