After Trump, America Needs Accountability for His Corruption

[Zorro]

Restoring the rule of law is not the same as “lock her up.”

Last week, NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Joe Biden whether, if elected, he could envision Donald Trump being prosecuted. Biden replied that the prosecution of a former president would be a “very, very unusual thing” and probably “not very good for democracy.” The former vice president said he would not stand in the way if the Justice Department wanted to bring a case, but when Garcia-Navarro pressed him, he suggested she was trying to bait him into a version of Trump’s threat against his 2016 opponent: “Lock her up.”

Biden’s reticence is understandable, because a president who runs the White House as a criminal syndicate creates a conundrum for liberal democracy. In a functioning democracy, losing an election should not create legal liability; there was a reason Trump’s “Lock her up” chant was so shocking.

But you can’t reinforce the rule of law by allowing it to be broken without repercussion. After four years of ever-escalating corruption and abuses of power, the United States cannot simply snap back to being the country it once was if Trump is forced to vacate the White House in January. If Biden is elected, Democrats must force a reckoning over what Trump has done to America.

Of course, a Biden victory is far from assured, and if he loses, there may be no stopping this country’s slide into a permanent state of oligarchic misrule. But right now, while there’s still hope of cauterizing Trumpism, ideas about post-Trump accountability are percolating in Democratic and activist circles.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/opinion/trump-corruption.html

[calguy]

1. Nothing I would like better

than to see new AG Preet Bharara go after these scum bags with everything they.ve got.

[lagomorph777]

4. Every DOJ patriot fired by Turd must get a senior job, prosecuting the Turd Syndicate.

[Maeve]

2. The corruption of this mis-administration has been a "very, very unusual thing"

And it should be treated appropriately.

[lagomorph777]

3. The time for "healing wounds" is long past. Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. committed

ever-bigger crimes because their predecessors got away with crimes. And of course, Trump represents the full flowering of the criminal GOP. This has to be stopped or America is over. Trump and his cronies must spend decades in the slammer (at a minimum) to get this syndicate in check.

[Ferrets are Cool]

5. This Administration MUST pay for their crimes. If not,

fuck it all.

[JudyM]

6. Here's hoping he's just trying to strategically defuse trump's anxiety about that

so that the manchild doesn’t create more catastrophe.

[dalton99a]

7. The Trump crime family must pay for their crimes.