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    • Trump’s win means DOJ will drop charges. It’s a mistake
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    Trump’s win means DOJ will drop charges. It’s a mistake

    Online Niel Posted on

    Donald Trump wants his criminal cases to die. We’ll know in four years if he won that fight.

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    Donald Trump didn’t just win the presidency on Tuesday. He also imposed himself v. US Department of Justicehis efforts to hold him accountable for trying to overturn the 2020 election and the secret documents he kept after he lost.

    Trump’s two federal criminal cases, long legal battles drawn out by his successful plan to delay justice until politics can save him, are about to end abruptly.

    Here’s what will happen next: Trump will use the good faith efforts of public officials in a bad faith effort to once again mislead Americans about why he faced criminal charges in the first place. He will cast a legal victory won at the ballot box, not in a courtroom, as evidence that the charges against him were somehow illegitimate.

    They weren’t.

    Trump also faces criminal charges in New York, where he was based convicted of 34 crimes in May and in Georgia, where he still faces charges for a failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election there.

    Trump has a hearing Tuesday in New York for his trying to overturn this belief according to the most inclined justices of the US Supreme Court in July it injected uncertainty in all his criminal cases, saying that he could be tried but that he was immune from any actions taken in his official capacity as president.

    His conviction in this case is set for November 26. He is a criminal. And he’s not the president. Not yet. We have a verdict. We should get a sentence too.

    Federal investigations into Trump will disappear immediately

    Jack Smith, the special counsel leading both federal cases, is seems to be making plans to liquidate the cases before Trump takes office in 10 weeks.

    This is a mistake. And I understand why Smith does it. Special Counsel and US Attorney General Merrick Garland, who called him two years agoyou revere the Department of Justice as an institution. I probably think that’s protecting the department.

    It does the opposite. I’m not saying the federal cases against Trump should continue. This is a recipe for chaos. And we will have no shortage of chaos. What matters here is who closes the cases and how.

    The department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo 51 years ago and reaffirmed it in 2000that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted for federal crimes. So Smith follows a longstanding precedent. But in doing so, it could call into question the functioning of the department.

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    The Trump campaign is already using Smith’s plans to attack Smith, the department and the very notion of justice. Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said Wednesday“It is now abundantly clear that Americans want an immediate end to the harmonization of our justice system.”

    This is the Trump campaign arming the judiciary against the Justice Department. Winning an election is not the same as being found innocent by a jury of your peers. But that’s how Trump wants you to see the world. He has a political motivation to lie when he claims the cases were politically motivated.

    It makes sense that Smith would leave the post before Trump takes it. Trump boasted about how eager he was to fire the special counsel if he won the election. But how Smith leaves makes the difference.

    Trump will rush to arm the Justice Department. Make him own this.

    Trump will pick a new attorney general and has repeatedly promised to use that person and the Justice Department to punish people he sees as political enemies simply because he opposed it. But first, that person should have the responsibility to kill the criminal cases against Trump.

    Make Trump and his new attorney general own this, in public, forever. Link this act to his entire litany of false complaints about how persecuted he is, and gather the evidence that shows the exact opposite is true.

    Smith should commit to writing both cases, detailing every piece of evidence, every word of testimony, every point about the lawless behavior we’ve seen Trump engage in.

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    This includes his case in Washington, DC, where Trump was held accountable for his actions before, during and after the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol uprising.

    Smith asked the judge in the case Friday to clear all set deadlines in the way it goes forward, in what seems to be a prelude to its conclusion.

    Expect something similar for the Florida case, which Smith had tried to revive in an appeals court after a Trump-appointed judge in July granted him a get out of jail card for keeping classified documents after he left office and refused to return them.

    File everything in court. Leave a complete and solid record. Don’t just let these cases go. Make Trump’s team kill them in public.

    Trump has done a masterful job of avoiding justice

    Trump, a former president with Secret Service protection, never seemed to me to be in danger of prison time for his New York conviction for driving a real estate business full of fraud. It was financial crime. The judge should hit him with a staggering financial penalty and a significant term of probation.

    Four years sounds about right.

    Georgia is more complicated, again because of Trump tactics to delay the procedure until the election results could insulate him from responsibility. Fani Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney who is handling the case, he staggered repeatedly while trying to push him forward.

    She should work to drop it now, which Trump wants, but only on the condition that in four years she can’t complain that her right to a speedy trial was violated if Willis or another prosecutor tries to revive the case.

    Justice delayed is not always justice denied. We’ll all have to wait and see if Trump ever has to face it.

    Follow USA TODAY election columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan

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