Restoring the Rule of Law After Trump

If one looks back over Donald Trump business practices over the decades he has always operated like a crime boss - and associated with both Mafia and Russian mafia figures and, if some news reports are believed, likely engaged in money laundering for Russian oligarchs through cash purchases of condo units in Trump developments, especially in Florida - and falsified financial statements to both lenders and governmental agencies (things that if you or I did them would land us in prison).  Since moving into the White House, there has been no change in Trump's mode of operation and, indeed, he is now trashing parts of the government if he believes their normal operations are a threat to his re-election: e.g., the U.S. Postal Service and U.S. Intelligence agencies. In the event Trump is hopefully defeated in November, 2020, then the question becomes how should his criminal actions both before and after the 2016 election be handled.  Allowing Trump and his organization - New York State appears to be moving against the Trump organization - and enablers to avoid accountability and a reckoning sends the message that wrongdoers can ignore the law.  A column in the New York Times looks at this issue.  Here are column highlights:

Last week, NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Joe Biden whether, if elected, he could envision Donald Trump being prosecuted. Biden replied that the prosecution of a former president would be a “very, very unusual thing” and probably “not very good for democracy.” The former vice president said he would not stand in the way if the Justice Department wanted to bring a case . . . .

Biden’s reticence is understandable, because a president who runs the White House as a criminal syndicate creates a conundrum for liberal democracy. In a functioning democracy, losing an election should not create legal liability; there was a reason Trump’s “Lock her up” chant was so shocking.

But you can’t reinforce the rule of law by allowing it to be broken without repercussion. After four years of ever-escalating corruption and abuses of power, the United States cannot simply snap back to being the country it once was if Trump is forced to vacate the White House in January. If Biden is elected, Democrats must force a reckoning over what Trump has done to America.

Of course, a Biden victory is far from assured, and if he loses, there may be no stopping this country’s slide into a permanent state of oligarchic misrule. But right now, while there’s still hope of cauterizing Trumpism, ideas about post-Trump accountability are percolating in Democratic and activist circles.

Senator Kamala Harris, of California, said that she believed the Justice Department would have no choice but to pursue criminal charges against Trump for the instances of apparent obstruction of justice outlined in the Mueller report. In January, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, called for a Justice Department task force “to investigate violations by Trump administration officials of federal bribery laws, insider trading laws and other anti-corruption and public integrity laws.” The House is discussing post-Trump reforms on issues including abuse of the pardon power, foreign election interference and the independence of inspectors general.

The “lack of accountability that people felt around the financial crisis and around torture didn’t go away,” said Rhodes. “It metastasized.” A generation of Republicans learned that there was no price for flouting the rules.

This time, Rhodes believes some sort of commission is warranted. “If you look at other countries, it’s important that the process be constructed in a way that doesn’t feel politically motivated, that doesn’t feel like revenge,” he said. It should be, he said, a “safe space for people to come forward and share what they know about what happened.”

As Rhodes suggests, any post-Trump rebuilding requires learning as much as possible about [Trump's] the president’s many misdeeds. Right now, we don’t know what we don’t know — for every scandal that a whistle-blower or journalist has brought to the public’s attention, there are likely many more that are still secret.

The administration’s failure to contain the coronavirus — exacerbated, according to reporting in Vanity Fair, by Trump’s hostile indifference to hard-hit blue states — deserves something akin to a 9/11 commission. So does the wholesale corruption of American diplomacy, only a small part of which was addressed by impeachment.

But simply airing this regime’s transgressions will not be enough. Sam Berger, who wrote the accountability report for the Center for American Progress, points out that Trump and his enablers can’t be shamed. To reveal all they’ve done without imposing consequences could only underline what they’ve gotten away with, a terrible message to future administrations.

So where there’s been malfeasance, we need legal sanctions. Prosecutions that likely would have happened had Trump not had presidential immunity — like the campaign finance case that helped land his former attorney, Michael Cohen, in prison — should go forward when he’s out of office. The CAP report calls for every government agency to “conduct an immediate internal review to identify corruption during the Trump administration and publicly report on the steps it will take to address it. Where appropriate, information obtained during these reviews must be shared with law enforcement, inspectors general, and congressional committees.”

In order to avoid repeating Trump’s politicization of law enforcement, a President Biden would need to give maximum autonomy to those in charge of Trump probes, which he’s already inclined to do.

Given that Trump has convinced large swaths of the country that the F.B.I. is a hotbed of leftist subversion, it’s hard to see how any prosecution would seem legitimate to most Republicans. But Bassin holds out hope that a President Biden could restore, among a majority of the country, “an understanding that there is a role for an independent Department of Justice.”

“I don’t underestimate the challenge here, but he’s got to do all the things that are possible to get us back on that path,” Bassin said. “Otherwise we are going to be fighting over the very foundational institutions of our democracy endlessly.”

This might be our fate regardless. But he’s right about the challenge for Democrats, should they take power. They must extirpate Trumpism, without ever seeming to imitate it.