If Trump did anything ‘illegal,’ so too did several of his predecessors
By Steven Calabresi, opinion contributor — 08/27/18 01:30 PM EDT President Trump is understandably upset about three developments from last week. First, his former personal lawyer, quite unethically, accused him of having committed a criminal violation of the federal election laws by paying money to an extortionist, alleged ex-mistress. Such conduct is not a crime: Trump is allowed to spend as much of his own money on an election as he desires.
When former vice presidential nominee John Edwards was accused of doing exactly the same thing in 2011, the Justice Department ended up dropping all the charges against him after it could not get a jury to convict. The federal election laws have to be applied to Donald Trump in exactly the same way they were applied to John Edwards in 2011. President Trump should not be criminally prosecuted for doing what John Edwards did.
Second, President Trump is upset that his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was tried and convicted of several felonies by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is trying to get to him “to flip†and testify against Trump as part of a “plea bargain.†Trump understands now that the American criminal justice system — which relies almost exclusively on plea bargains, and not on jury verdicts — is utterly unfair to criminal defendants. Law professors such as John Langbein at Yale Law School, Alan Dershowitz at Harvard Law School, and me at Northwestern Law School — along with many others — have been saying exactly the same thing for 40 years!
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http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/403807-if-trump-did-anything-illegal-so-too-did-several-of-his-predecessors
