At first a trickle and then a flood

| 7:00 pm EST January 19, 2022
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Okay, admittedly we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to evidence of just how stupid Donald Trump Jr can be. But he has now taken to metaphorically tweaking the nose of the FBI on Twitter this morning as I write this. Were I in his position that would be the last thing I would want to do, considering the potential trouble his father is in. Only an idiot would poke a bear with a stick when he knows (or ought to know) that somebody is about to open the bear’s cage.

I think MSNBC legal analyst and former prosecutor Glenn Kirschner would agree with me. When he recently spoke with Brian Tyler Cohen, Kirschner described himself as a “glass half full” kind of guy when it comes to the likelihood that Junior’s father will ultimately be criminally prosecuted.

Kirschner believes that Trump won’t just be criminally indicted, he will be indicted in multiple, possibly hundreds, of jurisdictions. “He will be prosecuted. Nobody, no prosecutor, wants to be the first to indict a former president of the United States, but Brian I predict every prosecutor will want to be the second.”

It turns out that just about any prosecutor in any jurisdiction anywhere in the United States can prosecute Donald Trump any time he or she wants to. How? “I maintain,” Kirschner explains, “as a former homicide prosecutor [Kirschner has prosecuted more than 50 murder trials] he has committed at least the crime of involuntary manslaughter or negligent homicide by the way he not just mismanaged but lied to us about the Covid pandemic.” So if you’re a district attorney and someone in your district died of Covid when Trump was president, you’re free to bring charges against Donald Trump.

“Once the first prosecutor brings charges against Donald Trump and suffers the white hot glare of media and world attention for it,” Kirschner explains, “everybody will be forced to say, “Well wait a minute, he committed crimes in my jurisdiction too and in my backyard too, I gotta charge him … and then you’re going to see the floodgates open.”

So why don’t they? “Nobody wants to be the first, but it’s going to happen.” But that’s not the only direction from which a Trump prosecution could come. “I don’t know where the first charges will be, whether they will be federal, whether they will be New York, whether they will be Georgia. I will say in Georgia the entire crime was captured on a recorded phone call so I would hope that the Georgia authorities will be able to move out sooner rather than later. But as I say, nobody wants to be the first, but it’s going to happen.”

That may explain the slow and reluctant forward motion in the quest to prosecute Donald Trump. Nobody wants to be the first. But once that first step is taken, as they say in France, “Après moi, le déluge.” After me, the flood. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.