Trump's Deepest Gift to the Republic
Tell Me How This Ends ^ | 18 Nov, 2024 | Chris Bray
Posted on 11/19/2024 6:57:59 AM PST by MtnClimber
A hundred years from now, Americans will benefit from a lesson learned in this election: When a political party prosecutes the leading figure of the opposing party in an attempt to influence an upcoming election, voters revolt against the politicization of criminal justice. Prosecuting the other side as a political maneuver makes a martyr — who probably wins the next election, the retribution election.
Shorter version: Donald Trump just buried lawfare. Maybe forever, certainly for a long time. And political lawfare, this profoundly authoritarian misuse of police and prosecutorial power, needed to be killed and buried. Conservative-ish media interprets the moment narrowly:
So lawfare against Trump, by Democrats, is over. I don’t think that’s the point. I think the point is that lawfare is discredited, full stop. Ninety years from now, when the Taylor Swift Party thinks about prosecuting the presumptive presidential nominee of the Drake Party, they’ll be all like, wait, didn’t that like not work and stuff? Donald Trump didn’t kill Democratic lawfare against Donald Trump; Donald Trump killed lawfare. Win elections with political arguments, the end.
Now, NBC News has published a story today that would win all the prizes for tone-deafness and missing the point, if we had journalism awards for that. I’m hinting about a new kind of journalism award, by the way, if anyone wants to design the trophies.
Oh no, Trump might “prosecute adversaries.”
But the story hurls itself right over the peak of the whole point with these paragraphs about an interview with the law professor Ilya Somin:
Somin warned that a prosecutor can investigate an individual over a long period and find that they had broken unrelated federal laws that cover minor offenses.
If Trump’s attorney general, for example, appoints a special prosecutor to examine the federal criminal investigations of Trump, they could find that a Justice Department or FBI official broke a federal law that does not relate to the Trump probes, such as a tax or drug infraction.
“If you think about it, a majority of adult Americans have probably violated federal laws, such as smoking marijuana, at some point in their lives,” Somin said.
Wow, so if a prosecutor starts with the person, wanting to charge a particular person with a crime and then going out and hunting for a way to do that, rather than starting with a reported crime, they can probably stumble into something stupid but prosecutable, because a majority of Americans have probably done something illegal at some point. Like, I don’t know, the 34 felonies of having your accountant pay your lawyer and record the payments in a ledger and with invoices?
I wrote repeatedly here about the Trump lawfare books, which all very openly bragged about trying to cook up something to stick onto Trump. The Manhattan DA’s office, Mark Pomerantz told us, assigned a bunch of staff prosecutors to a Get Trump effort, well ahead of having an identified crime to pursue, and then brought in retired prosecutors and high-powered litigators borrowed from white shoe law firms on temporary assignment. They:
1. Decided to prosecute Trump
2. Then built giant teams of lawyers to do that
3. Then tried to figure out things to charge him with, sometimes testing creative legal theories through months of brainstorming sessions
4. And then charged him.
See also the nearly identical boasting from the cretinous Norm Eisen, the District of Columbia’s village idiot.
Now scroll back up and look at what Ilya Somin told NBC News. The warning against Trump’s presumptive hypothetical future lawfare is a precise warning against the Get Trump lawfare....SNIP
TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: elections
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1 posted on 11/19/2024 6:57:59 AM PST by MtnClimber
To: MtnClimber
And the democRAT voters are either too stupid to see the corruption or they really don’t care about their side being corrupt. They hysterically claim Trump will use lawfare against his opposition when it is their side that actually did it. And the ‘RATs fail to see the irony.
2 posted on 11/19/2024 6:59:39 AM PST by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery, wildlife and climbing, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
To: MtnClimber
I hope that someone is scouting out a good location for Trump’s position on Mount Rushmore and is beginning to file the preliminary environmental impact statement for the construction.
3 posted on 11/19/2024 7:03:26 AM PST by Oscar in Batangas (An Honors Graduate from the Don Rickles School of Personal Verbal Intercourse)
To: MtnClimber
“Donald Trump just buried lawfare.”
All it takes is to be a billionaire with a very thick skin, a huge stubborn streak, and almost superhuman stamina. Given those things, anyone can beat lawfare. Easy peasy.
4 posted on 11/19/2024 7:04:48 AM PST by rightwingcrazy (;-,)
To: Oscar in Batangas
I think you’re right. Maybe consider Reagan at the same time.
5 posted on 11/19/2024 7:05:27 AM PST by Sacajaweau
To: MtnClimber
6 posted on 11/19/2024 7:05:39 AM PST by Delta 21 (If anyone is treasonous, it is those who call me such.)
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