Opinion: American voters just gave Trump a get-out-of-jail-free card. Like it or not.
Donald Trump didn't just win the presidency on Tuesday. He also prevailed against the U.S. Department of Justice's efforts to hold him accountable for attempting to overturn the 2020 election and the classified documents he held onto after he lost.
Trump's two federal criminal cases, lengthy legal slogs drawn out by his successful plan to delay justice until politics could save him, are about to come to an abrupt end.
Here is what else will happen: Trump will use the good-faith efforts of public servants in a bad-faith effort to again mislead Americans about why he faced criminal charges in the first place. He will cast a legal victory won at the ballot box, not in a courtroom, as proof that the charges against him were somehow illegitimate.
They were not.
Trump also faces criminal liabilities in New York, where he was convicted on 34 felony counts in May, and in Georgia, where he still faces charges for his failed attempt at overturning the 2020 election there.
Trump has a hearing Tuesday in New York for his attempt to have that conviction overturned after the U.S. Supreme Court's most politically bent justices in July injected uncertainty into all his criminal cases by saying he could be tried but had immunity for any actions taken in his official capacity as president.
His sentencing in that case is set for Nov. 26. He's a felon. And he's not president. Not yet. We have a verdict. We should get a sentence, too.
Federal investigations into Trump will immediately go away
Jack Smith, the special counsel leading both federal cases, is reportedly developing plans to wind down the cases before Trump takes office in 10 weeks.
That is a mistake. And I understand why Smith is making it. The special counsel and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who appointed him two years ago, revere the Department of Justice as an institution. They probably think this protects the department.
It does the opposite. I'm not saying the federal cases against Trump should go on. That's a recipe for chaos. And we're going to have no shortage of chaos. What matters here is who ends the cases and how.
The department's Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo 51 years ago, and reaffirmed it in 2000, that a sitting president can't be prosecuted for federal crimes. So Smith is following a long-standing precedent. But, in doing so, he could call into question the operation of the department.
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Trump's campaign is already using Smith's planning to attack Smith, the department and the very notion of justice. Steven Cheung, Trump's campaign spokesperson, on Wednesday said, "It is now abundantly clear that Americans want an immediate end to the weaponization of our justice system."
That's the Trump campaign weaponizing justice against the Department of Justice. Winning an election is not the same thing as being found not guilty by a jury of your peers. But that's how Trump wants you to see the world. He has a political motivation to lie when he claims the cases were politically motivated.
It makes sense for Smith to leave his post before Trump takes his. Trump has boasted how eager he was to fire the special counsel if he won the election. But how Smith leaves makes all the difference.
Trump will rush to weaponize Department of Justice. Make him own that.
Trump is going to pick a new attorney general and has repeatedly vowed to use that person and the Department of Justice to punish people he sees as political enemies for simply opposing him. But first, that person should have the responsibility of killing the criminal cases against Trump.
Make Trump and his new attorney general own that, in public, forever. Tie that act to all his litany of bogus complaints about how persecuted he is, and stack up the evidence that shows the exact opposite is true.
Smith should memorialize in writing both cases, spelling out every single bit of evidence, every word of testimony, every point about the lawless behavior we all saw Trump engage in.
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That includes his case in Washington, D.C., where Trump was being held accountable for his actions before, during and after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Smith on Friday asked the judge in that case to erase all the set deadlines in how it moves forward, in what appears to be a prelude to ending it.
Expect something similar in for the case in Florida that Smith had been trying to revive in an appellate court after a judge Trump appointed in July granted him a get-out-of-jail-free card for keeping classified documents after he left office and refusing to return them.
File it all in court. Leave a full and robust record. Don't just let these cases whither away. Make Trump's team kill them in public.
Trump did a masterful job of avoiding justice
Trump, a former president with Secret Service protection, never looked to me to be in danger of facing prison time for his New York conviction for running a real estate business rife with fraud. It was financial crime. The judge should hit him with a staggering financial penalty and a significant term of probation.
Four years sounds about right.
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Georgia is more complicated, again because of Trump's tactics to delay the proceedings until the election's results could insulate him from accountability. Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney running that case, has repeatedly faltered while trying to push it forward.
She should push to shelve it now, which Trump wants, but only with the condition that he can't complain in four years about his right to a speedy trial being violated if Willis or another prosecutor attempts to revive the case.
Justice delayed is not always justice denied. We're all just going to have to wait to see if Trump ever has to face it.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Opinion: Trump's win means DOJ will drop the charges. That's a mistake