Trump's Deepest Gift to the Republic

A hundred years from now, Americans will benefit from a lesson learned in this election: When a political party prosecutes the leading figure of the opposing party in an attempt to influence an upcoming election, voters revolt against the politicization of criminal justice. Prosecuting the other side as a political maneuver makes a martyr — who probably wins the next election, the retribution election.

Shorter version: Donald Trump just buried lawfare. Maybe forever, certainly for a long time. And political lawfare, this profoundly authoritarian misuse of police and prosecutorial power, needed to be killed and buried. Conservative-ish media interprets the moment narrowly:

So lawfare against Trump, by Democrats, is over. I don’t think that’s the point. I think the point is that lawfare is discredited, full stop. Ninety years from now, when the Taylor Swift Party thinks about prosecuting the presumptive presidential nominee of the Drake Party, they’ll be all like, wait, didn’t that like not work and stuff? Donald Trump didn’t kill Democratic lawfare against Donald Trump; Donald Trump killed lawfare. Win elections with political arguments, the end.

Now, NBC News has published a story today that would win all the prizes for tone-deafness and missing the point, if we had journalism awards for that. I’m hinting about a new kind of journalism award, by the way, if anyone wants to design the trophies.

Oh no, Trump might “prosecute adversaries.”

But the story hurls itself right over the peak of the whole point with these paragraphs about an interview with the law professor Ilya Somin:

Somin warned that a prosecutor can investigate an individual over a long period and find that they had broken unrelated federal laws that cover minor offenses.

If Trump’s attorney general, for example, appoints a special prosecutor to examine the federal criminal investigations of Trump, they could find that a Justice Department or FBI official broke a federal law that does not relate to the Trump probes, such as a tax or drug infraction.

“If you think about it, a majority of adult Americans have probably violated federal laws, such as smoking marijuana, at some point in their lives,” Somin said.

Wow, so if a prosecutor starts with the person, wanting to charge a particular person with a crime and then going out and hunting for a way to do that, rather than starting with a reported crime, they can probably stumble into something stupid but prosecutable, because a majority of Americans have probably done something illegal at some point. Like, I don’t know, the 34 felonies of having your accountant pay your lawyer and record the payments in a ledger and with invoices?

I wrote repeatedly here about the Trump lawfare books, which all very openly bragged about trying to cook up something to stick onto Trump. The Manhattan DA’s office, Mark Pomerantz told us, assigned a bunch of staff prosecutors to a Get Trump effort, well ahead of having an identified crime to pursue, and then brought in retired prosecutors and high-powered litigators borrowed from white shoe law firms on temporary assignment. They:

1. Decided to prosecute Trump

2. Then built giant teams of lawyers to do that

3. Then tried to figure out things to charge him with, sometimes testing creative legal theories through months of brainstorming sessions

4. And then charged him.

See also the nearly identical boasting from the cretinous Norm Eisen, the District of Columbia’s village idiot.

Now scroll back up and look at what Ilya Somin told NBC News. The warning against Trump’s presumptive hypothetical future lawfare is a precise warning against the Get Trump lawfare.

A bunch of prosecutors — in Fulton County, in Manhattan, in the New York Attorney’s General’s Office, and in Jack Smith’s $50 million inquisition — decided to charge Trump with something, or sue him over something, then went looking for the something, just as House investigators started with the intent to impeach and then went hunting for pretexts.

The warning that my goodness, you can’t go digging into Jack Smith, it’ll just turn into a dangerous fishing expedition is precisely, in every regard, a sharp condemnation of every lawfare effort against Donald Trump. And the people lamenting one but not the other can’t see it, or they pretend they can’t see it.

But it won’t matter anymore, because the outcome that followed their shameful examples have discredited the tool. No one will be dumb enough to pick it up again, for a long time. Donald Trump’s toughness and persistence did that.