Trump case is a test for the nation

The first federal indictment of a U.S. president was announced Friday with all due objectivity, sobriety, clarity, and restraint.

The 37 felony counts against Donald Trump, and six separate counts against his personal assistant Walt Nauta, were voted up by a grand jury of citizens in south Florida. The indictment includes violations of the Espionage Act for mishandling classified documents that Trump had no business keeping or showing others once he left office. For refusing to return the papers, some with the highest levels of security, to the U.S. government and then trying to hide them from investigators, he was charged with conspiring to obstruct justice.

This is the second Trump indictment. He’s charged in New York over hush-money payments to porn actor Stormy Daniels. He faces criminal probes of his efforts in Georgia to retroactively harvest more votes in the 2020 electoral count and in Washington for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

Issues raised in this documents case, however, are severe for their national security implications. As chillingly described, one document concerned “United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.”

Classified information in those documents, for which some in the intelligence service and military may have risked their lives, were recovered from an office space, Trump’s bedroom, a storage room, a bathroom, a ballroom, and in the shower. According to the indictment, Trump asked one of his lawyers if it wasn’t possible to respond to a grand jury subpoena by saying “we don’t have anything here.”

Reading this, an ordinary American can reasonably ask: What kind of president — let alone citizen — would conduct himself this way? Trump allegedly showed Pentagon plans to people without security clearance. Why? A president who treated the levers of government as his own allegedly did the same with the nation’s secrets.

Trump gives no real answer when he responds with venom. True to form, he has personally attacked Special Counsel Jack Smith and called it yet another “WITCH HUNT!” But this case is built on the grand jury testimony of three of his lawyers and other aides and the recovery of boxes upon boxes of intelligence documents.

In brief remarks, career prosecutor Smith drove home what all Americans should remember as this case unfolds. “We have one set of laws in this country — they apply to everyone,” Smith told the nation. “Applying those laws, collecting facts, that’s what determines the outcome of an investigation.” And: “The defendants in this case must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.”

If Smith sticks to that view, he and the Justice Department will serve the republic regardless of the political climate. These charges belong before a jury. Our constitutional processes are being tested. With fairness and restraint in words and actions, the justice system will pass this hard but necessary test.