Think Trump is being railroaded? It's happened to others in the U.S.
National Post, 19 April 2023
A trial judge called the case of Sen. Ted Stevens the worst example of prosecutorial misconduct he had ever seen
A very senior Republican is running for election. Prosecutors are determined to take him out, and are willing to compromise the integrity of the criminal justice system to do so. They indict their target on accounting matters. They cannot prevent him from being a candidate, but malicious prosecutors hope to damage that candidacy.
Am I writing about Donald Trump? No. As this column never tires of shouting about the descent of the American criminal justice system into a playground for prosecutorial abuse of power: Remember Ted Stevens!
If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone, although with the necessary adaptations, which in Trump’s case inevitably included an actress in pornographic films.
Many Americans, blithely unaware of how lawless their criminal justice system has become, accuse the Manhattan district attorney of partisan bias against Trump, as the Democrat campaigned for office on a promise that he would be tough on Trump. It’s much worse than that. Prosecutors do not need a partisan agenda to abuse their power. Abuse of power is a thoroughly bipartisan and nonpartisan affair.
Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska was, in 2008, the longest serving Republican senator in American history. He was cruising to re-election that year and expected to easily extend his 40 (!) years in the Senate. The federal department of justice had been investigating corruption in Alaska but had landed no big fish. Stevens was the biggest fish in all Alaska and one of the biggest in Washington.
If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone
Federal prosecutors desperately wanted to take him down, and so they indicted him on accounting irregularities that, in the weird world of American “process” crimes, amounted to a felony. In essence, they said that Stevens did not pay the full amount for renovations to his home, and therefore he had received a gift, and thus was guilty of not reporting the gift on his Senate disclosure forms. In typical American count stacking, federal prosecutors made one gift into seven felonies. (Trump faces 34 counts.) Stevens was convicted at trial and narrowly lost re-election eight days later by 1.3 per cent.
A few months later an FBI whistleblower revealed that prosecutors had suppressed evidence that Stevens had indeed paid for the renovations in full. Stevens was exonerated and the trial judge called it the worst example of prosecutorial misconduct he had ever seen. But it was too late for Stevens, who had been chased out of the Senate by lawless prosecutors.
The naked legal persecution of the Republicans’ most senior senator took place under a Republican administration. The attorneys general of George W. Bush did nothing to stop it.
The irate trial judge appointed his own investigator to look into criminal malfeasance in the Bush justice department regarding the Stevens case. The report was damning but there was no punishment for the prosecutors, though one did commit suicide. A Republican justice department took out the most senior Republican senator and there was no accountability.
Imagine then what prosecutors might do to ordinary, poor Americans every day when no one is watching and about whom no one cares. Those victims don’t get FBI whistleblowers.
Imagine then what they might do to Donald Trump. Why not, if the prosecutors of Ted Stevens got away with it?
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