With the Trump Indictment, America is a Step Closer to Being a Banana Republic

April 03, 2023

by William L. Anderson Mises.org

When Rudy Giuliani was pursuing his infamous Wall Street prosecutions in the 1980s, his aides admitted that they were indicting people on “novel legal theories” that had not been used before. A Giuliani lieutenant bragged to a group of law students that prosecutors in his office

…were guilty of criminalizing technical offenses. . .. Many of the prosecution theories we used were novel. Many of the statutes that we charged under . . . hadn’t been charged as crimes before. . . . We’re looking to find the next areas of conduct that meets any sort of statutory definition of what criminal conduct is.

At that time, federal prosecutors were going after people like investment banker Michael Milken, but even they would have stopped at indicting a former president. That day is gone, however, and today we have Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg following what John Cassidy of the New Yorker calls a “novel effort” to combine both state and federal laws to create what clearly is a bill of attainder to convict Donald Trump of a crime.