Former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said he expects former President Trump to be indicted by a special counsel appointed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to oversee two federal investigations.
Katyal, who served in the Obama administration, told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that the DOJ investigation into Trump’s handling of classified material at Mar-a-Lago is an “open and shut” case.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that if I did this, or you did this, we’d be in jail right now,” Katyal said. “We certainly wouldn’t get a special master or a special counsel or the like. It would be a very easy case.”
“It’s just the identity of the person, Donald Trump, that makes it different,” he added. “But at the end of the day, I expect Trump will be indicted by this special counsel.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland last week appointed the special counsel to oversee the Mar-a-Lago case and an investigation into whether any person or entity interfered with the peaceful transfer of power during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The special counsel is headed by Jack Smith, a longtime prosecutor who formerly served with the International Court of Justice to investigate war crimes.
Katyal said the more solid case is the Mar-a-Lago investigation, in which Trump is under investigation for taking thousands of documents from the White House, some of which were classified and could have held information about a foreign nation’s nuclear capabilities.
Trump has decried the investigation, calling it a political witch hunt and saying in a Fox News interview last week that he would not “partake in this.”
The last special counsel to investigate Trump was headed by Robert Mueller, who was appointed to determine if the Trump campaign team colluded with Russia to influence the results of the 2016 election.
While Mueller’s probe led to several charges against Trump officials, it did not find any evidence of collusion and did not charge Trump himself.
Katyal said the Mar-a-Lago case is different than the Mueller probe, noting the DOJ has already substantially investigated the case before it was turned over to the special counsel.
“The fact that [high-level indictments] didn’t happen in Mueller doesn’t to me say anything about what would happen here,” he said. “They are very different animals.”