Trump Just Saved Hillary from Jail

It was the biggest applause line from the second Presidential debate.  For almost every Trump supporter, and for many Republicans who don’t particularly care for Trump but dislike Hillary Clinton more, it was a moment they’d been waiting their entire lives to see.  It was, honestly, one of the main reasons many Republicans were secretly looking forward to these debates, even if they couldn’t stand Trump and what he’s done to the GOP: the image of him letting loose on Clinton in a debate.

Here’s the moment, in all its glory.

The transcript reads as well as watching it live.

CLINTON: …it’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.

TRUMP: Because you’d be in jail.

It was a zinger for the ages, one that will rank up there with “…you’re no Jack Kennedy” and “there you go again.”  It was the most memorable moment in a debate filled with memorable moments.

It’s also Hillary Clinton’s get-out-of-jail-free-card.  Those five words have almost ensured that she will never be held accountable for the e-mail scandal, regardless of who gets elected President in 2016.

Why?

If Clinton wins, obviously, no Department of Justice run by her appointees nor any United States Attorneys appointed by her will dare pick up the case and bring it to a grand jury.  It will likely turn into the political equivalent of Bush v. Gore or the Obama birther nonsense – something that is never fully tamped down and that she will have to listen to for the rest of her life, even after she leaves the White House for the second time, but there’s little chance of a resolution.

And, if Trump wins, you can almost guarantee, that the hue and cry raised throughout the country – by both the right and the left – about political persecution will build to a crescendo.  We’ll hear even more about how “locking up” political opponents is not how we do business in the United States.  That will leave President Obama with little choice other than to pardon Hillary Clinton before he leaves office.

The media has been concerned with the mentality of Trump supporters since the first crowds started chanting “lock her up” at Trump rallies last year and most notably at the Republican National Convention.  But it’s not just a Trump mentality – Bernie Sanders supporters chanted similar things during the Democratic primary.  The concern hit its peak after the second debate, and in the days since when Trump has doubled down on his desire to prosecute Clinton should he get elected.

The Atlantic’s senior political editor, Yoni Applebaum, said that Trump had “crossed a dangerous line” with his rhetoric at the debate, arguing that candidates have rarely, if ever, taken such rhetoric to this level.  While many campaigns in the past, especially in the 19th century, had a taint of hooliganism to them, candidates themselves never partook in that behavior.  Trump has changed that, and not for the better, Applebaum argues.

From the opposite side of the political spectrum, Charles Krauthammer wrote in his column today, that Trump’s “lock her up” talk is more damaging to his case for the presidency than the now infamous “locker room talk” – Trump’s cynical euphemism for what everybody else calls sexual assault.   Krauthammer wrote,

Such incendiary talk is an affront to elementary democratic decency and a breach of the boundaries of American political discourse. In democracies, the electoral process is a subtle and elaborate substitute for combat, the age-old way of settling struggles for power. But that sublimation only works if there is mutual agreement to accept both the legitimacy of the result (which Trump keeps undermining with charges that the very process is “rigged”) and the boundaries of the contest.

The prize for the winner is temporary accession to limited political power, not the satisfaction of vendettas. Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chávez and a cavalcade of two-bit caudillos lock up their opponents. American leaders don’t.

The specter of a sitting President appointing a Special Prosecutor to investigate his opponent’s alleged release of classified information through her use of a private e-mail server is one that has many, on both the left and the right, fidgeting in their seats.  It’s not something President Obama could ignore, and he has the power to clear Clinton once and for all with one stroke of his pen.  Does anyone out there think he wouldn’t do it?

A presidential pardon would end the prosecutions and end the debate.  It would signal the end of Clinton’s political career, but let’s be honest – if she loses to Donald Trump, her career is over anyway.  The precedent already exists, too.  Gerald Ford’s ending of “our long national nightmare” by pardoning Richard Nixon ended Watergate and allowed the country to begin healing.  The pardon power was broad enough that Nixon’s pardon ended active investigations before criminal charges were ever filed.  Even Heritage acknowledges the broadness of the pardon power.  While the damage from a Trump presidency is hard to predict at this point, President Obama could at least take the looming threat of political prosecutions off the table with a pardon.

That would leave Trump and his supporters, including the most ardent Hillary-haters, seething with impotent indignation.  That alone, for the Democrats, might make this worth doing.  Had Trump kept his mouth shut, it is likely that Obama would not be willing to risk his legacy to do a favor for Hillary Clinton.  We all know, of course, that self-discipline is not one of Trump’s strong points. Even if he saw this as a possible play, which he likely didn’t given his tissue-thin knowledge of the Constitution, he probably couldn’t have helped himself.

Donald Trump’s desire to get in a good zinger at Hillary Clinton in the debate, and his egging on of his followers to publicly demand Clinton’s jailing for the email scandal, has essentially made it inconceivable that she will ever be held accountable for what she did.

Ironic, ain’t it?

 

 

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