Why Trump is on the verge of the presidency and not in prison.

Slate finally takes stock of how Not normal this choice was.

Regardless of the outcome, the American people will make history in the 2024 election. We will either elect the country’s first female president – ​​among others the first for Kamala Harris – or we will elect the first convicted felon. Because in the eyes of the law, if not the country, Donald Trump remains an unrepentant fraud and predator awaiting a likely prison sentence.

History awaits!

As I pondered this depressing binary in the final days of the race, I’ve been thinking about how we got here. There are of course many answers to that, but what I have been thinking about the most is what the role of the criminal justice system is in our current predicament. Did that system – the system tasked with keeping the public safe but seemingly unable to deliver consequences for one man – the American people fail? Or are we on the precipice of failing ourselves by re-electing this guy despite the hard work of decent, well-intentioned public officials and line lawyers who manage the complex, grinding machinery of American law?

I’ve ping-ponged between these two perspectives, but on the eve of this election, I think I figured out the answer: Time and time again, they chose systems tasked with protecting the public from a dangerous criminal like Donald Trump. appeasement, which is a big reason why we stand on the precipice of re-electing a man who threatens to end the democratic system that Americans have known for nearly 60 years. At the same time, the law has exposed enough of Trump’s flagrant criminality that we will have only ourselves to blame for the inevitable consequences if we extradite Donald Trump—a man who has promised violence against his political enemies and mass deportations of some of the most vulnerable people in this country – absolute, unchecked power. Blame the system and the voters!

Criminal law has been nipping at Trump’s heels for years. For starters, there are the many, many allegations of sexual assault over the decades—one of which is E. Jean Carroll’s claim that he assaulted her in a department store in the 1990s, for which the law found him liable . Many of these cases were reported years after they happened and were never investigated by authorities, but it’s hard not to believe them given the sheer number of credible allegations and the fact that this is a man who secretly been recorded bragging about assaulting a woman.

Sexual assault allegations are not the only area where Trump has gotten off easy. Consider the Manhattan District Attorney’s 2012 criminal investigation of Trump and his children Donald Jr. and Ivanka for housing fraud. According to reporting in the New Yorker, Vance “overruled his own prosecutors” and dropped the investigation after Marc Kasowitz—Trump’s lawyer and a Vance donor—contacted Vance personally. These are not even the only Trump financial mistakes for which he avoided meaningful scrutiny.

Then there are the crimes Trump has committed since gaining political power. First, there was extensive evidence that Trump obstructed justice in 2017 to prevent a full accounting of his dealings with Russia during the 2016 election and transition. While this evidence was presented in the Mueller report, against the wishes of some of his top prosecutors, special counsel Robert Mueller declined to formally allege that Trump had obstructed justice. Nor did he use his full subpoena powers to investigate Trump’s finances. “The evidence is so overwhelming that he obstructed justice, but we’re not actually going to come out and say that,” Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said. said. “I honestly think the American public did them a bit of a disservice because we weren’t very clear about what we had concluded.” There were never any consequences for these crimes.

Then there is the 2019 Ukraine blackmail scheme that Trump is pursuing was impeached in Parliament … but ultimately acquitted in the Senate. Despite diligent efforts by the House Intelligence Committee, investigators were eventually hamstrung by Trump’s refusal to cooperate with allegedly mandatory subpoenas. Trump’s Justice Department, under Attorney General William Barr, swept the entire case under the rug without an investigation, and Trump’s allies in the Senate helped him evade a single witness who testified at trial. They then voted to acquit.

Then there are the crimes he committed, as the prosecutors finally did decide to charge who have not yet been brought to trial. Primary among these are the cases of election theft and the January 6 Capitol assault in DC and Fulton County, Georgia, neither of which were able to proceed until November. The Georgia case stalled because of Fani Willis’ personal misstep. DC January 6^th The case appears to have been sufficiently derailed by the Supreme Court’s decision granting Trump and future presidents virtually unchecked immunity for crimes they commit while in office. Meanwhile, in the Mar-a-Lago case over stolen classified documents, prosecutors dragged a Trump-appointed judge willing to go to any lengths to protect his benefactor, up to and including dismissing the case on a novel and fabricated theory on the illegality of special advisers themselves.

It is certainly notable that the sabotage of Trump-appointed judges and magistrates played a key role in these cases. But at least in the federal cases, there was another issue at stake: Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to wait until the last possible moment to move forward with a special counsel appointment and ultimately indictment.

According to reporting in the Washington Post, Justice Department prosecutors were poised to begin looking at Trump as early as February 2021, immediately after the January 6 attack on the Capitol building and Trump’s attempt to overturn the election. During deliberations, DOJ officials “recognized the political risks” and ultimately decided to go after low-level troublemakers before looking at anyone in Trump’s orbit. The DOJ refused to look into Trump’s fake voter scheme for one whole yearuntil Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel referred the case to the department. The investigation only really began to sink in on Trump himself after public pressure mounted following the bipartisan House Jan. 6 committee investigation that produced a wealth of testimony about Trump’s damning behavior that day and led to the Capitol riot.

The DOJ will deny it until the end, but it seems clear that Garland wasn’t willing to go there until 2022 because there was a perception that the law had Trump in a box after his post-insurgency plunge in popularity. The reason for the delay had been concern about exposing our country to the unpredictable consequences of prosecuting a former president. There was a legitimate fear that it would cut the road to future “banana republic-ing,” as former DOJ prosecutor Frank Bowman put it to me, ie. government entities that wrongfully prosecute political enemies. But now, with the benefit of hindsight, Bowman believes Garland waited too long, given the predictable procedural hurdles to any prosecution of this complexity and Trump’s unmatched ability to challenge such a case. “Perhaps the criticism you can make is that he took too long to make that decision, given what he and his experienced advisers certainly knew, which is that once you decide to do it, it won’t be a quick process,” he told me.

Then there was the matter of classified documents, which Bowman called a “slam dunk” but which Garland also delayed. Two years ago, I wrote that this decision to stay the prosecution and appoint a special counsel would only benefit Donald Trump. Now we know that the decision to appoint a special counsel would be the basis for Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to dismiss the case.

Finally, there’s the one case that actually made it to court: Trump’s conviction in Manhattan for violating election and fraud laws in his scheme to pay Stormy Daniels to keep her story of an affair quiet before the 2016 election. Even in that However, in some cases, Trump can avoid accountability, as the sentencing was delayed from June to mid-September to November 26 in response to the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. If he wins the election, it is almost impossible to imagine the sentencing going forward. Even if he loses, the case could still be caught in procedural hell brought on by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. This felony conviction itself appears to have done little to maintain Trump’s appeal to the public as those of us who were in the room for the trial have struggled to convey the depth of the evidence of Trump’s criminality to the public.

There is certainly much on this side of the accounting for the failure of the legal system, from Merrick Garland to prosecutors in every jurisdiction where Trump’s crimes were committed. On the other side of the ledger, however, there is a simple truth: Americans know all about his crimes and it really doesn’t seem to matter to about 50 percent of us. “We somehow thought there was something special—better informed, more virtuous, more something— about Americans unlike any other in human history,” Bowman noted. “And it turns out we’re wrong.”

Ultimately, there is no binary. Voters have the information they need to judge Trump’s criminality when they go to the polls and may still make the wrong choice. Yet the law did not do enough to protect the country. It could have done more, faster. It could have given us more information and brought Trump’s crimes to light sooner and more fully. It could have locked him up.