Donald Trump made clear on Saturday evening that he is frustrated with his attorney general over her hesitance to bring politically-motivated criminal cases against a list of the president’s enemies, something the White House has been working to engineer on flimsy pretenses for months.
The president issued a Truth Social post on Saturday addressed to Pam Bondi, the U.S. attorney general, stating that he’d reviewed numerous reports from the Department of Justice apparently stating that no progress was being made on launching the prosecutions after criminal referrals were sent to Bondi’s team by William Pulte, an official at the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
In the post, which began “Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done,’” Trump assumes the guilt of Sen. Adam Schiff and others like Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook, and demands that Bondi begin criminal prosecutions without “delay.”
I mean, Trump’s a pretty bad president, but under the system, as it stands, if an unjust prosecution happens, the courts are expected to shoot it down. That’s why one has a court system. It shouldn’t fall over just because he demands prosecution of political opponents.
In Japan, you have a system where prosecuted cases virtually always lead to a conviction, where for practical purposes, the “filter” happens at the decision to prosecute:
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/c05401/order-in-the-court-explaining-japan’s-99-9-conviction-rate.html
But that’s not how the US works.
There’s a legitimate issue in that a prosecution can cause a defender to incur legal fees — and maybe it’s the case that we should try to mitigate than more than is the case today. Or maybe nuisance. Trump certainly has managed to fire people in the Executive Branch who he was angry at. But I’m not especially worried that Trump is going to be just running around convicting people of crimes because he doesn’t like them. Trump was prosecuted and convicted because he broke the law. He is, no doubt, pissed off about that. But it doesn’t mean that he can just readily go out and have people convicted who he personally doesn’t like who haven’t broken the law.
I’d also add that even past judges acting to throw out cases that flagrantly don’t have any merit or to rule in favor of a defendant, even if you could somehow compromise a judge, the common-law system has the right to a jury trial to add yet another barrier to a compromised government attempting to misuse prosecution.
Finally, there’s the pardon, something that Trump has used himself very vigorously to remove punishment from people who he liked, which can come from a future administration.
This is something that the system is already designed to handle. It doesn’t need out-of-band involvement.