The Best Disinfectant

25 November 2020

 

Cogito Ergo Non Serviam

Justice Demands Publication of Trump Papers

 

The corruption in the Trump administration is vast. The abuse of power is almost autocratic. The malfeasance approaching biblical proportions. The question for the Biden administration is just how does one dispense justice without making it look like a Trumpian revenge move? Some have suggested simply ignoring it all, but that only invites future corruption. Others have proposed a South African style Truth and Reconsiliation Commission, which would be useful, but that requires the cooperation of the perpetrators of the crimes. Far better would be for the Biden administration simply to publish all the documents and let the media do the rest.

First and foremost, the important thing here is to establish that the goal is to prevent future presidents from acting as Mr. Trump has. The dangling of pardons, the misappropriation of government funds via his hotels, the mischaracterization of the Mueller Report, and so on cannot be allow to become the normal sort of things presidents do. Heretofore, the presidents have not engaged in actions like this as a habit. There were the Watergate and Iran/Contra affairs, but these were exceptions rather than a standard modus operandi. A return to the pre-2016 norms is the objective.

Prosecuting the crimes of the administration as crimes will set off a partisan fight in defense of the outgoing president and his party/cult. While many do deserve jail time (e.g., Roger Stone), the public will need to be prepared for such trials. The only way to do that is to provide the average America with the information that demonstrates just what was going on. Once that is done, the prosecution of cases will be seen as judicial rather than revengeful.

That means the publication of the information via the media and the release of “classified” documents from the various departments. The abuse of power is clear, but there is a large swathe of the public that will not believe the information unless the memos, emails and phone transcripts are there to see. And if the malfeasors who wrote the memos and emails and who spoke in the phone calls want to defend themselves, so be it. The court of public opinion is the appropriate venue when it comes to protecting democratic values and habits.

The nation has had its hearings on many of these matters. The impeachment trial of Donald Trump provided adequate Congressional participation. What is needed now is simply a data dump by the incoming administration. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Those of a legalistic mindset may believe that the courts are the correct place to rectify this problem. In the case of actual crimes, that could be so. However, much of what the Trump administration did was not obviously illegal as much as it was a twisting of the norms to such an extent that the system was subverted.

As an example, Attorney General William Barr lied about the contents of the Mueller Report weeks before the report was published. That is not actually illegal. It is wrong and harmful to democracy, however. All documents in the Department of Justice related to that shameful press conference should be published before February 1, 2021, as well as all the follow-up paperwork. If it makes Mr. Barr look bad, well that is most unfortunate. And if it exonerates him, that's fine, too. One could do with the surprise.

While the Trump administration winds down, it can still do a lot of harm. It has altered force deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has detroyed military equipment useful in the Open Skies Treaty and it has put $450 billion of unspent stimulus money into an account requiring new Congressional authorization rather than actually stimulating the economy with it. If it were known that the new administration would expose such shenanigans and place blame on specific individuals, it would deter such damage.


© Copyright 2020 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.


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