Jail Time Debate Club

Who Should be in prison now? Trump vs Nickson and Others? You decide! If convicted in any of the three criminal cases he is facing, Donald Trump may be able to influence whether he goes to prison and what his stay there looks like under a law that allows former U.S. presidents to keep Secret Service protection for life, some current and former U.S. officials said. NATIONAL SECURITY If Trump is convicted, Secret Service protection may be obstacle to imprisonment Donald Trump can keep Secret Service protection for life, even if he were to be convicted and sentenced to prison or home confinement If convicted in any of the three criminal cases he is facing, Donald Trump may be able to influence whether he goes to prison and what his stay there looks like under a law that allows former U.S. presidents to keep Secret Service protection for life, some current and former U.S. officials said. Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics. Presidents since 1965 have been afforded lifetime protection. Since then, only Richard M. Nixon has waived it, as a cost-saving move for taxpayers 11 years after his resignation. But unless he follows Nixon’s example, Trump could force politically and logistically complex questions over whether officials should detail agents to protect a former American president behind bars, leave it to prison authorities to keep him safe, or secure him under some type of home confinement, former U.S. officials said. Could Trump face prison? “Theoretically, yes and practically, no,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former top federal prosecutor and counsel to then-FBI Director James B. Comey. Rosenberg served briefly as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in the Trump administration and notably said the president had “condoned police misconduct” in remarking to officers in Long Island that they need not protect suspects’ heads when loading them in to police vehicles. Donald Trump has been indicted in four cases. The Washington Post is keeping track of where each Trump investigation stands. Here is a breakdown of all 91 charges Trump faces. End of carousel Trump is now facing three separate criminal cases, with the prospect of at least one more on the horizon. He has a pending March trial date in a New York state fraud case. He was charged by special counsel Jack Smith in federal court in Florida over the handling of classified documents that were taken from his Mar-a-Lago home after he left the White House. In federal court in D.C., Smith’s team alleges Trump conspired to subvert the results of the 2020 election. He could soon be charged in Georgia on similar allegations. Even after his fall from grace, Nixon found a way to serve. At the initiative of Edmund Muskie and Howard Baker, he joined a confidential initiative to counsel Ronald Reagan in shaping productive diplomacy with Mikhail Gorbachev. And Bill Clinton, no less, stated publicly that Nixon had given him some of the best advice he received. Can anyone imagine a future president calling on Trump for advice on policy? It would be a disservice to history to conflate the records and memories of Trump and Nixon. It is not too early to resist that inclination. If you live in America today, the one historical fact you are most likely to have heard is that former President Donald Trump is the first U.S. president ever to face criminal charges. What is not as well-known is how many previous presidents came close — or might have come close — to confrontation with the U.S. criminal justice system. Unique as he is in many ways, Trump is not the first president to gaze out the White House windows and wonder if one day he might wake up behind bars. Trump uses his indictment to unify GOP, even as his vulnerabilities are glaring POLITICS Trump uses his indictment to unify GOP, even as his vulnerabilities are glaring A president has faced arrest before Trump — for carriage speeding, 150 years ago POLITICS A president has faced arrest before Trump — for carriage speeding, 150 years ago We have had one president who was named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" by a federal grand jury in a breathtakingly wide conspiracy case that sent some of Washington's biggest names to jail. That happened in 1974 and the president was Republican Richard Nixon, the centerpiece figure in the scandal known as Watergate. Nixon was also the one president who felt it necessary to tell a televised news conference: "I am not a crook." Watergate involved burglaries, illegal wiretaps and other crimes committed by operatives for Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign. There had been months of concerted White House efforts to cover up those crimes. Forty federal officials were indicted or jailed in the case, including Nixon's chief of staff, White House attorney, chief domestic adviser and attorney general. All had carried out orders that, directly or indirectly, originated with Nixon himself. On the brink of impeachment in August 1974, Nixon resigned. An indictment might well have followed, but in September he received a blanket pardon from his successor, Gerald Ford. Nixon had chosen Ford when the previous vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned in 1973 over corruption charges of his own. Ford's popularity plummeted after the pardon and he lost his bid for a term in the White House in his own right in 1976. There has never been any proof that Ford agreed to the pardon before Nixon's resignation. Nixon's shield becomes Trump's But why did that grand jury name Nixon an "unindicted co-conspirator"? Because an opinion from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in 1973 had said a sitting president could not not be indicted. Some, including former U.S. Solicitor General Walter Dellinger, have argued that the OLC prohibition on indicting the president dealt "mainly with the question of whether a president can be put on trial." Dellinger was head of the OLC from 1993 to 1996. Nonetheless, the 1973 OLC opinion was treated as policy in the Justice Department in 2019, when independent counsel Robert Mueller was reporting on links between Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and Russian interference in that year's election. Mueller did not find such links, but his report did cite several instances of what some legal authorities considered obstruction of justice. That idea was flatly dismissed by William Barr, who was the Trump's attorney general at the time, who treated the Mueller report as an exoneration (over Mueller's objections). Some Democrats in the House read Mueller's report as a "road map" to impeachment. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not support calls for impeachment at that time. (She later supported impeachment proceedings over Trump's pressuring Ukraine to investigate Joseph Biden, who would be Trump's opponent in 2020.) It is worth noting, too, that impeachment "for high crimes and misdemeanors" is a congressional action. It is not the same thing as a being indicted or charged by the criminal justice system. And we saw that again in the case of Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The Clinton case: impeachment but no arrest Clinton was accused of giving false testimony to a grand jury, which amounts to perjury, and obstruction of justice. It happened in 1998, as Clinton dealt with the fallout from his affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. Clinton had been pursued by special counsels since shortly after his election in 1992. An extensive investigation of Whitewater, a real estate deal tied to a savings-and-loan failure in his home state of Arkansas, led to criminal charges against some of Clinton's former associates, but not against Clinton or first lady Hillary Clinton, who had been an attorney in Arkansas while her husband was governor. But one of the special counsels, Ken Starr, appointed by a federal appeals court, eventually made the case about Lewinsky. That supplied the substance for an impeachment proceeding in the House in the fall of 1998. In December, the House approved one article of impeachment for perjury and one for obstruction of justice, both based on Clinton's false representations regarding Lewinsky. The vote on both articles was close and almost perfectly followed party lines. And, like Trump two decades later, Clinton was found not guilty in the Senate. In the Clinton case, though the Senate was 55-45 Republican at the time, the chamber could not muster a majority for a guilty verdict on either count — let alone the two-thirds majority required. It is worth noting that Clinton's impeachment was not popular with the electorate. Clinton registered a 73% approval in the month the House approved the articles against him, and he left office two years later at 66%. Several other women also came forward to accuse Clinton of sexual advances and even assaults, but none of their efforts resulted in criminal charges during or after his presidency. Out of office, Clinton's attorneys negotiated a five-year suspension of his license to practice law back in his home state. But he has not been formally indicted or charged with any crime, anywhere. There have been allegations of "womanizing" or other forms of abusive relationships lodged against other presidents — including after they have left office. John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960 and assassinated three years later, has been the subject of many such reports, in some cases involving well-known individuals such as the movie star Marilyn Monroe.