Yesterday, Marjorie Traitor Greene, a deranged QAnon freak and seccessionist from a backward corner of northwest Georgia, texted several times that she’s going to New York Tuesday to protest tyrants and what she called the unconstitutional WITCH HUNT. She and other extremists are trying to drum up violence again. I’ve seen a lot of journalists referring to democracy being tested. Peter Baker painted a picture of “a country heading down a road it has never traveled before, one fraught with profound consequences for the health of the world’s oldest democracy. For more than two centuries, presidents have been held on a pedestal, even the ones swathed in scandal, declared immune from prosecution while in office and, effectively, even afterward. No longer. That taboo has been broken. A new precedent has been set. Will it tear the country apart, as some feared about putting a former president on trial after Watergate? Will it be seen by many at home and abroad as victor’s justice akin to developing nations where former leaders are imprisoned by their successors? Or will it become a moment of reckoning, a sign that even someone who was once the most powerful person on the planet is not above the law?” Obviously, it will be one of those things for some and the other for others.
Trump’s allies branded the Manhattan case political even before any indictment without waiting to review the actual evidence. Whatever Alvin Bragg, the district attorney, turned up was immaterial— to defend their party’s most recent president, and possible next nominee, they preemptively declared the prosecution illegitimate because it was brought by a Democrat.
Representative Mark Green, [fascist] Republican of Tennessee and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, compared any prosecution of Trump to political cases in less developed countries. “Daniel Ortega arrested his opposition in Nicaragua and we call that a horrible thing,” he said last week. “Mr. Biden, Mr. President, think about that.”
Locking up former leaders on specious, politically driven charges may be common in the world’s autocracies, but some of the most advanced democracies have not shied away from putting their leaders on trial for crimes. In Israel, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert spent more than a year in prison for bribery, fraud and other charges while the incumbent prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is currently on trial on similar charges.
In Italy, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who just regained some power as part of a governing coalition, has faced 35 criminal court cases during his long career, although he was definitively convicted just once for tax fraud and sentenced to a year of community service. Just last month, he was acquitted on charges of bribing witnesses at a previous underage prostitution trial.
Other democratically elected leaders convicted in recent years include former Presidents Jacques Chirac (embezzlement) and Nicolas Sarkozy (influence peddling) in France, former President Park Geun-hye (corruption) in South Korea and former President Chen Shui-bian (bribery) in Taiwan.
In the United States, Teapot Dome, Watergate, Iran-contra and Whitewater never put a president in the dock. The only sitting president to see the inside of a police station as a defendant was Ulysses S. Grant, who was stopped for speeding down the streets of Washington in his horse-drawn carriage. He paid $20 and went on his way.
While no president has ever been indicted before, an early vice president, Aaron Burr, was put on trial for treason after leaving office for plotting to carve off Western territories into a new country, although he was acquitted. Nearly two centuries later, another vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned amid a plea deal in a corruption case.
Trump would not be barred from running for his old office by an indictment or even a conviction. In 1920, Eugene Debs, the Socialist leader, mounted his fifth bid for the White House from prison, where he was serving time for his opposition to World War I. He received 919,799 votes, or 3.4 percent of those cast. Of course, unlike Trump, he was not a major-party candidate and had no prospects of winning.
At least a couple other presidents worried about being indicted after office. Richard Nixon was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, a month after resigning, sparing him any prosecution in the Watergate scandal. Bill Clinton struck a deal with Whitewater prosecutors on his last full day in office in which he admitted providing false testimony under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, gave up his law license for five years and paid a $25,000 fine in exchange for not facing charges as a private citizen.
In pardoning Nixon, Ford was not trying to set a precedent barring future prosecutions of a president, said the historian Richard Norton Smith, whose biography of Mr. Ford, An Ordinary Man, will be published next month. Instead, he was trying to move the country beyond Watergate as he confronted challenges like inflation, the last vestiges of the Vietnam War and deep public cynicism.
