This has stopped making sense a long time ago. Last week, a letter leaked from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office asserting that former President Donald Trump is “guilty of numerous felony violations” and getting away with it. So are the legal walls still closing in?
The New York Times obtained the letter written by career prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, who led the team investigating the Trump Organization, to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat elected last year. Pomerantz wrote, “The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes — he did.”
I wouldn’t question the integrity of the prosecutor who resigned in apparent protest when Bragg opted not to bring the case to a grand jury. Nor would I attest to the integrity of Donald Trump—particularly in a case revolving around whether he and his company were completely honest to the tax officials and bank officials about the value of the sprawling real estate holdings.
But to imply an ideologue like Bragg walked away from a slam dunk case against Donald Trump stretches credulity. In New York City, there would have been no political downside to prosecuting. Given the political demographics of drawing a jury pool or grand jury pool, it would have to be an incredibly weak case to fail to even get an indictment.
Yes, Bragg has faced criticism from law enforcement advocates and career prosecutors for not fighting crime. But that’s from a social justice angle. Social justice warriors, such as Bragg, would gladly clear the docket and only prosecute wealthy people committing white-collar crimes.
Bragg’s office seems to want to have it both ways, as a spokesperson told The Hill, the “investigation continues,” despite the staff prosecutors resigning.
But enough already. If Pomerantz is even half correct, Bragg owes it to the public to put up or shut up on the case that began under his predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., the son of President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state.
We don’t know who leaked the letter, but it does keep a convenient narrative alive: Convict Donald Trump in public opinion without the burden of accountability in a trial.
Presumably, either Pomerantz or someone in the DA’s office who had accessed passed it along to the Times. Just leaking that Trump is getting away with something that doesn’t serve justice. It’s nominally unfair to Trump but he almost seems to enjoy grievances.
The only group this helps are the seething, irrational Trump haters who can feel temporary vindication, and continue to hope for “one of these days.” But for many of those folks, if their dreams of a jailed Trump were ever fulfilled, they might cease to find meaning in life after the short-term burst of jubilation fades, and the orange-man-bad anger that long sustained them would be absent.
In the meantime, it seems that Big Apple’s version of Impeachment 3.0 is either dead or sidelined, with Bragg continuing a matter that doesn’t seem headed to a grand jury anytime soon. In the graveyard of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe that fell flat when it came to Trump.
The House Jan. 6 Committee has already suggested a criminal referral of Trump for fraud and obstruction in a court filing. Though a smoking gun from such a highly partisan select committee seems unlikely to have credibility.
If there is a viable case, Fulton County District Attorney Fanni Willis might have the closest thing to it. She’s going after Trump for his call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the president – seeking to reverse the close election in Georgia – asked the state’s top election official why he couldn’t “find” enough votes to reverse the outcome. A special grand jury will be seated in May. Even here, Donald Trump’s intent is in question—as he was relaying to Raffensperger that his lawyers had reached a very different tally than the official count certified by the state. Willis is pursuing a potential case of solicitation of election fraud.
So, there might well be an Impeachment 3.0 so to speak. Just not in New York. But the more such efforts are tried and fail, the more even moderate Donald Trump critics will start to view it as stalking.
It’s become an article of faith by the left that Donald Trump is guilty of something, somehow, someway, and getting away with it. But Democrat prosecutors don’t have to let him get away with anything. Maybe there is a rational and legal reason they aren’t prosecuting cases.
Fred Lucas is chief national affairs correspondent for The Daily Signal and the author of “Abuse of Power: Inside The Three-Year Campaign to Impeach Donald Trump.”
