From Georgia to New York, 2024 could turn on the odor of selective prosecution

The Hill ^ | 16 Mar, 2024 | JONATHAN TURLEY

[MtnClimber]

he removal of lead special prosecutor Nathan Wade from Donald Trump’s prosecution had the feel of a Southern Gothic.

Fulton County, Ga. District Attorney Fani Willis had described Wade as “a Southern gentleman. Me, not so much.” For weeks, the public has been enthralled by accounts of Wade’s illicit affair with Willis. Then there was the roughly three-quarters of a million dollars paid to Wade before he was booted from the case this week.

Channeling Tennessee Williams in his play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Judge Scott McAfee wrote that, after their testimony, there remained “an odor of mendacity.”

That odor was particularly strong after the hearings indicated that Wade may have committed perjury in his earlier divorce case, and that both Willis and Wade were credibly accused of lying on the stand about when their relationship began.

They are prosecuting defendants in the Trump case accused of the same underlying conduct, including 19 individual counts of false statements, false filings or perjury.

Yet, that distinct odor noted by Judge McAfee goes beyond the sorted affairs of Willis and Wade.

For many citizens, mendacity, or dishonesty, is wafting from various courtrooms around the country. The odor is becoming intolerable for many Americans as selective prosecution is being raised in a wide array of cases.

The problem is that courts have made it virtually impossible to use this claim to dismiss counts. Yet there is a disturbing level of merit to some of these underlying objections.

For years, conservatives have objected that there is a two-tier system of justice in this country. I have long resisted such claims, but it has become increasingly difficult to deny the obvious as selective prosecution in a variety of recent cases and opinions.

I have long stated that the charges against Trump over documents at Mar-a-Lago are strong and based on established precedent. However, the recent decision of Special Counsel Robert Hur not to bring criminal charges against President Joe Biden has undermined even that case.

Hur described four decades of Biden serially violating laws governing classified documents. The evidence included Biden telling a third party that he had classified material in his house and actually reading from a classified document to his non-cleared ghostwriter. There is evidence of an effort to destroy evidence and later an effort of the White House to change the report. There is also Biden’s repeated denial of any knowledge or memory of the documents found in nine locations where he worked or lived.

Hur ultimately had to justify the lack of charges based on a belief that he could not secure a conviction from a D.C. jury with an elderly defendant with diminished mental faculties.

Although Special Counsel Jack Smith could still proceed on obstruction counts, his prosecution of Trump for the retention and mishandling of national security documents is absurdly in conflict with the treatment Biden is receiving.

In New York, the legislature changed the statute of limitations to allow Trump to be sued while New York Attorney General Letitia James effectively ran on a pledge of selectively prosecuting him. She never specified any particular crime, just promising to bag Trump....

[nopardons]

BTTT

[kiryandil]

Jonathan Turley goes there.

[kiryandil]

This is nothing but Jim Crow justice aimed at conservatives this time instead of blacks.

Yes, Jim Crow justice - and the perps are the same as they were back in the days of Jim Crow...

[Fledermaus]

Yet Turley will vote all Democrat in 2024 and then get his hair dyed again.