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The party of 'lock her up' insists prosecuting Trump would be 'unAmerican' [1]
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Date: 2023-03-21
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump has assembled a list of national political figures who have been investigated, indicted, or convicted of crimes. Their countries include France, Portugal, Italy, Croatia, and Israel. A former German president was tried and cleared. Spanish and Austrian leaders stepped down during corruption investigations.
In France, both a former president and a former prime minister have been sentenced to prison for corruption. In Italy, the list of things for which former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has been charged is too long to get into, with some resulting in convictions and some in acquittals.
Democracies do this. They hold leaders and former leaders accountable for their actions. Republicans are all for that when it comes to Democrats, to an extreme extent—shoot, many of them still think Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted for things the Justice Department has concluded did not merit prosecution, and the drive to prosecute the current president’s son is like 90% of the House GOP’s reason for being right now. But Donald Trump? To Republicans, any investigation or prosecution of Trump can only ever be persecution. And that is partisan.
Republicans are now using their political power in the House to threaten the Manhattan district attorney believed to be poised to indict Trump. In Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is also believed to be poised to indict Trump on charges relating to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Republicans are pushing to make it easier to remove district attorneys. This is overt political interference in prosecutions.
It’s true that authoritarian leaders do prosecute political opponents on flimsy or false grounds, but authoritarian leaders also protect themselves and their own from consequences for corruption or crime. Saying that someone is above the law because they were once the president is absolutely the kind of thing you expect in authoritarian regimes. The fact that Republicans are brazen in their insistence on both things at once—“lock her up” and using Hunter Biden’s name as a shorthand for unidentified corruption on the one hand, and outrage at Trump being methodically investigated by prosecutors on the other—is telling, frankly.
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