No one will grieve long for Paul Manafort or Michael Cohen or count their days in prison.
One man (Manafort) was part of what is killing our politics —high-level influence peddling. The people who do this, as lobbyists, foundation heads, and fixers, are selling our democracy.
They epitomize the swamp that President Donald Trump promised to drain, and still could drain.
And while Manafort is a particularly shameless exhibit of the species, he is certainly not an exception. Washington is full of such people, many of whom are former members of Congress. Very seldom do they go to jail. The Clinton Foundation was about selling the office of the presidency and the office of secretary of state.
In terms of the health of our democracy, government for sale is far more serious than paying off a mistress, which is not admirable but also not illegal.
Michael Cohen is more of a grifter and fixer — small-time and more of a threat to his business partners and clients than to the republic. He is a bag man who dabbled in New York taxi cab medallions and other interests bound to eventually sink him. His first story was that he paid hush money to Mr. Trump’s mistresses on his own. His new story is that the president told him to do it.
Even so, unless the money came from the Trump campaign, and not Mr. Trump personally or his company, it is hard to see how the hush money is an indictable offense or an impeachable one. The argument that the money was paid to influence the outcome of the election seems like a stretch and far less strong than the argument that it was paid to save a marriage and avoid humiliation.
No one who has followed the fall of these two men doubted that they would be convicted, and no one can maintain with a straight face that they would have been brought to justice if Hillary Clinton had been elected president.
Sleaze is tough and expensive to prosecute, unless it is fantastic in proportion and people were hurt — as with Bernie Madoff or Harvey Weinstein. Or unless it is political.
Let’s be honest, all of this is about squeezing, delegitimizing, and, if possible, ultimately removing Donald Trump from office. Neither of these cases, and none of the case being built with the president as target, so far as we know, are about Russian interference in our elections, or political corruption. They are not about justice. They are about politics. They are about getting Mr. Trump.
Many Americans think Mr. Trump should be removed from office for bad manners, for political and personal immaturity, and for degrading our politics and diminishing the presidency. But none of those is a crime, just as cheating on your wife is not a crime and employing snake oil salesmen is not a crime.
The voters elected Donald Trump. Why not trust them to decide if he should have majorities in Congress in 2018 or be removed from office in 2020?
Recall that many of them, a majority in the requisite states, knew he was far from a perfect person when they elected him in 2016. But he has given them lower taxes, fatter 401(k) accounts, a more muscular war on terror and a start at fair trade. Those people feel he has kept faith with them. And they will lose faith in the system if he is hounded from office by a prosecutorial coup.
Remember when candidate Trump said he might not accept the outcome of the election and liberals, properly, were aghast? Remember when he led chants of lock her up, lock her up at his rallies and the pundits (properly) said: My God, are we a banana republic in which the losing candidate goes to jail and the justice system is wholly politicized?
Well, what Mr. Trump threatened is actually being done to Mr. Trump by his enemies. The left and the deep state have not accepted the result of the election and have used every available means, including the Justice Department and the justice system, to say, in effect: Get him out; get him out.
We go down this road at our peril.
First, there is the matter of prosecutorial excess, which we saw in the case of Bill Clinton and Ken Starr, too. What do bag men and high fliers have to do with Russia interfering with the election? Interference, it should be noted, that no serious person can believe changed the outcome of the election.
Then there is the matter of a prosecutorial society. Do we really want to live in a polity in which a thousand little Javerts are always on a crusade against the sinners and the neer-do-wells? The New York prosecutors who broke Cohen reportedly did so in part by floating the possibility of jailing his wife, who had signed joint tax returns. That is known as a prosecutorial pressure point. So one wonders, paraphrasing Shakespeare, whether the cure for the disease of corruption is worse than the corruption.
But, lastly, if a special counsel or special prosecutor can negate a presidential election, we really are a banana republic and the republic is truly dead.
Donald Trump is a passing thing. Whatever good or harm he can do is fleeting. Not so the extra-constitutional remedies for him. Those will reverberate and corrode our national soul.
First Published: August 24, 2018, 4:00 a.m.
