Donald Trump Indictment Ends Unwritten Rule For Ex-Presidents – Indicting former President Donald Trump ends an unwritten rule for ex-presidents, namely that the decorum of the presidency and the stability of the nation means that presidents aren’t prosecuted. It could also open other former presidents to criminal investigation and prosecution.
A Historic Mistake?
The era of respecting the presidential office and treating the malfeasances of its occupant as untouchable by political vendettas is over.
No one less than former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo accused his party of engaging in partisan prosecutions of the former president.
“You have a cynical public, they don’t believe anyone and when you start to see these prosecutors bring political cases, it just affirms everybody’s cynicism,” Cuomo told John Catsimatidis on WABC 770’S “The Cats Roundtable” earlier this month. “It’s a coincidence that [Manhattan District Attorney Alvin] Bragg goes after Trump and Tish James goes after Trump and Georgia goes after Trump. That’s all a coincidence.
Cuomo continued: “It feeds the cynicism and that’s the cancer in our body politic right now.”
What Happened?
As expected, a grand jury in Manhattan brought forth a 34-count indictment alleging business fraud against the former president.
The charges against Trump have been widely regarded as legally dubious. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., declined to prosecute Trump for alleged campaign finance violations because state courts lack jurisdiction to prosecute federal crimes.
“Bragg is attempting something that many lawyers think is as improbable as the reanimation of the dead. The Justice Department itself declined this prosecution and both the former chair of the Federal Election Commission and various election law experts have thrown shade on the theory,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley wrote on his blog after the prosecution was announced. “Not only did Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance, not bring this case, but Bragg himself stopped the prosecution
Turley continued: “It was after one of Bragg’s lead prosecutors resigned and wrote a book on prosecuting Trump that pressure became too much for the district attorney, who grabbed his shovel and went to work.”
What History Says
This prosecution relegates the precedent set by former President Gerald Ford when he decided to pardon Richard Nixon for crimes committed during Watergate to the ashbin of history, namely that presidents are not prosecuted after leaving office due to the sake of the stability of the country.
Ford pardoned Nixon to get his predecessor off the front pages of the nation’s newspaper and to promote healing, according to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward.
“It was Ford who quite frankly convinced me, who said, ‘I pardoned Nixon not for myself but for the country, and let me tell you the world I was living in looked like if Nixon was not pardoned, he’d be further investigated, indicted, tried, going to jail; this would be two or three more years of Watergate … I had to pre-empt the process. We were in the middle of the Cold War, serious economic problems, and my sense of purpose of being president at that moment was to get Nixon off the front page,” Bob Woodward said during a 2011 talk at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
Could Others Get Charged?
The death of the Ford precedent could open Bill Clinton to criminal investigation over the misdeeds of the Clinton Foundation. George W. Bush could be criminally prosecuted due his having authorized waterboarding and illegal renditions of terrorist suspects to third countries to be tortured and detained.
Were Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to run and win in 2028 it could open Barack Obama up to criminal investigation for his role in the Russiagate effort against Trump, or Joe Biden to potentially being prosecuted for his involvement in Hunter Biden and Jim Biden’s pay-to-play political corruption schemes.
“This seems to be the latest example of the two-tiered justice system … that the American people have had enough of,” former Vice President Mike Pence told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer following the indictment, noting that Bragg ran for office on a platform of prosecuting Trump.
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John Rossomando was a senior analyst for Defense Policy and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award in 2008 for his reporting.