Former President Donald Trump is now facing 91 criminal charges in four cases. It’s certainly historic and unprecedented in the United States. But what does it mean? The editorial board of this newspaper is as divided as the nation. Here, we present the views of members of the editorial board. Let us know what you think at opinion@scng.com
Susan Shelley
Partisan politics has its place. The courtroom isn’t it.
Yet the Biden administration, through its Department of Justice and its political allies, is seeking to defeat the Democratic incumbent’s leading Republican opponent in next year’s presidential election with ginned-up criminal charges and perpetual perp walks. In Biden’s own words, spoken on Nov. 9, 2022, as former President Donald Trump prepared to announce that he was running: “We just have to demonstrate that he will not take power if he does run, making sure he — under legitimate efforts of our Constitution — does not become the next president again.”
To paraphrase former President Bill Clinton, it depends on what the definition of “legitimate” is.
Since Trump announced, he’s been indicted four times. This latest stack of charges, brought by the local district attorney of one of Georgia’s 159 counties, asserts it’s a criminal conspiracy under Georgia law for a presidential candidate to talk with lawyers and elected officials, even in other states, about challenging the results of an election in the Electoral College. The indictment charges Trump with making phone calls and tweeting. Absurd. Alternate slates of electors are not illegal; that’s the Electoral College process.
Democrats have called for all of Trump’s trials next year to be televised. If they think that’s going to be bad for Trump, they don’t know much about television.
Larry Wilson
Clearly, former President Donald Trump is in a heap of legal trouble, indicted by local justice officials and citizens on grand juries four times in four months for illegal activities far and wide in our nation.
Equally clearly, our democracy is in trouble when a demagogue still fails to concede defeat when he is beaten overwhelmingly in the popular vote and by the same margin in the Electoral College that he declared his “landslide” four years earlier.
But indictment fatigue is a real danger, just as the people had an understandable impeachment fatigue when Trump twice avoided losing his job because senators voted their party line rather than on the facts.
Let’s put the other three indictments aside and look at the charges in the fourth.
They show a crystal-clear case that Trump and his 18 co-defendants tried to illegally interfere with the outcome of the Georgia vote with intimidation from the Oval Office of election officials, with fake electors, with wild lies about voting machine integrity. It was organized racketeering aimed at falsely overturning the election. Read the indictment. These racketeers need to pay the price for their brazen work to steal the presidency. Most of all, their ringleader, who tried to order Georgia to “find” Trump votes that didn’t exist, needs to meet justice for the first time in his privileged life.
Steven Greenhut
There are two ways of looking at the latest indictments against Donald Trump. His loyal followers claim the entire legal system is rigged against the former president, just as the political system was rigged against him during 2020’s “stolen” election. The other — advocated by yours truly — echoes Occam’s Razor (the most likely answer is the most-obvious one).
Maybe the insurrection-fomenting ex-president bears responsibility for some of the 91 indictments and other nastiness (sexual-abuse allegations, two impeachments, fraud settlements, etc.) that form the foundation of his career. Perhaps the man who wanted to prosecute his enemies (“Lock her up”) finally is being held to account.
New York’s indictments are a stretch, even if making hush-money payments to a porn actress is unseemly. I can only imagine what Trump’s minions would have said had a Democrat been charged with mishandling classified documents. But the Georgia case is damning. It details an alleged conspiracy to steal the election by strong-arming election officials and promoting a fake-electors scheme.
Are prosecutors overcharging? Most likely, but this was not your run-of-the-mill effort to challenge the results of a close election. Trump tried to overturn election results even if it meant destroying our democratic system in the process. Was it a crime? That’s for a jury to decide. But the system isn’t rigged. It is finally working as it’s designed.
John Seiler
For the legal arguments against all four indictments of former President Trump, see the analyses by Alan Dershowitz.
I want to concentrate on one aspect of the fourth indictment in Georgia: The use of the state’s RICO statute against him and 18 other defendants. It stands for Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act.
President Nixon signed the federal act in 1970. Since then, 33 states followed, including Georgia and California. Which obviously didn’t work because 53 years later we suffer record deaths from illegal drugs.
RICO acts allow overzealous prosecutors to bundle unrelated charges against alleged criminals. For example, under Acts of Racketeering Activity of the Georgia indictment, Act 22 charges Trump “caused … an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy” with this simple tweet: “Georgia hearings now on @OANN. Amazing!” Tweeting people to watch a TV show is illegal?
In 1989, the Supreme Court upheld RICO, although four justices suggested it actually might be unconstitutional. Which it is. An analysis by the Independent Institute found “RICO has succeeded in blurring the lines between state and federal law enforcement and in overturning the protections inherent in the due-process guarantees of the U.S. Constitution.”
If any good comes from these indictments, most useful would be to put all RICO laws under scrutiny — then repeal them.
Richard Boddie
I submit that the United States of America’s experiment with individual liberty is just about totally gone now. And that has all occurred in the past few years.
The unprecedented scores of indictments pending everywhere against former President Donald Trump underscore this.
Let me initially state for those of you who are not aware that as a Libertarian I am not a fan nor supporter of “The Donald.” But neither am I a hyper-reflexive hater, like way too many are today. Also understand that I say this having watched the “major media” and social media giants totally demonize Trump, starting in the fall of 2016, daily and constantly, after he shocked the world and became president.
Donald Trump soundly beat Hillary Clinton. The Democrats openly complained that election was “stolen,” just as they complained in 2000.
Trump has been relentlessly demonized again and again, while very few have the integrity to apply the same level of scrutiny to the current president of the United States.
Can you imagine The Donald and Bobby, Jr. winning it all in 2024? I can, and it’s pretty obvious that the backers of the status quo incumbent regime, wokies, progressives, and other haters of the American republic fear that possibility.
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