Trump Indictments Are a New Beginning

Lawfare: “The indictment of former President Donald J. Trump that was unsealed today by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida represents a beginning in several distinct senses.”

“It is, at one level, the beginning of a single criminal proceeding: an indictment which alleges discrete crimes against two individuals, one of whom happens to have served as President of the United States.”

“It is also, however, the beginning of the broader effort to use federal criminal law as a vehicle of accountability for Trump’s behavior—both in office and following his departure from office. It is, after all, the first federal criminal case against Trump—against whom prior criminal investigations have come up short and other federal and state criminal investigations remain ongoing.”

“And it is, at the same time, the beginning of new era in American political life, one in which federal prosecutions of former presidents are—fortunately or unfortunately, as Trump might say—no longer either unthinkable or an eventuality to be avoided, either by prudential exercises of prosecutorial discretion (as in the case of Bill Clinton) or by preemptive exercises of the presidential power of clemency (as in the case of Richard Nixon).”