In a Op-Ed piece in Politico, Ankush Khardori, a former federal prosecutor, details the actual legal and procedural steps that the Justice Dept. is considering in dealing with two criminal investigation that are high profile and historic in their nature….
While the cry’s in the media are for indictment’s and convictions?
The Attorney general has momentous decisions to make….
Charging his bosses kid with a crime, one that has admitted he was a drug dependant individual ….
Charging an ex-President that would be first in history, and crossing several lines to do…
That ex-President that would access to top shelf legal consul (That he wouldn’t necessarily listen to)….
Could those handling the case be the targets of violence ?
And the political fire storm that would occur if that ex-President was acquitted ….
And?
There is a probability that those who went after him would be the targets of retribution if the former President won a second term in office….
Charging Donald Trump HAS TO BE a WIN.…
Period…..
These are boom times for the country’s armchair prosecutors. Every day seems to bring some fresh new possibility or development in a high-profile criminal investigation, along with the opportunity to speculate about whether a major public figure will wind up in prison. Most of the time these days, we’re talking about Donald Trump, but of course the current president’s son, Hunter Biden, is also under federal criminal investigation, and that has generated similar questions about how that investigation will be resolved.
Much of this commentary, however, has relied on a mechanistic account of how federal prosecutors operate in complex cases: an assumption that if there is sufficient evidence of a crime, then it will, or at least should be, prosecuted. That’s incomplete at best and misleading at worst. The result has been a widespread over-simplification of the questions that Attorney General Merrick Garland and the prosecutors working on these investigations will need to confront — and the distinct possibility that, one way or another, many people will be confused or disappointed if their preferred target is not ultimately indicted.
It is worth taking a step back and understanding the decision-making framework that is supposed to govern whether the Justice Department seeks an indictment of someone. The department has a set of policies that govern such “charging decisions,” but they provide prosecutors with discretion in determining whether to criminally charge someone, and in the Trump and Biden cases, that discretionary element could be crucial….
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Things are not so simple, however, when the underlying conduct is either relatively unusual or concerns a subject in which prosecutors tend to be more flexible in their approach to criminal charges…
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Many people have presented the situation confronting the Justice Department more simply — as a question of whether the Justice Department has sufficient evidence to indict Trump to convict him during a trial — in part based on public comments by Garland, but they are less straightforward than people are inclined to think…
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Ultimately, the Justice Department could end up charging Trump, Biden, both of them, or neither of them. Yes, I am deliberately withholding my own predictions from this piece. But whatever the result, the department’s decisions are likely to be far more complicated than you might think….
image…The New Yorker