nymag.com excerpt-—Republicans have long been predicting that criminal charges against Donald Trump would lead to Republicans ginning up charges against Democrats out of pure revenge. The prediction, of course, was designed to legitimate it. And now, inevitably, members of the Republican legal Establishment have moved from predicting this turn of events to advocating for it.
John Yoo, the former Bush administration lawyer (who himself escaped prosecution for his role in constructing legal justifications to torture detainees, many of whom turned out to be held wrongfully in the first place), has an essay in National Review arguing for revenge prosecutions. The imprimatur of Yoo, a Berkeley law professor and fellow at two of the conservative movement’s least-insane think tanks (the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution), underscores the progression of “lock her up” from wild seriously-not-literally Trump-campaign demagoguery in 2016 to party doctrine in 2024.
“Repairing this breach of constitutional norms will require Republicans to follow the age-old maxim: Do unto others as they have done unto you,” urges Yoo. “In order to prevent the case against Trump from assuming a permanent place in the American political system, Republicans will have to bring charges against Democratic officers, even presidents.”
I agree with Yoo that one of the cases against Trump, the Alvin Bragg prosecution, is weak. That’s not to say Trump is innocent, but that it’s a borderline case that did not need to be charged.
But Yoo is not confining his complaints to the Bragg case. He explicitly denounces all the charges against Trump, including the ones for attempting to negate the election results and for stealing classified documents, repeatedly ignoring or lying in the face of requests to return them, and engineering a cover-up.
snip——long read
I’ll believe it when I see it. So far, the J6 and Peter Navarro are in jail while Antifa and BLM walk free. The GOP is like a tempest in a teapot. Please, prove me wrong!!