IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO NOT PROSECUTE DONALD TRUMP’S CRIMES

 

                                         …Attorney General, Merrick Garland

 

Trump’s crimes are too important, and too dangerous, to ignore.

 

“What the heck is Attorney General Merrick Garland up to?” said Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post.  “Over the last seven weeks, the Jan. 6 committee has made more progress than the Department of Justice (DOJ) at linking former President Donald Trump to potential crimes.”  They’ve shown that Trump was repeatedly informed by top officials that he’d clearly lost the 2020 election, but he still tried to overturn state election results and he participated in a plot to submit fake electors.  White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Trump knew some of his Jan. 6 rallygoers were armed with weapons, and that he intended to lead them to the Capitol.  Meanwhile, Justice Department prosecutors, taking a “bottoms-up” approach, has so far, only focused on the rioters.  They were reportedly “astonished” by Hutchinson’s testimony.  If a president who tried to engineer a violent coup escapes prosecution , it “would amount to the greatest failure in the department’s history.”

Trump knows he faces multiple potential prosecutions, said Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley in Rolling Stone, and Trump has a plan of dodging them.  He plans to announce an early start to his 2024 presidential campaign.  Trump recently told a New York magazine interviewer that his mind is already made up, and that the only decision left is whether to announce “before or after” the 2022 midterms.  By running, Trump can claim Garland and other prosecutors are just Democrats conducting political prosecutions of the possible GOP nominee.  All this “puts country in an incredibly dangerous situation” said Damon Linker in his Substack newsletter.  Per the newsletter, prosecuting a former president, even a “would-be tyrant, could muddy ”the distinction between justice and officially sanctioned persecution of political opponents.”  The “rule of law itself” would be on trial, and for Trump’s tens of millions of devotees, “I’m not at all sure it would end up exonerated.”

Only “the gravest circumstances” can justify an attempt to imprison a former president said Jonathen Bernstein in Bloomberg, but that’s what we now face.  Trump, the House committee has clearly demonstrated, used the powers of his office to attempt “to overturn an election that he had lost.”  Not to prosecute a crime of that magnitude would be a political decision, and the DOJ should not be cowed by warnings that: “Trump’s base would act violently.” 

“Trump’s crimes are too important, and too dangerous, to ignore.”

Copyright G. Ater 2022