The indictment of Donald Trump has not only brought unity to a fractured Republican party, political pundits and legal analysis also say it may very well dampen any trust Americans have in the justice system.
“I think this is going to backfire. I think this is going to leave a bad taste in people’s mouths,” Gavin Wax, president of the New York Young Republican Club told The Epoch Times. “It’s bigger than Trump.”
As evidence to that—all five Republicans looking to outstep Trump for the party’s nomination for president have put political advantages aside and condemned Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for the indictment.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, considered to be Trump’s biggest rival for the nomination, called the indictment un-American and vowed that his state would not assist with extradition of Trump to New York.
“The weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda turns the rule of law on its head. It is un-American,” DeSantis said on Twitter.
Even progressive Republicans like Gov. Chris Sununu (N.H.), among GOPers long labeled RINOS (Republican in name only) for sympathizing with Democratic agendas and a well-known critic of Trump, condemned the indictment, saying he felt like the former President was “being attacked.”
In pointing out that no one likes a bully, Trump’s attorney Jesse Binnall told Epoch Times affiliate NTD’s Capitol Report, that he believes the Bragg indictment will be perceived as prosecutorial bullying that will, alarmingly, broadly cast the justice system in a poor light. “It’s a very, very dangerous road that they have decided to down here,” he said.
Immediately following the Trump indictment, long-time columnist and Pulitzer prize winner Peggy Noonan, who has proven herself not to be a Trump fan, even joined Trump loyalists in warning that Braggs may end up bringing unwanted scrutiny not only to his office but the entire American justice system.
Entitled “The Wrong Indictment Against Trump,” the Wall Street columnist wrote the indictment is “below us—not below him, but us.”
Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, known to be pro-Trump, said that even if the allegations against Trump prove to be true, it will end up discrediting the American justice system. “If reports are to be believed, it is not merely an unworthy exercise of prosecutorial discretion. It is one that will threaten the legitimacy of the justice system—on the public acceptance of which the rule of law hinges,” he wrote in a March 31 commentary for the National Review.
Wax said that Bragg’s avowed “soft on crime” agenda coming into office in 2022 almost makes it seems like he is intentionally trying to create distrust in the conjoined American political and justice systems, especially given the violent nature of the cases that he’s not prosecuting.
“He is not prosecuting rapists. He’s not prosecuting assaults, people committing a burglary, or mugging people, or people with long wraps,” charged Wax. “He has this worldview of narco tyranny that he’s going to allow criminals to rampage the streets, but then go after Trump for basically [what] was effectively a bookkeeping infraction.”
Of the crimes Braggs has not prosecuted in recent times includes a hate crime against a Jewish man and a group of teens who violently assaulted FOX weatherman Adam Klotz on a New York subway.
Even in division, Braggs has brought unity.
Conservative television host and pro-Trumper Tucker Carlson said on his show that the indictment likely regarding “a payment that federal regulators said [several years ago] violated no law” will send “American politics into complete chaos, perhaps permanently,” as anti-Trumper Presidential historian Michael Beschloss told MSNBC, “Tomorrow, I think, in terms of American history, we will be waking up in a different country.”
Almost two decades ago, Gene Healey, senior vice president of policy of the Cato Institute, wrote a 2004 article warning that the broadening of laws was expanding more opportunities for the abuse of prosecutorial power. It was based on the indictment and conviction of Martha Stewart at the time for insider trading.
In the article, Healey quoted this line out of a famous speech by U.S. Attorney General Robert Jackson in 1940.
“With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone.
“The great danger,” Jackson said, is that “he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.”
From The Epoch Times