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Those of us who actually love this country — in a much deeper sense than just wanting to slip on a pair of American flag Crocs and pretend we’re better than people overseas while remaining ignorant of the nation’s rich and complex history — had a hard time watching Donald Trump profane the ideals of the United States by baselessly calling for the imprisonment of his political rivals. He has been goading crowds into “Lock her up” chants aimed at Hillary Clinton for well over four years. Trump has targeted other female Democratic Party leaders with the chant too, including Senator Dianne Feinstein and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. More recently, Trump tried spicing the chant up a bit by changing it to “Lock him up” and aiming it at former President Barack Obama as well as at Joe Biden. What a wordsmith.
There was a little problem though. None of those people committed a crime (if you’re a QAnon hockey mom or whatever and have somehow gotten this far into the column already, don’t write me any emails, I’ll take my cues on who has and hasn’t committed a crime from prosecutors rather than from some random jerk with an internet connection and way too much time on her hands, thank you very much).
A warped Justice Department weaponized by Bill Barr to fight Trump’s political battles wasn’t enough to actually charge any of the targets of Trump’s chants based on completely nonexistent evidence. Even so, Trump said less than a month ago that he still “100 percent” agreed with the idea that Hillary Clinton should be jailed, and he implied that Barr’s legacy depended upon it. Boy, if he’s concerned about Barr’s legacy, I have some really bad news for him.
But that’s the least of Trump’s concerns, because unlike all of the people he made up lies about to further his political ambitions, it seems that Trump has committed multiple crimes, again and again, for decades. Uh, let’s start with sexual assault, which he famously bragged about committing while being recorded on a hot mic. At this point at least 26 women have publicly accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct.
Sure, a lot of the sexual assault claims are too old to prosecute under the relevant statutes of limitations, and there are evidentiary hurdles in such cases in that no one typically witnesses a sexual assault but the victim and the perpetrator. So let’s just move right along into the state-level frauds.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance has been criminally investigating Trump and the Trump Organization for more than two years. The probe was originally launched to look into the likely illegal hush money payments Trump made to two women before the 2016 election, but recent court filings suggest the investigation has broadened to include possible bank fraud, tax fraud, insurance fraud, and falsification of business records. While the full details of Vance’s investigation are not yet public, Vance does seem poised to obtain Trump’s tax records, which would likely further whatever type of case he is building.
At the federal level, many legal commentators have raised the possibility that Trump could face tax evasion charges in the wake of revelations that he only paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and in 2017. Although Biden has been very reticent to say he would support federal criminal charges against his predecessor, he has also indicated that he would not interfere with the independent judgement of his Justice Department. A state level tax fraud investigation against Trump and the Trump Organization is already underway by New York’s Attorney General Letitia James, who deposed Eric Trump in October as part of that probe.
Then there’s sedition. 18 U.S. Code § 2384 is entitled “Seditious conspiracy,” and says:
If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States…they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.
The Biden administration is going to be heading the new government of the United States, and with no evidence whatsoever, Donald Trump, Kayleigh McEnany, Rudy Giuliani, and a host of other D-list goons have been continually crowing that the Biden administration is illegitimate, committed widespread voter fraud, and will be stealing the election. Nobody’s going to charge Trump with sedition. But like with everything, we’re grading him on a big curve. If I barricaded myself in the White House, claimed that I actually won the election even though I have no evidence to call into question the legitimate election result, got all my friends to go out and say that the voters legitimately elected me instead of Biden, and insisted that I wasn’t going anywhere, people would call that a coup. For some reason, Trump always gets a pass.
Maybe, though, this doesn’t need to get a whole lot deeper than the grand legal principle of “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” I don’t think Trump has the self-awareness to regret those “Lock her up” chants, or anything else, really. But if he does wind up behind bars, well, that will be quite a twist for those of us who do have the capacity to grasp irony.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.