There's something odd and tinny about expressed media worries that "some Democrats" are ”openly taunting President Donald Trump with threats” of jail time for, you know, those crimes he did. No—I hear you, it certainly is unpleasant for national figures to threaten to toss each other in jail, and it hasn't gotten more pleasant just because Donald J. Trump, his advisers, his hangers-on, his supportive Republican lawmakers, and pundits, and Fox News talking heads, and his aneurysm-adjacent rallygoers have been screaming themselves hoarse with precisely that threat for over three long gargling years now. It certainly would be gauche for anyone else to follow that lead.
And so, certainly, it is time to hear from senior Obama-era Justice Department officials warning that the norm should still exist for at least everyone else, even if Trump (and the near-entire mass of the political party propping him up) lacks all ability to refrain from such outbursts. And of course it is necessary to hear from professional Appearer In News Stories Alan Dershowitz for some reason as well, as he obtusely expresses his peevishness at the the idea of some politician out there growling about their political opponent being locked up.
But it is hard not to see in those concerns a strong undercurrent of we should let bygones be bygones, used so often to educate the too-stupid American public as to why actual and intentional crimes ought to be glossed over, when committed by a president or his top advisers, lest a full accounting for those acts angry up our public blood.
And when the article that began with tut-tutting over "taunting" Trump for his crimes slides after only a few quick paragraphs into the not-at-all-the-same question over which of the Democratic contenders might or might not "prosecute" Trump for the specific crimes special counsel Robert Mueller listed off in his report or that multiple news outlets detailed in their own investigations of Trump's financial scheming, then segues yet again into the precise language of yes but maybe presidents should be allowed to get away with crimes because boy howdy, it would certainly be a shit show to try to do anything about it, we're left wondering if the point being made is that our lawmakers and candidates shouldn't brag about criminal acts being potentially prosecuted, or that those figures should should reject the notion of criminal acts being potentially prosecuted.
To wit:
“You can see a case where an incoming [Democratic] president might not want a prosecution of Trump. It has the ability to blot out your entire agenda,” said Matthew Miller, a former Obama-era Justice Department spokesman. He called it a “very slippery slope” that the next president in many ways won’t even have control over — especially if they actually step back and leave it to their new crop of DOJ leaders to decide.
Well, there it is in a nutshell, all right; you can't put it much terser than that. It would sure be a pisser for a Democratic president to have to fight for media attention when the papers are full of dispatches from the trial of a previous national leader who was discovered by our government to have done Crimes. And yet if the system works—if it truly works, the way everyone steadfastly insists it does even in news articles musing over whether it really, you know, should—then the next president will not have one damn thing to say about whether Donald Trump faces criminal prosecution for crimes committed before, during, or after office. It is out of that their hands.
"An independent attorney general might determine he or she has no choice," Miller added.
That is the whole point. By all means, prepare the brow-furrowing takes whenever the subject comes up on the campaign trail, but the sole role any future, not batshit insane president will have in making the determination will be in appointing or not appointing an attorney general independent enough and spine-owning enough to crack open the law books, read the text, and determine whether what a bevy of investigators across an array of House and Senate and federal and state and media probes have asserted to be potential crimes are, in fact, crimes. By all means, numerous political hacks will have approximately one billion takes on why those laws ought to be bent or ignored outright, this one time, because they were never intended to be used against famous figures, and hopefully they too will not have one damn bit of influence on the actual process because there is no legal precedent for granting the Wall Street Journal or National Review a new constitutional power of backsies.
So this is all largely pointless, except in the original context of norms-policing and finger wagging as Trump burns the courthouse down around the rest of us. That, or the nation is completely broken and we are all extremely screwed.
Donald Trump has led a multi-year campaign to have his once-campaign opponent "locked up" for a series of ranting conspiracy theories revolving around words like Benghazi! and Uranium One! and for violations of email protocol that the FBI director loudly sounded off on as very bad and quite disappointing but not a prosecutable crime. Duly noted! Federal investigators have identified Donald Trump as Individual 1 in a criminal campaign finance scheme and as responsible for multiple well-defined and specific attempts to obstruct justice in a federal criminal probe; these charges are independent of other probes that have alleged criminal abuse by Trump and family of their self-run charity organization, tax evasion, and bank fraud. Also noted!
We do still recognize the two things as not the same, yes? We are not yet dimwits, are we? By all means, Nixon would have loved to dodge Watergate by declaring that his detractors had all committed imaginary crimes far worse than any of his real ones and so he is the real victim here, but it didn't work and even his fellow Republicans were not quite that dumb and in the end he had to rely on a compliant Gerald Ford to pop the law's tires and steal its spark plugs while he made off for the coast.
Fine, yes, agreed: Dear "some" Democrats, please refrain from intentional invocations of irony during your observations that the man who made "Lock Her Up" a campaign chant appears to have committed a wide array of state and federal crimes, numerous of which will still be prosecutable the moment he last steps out of the White House and its inherent, or invented, executive protections.
And everyone else, please refrain from concerned takes over whether those prosecutors making those decisions ought to be preemptively restrained lest they upset the news cycle with news simply too exciting, too titillating, for the general public to handle. Please. Let us just ... not do this, for now.