All Federal Charges Against Trump Dismissed

Last week, this happened:

NYT (“Trump’s Sentencing in New York Is Officially on Hold“):

A New York judge on Friday postponed President-elect Donald J. Trump’s sentencing in his Manhattan criminal case, confirming that the former and future president would not receive his punishment next week.

Mr. Trump was convicted in May of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal and was scheduled to be sentenced on Tuesday, but his election victory made that all but impossible. The judge had already decided to halt the sentencing while Mr. Trump’s lawyers sought to have the whole case thrown out.

Prosecutors from the office of Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, declined to drop the case this week, noting that a jury had already convicted Mr. Trump. But they agreed to delay the sentencing and signaled a willingness to freeze the case for four years while Mr. Trump holds office.

So far, the judge, Juan M. Merchan, has not ruled on whether to freeze the case or dismiss it. He simply confirmed on Friday that Mr. Trump’s lawyers could formally seek a dismissal, and that the sentencing would be on hold while the defense submitted its arguments.

The battle over whether to dismiss the case could stretch on for months or more and ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court. If he ultimately loses in the courts, Mr. Trump could be sentenced once he leaves office. He faces up to four years in prison.

I don’t like it one bit, it seemed like the correct outcome all things considered. Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts on May 30 but sentencing was inexplicably set for November 26. Having been elected President in the interim, it would have been bizarre, indeed, to have him go to jail on state-level charges of which the voters were presumably quite aware on Election Day. Delaying the sentencing until after his second term is the least bad option.

The other shoe dropped yesterday.

NYT (“Jack Smith Seeks Dismissal of Two Federal Cases Against Trump“):

The special counsel Jack Smith asked two courts on Monday to effectively shut down the federal criminal cases he brought against President-elect Donald J. Trump last year, bowing to a Justice Department policy that says it is unconstitutional to pursue prosecutions against sitting presidents.

The twin requests by Mr. Smith — made to judges in Washington and Atlanta — were an acknowledgment that Mr. Trump will re-enter the White House in January unburdened by federal efforts to hold him accountable through charges of plotting to subvert the last presidential election and holding on to a trove of highly classified material following his first term in office.

The double-barreled filings were also the latest sign that Mr. Smith and his team were working to close up shop after years of intensive investigation and courthouse drama that tested the justice system’s ability to hold a once-and-future president to account amid shifting politics, misinformation and evolving legal standards.

Hours after Mr. Smith submitted his requests, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the election interference case in Washington, issued a brief order dismissing the proceeding.

Mr. Smith’s moves came after the president-elect began filling out his choices to lead the Justice Department. They followed Mr. Trump’s vow on the campaign trail to fire Mr. Smith within “two seconds” of taking office and to launch investigations into the prosecutors who pursued him, along with other perceived enemies. Mr. Smith has signaled that he intends to resign before Mr. Trump takes office.

In both of the court submissions, Mr. Smith made clear that his moves to end the charges against Mr. Trump were a necessity imposed on him by legal norms, rather than a decision made on the merits of the cases or because of problems with the evidence. The filings cited a Justice Department policy that sitting presidents may not be prosecuted.

I like this even less, as the federal charges were considerably more serious, not based on a novel legal theory, and related to his conduct while President. But, aside from the longstanding policy that the Justice Department does not pursue cases against a sitting President, it would seem to be the will of at least a plurality of American voters that Trump serves the next four years as President, notwithstanding his theft of classified documents and attempt to steal the previous election.

While my preference would have been to somehow suspend the investigation until the end of Trump’s term, there’s no practical way to do that. Theoretically, the materials from the investigation and court filings could be preserved, and the cases could be set back into motion in 2029. Realistically, that’s not going to happen even if a Democrat wins the next election. Presumably, they’d like to get on with implementing their policy agenda rather than getting bogged down with Trump.

Marc A. Thiessen and Danielle Pletka take the next logical leap, arguing, “Biden should pardon Trump.” Their lede gives them away as partisan hacks:

During his inaugural address, President Joe Biden promised to put his “whole soul” into ending what he called our nation’s “uncivil war” and “bringing America together.” He failed to deliver on that pledge, instead accusing Republicans of supporting “Jim Crow 2.0,” comparing them to George Wallace, Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis, and declaring right before the election that “the only garbage I see floating out there is [Trump’s] supporters.” (He later said, implausibly and without apologizing, that he was referring to the rhetoric displayed at Trump’s Oct. 27 rally at Madison Square Garden.)

But they have something of a case:

But while Trump might not need Biden’s pardon, America does.

More than a year ago in this space, we suggested that Biden should pardon Trump before the 2024 election. The threshold for the sitting president’s administration to indict the leading candidate of the opposing party should be extraordinarily high, we argued, and polls then showed that most Americans believed the charges were politically motivated. Continuing Trump’s prosecution would not only be divisive, it would erode public confidence in our judicial system and the principle of equal justice under law.

Unfortunately, Biden didn’t take our advice. Americans watched the unfolding legal spectacle, and in November they delivered their verdict, electing Trump decisively. In retrospect, Biden’s failure to shut down the Trump prosecutions helped make the former president’s improbable comeback possible, causing Republican primary voters — many of whom had been open to supporting another nominee — to rally around Trump, helping him to secure his party’s nomination and eventually the White House.

Trump has now endured an investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III (which concluded that he had not engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia), two impeachments, and 91 felony charges at the federal, state and local level — and has so far survived them all. As University of California at Berkeley law professor John Yoo put it recently during an interview for our podcast: “Trump has defeated lawfare.”

But while Trump has survived, the collateral damage to our democracy might only be beginning. Absent decisive action, we could find ourselves at the start of a vicious cycle, in which Republicans now argue they are justified in weaponizing the justice system to go after Democrats, and Democrats then feel free to retaliate when they regain power — sending the country spiraling into a miasma of partisan litigation.

Democrats might insist that Trump earned his indictments, but the spurious Mueller investigation undercut those claims in the eyes of the broader voting public. If we do not want to go through an endless cycle of what goes around comes around, a bold act of statesmanship is required: Biden should announce that he is issuing a blanket pardon for Trump, allowing him to start his presidency with a legal tabula rasa. In announcing his decision, he should recommend that state officials in New York and Georgia drop their cases, as well. “The American people have chosen Donald Trump to lead our country,” Biden should declare. “He deserves a chance to be successful — and America deserves a chance to heal.”

Hidden amongst the hackery lies a point. While underestimating the knowledge of the American public is nigh unto impossible, it would have been hard even for them to have missed the events of January 6, 2020. Clearly, at least half of them think it was not that big a deal. And, surely, the documents case pales in significance—especially since he’s about to once again become the ultimate classification authority. There is, then, a case to be made that pardoning Trump would be a magnanimous, healing gesture.

Mitigating that considerably, though, is Trump himself. Not only has he demonstrated not the slightest bit of remorse for inciting a riot that Americans killed and could have been a whole lot worse than it was on that score, but he’s doubled down since. He has declared his political enemies “vermin” and vowed to use his presidency to get revenge. Magnaninimy, in the face of that, is weakness, if not cowardice.