HuffPost: Donald Trump Has Hidden Evidence Of His Crimes For Years. Joe Biden Can Expose It.
HuffPost: Donald Trump Has Hidden Evidence Of His Crimes For Years. Joe Biden Can Expose It.
President Donald Trump will leave office on Jan. 20 under the biggest cloud of corruption and scandal of any president since 1974, when Richard Nixon waved dual victory signs after resigning in disgrace.
If President-elect Joe Biden was inclined to prosecute Trump, his only dilemma would be where to start. Trump’s own Department of Justice refused to indict him for alleged crimes uncovered related to hush-money payments to his extra-marital lovers, and for obstruction of justice alleged in the Russia investigation. He faces multiple state-level criminal inquiries stemming from his personal business practices, civil suits related to his alleged sexual assaults and his 2017 inauguration.
But Biden is reportedly wary of launching investigations into his predecessor — and has made clear he won’t tell federal law enforcement what to do. “I will not do what {Trump] does and use the Justice Department as my vehicle to insist that something happened,” Biden told NBC News on Nov. 24.
While Biden admirably does not intend on echoing Trump’s undemocratic “lock them all up” chants, his administration can simply allow independent prosecutors to make their own decisions by opening the books on the Trump administration to expose wrongdoing, self-dealing and unlawful activity.
This will require the adoption of an affirmative policy to release and disclose information both in response to requests from Congress, oversight entities, journalists and the public — something the Trump administration did not do almost as a matter of policy. But in other respects it will involve the proactive implementation of policies through executive order or agency directive that would allow for the release of documents suppressed by the Trump administration. Much of the evidence of the Trump administration’s malfeasance is not yet in the public sphere, and by simply disclosing it Biden could begin the process of holding the soon-to-be ex-president accountable for his misdeeds. …
The disclosure of information from the Trump era could lead the Department of Justice to appoint special counsels, initiate prosecutions or indict officials. The release of new information may alternatively result in congressional investigations detailing what happened. Or this information could inform ongoing criminal and civil probes.
There are already areas where prosecutors could simply decide to prosecute once Trump is out of the White House.
The most obvious one is that the president’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, named Trump as a party to the campaign finance crimes that he pleaded guilty to stemming from payouts to Daniels and another woman, Karen McDougal, during the 2016 campaign to keep hidden word of their alleged affairs with Trump. The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York could independently indict Trump for these crimes on Jan. 20 if prosecutors there were so inclined.
“It’s important for the sake of democracy for people who break campaign finance and other laws to be held accountable even if they’ve spent four years as president,” said Paul S. Ryan, a campaign finance litigator at the nonpartisan nonprofit Common Cause.
Current and separate criminal inquiries are underway in New York state led by Attorney General Tish James and Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance into Trump’s businesses for a range of financial and tax crimes. These cases operate independently from any federal government probes.
“There are a number of investigations that I’ve read about that are at a state level,” Biden has said. “There’s nothing at all that I can or cannot do about that.”