Donald Trump is now facing three indictments. Can he still run for president?

Donald Trump is now the subject of three criminal cases – at a time when he is hot on the trail of another stint in the White House. The former president was indicted, again, by a federal grand jury on 1 August – two months after Special Counsel Jack Smith unveiled charges against the former president for his alleged retention of classified documents. This time, Mr Trump faces four counts of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, conspiracy against rights and obstruction of, and attempt to obstruct, an official proceeding. The charges are related to Mr Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the subsequent January 6 attack on the Capitol. In the 45-page unsealed indictment , the Department of Justice outlined the ways that Mr Trump and six co-conspirators allegedly attempted to spread false claims of election fraud and obstruct Congress’ certification of the election results. Mr Trump also is at the centre of another Justice Department special counsel investigation surrounding his alleged illegal retention of government papers and showing highly-classified information to unauthorised persons on two separate occasions, among many other allegations. Earlier this year, Mr Trump became the first-ever former or current president to face criminal charges when a New York City grand jury voted to indict him on criminal charges involving hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the days before the 2016 presidential election. He pleaded not guilty in that case to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in order to conceal an alleged scheme to illegally influence the national vote by suppressing negative stories about him. That followed another Manhattan civil jury finding Mr Trump liable for the sexual abuse of Elle magazine columnist E Jean Carroll in a dressing room of the exclusive Bergdorf Goodman department store in the 1990s. Ms Carroll, 79, sued the former president for assaulting her and then ‘destroying’ her reputation when he accused of lying about the encounter, claiming that she was not his ‘type’. He also faces a $250m civil lawsuit from New York attorney general Letitia James , whose investigation allegedly reveals ‘years of illegal conduct to inflate his net worth… to deceive banks and the people of the great state of New York.’ Mr Trump remains the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination for president and has insisted that he will remain in the race regardless of any outcome in the criminal cases against him. He also has relied on news of the investigations and indictments to raise money for his campaign, which has netted millions of dollars. But with potential convictions and judgments in both state and federal indictments and with multi-million dollar lawsuits to fight, what will the state of chaos mean for Mr Trump’s political future? In short, yes. There are no restrictions in the US Constitution to prevent anyone under indictment or convicted of a crime – or even currently serving prison time, for that matter – from running for or winning the presidency. Even if Mr Trump were to be tried and convicted in one of the so-called ‘quick trials’ he has repeatedly cheered China’s government for operating in cases of drug offences, he could still run the entirety of his presidential campaign from a prison cell. What is far less clear is what would happen were he to win in that scenario. Just as there are no restrictions in the Constitution on a person running while under indictment, there is no explanation for what should occur in the event that they win. There is nothing in the founding document that would automatically grant Mr Trump a reprieve from prison time, save for the likelihood that any charges brought by federal authorities, were they still being litigated at the point when he assumed the presidency for a second time, would be dropped due to the Justice Department ‘s refusal to prosecute a sitting president. All that could change if Mr Trump is charged and convicted for insurrection in connection with the Justice Department’s probe into January 6, however. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states that no one can ‘hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State’ if they took an oath to support the Constitution and then ‘engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.’ The House select committee investigating the events surrounding January 6 unanimously agreed that Mr Trump should be charged for inciting an insurrection and giving aid or comfort to insurrectionists – a rare and severe charge that prosecutors will approach only with extreme caution, if they decide to prosecute at all. In Ms Carroll’s case, Mr Trump did not face any jail time because it was a civil trial. State-level charges like the ones filed by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg in the hush money case are far trickier and would fall outside of Mr Trump’s prospective presidential pardon power were they to conclude in a conviction. Were conviction on state charges to occur alongside a Trump election victory, it would likely lead to a massive legal fight to determine whether there was a way for the former president to worm his way out of serving time. If Mr Trump was unable to avoid that outcome, it would almost certainly lead to his impeachment (for a historic third time) or removal via the 25th Amendment, which allows the Cabinet to remove a president who is unable to perform their duties. There are many duties and trappings of the presidency that he would simply be unable to fulfill from a prison cell, the viewing of classified materials to name just one. Any potential conviction of Mr Trump is still a long way off and little more than a distant possibility. But the conversations he has started with his bid for the presidency, despite facing two indictments and multiple criminal investigations, have already pushed parts of theoretical US constitutional law into a much more real place than many experts ever believed they would live to see. The former president has repeatedly characterised the multiple investigations against him, including the January 6 probe, as a politically motivated ‘hoax’ and an attempt to ‘steal’ the 2024 election from him. On 1 August, Mr Trump called Mr Smith ‘deranged’ and the January 6th indictment a ‘fake indictment’. ‘The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes. President Trump has always followed the law and the Constitution with advice from many highly accomplished attorneys,’ a statement from Mr Trump’s campaign read. This story was updated on 1 August 2023 to reflect new developments