Donald Trump has been the target of “selective and vindictive prosecution” throughout the 2024 campaign. The most prominent case of this “arbitrary prosecution,” as Judge Aileen Cannon put it, is the classified documents case, of course.
On Thursday, Judge Cannon raised the many issues with former President Donald Trump being charged with violations of the Espionage Act and other U.S. statutes against mishandling of classified documents beginning with the day that he willfully and voluntarily stepped down from the presidency on January 20, 2021, while former Vice President Joe Biden, former Vice President Michael Pence, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remain uncharged, despite lacking the legal coverage of the Presidential Records Act.But that is not the only case of such selective prosecution, which is anathema to justice and equal treatment under the law. In late February, Judge Arthur Engoron issued a civil penalty against Donald Trump for $354 million, which was adjudicated without a jury of his peers. Furthermore, Judge Engoron slapped Trump with several restrictions against operating his businesses in the State of New York.
The major flaws with this ruling are extensive, but boil down to this: Firstly, there were no actual victims of Donald Trump’s allegedly inflated valuation of the assets he claimed in negotiations with willing lenders; Secondly, the practices that Donald Trump used in his lending contracts are almost universally used among prominent real estate developers.The State of New York even bizarrely changed the law to pave the way for E. Jean Carroll’s civil rape case. This is as “selective and vindictive” an abuse of the law as it gets.
After Judge Engoron’s ruling, she embarrassingly gushed on Maddow’s show that she wanted to take the MSNBC host shopping.