Supreme Court blamed for 'ethically vacant' Trump's likely escape from criminal prosecution

Although he says President Donald Trump is "well on his way to becoming the most corrupt president in American history, Thomas B. Edsall writes in the New York Times that despite that, he is likely to escape criminal prosecution after leaving office.

"Even though Trump has defied the law and the Constitution more egregiously in his second term than he did in his first, most legal experts agree that he will face few, if any, of the kind of prosecutions he was confronted with after grudgingly leaving office in 2021," Edsall writes.

There is one exception, he notes, but even that one is "far from probable," and that is the "Trump family’s involvement in the cybercurrency business through its 60 percent ownership of World Liberty Financial."

World Liberty, Edsall explains, has "made profits exceeding hundreds of millions from investments by men who have been granted pardons and by corporations that have benefited from the halt or suspension of regulatory investigations by the Trump administration."

Trump has said that he turned over all operations of his family business to his sons Eric and Donald Jr., and while the president's "culpability in the case of his family’s crypto business may seem crystal clear to some, legal experts contend that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has so muddied the law that prosecutors would face many hurdles — perhaps insurmountable — trying to bring a case against him," he writes.

During his four years out of office, Trump was charged with over 80 criminal counts in four separate criminal proceedings, Edsall notes, but he owes his current "insulation from potential prosecution to the 2024 Supreme Court decision" that afforded him "absolute immunity" from criminal prosecution for actions that fall under what they deemed official acts of his presidency.

Philip Lacovara, former counsel to the Watergate special prosecutor and deputy solicitor general, tells Edsall that because of that decision, "there is virtually no chance that Trump will face criminal prosecution."

"The Supreme Court’s Trump immunity decision last year provides Trump (and any future presidential felons) with a get-out-of-jail-free card for committing federal felonies, and it would be impossible, as a practical matter, for a post-Trump prosecutor to pursue those misdeeds through the criminal process," Lacovara says.

And while Edsall notes there are "too many" actions to put into one column that would render Trump worthy of more criminal investigations, he points out two specific examples that could warrant investigation.

Trump's "abuse of the law" in his relentless retaliatory pursuit against his perceived enemies is one, but "any public official considering an inquiry into the Trump administration risks his or her career and a possible sentence to prison," Edsell writes.

Trump's family crypto venture is another one that evokes, among other things, money laundering and wire fraud, but, again there are issues.

Jack Balkin, a law professor at Yale, described some of the difficulties in bringing a criminal case involving Trump’s World Liberty Financialsays that "If you are asking whether Trump could be held criminally liable for making regulatory decisions that create a conflict of interest, this is likely covered by the immunity created in Trump v. United States."

"The very murkiness of the laws governing presidential criminality and misconduct creates a cloud that can only work to Trump’s advantage," Edsall writes.

Trump, he says, is a "renegade president," that Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy says "is uninhibited by any decent sense of self-restraint. It will push as far as circumstances allow. If it believes that it can get away with killing people on the high seas without the restraints of domestic or international law, it will continue to do so — law be damned. One has to acknowledge the audacity of the Trump administration."

Edsall says that while none of this is surprising, it is still appalling.

"The very fact that this nefarious, ethically vacant man — a man who wears his venality on his sleeve — could twice win the presidency and in all likelihood retire with billions in ill-gotten gains suggests that America is dangerously close to falling into a political sinkhole," he says.