Former President Donald Trump was indicted by the Manhattan district attorney on Thursday for his role in paying alleged hush money to a porn star. The move raised a number of legal questions as Trump vies for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination; one of them being—do criminal charges disqualify Trump from being elected president?
The short answer is that even if Trump is convicted, the charges against him won’t disqualify him from the presidency, legal experts tell TIME.
“There is no constitutional bar on a felon running for office,” says Richard Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA Law School. “And given that the U.S. Constitution sets presidential qualifications, it is not clear that states could add to them, such as by barring felons from running for office.”
Under the constitution, all natural born citizens who are at least 35 years old and have been a resident of the U.S. for 14 years can run for president. There is no legal impediment to Trump continuing his presidential campaign while facing criminal charges—even if he were jailed, legal experts say….
And while Trump is the first former president to be charged with a crime, he’s far from the first presidential candidate to run despite criminal charges. At least two candidates with criminal convictions have even run for president in the past, albeit unsuccessfully. Hasen, of UCLA Law, noted that in 1920 a candidate named Eugene Debs ran for president while in a federal prison in Atlanta as the nominee of the Socialist Party. Debs was convicted of violating the Espionage Act over an anti-war speech, and won more than 3% of the vote nationally. Another convicted presidential candidate, Lyndon LaRouche, ran for president in every election between 1976 and 2004. LaRouche, a fringe candidate who embraced conspiracy theories, was convicted of tax and mail fraud in 1988 and ran his 1992 campaign from prison.