18 November 20
Urgent and Immediate Appeal for Donations
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18 November 20
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Can America Restore the Rule of Law Without Prosecuting Trump?
Jonathan Mahler, The New York Times
Mahler writes: "Early in November, as President Trump challenged the integrity of the election with baseless lawsuits, Joe Biden delivered his first speech as president-elect, declaring it a 'time to heal.'"
Donald Trump’s potential criminal liability is the key to understanding his presidency. When he leaves office, it will present the country with a historic dilemma.
It was a phrase that many Americans were surely longing to hear, given the precarious state of the nation’s political culture. But it was also one that carried significant historical weight and possible implications for the future. When President Gerald R. Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for his role in the Watergate scandal, he, too, spoke about the need for “healing.” (Ford titled his subsequent memoir “A Time to Heal.”) When President Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address during the waning days of the Civil War, he spoke in similar terms about the imperative to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” Whether Biden intended to do so, his words provided an early signal about one of the first questions he is going to confront as president: What to do about Donald Trump? Biden faces many daunting challenges — mitigating the ongoing damage from the pandemic, repairing institutions, restoring faith in government — but how to deal with his predecessor’s flagrant and relentless subversion of the rule of law is in many ways the most vexing.
Last year, one of Trump’s lawyers, William Consovoy, memorably argued in open court that a sitting president could shoot a man in public and not be prosecuted. The legal validity of this claim notwithstanding, there is nothing to protect a former president from prosecution. No ex-president has ever been indicted before, but no president has ever left office with so much potential criminal liability.
As the election approached and the polls pointed to a Trump defeat, there was a growing sense that his moment of reckoning was coming. He was, after all, already the subject of a criminal investigation by the district attorney of Manhattan as well as a civil investigation by the attorney general of New York State. Both of those inquiries concern his conduct as a private businessman. The bigger and infinitely more fraught question is how to address Trump’s potentially criminal acts as a political candidate and president. Those would most likely be federal crimes that could only be prosecuted by the federal government.
One could make the argument that BILL BARR's destruction of evidence and pardons prevented the senile pResident and his CIA DIRECTOR VP from impeachment:
When President George H.W. Bush pardoned six Reagan White House officials who were involved in the Iran-contra affair, he warned of “a profoundly troubling development in the political and legal climate of our country: the criminalization of policy differences.” Bush was sparing members of his own party.
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