“He wasn’t forgiving Nixon so much as he was trying to forget him,” Smith said. “That is, to counter the popular, political and media obsession that, quite understandably, had formed around the previously unthinkable concept of an American president facing jail time. And the existence of which prevented him from doing his job or the American people from moving on to confront all the problems that Nixon left behind him.”
That decision, he added, should not mean that Trump is handed a get-out-of-jail-free card due to Ford. “It seems more than a little unfair to make him a scapegoat for the wrongdoing of subsequent presidents,” Smith said. “As he himself warned in 1980, if voters ever chose an arrogant president ‘and I mean in a vicious way— God help the country.’”
That said, had Nixon wound up in front of a firing squad— or even in a prison cell for the rest of his life— would Trump have dared to even run for president? Maybe, but would have his life of criminality continued while he was in the White House?
Yesterday, Alvin Bragg slapped back hard at McCarthy and his gangsterish GOP colleagues who have been trying to insert themselves into the Trump criminal case. Bragg’s office's general counsel wrote to McCarthy’s 3 stooges and henchmen-- Gym Jordan (OH), Bryan Steil (WI) and James Comer (KY)-- that “What neither Mr. Trump nor Congress may do is interfere with the ordinary course of proceedings in New York State,” the fourth letter in a back-and-forth between Bragg and the clownish committee chairmen, who demanded all the documents in the case as well as any communications Bragg’s office has had about it.
The GOP leaders contended the probe was politically motivated — a point Bragg has repeatedly contested.
“Your second letter asserts that, by failing to provide it, the District Attorney somehow failed to dispute your baseless and inflammatory allegations that our investigation is politically motivated. That conclusion is misleading and meritless,” Dubeck wrote.
“We did not engage in a point-by-point rebuttal of your letter because our Office is legally constrained in how it publicly discusses pending criminal proceedings, as prosecutorial offices are across the country and as you well know. That secrecy is critical to protecting the privacy of the target of any criminal investigation as well as the integrity of the independent grand jury’s proceedings.”
Bragg’s office reiterated a willingness to meet but this time asked lawmakers to supply them with a list of questions and documents they could discuss “without violating New York grand jury secrecy rules or interfering with the criminal case now before a court.”
The letter attacks another GOP argument seeking to justify their intervention, with the lawmakers in their original March 20 letter saying they were weighing “potential legislative reforms.”
Again, Bragg’s office questioned the intent of GOP plans.
“We doubt that Congress would have authority to place a single private citizen— including a former president or candidate for president— above the law or to grant him unique protections, such as removal to federal court, that are unavailable to every other criminal defendant,” Dubeck wrote.
“Even if you were seriously considering such legislation and had the constitutional authority to enact it (which you do not), your request for information from the District Attorney and his former attorneys concerning an ongoing criminal probe is unnecessary and unjustified. Congress has many sources from which it could seek information on the wisdom of this legislation, including from former federal or state prosecutors not involved in this pending matter.”
Trump can't differentiate between himself and the United States; that's one of his biggest problems and has landed him in so much hot water. He called this the darkest day in American history. Not Antietam (September 17, 1862), not Pearl Harbor, (December 7, 1941) not 9/11, not the assassinations of Lincoln (April 14, 1865), JFK (November 22, 1963) or Martin Luther King (April 4, 1968), not the Oklahoma City bombing by a right-wing domestic terrorist (April 19, 1995), not the Battle of the Bulge, which saw 100,000 American casualties and 19,000 deaths (December 16, 1944). None of those-- just the day Donald J. Trump was indicted by a grand jury. Asa Hutchinson was one of the few sane Republican voices on the indictment but he will undoubtably be shouted down and completely ignored by suck-ups like Lindsey Graham, who urged violence.
reminding you that trump is saying what he is saying because he believes what his worshippers have been telling him for 8 years now... that he's their messiah and god.
he's saying these things because he knows his flock expects him to say them. they NEED him to say them. And because he believes that, after over 70 years of being above the law, he *IS* above the law.
note: it remains to be seen if he'll actually suffer any consequences. After all, this relatively minor Stormy thingie has been known now for no less than 7 years and finally someone had the ball to actually try to do something. This all may just acually prove that he *IS* abo…