Trump Cases Are Fueled By Partisan Political Hatred
By John J. Duncan Jr.
duncanj@knoxfocus.com
There is a very old saying that a zealous prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich if he wanted to.
If we really believed in the presumption of innocence – that a person is supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt – we would greatly reform the grand jury process or eliminate it altogether.
With very few exceptions, the grand jury hears only the prosecution’s side of a case. The grand jury is totally under the control of, and is a rubber stamp for, the attorney general, district attorney, or U. S. Attorney.
Thus, a defendant starts out at trial with two strikes against him. One, he has been arrested and charged with a crime, and two, he has been indicted by the GRAND Jury.
To most non-lawyers, the GRAND Jury sounds more important than just a regular jury. Even though the law says the burden is on the state or government to prove a case, in truth the burden is really on the defendant to prove his innocence if he is to be found not guilty.
I suppose this is not a serious problem, because probably 98% or more of all defendants are really guilty. However, Heaven help the poor person who is truly innocent but gets prosecuted anyway like many of the January 6th defendants who simply walked peacefully through the Capitol.
Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many thousand visit the Capitol each day and do exactly what most of the January 6th defendants did.
Because prosecutors win well over 90% of all criminal cases that go to trial, I believe President Trump will be convicted on one or more of the cases against him, but I don’t believe he should be.
First, conviction in a criminal case is supposed to require criminal intent. President Trump is not a lawyer, and I don’t believe he thought he was breaking any law or that he intended to do so.
The New York case was seen as being very weak, almost a joke or a travesty of justice by most lawyers, although it will be fairly easy to get a conviction by a New York City jury. That case was brought apparently to help the district attorney in a run for higher office.
The election cases revolve around Trump’s belief that the election was stolen. I was still in Congress in January of 2017 when many Democrats in Congress stood and objected to the certification of the Trump victory in 2016. Many Democrats not in Congress, including former President Obama and Hillary Clinton herself, questioned that election, but none of them were prosecuted.
As to the classified documents case, I wrote a column many months before this case about how many experts say we have a tremendous over-classification in this country. Some say as much as 90% of our classified material no longer needs to be classified.
With 22,000 people working in 16 intelligence agencies, and with technology moving so fast now that most technical products are obsolete the day they are taken out of the box, do you believe anything is really secret anymore?
When almost anyone can find out about your prescriptions, your purchases, your home, etc., do you really believe the Chinese cannot find out about everything we are doing? And the documents Trump had all date back to when he was in office two and a half years ago or more.
Harvey Silverglate, a Harvard and Princeton educated Boston lawyer, wrote a book published in 2011 entitled “Three Felonies A Day – How the Feds Target The Innocent.” The book overview says: “The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also have become impossibly broad and vague.”
The book “reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior” and added that there is now “a morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets.”
President Trump is being prosecuted because of partisan political hatred the likes of which has never been seen before in this country.
