The wrong indictment

Peggy Noonan writes:

Have we totally lost our marbles? An American grand jury is apparently about to criminally indict, for the first time in history, a former president of the United States. This is a weighty and meaningful act. It couldn’t have more gravity. And so the charge will be … falsely accounting for hush money paid to a porn star?

One of the marks of personal maturity is a sense of proportion. A healthy democracy has a gracious sense of the rightness and wrongness of things, and is alive to symbols and signs. Is this, perhaps, the wrong indictment to bring?

On and in the days leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump encouraged and unleashed an assault on our Constitution. Before that he appears to have waged a concerted and thuggish effort to overturn a democratic outcome in the state of Georgia.

For these things he deserves it all — the indictment, the handcuffs, the mug shot, the hauling into court, the bail hearing. Georgia and Jan. 6 are big and serious events, worthy of the strictest legal approach and subject to all legal remedies. These events are being investigated, the former through a state grand jury, the latter through a federal special counsel.

You say, but those cases aren’t ready! Then wait. Allow a serious process to play out seriously.

Charging him in the Stormy Daniels case is below us — not below him, but us. The subject matter is below us. The nature of the charges is below us. The players in the drama aren’t people of import who stand for big things, they’re not fate-of-the-republic people, they don’t have any size. They’re tacky lowlifes doing tacky low-life things. The case involves a questionable legal theory that depends on the testimony of Michael Cohen, who is half-mad in his own right and also in the way all “close Trump advisers” past and present are half-mad: money-addled, fame-addled, power-addled, screwball in their thinking.

I very much agree with Noonan on this.

Indicting Trump over how a payment was classified seven years ago in relation to him hooking up with a porn star 17 years ago is ridiculous. It looks petty and will backfire if the DA proceeds.

Many many legal commentators, left-leaning, have said the case is shaky.

There are, as Noonan says, much more important and stronger cases. Obstruction of justice charges over his denying he held top secret classified comments could see his in real trouble. The fact the Judge has said his attorney has to testify, is an indication that there is strong proof that he lied to his own attorneys.

Indicting Trump over obstruction of justice will harm Trump. Indicting him over Stormy Daniels will help him.