Inside the Justice Dept.’s decision on whether to charge former President Trump in the Mar-a-Lago case:
, Asia Janay Lavarello was sentenced to three months in prison. She had pleaded guilty to taking classified records home from her job as an executive assistant at the U.S. military’s command in Hawaii.
People familiar with the deliberations of Attorney General Merrick Garland and his top aides say the AG does not believe it’s his job to consider the political or social ramifications of indicting a former president, including the potential for violent backlash. The main factors in his decision, these people say, are whether the facts and the law support a successful prosecution — and whether anyone else who had donewould have been prosecuted.
The addition of Raskin, an experienced former terrorism prosecutor, and David Rody, another veteran prosecutor who left a law firm partnership to join the investigation, is widely seen as an effort to beef up the prosecution team in the event the case goes to trial. “It’s precisely in cases like this where so much is on the line for the Department of Justice that it’s critical for DOJ leaders to participate in discussions on whether to approve charges,” Laufman said. “They should have the opportunities to kick the tires hard and as often as possible, and ultimately they should own the decision to approve or disapprove for the first time in American history potential criminal charges against a former president.
“I think it’s a relatively minor case, and I don’t think you bring a minor case against a former president,” that person said. Pho “compromised some of our country’s most closely held types of intelligence and forced the NSA to abandon important initiatives to protect itself and its operational capabilities at a great economic and operational cost,” Maryland U.S. Attorney Robert Hur said at the time.A former NSA contractor, Harold Martin, was sentenced in 2019 after prosecutors said he took home at least 50 terabytes of data — the equivalent of 500 million pages of mostly highly classified material — over 20 years.
“The reason he will almost certainly be indicted, in my view, is because of his efforts to obstruct and conceal the documents and prevent the government from recovering them," said Moss.
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