Indicting Donald

Some men are above some laws.

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

Power corrupts.

Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, not because Nixon deserved to be pardoned, but because prosecuting him would have been bad for the nation. We survived Nixon’s pardon, and, I believe, based solely on what we know so far, that we would survive Donald Trump’s not being prosecuted for the Stormy Daniels thing. What else may appear in the Manhattan indictment remains to be seen, and there may be something bad enough to support a prosecution. But at this point, the prosecution seems to do more harm than good, which, ultimately, should be the test of a prosecutor’s discretion.

Andrew Carnegie famously said “put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket.” For the USA, the Presidency is that basket. The President is the only important elected official with a national constituency and, therefore, national enemies. There is always a prosecutor somewhere ready to make his bones by prosecuting someone that 70,000,000 people, and a majority in his jurisdiction, voted against. So we just don’t do it.

There’s nothing unusual about this calculus. We’d have a lot of stiffer penalties for a lot more crimes — does anyone really think ransomware shouldn’t carry the death penalty? — if we trusted the law enforcement machinery not to abuse the power that such punishments create…