A potential Trump indictment would still leave crimes unpunished
The former president was told he could do anything he wanted. It's no surprise that he listened.
By Richard W. Painter, MSNBC Opinion Columnist
Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan district attorney, appears to be closing in on former President Donald Trump. The Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Alan Weisselberg, is in the prosecutor’s crosshairs and may turn state evidence on Trump in order to save his own skin.
Weisselberg’s son is also in trouble, presumably for not reporting compensation from Trump as taxable income, giving Weisselberg even more incentive to cooperate with Vance.
Vance’s office has finally obtained the Trump Organization records subpoenaed by a grand jury after Trump tried unsuccessfully to block the subpoena in federal court. As I pointed out in a Supreme Court amicus brief submitted with University of Pennsylvania professor Claire Finkelstein in Trump v. Vance, it was absurd for Trump to have argued that the enumerated powers of the president under Article II of the Constitution included a right to block a grand jury subpoena of his personal business records. But it is the crimes that Trump allegedly committed in office that are the greater danger to our republic.
Trump is in plenty of other legal hot water, including an investigation by the New York state attorney general; the investigation into Ukraine and other matters by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, which recently led to carrying out a search warrant on Rudy Giuliani’s apartment; an investigation in Fulton County, Georgia, into whether Trump solicited election fraud last November in violation of a state criminal statute; and the investigation into his actions before the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
We still don’t know if, when and where Trump will be indicted and if so for what crimes, but he surely has a lot of legal exposure.
At some point, we need to decide if we really do embrace a notion of presidential power under the Constitution that allows a president to fire anybody for any reason, even to obstruct justice; that allows a president to conduct foreign policy any way he or she wants, even if to coerce a foreign power to interfere in the next U.S. election; that allows a president to use control of the military any way he or she wants, even if to “redo” a lost election; and finally, that allows a president, if unsuccessful in all of these things, to incite followers to stage an insurrection at the Capitol.
What’s most troubling is that throughout Trump’s presidency, he believed himself to be immune from criminal prosecution and that the powers of the presidency entitled him to do anything he wanted to do. The same president who Vance suspects of violating the law in conducting the business of the Trump Organization was also running the presidency like a criminal enterprise.
Trump had plenty of enablers both inside and outside the government. First and foremost was Congress, which, while both houses were in GOP control, did nothing to constrain Trump. For the first two years of the Trump presidency, there were no serious investigations into potential malfeasance in office, and some powerful committee chairs such as Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., colluded with the White House to give advance information about where investigations were headed.
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Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Saturday, May 15th 2021 at 3:44PM
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