No One Is Above the Law. That Means a Trump DOJ Must Indict Joe Biden
Let’s apply the new Trump standard
Special counsel Robert Hur found that there was enough evidence to charge Joe Biden with a crime, yet he didn’t.
As we know, Hur concluded that a jury would probably find that Biden didn’t have criminal intent, although he stipulated during his congressional hearing a couple of weeks ago that a reasonable juror might conclude that Biden was guilty.
If this wasn’t an outlandish decision on Hur’s part, neither was it inevitable. Clearly, the fact that recommending charges against Biden would have been a thermonuclear political event, potentially affecting the election outcome, helped stay Hur’s hand. He could have gone by the strict letter of the law but allowed prudential considerations — again, not unreasonably — to play a role.
The ongoing bout of civil cases and criminal indictments against Donald Trump and, soon enough, a criminal trial raise the question: Why, if Trump wins election, should his Justice Department accept Hur’s judgment? Why wouldn’t it simply take Hur’s report and fashion it into an indictment of former president Biden?
After all, if there’s anything we’ve learned recently, it’s that no one is above the law.
After getting her fraud judgment against Trump, New York attorney general Letitia James said, “No matter how big, rich or powerful you think you are, no one is above the law.”
This was her gloss on targeting Trump under an endlessly elastic statute meant to address consumer fraud and then, without any evidence of victims or harm, sticking him with a massive penalty.
When Trump got some relief from having to pony up a $450 million bond in the case, getting it reduced to merely $175 million, Jamelle Bouie wrote an outraged column, “No One is Above the Law, Except, Apparently, Donald Trump.”
Representative Dan Goldman rushed to Alvin Bragg’s defense when the Manhattan DA indicted Trump in the Stormy Daniels case last year with a piece titled, “I helped impeach Trump. His indictment shows no one is above the law.”
See? No one is above the law. That statement, of course, is a truism. In the hands of Trump enemies, though, it becomes something more — a rationalization for hostile prosecutors subjecting a political opponent to whatever they can possibly get him on.
By this standard, what would stop prosecutors in a Trump administration from trying to nail Biden? All the evidence is right there in the 350-page Hur report.
