Finally, they have their man.
At long last, the nation’s most notorious falsifier of business records, the outlaw who has for years terrorized helpless accountants and hapless election regulators with a merciless campaign of bookkeeping irregularities and infringements of campaign finance laws, faces justice.
Thanks to the courage of a lone district attorney, the moral fortitude of a sex worker who ultimately earned $130,000 from a (disappointing, she said) one-night stand, and the disciplined integrity of a now-disbarred lawyer who endured prison time for tax evasion and false statements, the reign of terror of this cruel violator of auditing norms will soon be at an end.
Let us bow our heads to the majesty of the law.
Democrats can feel proud of themselves this week when Donald Trump walks into the courtroom in Manhattan to face his arraignment.
Unless Alvin Bragg has been hiding the most monumental legal ace up his sleeve for the last six months, the charges that are about to drop against the former president have all the moral—and, as far as we can tell, legal—weight, of one of
delicately spun ice creams.
With this shoddily prefabricated case, a sordid cast of supporting characters and an overbearing eagerness to delegitimize all opposition, they have in one go succeeded in discrediting the judicial process, lowered us all one more notch down the ratchet of civic self-destruction, and, in the process, probably precluded any chance of ever securing public legitimacy for an accounting of the former president’s actual crimes and misdemeanors, of which there are plenty.
Qualified legal minds can explain better than I why the Manhattan case as we know it is so flimsy (listen to my podcast interview with Jonathan Turley for a full explanation), but you get a powerful sense from their impressively united public defense that even Democrats know this is an abuse.
“No one is above the law,” they solemnly intone, as though summoning the spirits of Moses, Solon and the barons of Magna Carta. But we are wise enough in the ways of the law to know that this is the convenient, clichéd refuge of every politically motivated scoundrel.
Did the law tower above Hillary Clinton? Does it throw shade over Hunter Biden? What about the street miscreants Mr. Bragg’s office chooses not to prosecute every day in Manhattan?
That we are all subject to the law’s authority doesn’t mean we all feel its weight for every breach of its many proscriptions. Prosecutorial discretion is exercised every day by people like Mr. Bragg. There are no hard-and-fast rules, but it’s a fair bet that most prudential legal brains would caution restraint when considering the prosecution of a former president and current candidate on a charge built on weak evidence and a fragile legal theory that wouldn’t be pursued against anyone else. But in this case there was never any question of exercising “discretion,” since the prosecutor had found a crime and culprit before he had even begun investigating—before he was even elected district attorney in 2021.
Some Democrats must know how seriously this indictment undermines their most basic argument against Mr. Trump. They used to have more of a point than his defenders when they accused the man of trashing democratic norms, flouting the constitutional order and menacing the rule of law. Spare us the performative disgust, please, Republican apologists—especially you,
It took you two years to decide that your former boss’s attempts to subvert an election and illegally install himself as president, using you as his pawn, was “wrong.”
Yes, both sides can claim a great victory with this travesty. It gets Republicans off the hook for their craven accommodations, since they can now claim the whole effort to get Mr. Trump was indeed a witch hunt. Democrats get the day in court they have been rehearsing for seven years.
The media have been breathlessly talking up how all this represents the most dramatic, unprecedented moment in American political and legal history, a new line crossed for a peaceable republican government.
Forgive me if I couldn’t muster the same excitement. To me it seems like an entirely predictable, even somewhat dreary escalation in the cold civil war the country has been fighting for decades, another small step toward the complete delegitimation of all political opposition, another exercise in the weaponization of the law for political ends, another episode in the subordination of every single aspect of our civic lives to the cause of partisan political advantage.
Perhaps a decent jury will hear the evidence and come to the right verdict. It would be fitting if the politicians and the prosecutors and the whole sorry procession of angry zealots were saved from the consequences of their own vain folly by the common sense of ordinary people.
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
