Convicted felon Donald Trump. That factual description written into history Thursday by a jury of 12 New Yorkers interrupts a streak of people with far more power and privilege enabling the disgraced 45th president to evade accountability for far more serious offenses.
This wasn’t the case I expected to see result in a guilty verdict first, or maybe ever. The conduct covered by those 34 felony charges brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg–falsifying business records to commit or conceal other offenses, which in non-legalese means Trump hiding hush-money payments to suppress news coverage of some of the times he had sex with women besides his wife–seemed tawdry and even trivial compared to the other charges Trump faces. And the logic of Bragg’s charges was not easy to follow as the others.
Most stark among the other cases: The attempted murder of democracy that Trump staged after the 2020 election, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol.
Special prosecutor Jack Smith indicted Trump for that last August. But a feckless Supreme Court–on which two ethics-deprived members, Clarence Thomas (R) and Samuel Alito (R), show multiple signs of being at least insurrection-curious–has instead slow-walked its way through handling Trump’s absurd claim that former presidents warrant lifelong immunity from prosecution for acts during their time in office.
As a result, Smith’s case may not come to trial until after the election that could see Trump returned to the White House, from where he could fire Smith and order whatever lackey he appoints as his attorney general to drop the charges.
A separate case that could see Trump and his minions brought to justice for their attempted self-coup now sits in a ditch not because of the waffling of judges but because of a prosecutor’s foolishness. Fulton County, Ga., district attorney Fani Willis decided to hire the lawyer with whom she was having an affair to serve as her special prosecutor, and of course the defense found out.
The first case Smith brought against Trump–charging the former president with taking hundreds of classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago compound in Florida and then refusing to return them while being extremely careless in his custody of them–brings the added karmic richness of targeting the guy who campaigned on Hillary Clinton’s self-serving e-mail habits representing an unforgiveable threat to national security.
But Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon has been so solicitous of Trump’s interests and so slow in handing down rulings that she has all but assured that this case, too, won’t go to trial until after the election. In the process, Cannon’s contortions in favor of Trump may have single-handedly invented a new job description: emotional support judge.
All of these cases could have been rendered less eventful had 10 more Republican senators voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment in February 2021. A conviction would have banned Trump from holding “any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States”; instead, many of these cowards said that they punted because courts would hold Trump accountable.
After all that, 12 unnamed New Yorkers showed up and did their job over the past few weeks in Judge Juan Merchan’s court as Bragg’s lawyers effectively made their case. And they did so even though there is a real risk that the efforts of some of Trump’s more rabid supporters to dox the jurors will lead to one of his most deranged followers shooting one of these dutiful citizens–or a random person whom they think looks like one of them–on Fifth Avenue.
We owe these 12 men and women our thanks for showing that even former presidents are not above the law. But we cannot thank them by name.
https://robpegoraro.com/2024/05/31/former-area-resident-encounters-belated-accountability/
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