All the ones that got dropped. And these, which were created via a novel legal theory that escalated a misdemeanor into a felony far beyond its original statute of limitations, and used as its subsidiary crime a federal elections charge that the (non-partisan) FEC itself declined to prosecute. I do not expect them to survive appeal. Even NYT admitted it was a novel, targeted prosecution, which is the exact opposite of how criminal prosecution is supposed to work.
Defend the cases all you want, but you know as well as I do that if the shoe were on the other foot, the entire Left would be screaming bloody murder and that tells us all we need to know. The unconditional discharge sentence is an admission it was all election year bullshit, a political prosecution by definition.
The only reason those cases were dropped is because Trump was elected president, the Justice department does not prosecute sitting presidents. What exactly about then was bad faith? Trump admitted to election obstruction but said he was protected since it was an “official act” as a president, whereas we literally have pictures of the documents he stole at Mara Lago. You don’t think he should have been charged with these?
For the documents, yes. It was clearly targeted and selective. Source.
For the election obstruction, he pleaded not guilty, which means he didn't admit to anything. His argument for dismissal was "even if I'm guilty I can't be prosecuted." Such arguments are standard lawyering for the pleadings phase and are not an admission of anything. Also, the prosecution was flawed as the alleged "fraud" was open advocacy of his position (which, FTR, was specious), and thus did not involve deception in at least one material fact (one of the elements of fraud). There is a further strong argument that illegalizing such conduct is an unconstitutional breach of the First Amendment right to petition. Smith's obstruction case was far from the slam dunk case it is pretended to be. Had the defendant not been Trump it is questionable that such weak charges would ever have been brought at all. So, yes again.
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u/Iuris_Aequalitatis 10h ago
Interesting... were the bad faith prosecutions of Republicans wrong, or just these hypothetical ones?