President Donald Trump’s legal retribution campaign against his foes is in full swing.
The administration has already targeted key figures in every major recent investigation of Trump. On Friday, the FBI searched Trump adviser-turned-critic John Bolton’s home and office. And on Sunday, Trump explicitly tied his complaints about another critic, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, to the prospect of criminally probing him.
All of which has led Trump’s defenders to launch a familiar “whataboutism” defense: What about all the times Trump and his allies were prosecuted? Isn’t turnabout fair play?
“Some people say it’s retribution; I say, who cares?” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said Friday, adding: “Don’t lecture me on politically motivated investigations. You guys invented this stuff.”
But there is a key and very important difference: Prosecutions of Trump and Co. were overwhelmingly successful; the president’s allegations have fared much worse when his side has actually tried to prove them. To the extent cases against Trump himself didn’t result in convictions, it’s not because the evidence was insufficient. It’s because of technicalities and his being reelected president.
A big question right now is whether the Trump administration actually pursues these charges or just uses the probes to shame people and send a message – as one top DOJ official suggested could be the goal. There’s a case to be made that one of the best things for our body politic would be for these cases to result in charges that the administration then has to actually detail and prove.
To this point, though, they haven’t been able to prove much.
We should learn soon, for example, whether the administration deports Kilmar Abrego Garcia before it tries to prove its criminal case against him.
The administration sought to justify its wrongful initial deportation of Abrego Garcia to El Salvador earlier this year by pointing to a series of unproven allegations against him. Those included that he was a “leader” of the MS-13 gang. (Abrego Garcia’s family and lawyers have denied he’s a gang member.)
When the administration ultimately bowed to judges’ orders that it facilitate his return, it made a show of charging him with a years-old human smuggling offense. (Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty to transporting other undocumented people from Texas to Maryland in an SUV in 2022 and taking part in a smuggling conspiracy.) The administration said it intended to prove those allegations before it would deport him again.
“He will face the full force of the American justice system – including serving time in American prison for the crimes he’s committed,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said at the time.
“Upon completion of his sentence,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “we anticipate he will be returned to his home country of El Salvador.”
But that was then.
Two judges have described the administration’s allegations against Abrego Garcia as being tenuous. A whistleblower revealed that some in the Justice Department cast doubt on the handling of some litigation in his case. And now the administration appears to be preparing to deport him to Uganda before his trial.
It’s a move that would both contradict what the administration said before and perhaps send a signal about its lack of confidence in its criminal case against him.
It wouldn’t be the only time that Trump and his team have failed to prove their case when the rubber met the road.
For years, House Republicans waged an impeachment probe of then-President Joe Biden – seizing on allegations pushed in large part by Trump.
But the hodge-podge of allegations were routinely shown to be speculative, false or misleading. The impeachment push was derailed when the source of a key claim the GOP had hyped – that the Bidens took a $10 million bribe – was charged and later convicted of lying to the FBI.
Even before that, though, some Republicans acknowledged the evidence just wasn’t there. The House never impeached Biden, despite Republicans having the majority to do so.
(The lack of GOP support for impeaching Biden was a notable contrast to Trump’s two impeachments, which both garnered historic levels of bipartisan support though Trump was ultimately acquitted when two-thirds of the Senate failed to convict him.)
Republicans did get some traction with their allegations against Biden’s son, Hunter, who was convicted last year of tax and gun crimes. Still, the charges didn’t pertain to Trump’s biggest claims against him and Joe Biden, including the younger Biden’s work for a Ukrainian energy company.
But perhaps the biggest example of cases tied to Trump’s allegations actually going to court was the Durham investigation — a special counsel probe launched late in the first Trump administration and headed by former US attorney John Durham.
The purpose was to re-investigate the origins of the Russia probe that plagued the early part of Trump’s first term — and to search for political bias in it.
Then-Attorney General William Barr extensively hyped it. He called the Russia probe “one of the greatest travesties in American history” and cited “a whole pattern of events … to sabotage the presidency — or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency.”
But the Durham probe demonstrated nothing of the sort.
Three people were charged with relatively small crimes; two of them were acquitted. The one successful prosecution was actually a case originating from an earlier inspector general investigation, not Durham’s. It resulted only in probation after the judge said prosecutors hadn’t proven the defendant, an FBI lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith, acted out of political bias.
By contrast, around 10 Trump allies and advisers have been convicted or pleaded guilty to crimes, depending on how you slice the definition of “ally.” When longtime ally Tom Barrack – who’s now Trump ambassador to Turkey — was acquitted in 2022, it was the exception rather than the rule.
Trump himself was convicted in the only one of his four indictments that went to trial, in Manhattan. He was also found liable in both a sexual abuse case and a civil fraud case. (An appeals court last week voided the $500 million penalty against him but said Trump was still liable for the fraud.)
As for the other Trump indictments? Juries never got to render a verdict in those cases.
His two January 6, 2021-related indictments were shelved when he won the presidency again. But the evidence was compelling enough that a record number of Senate Republicans had voted to convict him in his 2021 impeachment trial.
And his federal classified documents case was dismissed not for lack of evidence, but because of a Trump-nominated judge’s extraordinary ruling on a technicality that legal observers said bucked precedent: the special counsel handling the case, she ruled, was illegally appointed. Indeed, that classified documents case was perhaps the most iron-clad against him – to the point where even the likes of Barr said the government had been “deceived.”
In these cases, the government showed what evidence it had and was prepared to back it up. And when it was forced to back it up, it was often successful.
Perhaps that will ultimately be the case with the investigations the Trump administration has launched against its foes. We’ll see if the administration actually starts charging people.
But history suggests Trump and Co. just throw a bunch of stuff at the wall – in ways that their opponents haven’t.
Source link
#Trumps #tortured #history #legally #targeting #foes