He Didn't Go to Jail -- And That May Have Broken America - Andrew Weissmann - America at a Crossroads

[Picaro]

1. Haven't watched this yet, but I fully intend to

Going to key off the headline. I don’t think there is any question that the system has been broken. But it wasn’t Trump so much as the very foundation of the legal system that broke America. It was the Supreme Court with one decision after another that had no basis in the Constitution. They just made it up when it suited them—over and over again. The final judicial coup was the immunity decision—completely ignoring that the Constitution grants immunity to no one given criminal behavior.

If the law and the judiciary were at all functional Trump would have been arrested and jailed for fomenting an insurrection once he left office. America has been utterly squeamish about enforcing the law against previous executive office holders in a way that no other constitutional republics around the world have been. Peru, South Korea, France, Brazilian—have all prosecuted and jailed former chief executives.

But not the U.S.. Largely because of some truly stupid DOJ policies that were initially put in place to protect Nixon from prison. Gerald Ford’s ill considered pardon stuck a knife in the heart of our legal system. The DOJ policy that Presidents are too important and busy to face criminal prosecution while in office led to it being almost unthinkable and practically impossible to arrest and prosecute a former president. This policy was, again, a blatant protection policy for Nixon, but it also served to protect Bush Jr. when he should have been charged and prosecuted after his terms in office.

Andrew Weissman was a part of that dysfunction.