The Democrats’ ‘charge Trump’ paradox

Yesterday, a political committee set up in order to condemn Donald Trump condemned Donald Trump. It would have been truly jaw-dropping if the congressional January 6 Committee (which consisted of seven Democrats and two Republicans, all of whom thought Trump was guilty as hell) had decided to say that Donald Trump had not criminally abetted the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. As it was, the Monday headlines are about as surprising as the news that Donald Trump has released a new set of Trump-themed NFTs.

Congress is not the Justice Department. The committee’s “criminal referrals” may sound dramatic, yet the four counts have no legal teeth. The January 6 Committee will be dissolved next month as a new Republican-led House of Representatives comes in. Its conclusion is essentially a grandiose recommendation to the Justice Department, which is led by President Joe Biden, to pursue a criminal indictment of Biden’s predecessor.

And here’s where the story gets interesting. The key characters are Attorney General Merrick Garland and Jack Smith, the special counsel whom Garland has appointed to conduct two potential criminal prosecutions of Trump. The first case is over the January 6 shenanigans. The second is over the allegedly illegal hoarding of sensitive state documents at Trump’s house in Mar-a-Lago.

How Garland and Smith act together will be vital in determining Trump’s fate.  Yet the closer the Justice Department comes to an actual prosecution of Donald Trump, the more the anti-Trump coalition comes unstuck. Biden and many senior Democrats may believe their rhetoric about the urgent need to save democracy from the menace that Trump and MAGA Trumpism pose to free people everywhere. At the same time, they clearly know that the menace of the Donald is still a, er, trump card for them at the ballot. Nothing mobilizes Democratic voters — still traumatized by 2016 — quite like the threat of more Trumpism. The November midterms appear to have proved that.

So the ideal for Team Biden, in realpolitik terms, would be for the Justice Department to spend another two years prosecuting Donald Trump without actually prosecuting Donald Trump.

Is that feasible? Can they expect the world to keep treating Trump’s alleged criminality as a serious story if the Justice Department keeps dragging it out?

A number of Republicans, including old establishment types such as Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger (the two Republicans on the January 6 panel) would much rather see Trump behind bars so their party can move on. A strange dynamic in 2023 might be the Republican Party calling on the Democrat-led Justice Department to get on with it and either bring charges against their former leader or not. The Democrats, meanwhile, may try to keep Trump in legal limbo indefinitely.

Do the wheels of justice have to grind so slowly? Or is it huis clos at the top of the American establishment? We’ll find out in the coming months.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.