On the docket: Law enforcer versus law breaker
For weeks, Donald Trump’s legal wins have been the icing on the cake in his campaign against Joe Biden. Trump saw criminal case after criminal case against him all but crumble, while he bested Biden in most polls and pulled off what many described as a “unified” Republican national convention.
That changed on Sunday.
Biden announced that he would leave the race and immediately backed Kamala Harris – a prosecutor whose long political path led her to the vice-presidency.
Harris quickly seized on her prosecutorial background to focus on Trump’s history of law-breaking. Trump’s campaign, which almost exclusively targeted Biden amid Democrats’ infighting over his viability, reportedly scrambled for an effective anti-Harris play.
“Before I was elected as vice-president, I was a courtroom prosecutor,” Harris said Monday shortly before she secured enough delegate support to become the presumptive nominee, bolstered by endorsements from most leading Democrats and a historic influx of campaign cash. “In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”
Harris, who has served as district attorney of San Francisco and California attorney general, said in her memoir, The Truths We Hold, that her decision to pursue work as a prosecutor shocked family and friends as US law enforcement has historically targeted persons of colour.
Harris, however, thought that these injustices could be repaired by working within the system. In a 2017 address to students, she said: “You can march for Black lives on the street, and you can ensure law-enforcement accountability by serving as a prosecutor or on a police commission. The reality is, on most matters, somebody is going to make the decision – so why not let it be you?”
Harris’s work as a prosecutor has not gone without criticism. Some progressives have criticized her record, which includes prosecuting parents of children who skipped school and blocking efforts by people who claimed to have been wrongfully convicted to have their sentences reconsidered.
Despite some stipulations among the left about her role as a “cop”, many Democrats have formed a chorus highlighting Harris’s role as a law-enforcer compared with Trump’s position as an adjudicated law-breaker.
“As a former prosecutor, Vice-President Harris has a lot of experience holding convicted felons accountable,” Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, told CNN. “She was fighting on behalf of abused women. She was in the trenches against giant banks. She was out in the middle of multiple fights every day as a prosecutor and then attorney general in California.”
Andy Beshear, the Democratic Kentucky governor whose name has circulated as a potential running mate, pointed to Harris’s record as a prosecutor to focus on Trump as well as on his vice-presidential pick JD Vance’s attacks on women and reproductive rights.
“She prosecuted rapists, domestic abusers, stood for victims and put away those abusers,” Beshear said. “Now, look at the other side, where JD Vance calls pregnancy arising from rape ‘inconvenient’ – no, it’s just plain wrong. He suggests that women should stay in abusive relationships. Listen, a domestic abuser is not a man – he’s a monster.”
Mini Timmaraju, head of Reproductive Freedom for All, said of Harris’s work as a prosecutor: “It’s such a beautiful juxtaposition.”
“Her whole career, she’s been taking on tough cases and tough characters like Donald Trump,” Timmaraju told CNN. “Her reputation has grown from her success in putting bad guys away. And now she has the chance to put the ultimate bad guy away for good.”
Harris becoming the Democratic candidate is a way for the party to refocus on Trump’s legal woes – which have gotten lost while Trump’s attempted assassination in Pennsylvania and Democratic infighting dominated news cycles.
And there’s a lot of legal developments that Democrats no doubt want to highlight. Mere days after Biden suffered a calamitous debate performance, a US supreme court ruling found that Trump had broad immunity for actions taken in his official capacity as president, potentially upending special prosecutor Jack Smith’s Washington DC election subversion case against him.
Trump’s legal team pounced on this decision in his Manhattan hush-money case, prompting Judge Juan Merchan to postpone sentencing while both sides argued whether the immunity ruling applied. And in Florida, Trump-appointed federal judge Aileen Cannon tossed his classified documents case, opining that Smith’s very appointment was an “unconstitutional problem”.
Now that there’s a new Democratic candidate ready to clearly and effectively lay out the threats of a second Trump presidency, she’ll no doubt want to highlight the risks of electing Trump in a time when he’ll have broad immunity – and could also make many of his legal troubles disappear.
But for Harris, her history as a prosecutor is more significant than just a way to go after Trump’s criminal record. It also undermines one of Trump’s key campaign strategies: Trump has repeatedly cast himself as a “law and order” candidate, but he’s now facing a candidate who spent years doing just that.
As vice-president and while campaigning for Biden, Harris often brings up her role as a prosecutor to underscore her points. “As many of you know, I am a former prosecutor,” she said while discussing Biden’s job creation. “So, I say, let’s look at the facts, shall we?”
“The prosecutor approach is really about just deconstructing an issue,” she told CNN in an interview this April. “It’s presenting and reminding folks about the empirical evidence that shows us exactly how we arrived at this point.”
Sidebar: Trump’s civil fraud fight
Remember how Trump was hit with a more than $454m penalty in his Manhattan civil fraud case? If not, that’s totally understandable – the judgment came down in February, far before this election cycle started resembling a hackneyed political drama – but there is some new movement on this legal front.
Trump’s legal team filed extensive legal paperwork Monday in his fight against judge Arthur Engoron’s finding that he had tricked banks and insurers by vastly overstating his wealth on financial documents. Not surprisingly, Trump has once again portrayed himself the victim of an “unauthorized, unprecedented power-grab” by Letitia James, the New York attorney general.
James, he argues, is trying to penalize Trump for complex, highly successful transactions” with“sophisticated Wall Street banks”.
“President Trump stands among the most visionary and iconic real estate developers in American history,” they said. “As trial evidence highlighted, banks and lenders vied eagerly for his business. They acknowledged his unique ‘vision’ and unparalleled ‘expertise’ and they recognized that dealing with him would deliver ‘tremendous’ value.”
The state attorney general’s office isn’t too worried about his arguments, saying in a statement: “Once again, the defendants are raising arguments that they were already sanctioned and fined for. We won this case based on the facts and the law, and we are confident we will prevail on appeal.”
Cronies and casualties
Peter Navarro addressed the Republican national convention last week, fresh from a four-month stint behind bars. Navarro, who was convicted of contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena in the January 6 investigation, told the crowd: “I went to prison so you won’t have to.”
Paul Manafort, who managed Trump’s 2016 campaign, also attended the Republican national convention. He told Fox News: “I’ve done 10 conventions. This is the best.” Before leaving office, Trump pardoned Manafort’s federal conviction for bank and tax fraud.
Rudy Giuliani, a Trump adviser battling a host of charges related to election interference, had what could be described as another fall from grace. Video captured New York’s ex-mayor at the Republican national convention stumbling into a row of chairs before falling to the ground.
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