Grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump

The thing about Britain's constitutional arrangements is that there are many things which 'can't' be done, which it turns out simply 'aren't' done.

You could have written this exact comment about the political environment if there were live footage of him shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.

Your mistake is thinking a disastrous president that lost re-election somehow understands the modal voter. He doesn’t even understand the modal voter in swing states.

The statue of limitations in New York doesn't accumulate when the defendant is outside of the state.

I would be sure to make note of who is suggesting that legal approach. The full opinions of the court in that case can be found https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/19-635_o7jq.pdf

That's because the charges haven't been announced yet. The facts that we know are that a grand jury has voted to indict Donald Trump and has delivered a True Bill to the prosecutors.

The indictment is at this moment sealed. It should be unsealed shortly (speculation was a timeline of tonight/tomorrow, but I could also see it being early next week).

So, it's not known publicly what the specific charges are. Which is why people haven't described them in this thread. They're not yet known.

> most stories are vague.

This is partly because there's not a lot of information, but it's also because the news media needs to pump out an endless amount of content around this story (since it's both historic, and they have a profit incentive to keep people reading/watching), but there's really only a few paragraphs* of information that's currently available or relevant.

> It sounds like they have to prove two separate crimes, and connect them with intention. Intent of course is always hard to prove in court.

The speculated charges (which, again, are speculation, not the known public charges) involve a crime which is, on its own, a misdemeanor. The crime becomes a felony if it was committed with intent to commit another crime.

So, if (and again, this is a big if, since it's not the actual charges, just speculation) the prosecutors are going down that road, they don't actually have to prove two crimes. They have to prove the first crime and intent to commit another crime. They don't actually have to prove the facts of the second crime.

> Intent of course is always hard to prove in court.

Intent is hard to prove, but it's also something that gets proved in court cases frequently. For example, murder is (in almost all states) an intent crime. Prosecutors are still able to charge and convict on murder. So, while an intent element makes a case harder to make, it doesn't by default make it impossible.

For a crime similar to the being speculated about, consider Breaking and Entering. In many states a B&E is only a crime if it's done with the intent to commit another crime (in Washington state, for example, this is "Residential burglary" RCW 9A.52.025†). But if someone is caught breaking into a property at night with a ski mask and a burlap sack, prosecutors won't find it a challenge to demonstrate the requisite intent.

> Overall this seems like a weak case to me.

I think it's really too early to say at this point. I'd at least wait until the indictment is unsealed and released publicly so we can know the actual charges. Once we know the charges, and a summary of the available evidence, we'd be in a much better position to make a claim about the quality of the case.

* There's really only a single sentence of _news_ to report, but there's probably a decent amount of explaining the process that can reasonably happen, since most people aren't familiar with the details of the process.

† https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=9a.52&full=true...