By John Rolfe / Red Hook, N.Y.
Former Vice President Mike Pence has said history will judge Donald Trump, but he conspicuously didn’t mention the justice system having a hand in it.
“It just feels like a politically charged prosecution here,” Pence said about Trump’s possible indictment in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. “And I, for my part, I just feel like it’s just not what the American people want to see.”
Oh, yeah?
First off, the American people are hardly of one mind about Trump. There are millions who will rejoice when he is at long, long, long last held accountable in a court of law where his guilt or innocence will be determined beyond a reasonable doubt by facts, evidence and a (hopefully) impartial jury. I think it’s safe to say that most of us in this camp hoped that his first indictment would be for something more consequential than his attempt to cover up a tawdry extramarital affair of the kind that used to automatically doom political careers.
The continuous cries of “politically motivated witch hunt” from Trump and the GOP with regard to Stormy Daniels, his alleged tax evasion, attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and illegal possession of classified documents, is boilerplate hogwash.
First, it is impossible to avoid politics if a politician is involved in an alleged criminal act, especially one such as the Jan. 6 riot, which has anything to do with politics. Trump and his allies are arguing that one of the most powerful Americans is out of reach of the law. It already appears that sitting presidents are off limits, and the radical wing of the GOP — the supposed party of law and order and moral rectitude — is working to undermine legitimate investigations and the legal process itself. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky went so far as to tweet that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg should be jailed. Why? For daring to indict Trump.
Witch hunt, you say? The evidence in each case will determine if that claim is true, but I can’t imagine any prosecutor worth his sodium chloride would at this point present the kind of tissue-thin arguments and embarrassing bushwah that Trump’s legal beagles did in their court challenges of the 2020 election results. Then again, Trump and his allies have brilliantly claimed that law enforcement agencies are controlled by shadowy “deep state” Democrats who are out to get him. This leaves Trump free to flagrantly break laws because any attempt to investigate or charge him will automatically be decried and dismissed as bogus by his supporters.
If you’ve read the Mueller Report (I did, all of it), you know that the Trump campaign’s likely obstruction of justice during Mueller’s investigation made it impossible to determine his guilt or innocence. But there was plenty of probable cause for the inquiry and Mueller did establish that Trump and his people were well aware of, and hardly against, Russia’s efforts to help them by interfering in the 2016 election, so they tried hard to avoid the appearance of collusion.
Republicans argue that the Stormy Daniels case would slide if anyone but Trump had been involved. Maybe. But Al Capone’s tax evasion case mattered a little more than usual because he was Al Capone. Like that infamous mobster, Trump has worked overtime to bring his legal woes upon himself. And if the parties were reversed in all of the cases now in question, does anyone doubt for a moment that Trump and his minions would be cheering the efforts of the very same legal system they are now trying to destroy?
In the meantime, the right’s claim that law enforcement has been weaponized by the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Manhattan D.A.’s office, among others, is tantamount to a prime suspect in a robbery complaining that cops are biased against him. Their howls of “abuse of power!” and even “Stalinist prosecution!” are ludicrous.
A Stalinist system does not spend months, if not years, painstakingly building cases to present to juries that will render verdicts. It does not agree to independent special counsels who oversee or conduct investigations for the sake of impartiality. It actually abuses its power by simply hauling a suspect into court based on trumped up evidence (pun intended), providing dubious legal counsel to the defendant, and receiving a quick verdict from a transparently partisan judge. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Mar-a-Lago. Do not collect millions of dollars in donations from your supporters.
Laws are laws. In a civilized, orderly, coherent society they should apply to everyone. But the notion that a suspect shouldn’t be prosecuted unless all others who have done as much or worse are prosecuted first is absurd. Trump defenders constantly hold up the violence at Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020 as excusing or minimizing the carnage wrought by his supporters at the Capitol. The BLM mayhem, which occurred at some but not all of the hundreds of protests across the country, was wrong. It harmed the cause of racial justice and fair, effective policing, but there is a glaring difference between those events and Jan. 6.
There are many decades of well-documented evidence of police brutality of the kind that took the life of George Floyd and many other Black citizens, so the anger and frustration of protestors was understandable while not justifiable. On the other hand, there is still no evidence that the 2020 election was decided by voter fraud or subterfuge, even after 60-plus court challenges, recounts, audits, and investigations by Trump allies. There are only demonstrably false claims from the Trump camp that incited violence and continue to threaten our nation’s peace and stability.
The right’s constant attempt at equivalence is disgusting, yet weasels like Pence and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy only tepidly condemn Trump (if you want to call their words condemnation), even though he wouldn’t have batted an eye if either had been harmed by the mob on Jan. 6. Hell, Trump is now blaming Pence for the mayhem.
There is a great and justifiable fear that indicting Trump for anything will unleash more political unrest and violence. The former president is warning of “death and destruction” and D.A. Bragg has received at least one death threat. Some even fear civil war, but it appears that prosecution of Jan. 6 rioters and insurrection plotters has curbed the appetite for armed conflict on the extreme right. That only a tiny handful of protestors showed up in New York City at Trump’s urging on March 20 suggests as much.
I’d also like to think that at least some Republican voters are quietly hoping that prosecutions of Trump finally present an opportunity to shed the dangerous albatross he has become for their party and the country.
No matter what happens, a seismic event is at hand. If Bragg is the first to indict Trump, he must have a rock-solid case that does not jeopardize other ongoing investigations into far more grave matters. But to have strong evidence of a crime and not pursue it will only deal a severe blow to the millions of Americans who still insist that no one, especially Donald Trump, is above the law.
John Rolfe is a former senior editor for Sports Illustrated for Kids, a longtime columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal/USA Today Network, and author of The Goose in the Bathroom: Stirring Tales of Family Life. His school bus drivin’ blog “Hellions, Mayhem and Brake Failure” is parked on his website Celestialchuckle.com (https://celestialchuckle.com) with the meter running.