If a suspect is out publicly claiming that the prosecutors, the FBI, and the government generally are corrupt — e.g., that they planted incriminating evidence, lied to court, illegally seized privileged materials, and so on, there is apt to be strong pushback within the DOJ. I assure you that prosecutors and agents whose honor has been besmirched are certain to be pleading with their supervisors to let them charge the case so they can demonstrate to the public that they carried out their duties appropriately and that it is the suspect who willfully violated the law.
Finally, I observed at the start of this column that Trump’s defenses in this case are mainly legal, not factual. That is, they go to whether the Justice Department should bring the case, not whether the conduct it is able to prove violated the law. Does that remind you of any recent case? If you guessed the Steve Bannon case, you’ve aced the course.
The Justice Department’s decision to charge Bannon was controversial, and he had some colorable (if not necessarily persuasive) legal claims for why the indictment was unwarranted. But when these were rejected by the court, he was essentially left with no factual defense that could sway a jury. Perhaps months from now, he will get a sympathetic hearing from an appeals court, but the Washington jury took about a nanosecond to convict him after two-day trial.
There is a lesson in this. Bannon was very public in his attacks on the January 6 committee, the flouting of whose subpoenas were the basis for the case against him. He was public in his attacks on the Biden Justice Department. He might have tried quiet negotiation and belated cooperation. Instead, he portrayed the government as his corrupt, mortal enemy and tried to make that case in the court of public opinion.
How’d that go?
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