The New York Times recently made the case – inadvertently we’re sure – that the Biden Department of Justice has been politicized and there is a two-tiered system of justice in play.
In a front page column in last Saturday’s New York Times, senior reporter Charles Savage began with this about Donald Trump’s election case prosecutor: In accusing former President Donald J. Trump of conspiring to subvert American democracy, “the special counsel, Jack Smith, charged the same story three different ways. The charges are novel applications of criminal laws to unprecedented circumstances heightening legal risks, but Mr. Smith’s tactic gives him multiple paths in obtaining and upholding a guilty verdict.
It sounds very much to us that, for The Times, this Trump prosecution is not really a case involving criminality that leaps out at you. Rather it requires massaging and bending over backwards, perhaps pretzel-like, to make the man fit the crime rather than the other way round. Indeed, manipulating charging language, novel applications of criminal laws, and unprecedented circumstances hardly seems compatible with the notion that a prosecutor’s job is to prove criminality “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
And where does a concern for avoiding “legal risks” fit into a prosecutor’s search for answers to the questions of guilt? Compare this to the treatment of Hunter Biden days ago in his court appearance before Judge Maryellen Norieka. The prosecutorial gifts he got from the DOJ were astonishing. Even putting aside the stripped down penalties for his serious non-payment of taxes and illegal gun charges, the gratuitous offer of blanket immunity had no rhyme or reason whatsoever, as the judge duly noted.
The contrast is startling. In the Trump case, prosecutors were plainly looking for ways to stuff the former President, with however much difficulty, into the four corners of criminal statutes; while in the Biden case there was the palpable effort to find ways to let him skate. We rather thought the conventional wisdom was that former Presidents are accorded much greater slack than he has been given.
In the normal course, the contrast would be striking and alarming. When what is involved is a sitting president prosecuting a past and likely future political rival, it should be all the more so thought provoking.
