Reacting to threats from Republican party lawmakers that the indictment of Donald Trump in a Manhattan courtroom on 34 felony indictments will lead to a flood of conservative district attorneys retaliating against Democratic officeholders, one political analyst predicted any attempts to drag Democrats into court will fizzle out.
As MSNBC's Hayes Brown wrote, supporters of the now-indicted Donald Trump shouted to the rooftops that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg opened a "Pandora's box" by hauling the former president into court over charges tied to hush money payments before the 2016 election.
That, in turn, led House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) to run to Fox News and assert "he’d fielded calls from two county attorneys, one from Kentucky and one from Tennessee," and then claim, "They want to know if there are ways they can go after the Bidens."
According to Brown, not so fast.
"The idea that future presidents will bear the cost of Trump’s prosecution assumes that future prosecutions would inevitably gather enough evidence to get grand juries to indict in the first place. That wasn’t even a guarantee in Bragg’s investigation in the Democratic stronghold of Manhattan," he wrote. "Nor is it guaranteed that a judge wouldn’t toss out any case that’s seen as lacking in merit. Nor is it guaranteed that a jury would vote to convict."
Then there is the issue of overworking staffers to pursue a case that likely wouldn't pass judicial muster, which would make prosecutors think twice.
"This 'precedent' seems predicated on two conflicting ideas: that all similar prosecutions will end in convictions, threatening the freedom of former presidents, and yet all similar prosecutions are also politically motivated nuisances, with no threat of jail time but wasting massive amounts of time," he wrote before adding, "if Republicans decide to dig for a contrived reason to prosecute Biden, it feels safe to say that would have happened whether Trump was put on trial or not. And if they do, they’re going to be digging for a while — there’s not the wealth of criminality we’ve seen from Trump available for them to draw on."
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