With the indictment of Donald Trump by a New York state grand jury, a legal barrier has been broken. A maiden legal voyage has set sail. The most important takeaway is this: A president of the United States will never again rest comfortably in the belief that he or she can commit crimes with impunity. This is an important development for our republic.
Our nation has long suffered from the absence of accountability for presidential crimes. Most notably, President Gerald Ford decided that former President Richard Nixon should not be held accountable for his crimes in office. Ford claimed his decision was for the good of the country, to help the country heal. This reasoning always struck me, as a career prosecutor, as a cruel joke. In 30 years, I never once told crime victims that I was going to help them heal by declining to prosecute the perpetrators. Announcing that you are declining to prosecute crime in the name of healing is a perversion of justice.
A president of the United States will never again rest comfortably in the belief that he or she can commit crimes with impunity.
Of course, an indictment is only the first step toward accountability. Enormous challenges lie ahead. Trump’s legal team undoubtedly will wage a scorched-earth defense. And outside the court of law, we can expect Trump loyalists to wage battles in the court of public opinion, most likely deploying both facts and alternative facts. America cannot yet breathe easy, as justice is still well off on the horizon.
Another likely consequence of this precedent-setting indictment is that it increases the odds that additional indictments will follow. I have long maintained that no prosecutor wants to be the first to charge a former president of the United States. As we are seeing now, the first indictment attracts the white-hot glare of media attention from around the world.
And some of that attention can be downright dangerous. We cannot ignore that Trump and many of his associates have…
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