09 June 23
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Donald John Trump (the newspapers always give all three names of criminals) has been indicted on 7 counts having to do with espionage and obstruction of justice arising from his removal of classified documents from the White House and his refusal to turn some of them over when the government demanded them. The insular American television news media keeps calling this indictment “unprecedented.” But lots of heads of state have been indicted, even indicted more than once, and tried and jailed. The U.S. has been peculiar in the degree to which it has neglected to treat ex-presidents the way ordinary citizens are treated.
In fact, in this case Trump was given enormous latitude, since he was allowed the opportunity to return the purloined classified documents. An ordinary person found with classified documents in their home would have been arrested on the spot.
Trump has been indicted, as well, for his pay-offs to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougall on the eve of the 2016 election to hide his affairs with the women from the public .
France has put two former presidents on trial. Jacques Chirac, president 1995-2007, was found guilty in 2011 of having engaged in fraud to raise money for his center-right, Gaullist Rally for the Republic Party. One of the big differences between France and the U.S. is that here it isn’t illegal to engage in fraud to raise money for political campaigns, or otherwise Trump would be indicted for that crime, too. Chirac was in poor health when found guilty and suffered from some form of dementia so that he could not remember things, so the court gave him a two-year suspended sentence.
Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France from 2007 to 2012, has just lost an appeal on his conviction in 2021 on charges of corruption and influence-peddling. He was sentenced to three years in prison, but two of those years were suspended and he is permitted to serve the remaining year under house arrest, wearing an electronic bracelet.
Sarkozy is the subject of several ongoing investigations into campaign finance violations. He was investigated for having allegedly taken money under the table from L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt. Ironically, that charge has never been made to stick. But while the investigation was going on, Sarkozy and his lawyers wanted to know its status, and they promised senior magistrate Gilbert Azibert a cushy posting in Monaco if he would find out this information for them. This is the charge on which Sarkozy has been found guilty. It is not the last time he’ll have to go to trial– like Trump, he has been indicted on more than one charge.
The US Founding Fathers were deeply influenced by French political thinkers such as Montesquieu, who advocated the separation of powers, representative government and checks and balances, as well as by Voltaire and others. If France can indict and try its ex-presidents, why not the United States, as well?
There there is Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who served as president 1981-2011. He was convicted in 2015 of embezzlement of government funds to build palaces for himself and his sons. He was sentenced to three years, but released because he had already spent three years imprisoned. He was heavily fined, in an attempt to recover the money he stole from the Egyptian people. Mubarak was also indicted for the murders of protesters in 2011, and was convicted, but the conviction was overturned on appeal. He died in 2020.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was convicted in 2014 of bribery, fraud, breach of trust and obstruction of justice. He served prison time 2015-2017 and then was released early.
Current Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is on trial for corruption, but is hoping to use his return to the prime minister’s office from last December to avoid being convicted or going to jail. Aided by extremist, far-right allies, he is attempting to gut and politicize the Israeli judiciary, so that he he manipulate it into dropping the charges against him. This attempt to tinker with Israel’s structure of governance has caused enormous crowds to demonstrate against him every Saturday evening and some weekdays for the past several months.
Of all these other cases of indicted ex-presidents, it is the Netanyahu example that tells us most about what would happen if Trump is reelected in 2024. Like Netanyahu, he will try to tinker with the US justice system so as to shape it to please him and get himself off the hook.
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