The Atlantic: Accountability Arrives for Donald Trump
Presidential Reform Project co-chair Jack Goldsmith is quoted in this article in The Atlantic.
If we ever get to the point where efforts to intimidate prosecutors and judges keep justice from being done—where threats of violence, promises of revenge, or mob rule influences the outcome of legal cases—we will have started down the path of lawlessness. Trump has acted like a mob boss in this case, and through much of his life. It’s important that he not avoid being brought to justice just because of his thuggish tactics.
“Whether the indictment is warranted or not, it crosses a huge line in American politics and American legal history,” Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor and former top Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, told The New York Times. And more are likely to follow. Of the four potential cases against Trump—including a Fulton County, Georgia, investigation of election subversion; a federal probe of presidential documents at Mar-a-Lago; and a federal inquiry into incitement on January 6—this is generally regarded as the weakest. Which tells us something important.
Donald Trump obsessively portrays himself as a victim; in fact, he is a man of borderless corruption. It has touched seemingly every area of his life. That would be bad enough, but as president, he did inestimable damage to the country, up to and including inspiring a violent insurrection and attempting to overturn an election. Now that some measure of accountability may have arrived for the least of his offenses, he will rage and storm, sensing that the long-delayed reckoning for his other misdeeds may also be at hand.