President Donald Trump and members of his administration, including National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, are claiming that former President Barack Obama's handling of the Russia investigation during the 2016 presidential race amounted to treason. And on Wednesday, July 23, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), led by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, announced the formation of a task force that will investigate allegations that Obama and his aides pursued the Russia probe to hurt Trump.
Countless legal experts are attacking Trump and Gabbard's anti-Obama vendetta as ludicrous, stressing that Russian interference in the United States' 2016 election was quite real. When former DOJ special counsel Robert Mueller — a conservative Republican — released his final report on the Russia investigation in March 2019, he concluded that the 2016 Trump campaign's interactions with Russians didn't rise to the level of a full-fledged criminal conspiracy but stressed that Russian President Vladimir Putin's allies clearly interfered in that election.
In an op-ed published by The Guardian on July 25, Austin Sarat (who teaches jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College in Massachusetts) argues that a huge problem with Trump's approach to criminal justice is that he is obsessed with individuals, including Obama, rather than the law itself.
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"In Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union," Sarat explains, "the Alice-in-Wonderland world of 'sentence first-verdict afterwards' came to life in infamous show trials. Those trials lacked all the requisites of fairness. Evidence was manufactured to demonstrate the guilt of the regime's enemies. Show trials told the story the government wanted told and were designed to signal that anyone, innocent or not, could be convicted of a crime against the state. So far, at least, this country has avoided Stalinesque show trials. But the logic of the show trial was very much on display this week in the Oval Office."
Sarat continues, "In a now-familiar scene, during a meeting with the Philippines president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, Donald Trump went off script. He turned a reporter’s question about the unfolding Jeffrey Epstein scandal into an occasion to say that former president Barack Obama had committed 'treason' by interfering in the 2016 presidential election. 'He's guilty,' Trump asserted, 'This was treason. This was every word you can think of.' Speaking after the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, released a report on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, the president said: 'Obama was trying to lead a coup. And it was with Hillary Clinton.'"
Trump's Stalin-like view of criminal justice, Sarat argues, is "guilt first — charges, trials and other legal niceties come later."
"This is American justice, Donald Trump-style," Sarat warns. "He wants no part of the long and storied tradition in which presidents kept an arms-length relationship with the Justice Department and did not interfere with its decisions about whether and whom to prosecute for crimes…. Some may be tempted to write off the president's latest Oval Office pronouncements as an unhinged rant or only an effort to distract attention from Trump's Epstein troubles. But that would be a mistake…. The Justice Department seems ready and willing to do the president’s bidding, even though there is no evidence that President Obama did anything wrong in regard to the 2016 election."
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Austin Sarat's full op-ed for The Guardian is available at this link.
