Tom Woods is correct on the "dog & pony show” Trump Indictments

"If you're like me, part of your brain thinks: surely most people can perceive the partisan nature of the "indictments" against Donald Trump -- imagine thinking these bits of nothingness are the worst thing any president has ever done! -- and they won't be so naive to think he's being targeted because he "broke the law."

Then you spend five minutes on Twitter.

Alan Dershowitz, though, emeritus professor at Harvard Law, has been a consistent voice of reason on all this.

I've never been a particular fan of Dershowitz, who holds terrible positions on a bunch of issues. But I subscribe to a quaint philosophy from the days of yore -- perhaps the oldsters among you will remember it -- according to which it is all right to agree with people on some things and disagree with them on others.

Here's what Dershowitz said in a recent interview:

Well, first of all, nobody should take it at all seriously. The fact that there was a grand jury indictment means nothing. It's the prosecutor who indicted. The best evidence of that is that it was on his website before the grand jury even voted.

Now, the whole strategy of all these four cases is to get a conviction before the election, even if they're going to lose on appeal. I used to teach my students, many of them future prosecutors: if you bring a RICO case, that increases your chances of winning a trial and losing on appeal. The same thing is true with conspiracy and other cases involving mental states.

And so all four of these cases are designed to get quick, quick convictions in jurisdictions that are heavily loaded against Donald Trump. And these prosecutors don't care as much as prosecutors generally do about having the convictions reversed on appeal, because that will happen after the election. [Emphasis mine.]

Which only goes to prove what I've been arguing now for months. If you're going after the man who's running against your incumbent president, you had darn well better have the strongest case possible. And these are among the four -- at least three of them -- three weakest cases I've ever seen against any candidate. We don't know about the fourth, but it seems like it's very much like the DC case.

And if you're going after the man running for president against your person, you have to have the strongest case. Otherwise it becomes a banana republic: anybody can prosecute anybody. And we're opening the door to prosecution of Democrats by Republicans, Republicans by Democrats.

It's what Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist is the most dangerous threat to democracy. And we're seeing it unfold in front of our eyes very, very tragically. I'm not a Republican. I'm not a Trump supporter, but I care deeply about the Constitution. I care deeply about preserving the rule of law. And we're seeing it being frittered away for partisan political purposes.

The sentence I put in bold really says it all: even if the cases are without merit and will be reversed on appeal, in this situation the prosecutors don't even care: the damage will be done, and the reversals will occur after the election.

That's where we are, friends.

-Tom Woods”