The People Behind the Scenes of the Corruption of American Law

Conspiracy is a strong word, but the interlocking cliques are undeniable.

The prosecutions of President Donald Trump seem resistant to interpretation because of their strange combinations of intricacy, sordidness, and impact. The cases are filled with details that overwhelm and repel: affairs, thefts, hush money payments, cardboard boxes near toilets, the alleged complicity of property managers and valets. At the same time, their political effects are enormous, even overwhelming. Taken as a whole, the cases discourage sustained engagement, which may explain why many Americans have seemed disassociated from them, despite the drumbeat coming from both established and insurgent media.

In this context of disengagement, it is all the more telling that each of these cases are compromised in at least one significant way. Nobody at the Justice Department, which was providing federal funds to the Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney’s office, was aware of a romantic relationship between District Attorney Fani Willis and Nathan Wade, whom Willis appointed as one of the special prosecutors on the case despite Wade’s lack of experience prosecuting complex criminal cases. The crime that Trump was charged with in the New York case was a misdemeanor that District Attorney Alvin Bragg upgraded to a felony—an unusual move. The cardboard boxes with classified documents in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago bathroom, which are being investigated by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, seem to differ from the cardboard boxes with classified documents in President Biden’s Delaware garage only based on loose interpretations of Trump’s intent. 

This disjuncture between the cases’ strangeness and their weakness may not be a coincidence. In fact, the strangeness may function to mask a more familiar Washington story: a group of interconnected partisans hounding a president and corrupting American law. 

There is no smoking gun that proves this—if a smoking gun even exists in a city as reliant on unattributable nods, headshakes, and hints over phone calls as Washington, D.C. But links between movers in the four prosecutions indicate political and financial incentives, as well as loyalties and patronages, that could motivate a play against a populist presidential candidate on behalf of insider Washington. So do some of these players’ links to a past history that maps, unsettlingly, onto current events, suggesting that the prosecution against Trump is the most obvious symptom of longer-term distortions of the American justice system. 

Read more at The American Conservative.