Name: Trump must be prosecuted, or we should just admit presidents are above the law
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Trump must be prosecuted, or we should just admit presidents are above the law

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An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile.Redeem nowPresident Donald Trump cannot go unpunished this time.He's always been able to skate by despite criminal behavior, never facing the consequences for a long and in .But this isn't just about Trump. This is about the next president. And the one after that, and the one after that.If a president can brazenly threaten a state election official unless he invents votes to tip an election — an election that has already been recounted twice, and to which every legal challenge has been found to be without merit — .If Trump is not impeached, censured, or held criminally liable by a state or federal jurisdiction for his actions in , we might as well just do away with the generally held principle that the president is not above the law.Rule of law was the ostensible reason for making the country endure nearly two years of drama leading up to Bill Clinton's impeachment over allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice related to his affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky. (Lewinsky, , tweeted about the leaked audio recording of Trump's call: "i'm generally opposed to someone being surreptitiously taped on a phone call...but not this one, folks!")Any number of reasonable ethical critiques can be made of the independent counsel Ken Starr's investigation, including his like Clinton's affair. But ensuring an adherence to the law — that not even the president could dodge — was the primary argument being made to remove Clinton from office.Clinton was accused of lying under oath and using the power of the presidency to make an inconvenient witness shut up. I personally think he was guilty, based on the evidence. But the "high crimes" he was accused of were lying in court about sexual encounters and then having one of his friends try to get Lewinsky a job in the private sector to keep her quiet. Unseemly, illegal stuff, but not a threat to our very democracy.What Trump did — as documented in a 60-minute recording — is so much worse than anything of which Bill Clinton was accused, and with so much more clear-cut evidence, that it's mind-throttling to think he will face no discernible consequences for it.Some have already argued that while what Trump did was objectively despicable, it might not be a prosecutable federal crime because he didn't explicitly threaten Georgia's Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger.In other words, Trump could skate, again, because and his long record of would make it difficult to prove he was knowingly committing a crime."It is more illegal for you than it is for them," Trump told Raffensperger at one point, referring to Georgia election officials, "because, you know what they did and you're not reporting it."He continued: "That's a criminal, that's a criminal offense. And you can't let that happen. That's a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer."No reasonable person could listen to that and say it wasn't a blatant attempt at using the presidency to strong-arm an elected official into committing a crime. It was a barely veiled threat levied by an unconfident gangster.Worse, Trump was attempting election fraud on a massive scale. The sort of fraud that the president and his have failed to convince a single court that he was the victim of in the 2020 election.It shouldn't come as a that with barely more than two weeks left in his presidency, Trump found a new bottom.His insistence on perpetuating election-fraud conspiracy theories and his refusal to concede that Joe Biden won the election are actions he's telegraphed he would do for months. We're numb to his assaults on democracy.But we cannot be numb to the fact that he was caught abusing his power and attempting to commit election fraud.If Trump is not held accountable in some way, by some legal authority, for this particular crime, we ought to just adopt the notion infamously coined by Richard Nixon: "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."Sign up for notifications from Insider! Stay up to date with what you want to know.Subscribe to push notificationsAn icon in the shape of a lightning bolt.Keep readingIt indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options.An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt.For you

An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile.Redeem nowPresident Donald Trump cannot go unpunished this time.He's always been able to skate by despite criminal behavior, never facing the consequences for a long and in .But this isn't just about Trump. This is about the next president. And the one after that, and the one after that.If a president can brazenly threaten a state election official unless he invents votes to tip an election — an election that has already been recounted twice, and to which every legal challenge has been found to be...

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Anthony L. Fisher

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Trump must be prosecuted, or we should just admit presidents are above the law

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