Here are the five major investigations into the former president, mapped.
Could Donald Trump actually go to prison? |
This question has been on our minds for some time. He is the focus of so many investigations, for so many different reasons, it has been hard to keep them all straight — and to assess what kind of legal jeopardy he's actually in. |
My colleagues in the Opinion graphics department and I thought we might be able to untangle his legal troubles by mapping them. We could do the visual part, but we knew we needed a lawyer to help us with the analysis. |
Laura Reston, a politics editor in Opinion, knew exactly who could do that job: Ankush Khardori. He is a contributing editor to Politico and New York Magazine and a former federal prosecutor. |
Khardori submitted a detailed 11-page memo outlining what he thought could happen to Trump as a result of five investigations into his dealings, from his possession of classified documents to his involvement in the insurrection on January 6. |
Khardori made many surprising points on the particular legal advantages that Trump could enjoy: a supporter hanging a jury, the hornet's nest of problems in prosecuting a presidential candidate, a biased judiciary and, of course, the possibility of a presidential self-pardon should he be re-elected. As a result, our initial idea of mapping the ways that Trump could go to prison quickly became a diagram that highlights all the various ways he could stay out of prison. |
This also gave us a visual metaphor to work with. After reading Khardori's breakdown, I imagined these investigations as a long road trip with many offramps along the way. |
We wanted to design a piece that could take readers along this journey without tripping them up in the legal details. Making sense of one normal legal case is difficult, let alone five involving the former president of the United States. |
In the end, we came up with two designs: one for the website and one for the print edition. Online, we wanted people to be able to scroll through the various investigations quickly. In print, we wanted a long, sprawling diagram that they could spend a long time reading over a cup of coffee. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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