Americans can be forgiven if their faith in our justice system is shaken.
We have now seen so much naked partisanship that has nothing to do with truth and justice that it is becoming ever harder to place faith in this pillar of our democracy.
Yes, President Donald Trump has been the victim of partisan prosecution, with Manhattan’s district attorney promising to find something, anything to stick on him.
But Trump is the person most responsible for the ongoing degradation of American belief in fair and impartial justice.
Every week, it seems, we see another outrageous abuse of the presidential pardon power in absolution of personal and political allies, donors, sycophants and those who are otherwise somehow useful to the president.
Of the long list of pardons Trump has issued, that of U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a relatively conservative Democrat from the Texas border, is among the worst.
Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, were accused of accepting $600,000 from an oil and gas company owned by Azerbaijan and from a bank headquartered in Mexico City in exchange for official acts on Cuellar’s part to benefit Azerbaijan and the bank. The payments were allegedly routed through a shell company owned by Imelda with fake consulting work as the cover.
The Cuellars maintained their innocence. Trump called the prosecution a political weapon the Biden administration used to bludgeon Cuellar because the congressman advocated for tough immigration enforcement on the border.
But Trump’s own Justice Department reviewed the charges this year and pressed forward with 12 of 14 counts in the indictment. They dropped two charges based on a Trump-driven decision to sharply limit prosecution under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a tool that helped prosecutors bring cases against foreigners seeking to corruptly influence U.S. officials.
Career prosecutors and top officials in the Justice Department decided that the underlying facts of the case nevertheless indicated corruption. Those charges will never get their day in court.
Trump, apparently, saw his pardon as the quid in a political quid pro quo. Because when Cuellar announced he would remain a Democrat, the president was furious. How can anyone believe in a justice system where a pardon is part of a political deal?
Lest we think this is only a Trump problem, it is assuredly not. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House leader, described the indictment against Cuellar as “thin.” It wasn’t. It represented an exhaustive investigation and prosecution effort under the Biden and Trump administrations.
We are increasingly in a pick-your-own-truth world. The president makes it worse every time he undermines the pursuit of justice in the name of his political and personal interests.
— The Dallas Morning News
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