President Trump, as usual, is justifying awful behavior by exaggerating the meaning of a legal escape.
Trump on Thursday tweeted that political allies of his bully-boy buddy, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, received a “complete and total exoneration” from the Supreme Court. At issue was a criminal case stemming from the “Bridgegate” incident in which a governor’s appointee and that appointee’s aides closed bridge lanes during rush hour as political retribution against a town’s mayor.
….are getting caught doing very evil things, and Republicans should take note. This was grave misconduct by the Obama Justice Department! @GovChristie
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 7, 2020
Well.
Once again, Trump is celebrating an act of unspeakable indecency. The court found that the aides had not broken the specific federal laws for which they had been convicted, but made it quite clear just how despicable their actions were.
Yes, the federal legal case against them always was suspect. As the Supreme Court noted in its unanimous decision, the Justice Department tried and convicted the aides under statutes criminalizing property fraud. It was always a stretch for the federal government to claim the lane closures were property fraud, and the court found the prosecutors had stretched the statute too far. “The scheme here did not aim to obtain money or property,” the justices wrote. Therefore, they overturned the convictions.
Still, the justices made absolutely clear this didn’t excuse the behavior itself.
“Not every corrupt act by state or local officials is a federal crime,” they wrote (my emphasis added). Note the word “corrupt.” It was not the first time the justices used that word in this decision. After explaining that the officials closed the lanes “to punish the mayor of Fort Lee for refusing to support the governor of New Jersey’s reelection bid,” here are a few passages (nonconsecutive) the court used to describe the lane closures:
Further: “The [officials] merrily kept the lane realignment in place for another three days. … They did so, according to all the government’s evidence, for bad reasons; and they did so by resorting to lies. … [Alas for the prosecutors, federal laws] do not ‘proscribe schemes to defraud citizens of their intangible rights to honest and impartial government.’ … As [one of the defendants’] own lawyers acknowledged, this case involves an ‘abuse of power.’ For no reason other than political payback, [they] jeopardized the safety of the town’s residents.”
It would have been fine if Trump had duly noted that federal prosecutors should not misapply federal law. It is not at all fine to “congratulate” the corrupt officials and declare a “complete and total exoneration.” To be complete and total would be to say their acts were morally justified.
They weren’t; they were hideously corrupt.
A president with any decency would have pivoted from his admonitions to federal prosecutors by then denouncing the New Jersey officials and express empathy for the townspeople put at serious risk. Heart attack victims and missing children are nothing to celebrate — except, perhaps, in Trump’s own morally twisted psyche.
