This week’s recommendation by a House investigatory committee that Donald Trump be prosecuted for his involvement in the 2021 Capitol insurrection has no force of law.
The U.S. Justice Department can choose to ignore the recommendation, if it concludes the evidence does not support a criminal indictment or that the spectacle of prosecuting a twice-impeached president who is running for the office again is not worth it.
If Trump is not prosecuted, it will be as a result of the latter, not the former.
The investigation by the House committee, chaired by Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, was exhaustive and conclusive.
It lasted 17 months, included more than 1,000 interviews and more than a million documents. It complied a damning mountain of evidence that Trump knew he had fairly lost the election to Joe Biden in 2020, that he concocted a fiction that the election had been stolen from him, and that, when all else failed, he attempted to subvert the transfer of power by encouraging a violent uprising to stop the certification of Biden as the winner.
What Trump did was not just the sour grapes of a sore loser. It was a premeditated effort to subvert democracy by encouraging his diehard followers to storm the Capitol. Then, after it became obvious how dangerous the conflict had become to members of Congress and his own vice president, not to mention the Capitol police and other Capitol workers, he sat back and refused for hours to do anything to dial it back.
It was treasonous behavior, the likes of which there is no comparison in American presidential history.
If that does not rise to the level justifying the criminal prosecution of a former president, it’s hard to see how anything could.
Trump, during a campaign rally nearly seven years ago, famously boasted that he “could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” The boast reflected not only his narcissism but his conclusion that the American people have become so blinded by their political loyalties that the behavior of public officials doesn’t matter. They can say and do anything and get away with it, as long as they pursue policies that their supporters want or provide a platform for their supporters’ grievances.
It is a cynical perspective, but it’s one that Trump has proven so far to be largely true, with the exception of losing a close election to Biden.
Maybe the Republican Party, following its lackluster showing in the recent midterm elections, has come to its senses and will settle on someone more decent and more worthy when it selects its presidential nominee in 2024. But what if it doesn’t? What if the GOP allows him to bully his way back to being the party’s standard bearer? And what if he wins a narrow general election, rather than losing one? If Trump can get away with treason, there’s no telling what else he might try to do if he were to retake the White House.
Can this country stand to take that chance?
