New York prosecutors have been very clear: if President Donald Trump elects to pardon Paul Manafort, they will stop at nothing to try the former Trump campaign chairman at the state level. In doing so, however, one analyst says New York Democrats would be violating Manafort’s basic due process rights and engaging in selective prosecution — throwing the baby out with the bathwater simply to besmirch the president and vilify his administration.
Writing for The Hill, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley argued that “there is more blind rage than blind justice behind the effort to amend the New York constitution” and try Manafort a second time for pardonable offenses.
Blind Rage
Convicted on eight counts of bank fraud, in addition to charges of conspiracy and witness tampering, Manafort is no saint. Even if Special Counsel Robert Mueller was unable to find any evidence of Russia collusion from the former campaign consultant, Manafort’s corruption is undeniable and he deserves to be punished.
“Yet, there is something too tailored, too personal about the efforts by prosecutors to guarantee that he spends much of the rest of his life behind bars,” Turley wrote. “For more than a year, New York politicians have been pledging to voters to move aside constitutional protections to allow Manafort to be charged with state crimes that are based on the same underlying transactions or activities.”
During her 2018 state attorney general campaign, Letitia James promised that she would use “every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family.” Just days after she was elected as New York’s top prosecutor, Ms. James announced her intent to “close the double jeopardy loophole” to counter Trump’s efforts to “thwart our basic judicial processes.”
Given this Federal Administration’s efforts to thwart our basic judicial processes, it’s time we close the double jeopardy loophole. I’ll work w/leaders across NY to do so because this loophole can’t be seen as a means to circumvent our justice system.
No one is above the law.
— Tish James (@TishJames) November 29, 2018
A Mockery of Justice
Of course, the Constitution’s double jeopardy clause is hardly a “loophole.” As Turley notes, “Such guarantees originated in ancient Rome and were made part of our Constitution under the Fifth Amendment unless, it now seems, you are Paul Manafort.”
Likewise, presidential commutations are ingrained in the Constitution, as well, and the judiciary has consistently abstained from limiting the chief executive’s discretion. But that hasn’t stopped other New York Democrats from seeking to undermine these basic civil liberties purely to tarnish the president’s reputation.
Before he was forced to resign over sexual assault allegations, former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman lobbied state lawmakers to erode the state’s double jeopardy protections, which happen to be some of the strictest in the nation. Even Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo joined the liberal chorus of voices calling on state lawmakers to discard due process for all New Yorkers in order to see Manafort fry.
“New York must have the ability to stand up against the abuse of power,” Cuomo asserted in August. “I call on the State Legislature to amend current State law to close the double jeopardy loophole and ensure that these wrongdoers cannot escape justice.”
“Manafort must feel like this is the start of deer hunting season, and he is the only deer allowed to be shot,” Turley wrote. “The problem is not just the selectivity of these efforts but the fact that the other deer seem to have immunity by popular demand.”
The Cohen Connection
Indeed, to illustrate just how politically-motivated these double jeopardy reforms have become, Turley points to Trump’s former attorney and personal fixer, Michael Cohen, who has been treated with kid gloves despite being convicted in the same New York court of the same class of criminal offenses. As a key witness against the president, Cohen received an abysmally weak prison sentence and has received “hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to testify against Trump.”
“There have been no similar calls to find state charges against Cohen to guarantee a long sentence,” Turley wrote. “The effort against Manafort is being driven by the prospect of clemency as opposed to the actual underlying crimes. Indeed, there is a debate about what crimes might be best brought to bypass constitutional challenges and cement the harshest sentences.”
New York’s hysterical leftists are willing to completely rewrite their state’s constitution to take down a short-term Trump campaign staffer whose most damning offenses occurred while he was working with the Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton-led State Department. And although Trump has spoken with sympathy about his former campaign manager’s legal problems, nobody knows for certain if the president has ever considered pardoning Manafort.
“He is not worth undermining core due process and constitutional rights to add a few more years in prison as an insurance policy,” Turley concluded. Unfortunately, Democrats aren’t likely to pause and assess the real and lasting damage they are doing to their own constituents merely to score a few political points.
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