The news of Donald John Trump’s indictment seems slightly strange.
By that the old Lobsterman means: How could something so big – the first criminal indictment of an American president – seem so small?
The Orange Despot was NOT indicted for his efforts to overturn the results of the ’20 election or for engaging in egregious financial fraud to increase his wealth or even for allegedly obstructing the special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, which many once thought was the best avenue prosecutors had to ensnare “the former guy.”
NO, No, no…that was NOT to be…[yet some of us await such indictments in the near future].
Instead, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, and his team of prosecutors have brought the country back six and a half years, to the final weeks of the ’16 election, when Trump paid an adult film star to prevent her from going public with a story about an affair she said they had while Trump was married [the details of what the indictment contains remain unknown – its contents will be unsealed after Boy Orange turns himself in].
NO matter what the precise charges are, the prosecution will raise unusual and arguably novel legal issues.
And, as we’ve ALL seen Re’Trump’licans are ALREADY mounting an effort to frame Bragg as a political hack who is ‘weaponizing’ his office to take down Trump on behalf of Dems.
ALL that being said, you can make book that Bragg may have been the first local prosecutor to do it, but he will probably NOT be the last.
In thinking about, as well as watching and listening to the maddening crowds over the last three days, I’m now more convinced than ever that every local prosecutor in the country will now feel that he/she has free rein to criminally investigate!!! and prosecute presidents after they leave office.
It’ll become a political weapon of sorts!!!
The vast range, breadth and diversity of criminal laws throughout the country provide plenty of opportunity for mischief.
As the attorney general and future justice Robert Jackson observed more than 80 years ago, “A prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone.” He added, “It is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it; it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books or putting investigators to work to pin some offense on him.”
There is probably NOT much that presidents can do to mitigate individual personal risks, except perhaps to try to limit as many of their unofficial activities – where they live, vacation and conduct business and/or nonprofit work – to states and localities that are safely and consistently run by the same party.
So-o-o, why is it wrong to hope, as well as expect, that our president is a moral upstanding citizen with NO skeletons in the closet to come back to haunt him/her?
h/t: Robert H. Jackson Center.
Lobster on the Prairie 