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      The Trial America Needs

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      At last. The federal criminal justice system is going to legal war against one of the most dishonest, malicious and damaging conspiracies in the history of the United States. Tuesday’s indictment of Donald Trump, brought by the special counsel Jack Smith’s office, is the culmination of a comprehensive effort to bring justice to those who attempted to overthrow the results of an American presidential election.In the weeks after the 2020 election, the legal system was in a defensive crouch, repelling an onslaught of patently frivolous claims designed to reverse the election results. In the months and years since the violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, the legal system has switched from defense to offense. With all deliberate speed, prosecutors first brought charges against Trump’s foot soldiers, the men and women who breached the Capitol. Next, prosecutors pursued the organizers of Trumpist right-wing militias, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who had engaged in a seditious conspiracy to keep Trump in the White House.And now, Smith is pursuing Trump himself — along with six yet unnamed co-conspirators — alleging criminal schemes that reached the highest level of American government. This is the case that, if successful, can once and for all strip Trump of any pretense of good faith or good will. But make no mistake, the outcome of this case is uncertain for exactly the reason it’s so important: So very much of the case depends on Trump’s state of mind.At the risk of oversimplifying an indictment that contains four distinct counts — conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights — it can be broken down into two indispensable components. First, it will be necessary to prove what Trump knew. Second, it will be necessary to prove what he did. Let’s take, for example, the first count of the indictment: 18 U.S.C. Section 371, conspiracy to defraud the United States. The statute is designed to criminalize any interference or obstruction of a “lawful governmental function” by “deceit, craft or trickery.”There’s little doubt that Trump conspired to interfere with or obstruct the transfer of power after the 2020 election. But to prevail in the case, the government has to prove that he possessed an intent to defraud or to make false statements. In other words, if you were to urge a government official to overturn election results based on a good faith belief that serious fraud had altered the results, you would not be violating the law. Instead, you’d be exercising your First Amendment rights.The indictment itself recognizes the constitutional issues in play. In Paragraph 3, the prosecutors correctly state that Trump “had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.”Thus, it becomes all-important for the prosecution to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Trump knew he lost. Arguably the most important allegations in the indictment detail the many times that senior administration officials — from the vice president to the director of national intelligence to senior members of the Justice Department to senior White House lawyers — told him that there was no fraud or foreign interference sufficient to change the results of the election. That’s why it’s vitally important for the prosecution to cite, for example, the moment when Trump himself purportedly described one of his accused co-conspirators’ election fraud claims as “crazy.”The strong constitutional protection for efforts to influence or persuade the government makes the intent element inescapable, no matter the count in the indictment. While there are certainly nuances in the other counts regarding the precise form of proof necessary to establish criminal intent, the fact remains that the prosecution will have to utterly demolish the idea that Trump possessed a good-faith belief that he had won the election.But that’s precisely why this case is so important — more important than any previous Trump indictment. If the prosecution prevails, it will only be because it presented proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the election fraud claims that a substantial percentage of Americans still believe to be true were not only false but were also known to be false when they were made.I am not naïve. I know that not even a guilty verdict will change the perceptions of many of Trump’s most loyal supporters. As my Times colleague Nate Cohn wrote on Monday, “The MAGA base doesn’t support Mr. Trump in spite of his flaws. It supports him because it doesn’t seem to believe he has flaws.” The perceptions of these supporters may never change. They may remain loyal to Trump as long as they live.At the same time, however, a successful federal trial would strip Trump’s defenders of key talking points — that his voter fraud and vote manipulation claims have never been fully tested, that the House Jan. 6 committee was nothing but a one-sided show trial and that a proper cross-examination would expose the weakness of the government’s claims. Trump will have his opportunity to challenge