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In the battle of the dueling Bush attorney general op eds, the New York Times ran an op-ed from Jack Goldsmith, an assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, warning that, “The Prosecution of Trump May Have Terrible Consequences”.
The next day, the Washington Post, which unlike the Times hardly ever runs op-eds that venture outside the party line, ran an op-ed by former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez titled, “No, fellow Republicans, the Justice Department is not biased against us”.
Key to Al’s argument is the magical power of the… grand jury.
“Regardless, once prosecutors believe they may have grounds for an indictment, they cannot unilaterally indict any individual they choose. They must bring their evidence before a grand jury, which is made up of ordinary citizens, who weigh evidence and have the final say as to whether a defendant should be indicted,” Gonzalez argues.
“Let’s set aside the fact that three independent grand juries of Americans — not just three prosecutors — have indicted one Republican politician, Trump, for a variety of crimes,” he points out elsewhere.
A federal prosecutor, as was famously noted, could indict a ham sandwich. Why is that? Because they vote thumbs down 99.9% of the time.
The grand jury process is now so routinized in most state jurisdictions that it has become a pro forma proceeding to deliver an indictment for a prosecutor. It is for this reason that most lawyers say, repeating the famous expression of the former chief judge of the highest New York state court, Sol Wachtler, that prosecutors can get grand juries to “indict a ham sandwich.” According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.”
That comes from the notorious right-wing source known as… Columbia Law School.
Alberto Gonzalez could have made credible arguments, instead, he chose to condescend, from the beginning with that “My fellow Republicans” title, and to talk up the magical power of a grand jury.
Gonzalez, of all people, ought to know that’s nonsense, not just because of his role as a prosecutor, but because Democrats obsessed by his anti-terror work during the Bush administration, got a Texas grand jury to indict him.
The longtime district attorney in Willacy County, Texas, is not retiring from public office quietly after a defeat at the polls this year. Instead he has issued a flurry of indictments against his local political enemies, and then for good measure filed charges against Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.
Cheney was charged with “engaging in an organized criminal activity” in connection with the 2001 beating death of an inmate by two fellow inmates at one of the privately run federal detention centers in the county, which is on the Mexican border, court officials said.
The indictment also says both Cheney and Gonzales “committed the crime of neglect” because, it contends, illegal immigrants were ill-treated at detention centers.
Those indictments were politicized nonsense. So are the Trump ones. Gonzalez experienced enough politicized prosecutions that he ought to know better.
99.99% indictment rate 🙂
I thought Britain dropped Grand Juries in 1933, because Grand Juries didn’t inhibit prosecutorial abuse, they encouraged and rewarded it.
What folks need to know is that We The People can also form grand juries that can indict corrupt bureaucrat and politicians.
In his 2011 book “Three Felonies A Day – How the Feds Target the Innocent,” Boston civil-rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate notes that there are thousands of federal criminal statutes and thousands more federal regulations carrying criminal penalties. The exact number is constantly changing and, therefore, unknown. Tough toenails! Ignorance of an unknowable law is no excuse, according to the Deep State. Silverglate contends that the average American commits several felonies each day without even realizing it. Perhaps the post-Biden feds will drop all pretense of due process (i.e., notice of what behavior constitutes a crime) and come up with a catch-all crime analogous the “Anti-Soviet” behavior statutory offense that served communist Russia so effectively. In any event, it appears that the Trump Treatment awaits us all.
I can tell you from experience that illegal aliens and Mexican Americans aren’t ill treated in jails. They rule the imprisoned population. You don’t F with them. You fight one bean, you fight the whole burrito.
The blacks are quick to gang up on a lone white guy but they don’t stick together when things get tough. Those Chicans sure do. If you yell “La Raza,” they swoop in like hawks and F up anybody who gets in their way.
They used to think I’m a Criollo from Mexico City for some reason, so they liked me.
I´m sure your personal experience holds true for all prisons in the US.
Mexicans stick together WHEREVER they are. There’s a reason Compton is Mexican now instead of black and it isn’t because the blacks wanted to leave their territory. It’s because the Mexicans drove them out. Those people don’t tolerate having their sisters raped and houses robbed. Naturally, the crime rate in Compton plummeted when the black gutter scum were driven out. People pay their rent there now instead of waiting for welfare handouts.
As always, you’re full of shit and you try to defend the worst people. Black guys in jails and prisons are there for reasons and they tend to be extremely unpleasant. No wonder most of them are Dirtbagocrat supporters.
Yeah, I’ve seen that in the SF Bay Area also.It caught me completely by surprise, since I spent my teenage years in 70% to 90% black schools where us white punks were the oppressed ones and we were terrorized by the blacks. Curiously, the few Latinos generally were good friends with us white guys. There weren’t many Latinos back then because immigration was very strict.
I appreciate your speaking out as a demonstration that FPM grants underachievers with inadequacy concerns every right to speak out, just as if they held opinions derived from honest diligence and investigative effort.