Sorry, Donald, criminal suspects don’t get to pick which judge decides their fate

| 10:55 pm EDT June 28, 2018
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Imagine if, tomorrow, Paul Manafort announced that he wanted to hand pick a judge by name to preside over his upcoming criminal trial. Manafort would get laughed out of the building and right back into his jail cell. It’s simply not how our legal system works. So why on earth would a criminal suspect like Donald Trump get to hand pick a judge who’s going to end up ruling on his fate?

Yet that’s the precisely the situation we now find ourselves in with the open seat on the Supreme Court. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein reminded us this morning in open Congressional hearings that there is an active criminal investigation into Donald Trump and his campaign for colluding with Russia. Rosenstein previously confirmed that Trump is indeed a subject of that criminal investigation. And to be clear, he’s not being investigated for using the wrong email. He’s being investigated for the likes of conspiracy against the United States, money laundering, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and quite a number of other serious felonies.

At some point Donald Trump is going to realize that he can no longer fend off the Trump-Russia investigation. Either Robert Mueller is going to try to indict him while he’s still in office, or Trump is going to try to pardon himself, or we’re going to see some other constitutionally unprecedented situation that will ultimately have to be decided by the Supreme Court. If Trump is allowed to nominate a Supreme Court justice to fill Anthony Kennedy’s seat, Trump will literally be picking one of the judges who casts a vote to determine his fate.

Based on hundreds of years of precedent, it’s abundantly clear that our system of justice does not allow criminal suspects to hand pick which judge is going to decide their fate. Under the Constitution, there is no possible way that Donald Trump can be allowed to nominate a Supreme Court Justice. He’s a criminal suspect in a criminal investigation involving some of the most serious felonies ever committed against the United States.