Letitia James and Trump

It’s hard to imagine an ethical violation as clear as that alleged against a deputy of New York state’s attorney general, Letitia James, in their campaign against President Trump. One of her prosecutors. Daniel Wiesenfeld, alleges, per the Albany Times Union, that an aide “specifically directed him to target ‘Trump himself, Truth Social’” and a Hewlett-Packard merger “without having a credible reason for targeting the organizations and individuals.”That ethical issue was famously marked in a speech back in 1940 by FDR’s attorney general, Robert Jackson, later a justice of the Supreme Court. We’ve written about it before. Jackson’s speech was to a group of federal prosecutors, cautioning them about the great power they exercise. One thing he warned them against was deciding whom they didn’t like and then seeking a crime for which the miscreant could be indicted.“If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases,” Jackson declared, “it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick persons whom he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone.“In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it,” Jackson warned, but “a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.” In “this realm,” he said, when a “prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass,” rests “the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power.”Per Jackson, “it is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.” There it is. That is exactly what is being alleged under General James. One of her team is telling her subordinates whom they want to get — then looking for a crime.Mr. Wiesenfeld says the idea was to go after the president, along with Mr. Trump’s Truth Social platform and the Justice Department’s approval of a merger involving Hewlett-Packard. The plan was pursuing them “without having a credible reason for targeting the organizations and individuals,” he claimed. They were the parties the prosecutors wanted him to go after, and then they would try to find a crime.We get that General James is by no means the only one whose operation is alleged to be targeting a political foe in an inappropriate way. Mr. Trump himself appears to be pursuing a lawfare strategy that has made him few, if any, friends and, in any event, plenty of unnecessary enemies, during an election, to boot. Anyhow, one can surmise Jackson would be astounded at the degree to which the concerns he spoke about are rife today.As to the makings of a good prosecutor, Jackson concluded, “those who need to be told would not understand it anyway.” He warned that “a sensitiveness to fair play and sportsmanship is perhaps the best protection against the abuse of power, and the citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.”

Letitia James and Trump

Letitia James and Trump

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