Cal Thomas: Power of the prosecutor

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, June 6th, 2024. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. WORLD commentator Cal Thomas now with a notable speech about political prosecutions from 80 years ago.

CAL THOMAS: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg reached back to the 1930s to defend his role in the conviction of former president Donald Trump. He credited Republican Thomas Dewey for “usher(ing) in the era of the modern, independent, professional prosecutor.” Perhaps Bragg should consider a speech delivered in 1940 by U.S Attorney General Robert H. Jackson to the country’s chief federal prosecutors and U.S. attorneys.

Jackson said something that might be considered relevant to the Trump trial: “If a prosecutor can choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor, that he will pick people that he thinks he should get rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.” Jackson goes on, “With the law books filled with a great assortment of crime, a prosecutor stands a chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.”

Many, and not just Trump defenders, will see this as a warning that has just been ignored 84 years later. Jackson really nails it in the following sentence: “It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.”

That speech could have been delivered today if we had attorneys general in New York and Washington who believed it. One can oppose Donald Trump’s campaign and still be worried that this politicization of the criminal justice system will come back to haunt those who currently favor it. The trial had many suggested conflicts. Judge Juan Merchan contributed small amounts of money to Democrats and the 2020 Biden campaign, and his daughter once worked for Vice President Kamala Harris and raised money for Democrats off the trial. DA Alvin Bragg made a campaign promise to get Trump. Matthew Colangelo, the third highest official in President Biden’s Justice Department, quit his job to work on a state prosecution. The jury pool was drawn from a city that voted overwhelmingly for Biden.

I am reluctant to join the company of conspiracists, but this definition seems to fit the pile-on that resulted in Trump’s conviction: “Any concurrence in action; combination in bringing about a given result.” Nothing will prevent retribution by prosecutors in Republican states from doing unto others what has been done to Trump should they wish to engage in payback. A Wall Street Journal editorial had it right: “Alvin Bragg might have opened a new destabilizing era of American politics. And no one can say how it will end.”

To which I would add that Trump’s conviction might be overturned, but the stain on our legal system is likely to remain for some time.

I’m Cal Thomas.

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