Gregg Barak, Salon

As the machinery of justice slowly grinds closer to Donald Trump, the Trump Organization and the former president's criminal enterprise for a smorgasbord of possible charges — criminal fraud, defrauding the United States, espionage, falsification of business records, interfering with an official proceeding, insurrection, obstruction of justice, racketeering, seditious conspiracy, solicitation to commit election fraud, tax evasion, wire fraud and more — nobody has ever been as well prepared as the weaponizer-in-chief to do battle with the state and its agents of crime control, especially in the court of public opinion.

Trump filed a largely incoherent lawsuit on Monday seeking the appointment of a "special master" to "review and return evidence collected during last week's FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago estate." Trump had presaged this on his Truth Social platform last Friday: "A major motion pending to the Fourth Amendment will soon be filed concerning the illegal break-in of my home … right before the ever-important Mid-Term Elections."

The legal arguments in that lawsuit were so poorly developed, however, that District Court Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida "ordered Trump's lawyers to elaborate on their arguments for why the court has the ability to step in at this time, explain what exactly Trump is asking for and whether the Justice Department has been served with Trump's special master motion." Their responses are due back to Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, by the end of this week....

Putting a former president on trial for alleged criminal behavior would be the first prosecution of its kind in American history. It would also do much toward restoring the myth that no person or corporation is above the law. As James Doyle has explained, putting Trump on trial "redeems American justice."

Looking both backward and forward, I would argue that putting the former racketeer in chief and his accomplices on trial for seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government — arguably the ultimate constitutional crime — is more tangible than the abstract goal of redeeming American justice. In this insurrectionary moment, "substantive" due process justice trumps "procedural" due process justice.

After the first five public hearings held by the House select committee investigating the organized and coordinated activities of Donald J. Trump and his allies to steal the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, it seemed apparent that Attorney General Merrick Garland would not prosecute Trump for two likely federal crimes: "obstructing an official proceeding" and engaging in a "conspiracy to defraud the United States." ...

Donald Trump filed a lawsuit on March 24 in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida charging Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and various other people with attempting to rig the 2016 election by tying his campaign to Russian meddling.

Among multiple grandiose claims, the suit alleges both "racketeering" and "conspiracy" to commit injurious untruths: "Acting in concert, the Defendants maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty." Trump seeks both compensatory and punitive damages, and claims he incurred expenses of at least $24 million "in the form of defense costs, legal fees, and related expenses."

This comes straight out of the Trump playbook of suing and countersuing, and references a long list of grievances that Trump has been repeatedly airing since he was elected in 2016, not to mention his continued false claims that his 2020 defeat was the product of widespread fraud and conspiracy....