New York Attorney General Letitia James announced on Wednesday that she is preparing for retribution by newly elected President Donald Trump.
Smug and pompous as always, James is now terrified that Trump will do to her and Democrat prosecutors what they did to him —that is, weaponizing the law for purely political reasons.
Paranoia aside, James is imagining the kind of revenge that only Democrats have been anxious to employ.
At this point, it is worth recalling what Trump told Sean Hannity in a sit-down interview on Fox News in June. He said that critics claiming he’d seek retribution against political opponents are “wrong.” The use of “law fare” sets a terrible precedent for our country, he added.
“It has to stop, because otherwise, we’re not going to have a country.”
And while Trump might be justified or even tempted to punish those who engineered the legal abuse he long endured, he has repeatedly insisted that his focus on day one of a second term will be fixing what Biden and Harris broke, improving peoples’ lives economically and ending the cycle of crime, violence, and illegal immigration.
Punishing enemies the way Democrats have done is not a Trump priority or objective.
The case that James brought against the former president is an abject lesson in prosecutorial perversion and maltreatment. With the help of activist liberal judge Arthur Engoron, the judgment against him was a farcical $455 million dollars plus interest.
It will never be upheld. The case will either get tossed out completely on appeal or the fine will be significantly reduced.
During oral arguments, the New York appellate judges correctly surmised that the attorney general misapplied the law to bring an utterly absurd and nonsensical case based on a consumer protection statue where no consumers were harmed.
Even the witnesses called by James —bank lenders— testified that Trump’s asset valuations were reasonable. They never lost a dime, made truckloads of cash and wanted to lend him more money in the future.
So, this politically driven case will get reversed.
And so, too, will Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s ludicrous criminal prosecution of Trump. The guilty verdicts will never withstand judicial scrutiny on appeal because the case was legally unsound from the outset.
It’s not a crime to conceal a perfectly legal non-disclosure agreement. Moreover, Bragg utilized key testimony that is likely protected by immunity under the recent Supreme Court ruling.
All of that renders the verdicts illegitimate as a matter of law. But that’s not all.
With Trump’s election victory, the two federal cases against him are also over.
The classified documents indictment in Florida was already dismissed by the U.S. District Court judge. The companion prosecution in Washington involving January 6th is stalled because of the same SCOTUS immunity decision noted above.
Now, however, it will be dismissed because it is long-standing written DOJ policy not to indict or actively prosecute a sitting President.
As a practical matter, there will be no one to pursue it. Special counsel Jack Smith will soon head for the exit. He’ll resign before he’s fired by Trump or his new Attorney General. You can bet that his staff is already papering Washington with their disreputable resumes.
In sum, the crooked “law fare” game has reached an ignominious end. It backfired spectacularly on Democrats at the ballot box.
They thought they could weaponize the law to knock out Joe Biden’s presidential opponent whom Kamala Harris inherited.
Fortunately, voters are smart. They saw it for what it was —an illicit scheme to interfere in the election. In the end, these unscrupulous prosecutors lost their corrupt gambit.
But trust me, if given the chance, they’ll do it again.
