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[BeckyDem]

19. Trump Has Justified Breaking One of America's Most Sacred Norms

About the author: Paul Rosenzweig is a principal at Red Branch Consulting. Twenty years ago, he served as a senior counsel in the investigation of President Bill Clinton.

In the 240 years since America’s founding, no former president has been indicted for criminal conduct. This isn’t because they were angels—far from it. And it isn’t because post-term indictment is not legally allowed.

Instead, it is because Americans don’t like the idea of criminalizing politics. Both parties and the public see the prospect of post-term immunity as a guarantee that the country’s politics will remain civil and that power will transition peacefully from one party to the other. That is what drove President Gerald Ford to pardon Richard Nixon. And it’s one reason why the Office of the Independent Counsel decided not to indict former President Bill Clinton.

The presidency of Donald J. Trump has upended those calculations, and the resistance to post-term investigation may now come at too great a cost. When he leaves office, whether in January or four years later, the next administration or one of the states can and should investigate citizen Donald Trump—a former president whose legal status will be no different from that of any other American. The risk of politicization of such an investigation is far outweighed by the danger posed by failing to uphold our nation’s values. To protect future presidents from retributive investigations once they leave office, however, any investigation should be limited to Trump’s conduct before and after his presidency, not his behavior while he was president. If the findings of such an investigation justify it, prosecutors should indict the former president for violations of criminal law.

I come to this view reluctantly. The risks in the approach are both real and substantial. But after having served as a prosecutor in the Department of Justice, as a senior counsel in the Whitewater investigation of Clinton, and as a Bush appointee at the Department of Homeland Security, I’ve come to recognize that challenging, balanced judgments of the sort necessary today are sometimes forced on us by circumstances beyond our control. Hard choices do, sometimes, make bad law, but they cannot always be avoided. To decline to investigate Trump’s alleged criminality after he has left office is itself a choice—and it’s the wrong one.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/case-criminally-investigating-ex-president/616804/