If he wins the presidential election, Donald Trump is planning (and even threatening publicly) to direct the Justice Department to bring criminal charges against his political opponents. This by itself is a good enough reason to keep him out of the Oval Office.
But Republicans have an answer: The Biden administration is already using the Justice Department to target its enemies, so what Trump’s threatening would be no different.
The trouble with this defense is that Biden’s Justice Department keeps investigating and charging Democrats.
This week, Democratic Representative Cori Bush announced the Justice Department is charging investigating her over allegedly misusing federal funds for personal uses. Also this week, the former IRS contractor who leaked tax returns belonging to Donald Trump was sentenced to five years in prison.
That doesn’t sound like something that would happen if Merrick Garland was colluding with Biden to protect his allies and screw his enemies. Indeed, just imagine a Trump administration throwing the book at a government employee who leaked embarrassing information about Joe Biden.
The Justice Department is also busy charging Democratic Senator Bob Menendez with bribery, not to mention bringing charges against President Biden’s son, Hunter, for tax evasion that could lead to a prison term of up to 17 years.
As I’ve noted before, it’s not just Trump who constantly asserts that the Biden Justice Department is corruptly targeting Biden’s political enemies. Anti-anti-Trump Republicans state this as fact. “Biden Justice Department officials and Democratic prosecutors are currently trying to put the other side’s “leading contender for the White House in jail,” wrote National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry. “The vapors over Trump saying he’s going to target his enemies is rich coming from people who have targeted their enemy by any means necessary for years now.”
It would be nice if Republicans who weren’t full-fledged members of the Trump cult acknowledged that Biden has restored the post-Watergate norms of judicial independence and the system in which political charges are not simply weapons of the state. They might consider the enormous systemic risks of letting Trump import his Putin-esque style of corrupt justice, and think hard about what this could do to the American experiment that has delivered a measure of domestic peace and prosperity since the Civil War.
More likely, though, they’ll just ignore it and vote for the candidate who will cut their taxes.
Correction: This article previously said Cori Bush had been charged by the Justice Department. She has not been accused of a crime.
