The DOJ Needs A New Rule For Timely Prosecutions Of Tyrant Presidents Like Trump
The window of justice for corrupt former presidents intent on winning a second term’s worth of presidential immunity is too narrow.
The most annoying thing about the Department of Justice’s investigation and prosecution of lifelong criminal Donald Trump is the infamous Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo arguing that indicting or criminally prosecuting a sitting President would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its assigned functions.
It prevented Trump from being righteously prosecuted while serving in the Office of the Presidency, and might still prevent his righteous prosecution if he gets reelected next year.
In theory, this memo does not stipulate that a president truly has immunity in a king-like manner because the Founding Fathers presumed the legislative branch’s built-in checks and balances on the executive branch would motivate and even encourage Congress to impeach and remove a criminal sitting president to flex and preserve their own branch’s power and authority.
However, in contemporary practice, Congressional Republicans have given up their legislative authority over a demagogic president from their party. The Founders did not intend for such submissive legislators, and thought elected officials’ natural hunger for personal power would keep them eager to stop wannabe tyrant presidents. Unfortunately, the first-past-the-post style of executive elections the Founders designed perhaps made our two-party Congress’s hyper-partisanship inevitable.
Today’s Republicans are spineless fans of moral relativity, despite the precedent of Congressional Republicans exercising this power against Richard Nixon when they forced him to resign or be impeached. The previous couple Congresses obfuscated, obstructed, and killed two valid impeachment trials arguing absurd legal technicalities that defended Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed place above the law.
Which means the public good now depends on the Department of Justice, within the executive branch, to take on greater responsibility making sure presidential behavior stays within the confines of the law. While Trump’s own Department of Justice ignored calls for criminally investigating his conduct citing the OLC memo, Trump is no longer the president. He is a private citizen, and very indictable.
However, he is almost certainly going to win again the Republican Party’s presidential primary, and polls suggest the presidential election is again going to be very close and will depend on tossup outcomes in a small handful of swing states. Trump could be elected president again, and we all know he will certainly hire his next attorney general specifically to squash his ongoing prosecution so he can get right back to committing high crimes and misdemeanors. And his sycophants in Congress will get right back to rolling over, and obstructing their own branch’s duty to investigate, let alone impeach, a tyrannical president.
As such a case shows, Departments of Justice — and the Special Counsels they employ to prosecute criminal chief executives — have just four years to investigate, indict, and complete trials for corrupt presidents intent on a second, non-consecutive term. This is complicated further by other DOJ precedents warning against trials close to elections to avoid the perception of political meddling, which means the window for justice is even shorter. Criminal conspiracies, particularly with the White House’s protection of vaguely defined executive privilege, take a long time for prosecutors to unravel and prove, and perhaps no one in US history has proved our legal system can be exhaustively delayed and obstructed than Donald Trump.
His defense has wasted much of this prosecutorial window launching endless appeals and counter-suits with these dubious claims to executive privilege as well as even more fraudulent claims of client-attorney privilege that must be inevitably but slowly pierced as his White House underlings and personal lawyers are shown to be fellow co-conspirators to his indicted crimes.
A favorable judge in Aileen Cannon overseeing his highest, most treasonous crimes against the country is allowing Trump to delay his trial until the end of the primary process so he can cry “presidential harassment,” “election interference,” and “witch-hunt” to justify his consistent obstruction of justice, and it remains to be seen if Cannon will allow him to delay the trial further, like beyond the 2024 election so that he can — we all know he’ll do this — pardon himself or otherwise weasel his way out of accountability.
So how about the Department of Justice write and follow a new OLC memo that judiciously expedites trials of presidents in the narrow window between their first criminal administration and the months leading up to a possible second criminal administration in light of the time-sensitive obstacles to presidential accountability specified above?
The gravity of presidential crimes warrants some degree of haste, and Trump’s specific crimes definitely do. He literally incited a violent coup inside the Capitol Building after his plethora of election fraud schemes proved unsuccessful in organizing fake electors to interfere in Congress’s democratically sacred and Constitutionally mandated responsibility to accurately and faithfully count the electoral votes. In his trial for hoarding classified national defense documents, his flagrant negligence in storage, his refusal to obey subpoenas, his continuing financial conflicts of national interest, and the increasing allegations of secret-spilling from random rich people who are citizens of other countries blatantly suggest Trump is not just grossly incompetent. Yet Trump is effectively slowing down his trial with complaints that his crimes have produced too much evidence for him and his lawyers to quickly formulate their defense. And, outside of politics, Trump has been committing nonstop business, bank, and tax fraud always, forever, and isn’t about to stop now! No one in US history has ever deserved such elusive justice more, and it would be a flagrant flouting of our justice system to allow him to delay his way to another four years of immunity.
Regardless of whether or not Trump wins or loses the next election, he’s going to baselessly claim fraud. And if he loses, even by a landslide, he will no doubt try another coup with his politically complicit members of Congress who will gain partisan advantage from a successful effort.
A new memo restricting Trump’s delay tactics will allow the executive branch to have a lawful check and balance on itself, particularly in this case with Attorney General Merrick Garland acting so groaningly, responsibly, professionally by-the-book as he has been. Garland is not a showboating partisan. He appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith at a glacial pace finally on November 18, 2022, has been hands-off all along, and has offered almost no public commentary on Smith’s work.
President Joe Biden similarly has ventured nowhere near the DOJ in any of these proceedings, and is mute about the fact that his political opponent is all but fucked legally now that his lawyers are like dominos pleading guilty to the various criminal conspiracies, and Mark Meadows was reportedly revealed to have agreed to an immunity deal months ago, and Trump looks likely to lose all his New York business licenses. The prosecution of the former president is not at all political meddling.
(Take a moment to contrast Garland and Biden’s political maturity with Trump’s juvenility, with which Trump has loudly and obnoxiously led chants of “lock her up,” brought up “Hunter Biden” in every interview question and Truth Social post he can, and baselessly complained about rigging in every primary, caucus and general election… even the ones he won. Trump is a pestiferous loudmouth liar whose narcissistic fear of being humiliated as a loser in any way elicits the fascist tendencies of a sociopath, so we all know Trump would never be so utterly mute if his and Biden’s places were reversed.)
So, yeah, the DOJ needs to be allowed to timely expedite the prosecution of a former president’s high crimes and misdemeanors to prevent the tyrant from getting another four year joyride of presidential immunity.
The lawful process Garland has overseen of appointing a special counsel to independently investigate and prosecute Trump has been legitimate and professional, and, if our justice system is going to keep following previous OLC memos against indicting sitting presidents or prosecuting political candidates during general elections (to avoid a corrupt former and aspiring president’s obligatory claims of election interference) the public interest necessitates a speedy trial.
Particularly in the case of Donald Trump, who has already exhibited an eagerness to commit the rampant election fraud he baselessly accuses everyone else of and coups, and has shown himself a criminal savant at convincing his lawyers to assist him in breaking the law as accomplices and co-conspirators. Trump has delayed and obstructed justice from January of 2021 to October of 2023 so that only this month have prosecutors finally obtained the inevitable guilty pleas of some of his co-conspiring lawyers. Justice cannot allow future presidents to follow this playbook.
Trump is the personification of the monarchic tyranny our Founding Fathers feared, and his weaselry through the Justice System’s archaic memo-based protections for sitting presidents necessitate a new OLC memo mandating corrupt presidents’ between-term corruption is prosecuted prior to the next election.
Thanks for your eyeballs!
—Dash MacIntyre
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