Jim Geraghty of National Review Online critiques President Donald Trump’s approach to the US Department of Justice.
You can only indict somebody when there’s sufficient evidence to convince a grand jury that the accused has committed a crime. Traditionally, this is the easy part; Sol Wachtler, then the chief judge of the Court of Appeals for the State of New York, famously opined that a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich if asked to do so.
Federal grand juries are made up of 16 to 23 members, and at least twelve jurors must concur to issue an indictment.
At the federal level, federal prosecutors usually bring their A-game for this task, and up until recently, almost always got an indictment. “In 2016, the Justice Department brought charges against 130,000 suspects. Grand juries rejected indictments only six times, according to agency statistics compiled by Niki Kuckes, a professor at Roger Williams University with expertise in the grand jury process.” That is a success rate higher than 99.9 percent.
And yet, since Donald Trump started his second term, those criminal ham sandwiches have never had it so easy. The U.S. Department of Justice keeps trying to indict the president’s foes, and grand juries keep concluding that there isn’t sufficient evidence for an indictment, even though during grand jury proceedings, no one speaks on behalf of the accused. No grand juror hears a counterargument to the prosecutor’s argument. Under Trump, federal prosecutors keep standing before a grand jury, making their best argument, and losing to an opponent who isn’t even in the room. …
… You don’t have to be the world’s greatest detective to figure out what’s going on here. Trump wants revenge. He has at times explicitly instructed Bondi to go after his political enemies. She tells federal prosecutors to find something to justify an indictment, and then federal prosecutors must scramble to find something that could qualify as a crime. …
… Alas, the evidence that Trump’s enemies have broken the law remains scant in these particular cases, and so prosecutors march into court with an exceptionally weak case, and the grand juries remain unconvinced.
