"Saving Democracy" By Prosecuting Political Adversaries: A Roundup

Here in the U.S., with few exceptions, we have a commendable tradition that victorious politicians do not use the criminal justice system to prosecute or otherwise disable their rivals and adversaries.  At the presidential level, before Trump the two most prominent examples against that tradition were the prosecution of Aaron Burr by Thomas Jefferson in 1807, and the prosecution of Eugene Debs by Woodrow Wilson in 1918.  Otherwise, our defeated presidential candidates have gone peacefully to retirement.  

But then, after Trump was defeated in 2020, that tradition was abrogated in rather spectacular fashion.  At both the federal and state levels, prosecutors associated with the Democratic Party unleashed an unprecedented multi-barreled lawfare barrage, both criminal and civil, against the defeated adversary:  the Justice Department (Jack Smith) prosecution for alleged “obstruction of justice”; the separate Justice Department (also Jack Smith) prosecution for alleged mishandling of classified documents; the New York State (Alvin Bragg) prosecution for for some 35 felonies, all involving alleged mis-recording of blackmail payments as a “legal expense” in books and records of a private company; the separate New York State (Letitia James) civil case seeking to bankrupt Trump with hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties for allegedly over-valuing his properties on personal financial statements.

Notable about all the Trump prosecutions is how completely flimsy were all the charges against him.  The idea was rather transparently to use control of levers of government power to disable the main adversary in the political arena.  Meanwhile, the people involved sanctimoniously wrapped themselves in a claim that they were “saving our democracy.”

If you don’t keep track of international news, you may not realize the extent to which such efforts to use prosecutions, lawfare and courts to take out political adversaries are common in the world.  It’s worse in the third-world countries, but the seemingly sophisticated wealthy countries of Europe are by no means immune.  There are many more cases than I can cover here, but I thought a small roundup would be useful to illustrate some other places where such tactics have been used.