This court ruling just set Donald Trump’s whole life on fire
The minute Donald Trump was declared the loser of the 2020 election, there was never a scenario where he and his corrupt allies were going to just “get away with it all.” The legal system, once freed from Trump’s clutches, was always going to do its thing. The only real questions were precisely how it would all play out, in what timeframe, and in what order.
If you’re rooting for Trump and his friends to face legal justice, the fun part comes with the surprises. We all knew Rudy Giuliani would end up going down, but we didn’t know we’d get the pleasant surprise of waking up to the news of the raid. And now Donald Trump has just been hit with the first of what will likely be many surprises that we enjoy and he doesn’t.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s ruling yesterday means that we’re about to see the DOJ memo that proves Bill Barr was lying about how he came to the decision that the DOJ wasn’t allowed to prosecute Donald Trump for obstruction of justice. This may sound a bit legally obtuse in its own right. But it’s the first step in what will be a particularly ugly chain reaction.
This ruling and memo will push Trump’s long forgotten obstruction crimes from 2017 and 2018 back into the headlines. At a time when Trump’s adversaries are trying to cement his reputation as a traitor who incited a domestic terrorist attack against the United States government, here comes the reminder that he already committed a felony obstruction of justice attack against the United States government – and then he had his criminal Attorney General try to cover it up.
This memo is going to generate such public demand for Trump to be criminally tried for obstruction of justice, it’ll be difficult for the DOJ to avoid doing so. Based on Merrick Garland’s aggressive pattern of action thus far, we’re starting to suspect his DOJ was planning to prosecute Trump anyway. If so, this memo will actually make the DOJ’s life easier, in terms of generating public support for the prosecution of Trump.
Trump is already earmarked for prison in New York on state charges for the kinds of open and shut financial crimes that no one beats at trial. But even as we wait for that state-level indictment to emerge from the grand jury before that storyline finds its way back into the headlines, the media is about to go all-in on this Trump-Barr secret memo storyline. Trump’s whole life is now on fire. And since he no longer controls the DOJ, he lacks the tools to put that fire out.
