That the federal criminal charges against Donald Trump – who is soon to be president, again – have been dismissed because of a Justice Department policy that prevents a president from being charged with a crime must be one of the greatest injustices ever.
The two cases are at opposite ends of the spectrum in magnitude, but they share Trump’s view of the law: Complete disregard. In the far more major one, Trump asked that his supporters not be put in a position of giving up any weapons as they approached the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and said that his vice president be targeted violently – hanged, in fact – if he didn’t shift the elector count his way.
He sat idly by while the Capitol was raided and more than a hundred law enforcement officers were injured in the melee caused by his supporters wielding bars and sticks. They carried his flags.
The result was that he was impeached – but, along party lines, and not convicted.
In the other, Trump refused requests to return government documents he took after he left office. For more than a year he and his representatives either professed to not have them, falsely said they returned them all, and when it was pointed out that some had security restrictions, said that as president he had the right to independently reduce their security levels.
The result was government officials having to enter his residence to reclaim the documents he took illegally.
While some of the documents were secret, most weren’t and were apparently some of his favorite communications from his four years in office. And perhaps some just happened to be in boxes removed from the White House during his final days that he wouldn’t accept he had to give up.
What extraordinary hubris and sense of entitlement for no real need, only that he could do as he wished.
Jack Smith, special counsel, said earlier this week that ending the two cases’ legal work was being done because of “legal norms,” “rather than a decision made on the merits of the cases or because of problems with the evidence.” Smith knew well what the justice department had.
That action is a tragedy.
The justice officials who brought these charges, supported by evidence layers deep that included witnesses and video, were not weaponizing the law, as Trump so frequently claims when he’s in the legal wrong.
That he recognized that components of a raid on the Capitol were stirring, that his words could be an accelerant, and that he turned his back and ignored entreaties from his most senior aides and his family members, was clear cut. So was his yearlong refusal to cooperate in returning the documents.
With legal action at an end, what the country is fortunate to have is the extensive evidence-gathering that led to his impeachment, the videos taken that day at the Capitol and the photos of government documents in his Florida residence.
Those materials document Trump’s lawbreaking and should only be a pause in a possible future effort to have this man face the law, and possible conviction, for his lawbreaking.
For now, we are still a country of laws regardless of the office.