the government’s case. His lawyers will have the ability to cross-examine opposing witnesses. We will see his best defense, and a jury will decide whether the prosecution prevails.The case is no slam dunk. I agree with the Politico Magazine columnist and former prosecutor Renato Mariotti, who stated that it is “not as strong” as the federal documents case against Trump. But that’s because the Mar-a-Lago documents case is exceptionally strong and clear. A former Trump administration attorney, Ty Cobb, has described the evidence as “overwhelming.” The facts appear to be uncomplicated. By contrast, the facts underlying this new indictment are anything but simple. And Trump possesses legal defenses — such as challenging the scope and applicability of the relevant statutes — that he won’t have in his federal trial for withholding documents.Yet if a prosecutor believes — as Smith appears to — that he can prove Trump knew his claims were false and then engineered a series of schemes to cajole, coerce, deceive and defraud in order to preserve his place in the White House, it would be a travesty of justice not to file charges.Consider some of the claims in the case. Paragraph 66 of the indictment says that Trump directed “fraudulent electors” to convene “sham proceedings” to cast “fraudulent electoral ballots” in his favor. Paragraph 31, quoting audio recordings, claims that Trump told the Georgia secretary of state that he needed to “find” 11,780 votes and said that the secretary of state and his counsel faced a “big risk” of criminal prosecution if they (as the special counsel describes it) “failed to find election fraud as he demanded.”This is but the tip of the iceberg of the wrongdoing Trump is accused of. But those two claims alone — even leaving aside the events of Jan. 6 and the host of other Trump efforts to overturn the election — merit bringing charges.Millions of Americans believe today that Joe Biden stole the presidency. They believe a series of demonstrable, provable lies, and their belief in those lies is shaking their faith in our republic and, by extension, risking the very existence of our democracy. There is no sure way to shake their convictions, especially if they are convinced that Trump is the innocent victim of a dark and malign deep state. But the judicial system can expose his claims to exacting scrutiny, and that scrutiny has the potential to change those minds that are open to the truth.Smith has brought a difficult case. But it’s a necessary case. Foot soldiers of the Trump movement are in prison. Its allied militia leaders are facing justice. And now the architect of our national chaos will face his day in court. This is the trial America needs.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Matt DePerno, Trump Meddler in Michigan, Is Charged in Election Breach

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      A key figure in a multistate effort to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. DePerno lost his race for Michigan attorney general in 2022. He later finished second to lead the state’s Republican Party.Matthew DePerno, a key orchestrator of efforts to help former President Donald J. Trump try to overturn the 2020 election in Michigan and an unsuccessful candidate for state attorney general last year, was arraigned on four felony charges on Tuesday, according to documents released by D.J. Hilson, the special prosecutor handling the investigation.The charges against Mr. DePerno, which include undue possession of a voting machine and a conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a computer or computer system, come after a nearly yearlong investigation in one of the battleground states that cemented the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president.Former State Representative Daire Rendon was also charged with two crimes, including a conspiracy to illegally obtain a voting machine and false pretenses.Both Mr. DePerno and Ms. Rendon were arraigned remotely on Tuesday before Chief Judge Jeffery Matis, according to Richard Lynch, the court administrator for Oakland County’s Sixth Circuit, and remained free on bond.The charges were first reported by The Detroit News.Mr. DePerno denied any wrongdoing and said that his efforts “uncovered significant security flaws” in a statement from his lawyer, Paul Stablein.“He maintains his innocence and firmly believes that these charges are not based upon any actual truth and are motivated primarily by politics rather than evidence,” Mr. Stablein said.The criminal inquiry in Michigan has largely been overshadowed by developments in Georgia, where a grand jury is weighing charges against Mr. Trump for trying to subvert the election, but both are part of the ongoing reckoning over the conspiracy theories about election machines promoted by Mr. Trump and his allies.The efforts to legitimize the falsehoods and conspiracy theories promoted widely by Mr. Trump and his allies continued long after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and after Mr. Biden took office. In Arizona, such efforts included the discredited election audit of Maricopa County led by Republicans in the state legislature.In a statement, Mr. Hilson said, “Although our office made no recommendations to the grand jury as to whether an indictment should be issued or not, we support the grand jury’s decision and we will prosecute each of the cases as they have directed in the sole interests of justice.”Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general and a Democrat who went on to defeat Mr. DePerno in the November election, has not been involved in the investigation since the appointment of a special prosecutor in August last year. In a statement on Tuesday, Ms. Nessel said that the allegations “caused undeniable harm to our democracy” and issued a warning for the future.“The 2024 presidential election will soon be upon us. The lies espoused by attorneys involved in this matter, and those who worked in concert with them across the nation, wreaked havoc and sowed distrust within our democratic institutions and processes,” Ms. Nessel said. “We hope for swift justice in the courts.”The charges stemmed from a bizarre plot hatched by a group of conservative activists in early 2021 to pick apart voting machines in at least three Michigan counties, in some cases taking them to hotels and Airbnb rentals as they hunted for evidence of election fraud.In the weeks after the 2020 election, he drew widespread attention and the admiration of Mr. Trump when he filed a lawsuit challenging the vote tallies in Antrim County, a rural area in Northern Michigan where a minor clerical error fueled conspiracy theories.He falsely claimed that voting machines there had been rigged, a premise that was rejected as “idiotic” by William P. Barr, an attorney general under Mr. Trump, and “demonstrably false” by Republicans in the Michigan Senate.Mr. Hilson, the prosecutor in Muskegon County appointed as special prosecutor, had initially delayed bringing charges, asking a state judge to determine whether it was against state law to take possession of a voting machine without the secretary of state’s permission or a court order. A judge determined last month that doing so was against the law, clearing the way for charges.Democrats swept the governor’s race and other statewide contests last fall, in addition to flipping the full Legislature for the first time in decades. Mr. DePerno, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump, lost the attorney general’s race by eight percentage points.This year, Mr. DePerno had been a front-runner to lead the Michigan Republican Party after its disappointing showing in last year’s midterm election, but he finished second to another election-denier: Kristina Karamo.In his campaign to lead the G.O.P. in Michigan, Mr. DePerno had vowed to pack the party’s leadership ranks with Trump loyalists, close primaries to just Republicans and ratchet up the distribution of absentee ballot applications to party members — despite what he said was lingering opposition to voting by mail within the party’s ranks.His candidacy was supported by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who has spread conspiracy theories about election fraud and appeared at a fund-raising reception for Mr. DePerno in Lansing on the night before the chairmanship vote.Mr. DePerno lost to Ms. Karamo after three rounds of balloting at the state party convention, a process that was slowed for several hours by the use of paper ballots and hand counting.Danny Hakim More

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      Judge Rejects Trump’s Effort to Short-Circuit Georgia Election Case

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      A Fulton County judge chided Donald Trump’s lawyers for “unnecessary and unfounded legal filings” ahead of indictments expected in mid-August.A Georgia judge forcefully rejected on Monday an effort by former President Donald J. Trump to derail an investigation into attempts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state — an investigation that is expected to yield indictments in mid-August.Mr. Trump tried to get Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of the Fulton County Superior Court in Atlanta to throw out evidence collected by a special grand jury and disqualify the prosecutor overseeing the investigation, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney.But in a nine-page order, Judge McBurney wrote that Mr. Trump did not have the legal standing to make such challenges before indictments were handed up. The judge said the “injuries” that Mr. Trump claimed to have suffered from the two-and-a-half-year investigation “are either insufficient or else speculative and unrealized.”The office of Ms. Willis, a Democrat, is expected to present potential indictments in the matter to a regular grand jury in the next few weeks.The Georgia investigation is part of a swirl of legal troubles surrounding Mr. Trump, who has already been indicted on state charges in New York connected with hush-money payments in 2016, and on federal charges over his retention and handling of classified documents after leaving office in 2021.He has also received a target letter as part of a federal investigation into wider efforts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election, suggesting that he could be indicted again.In Atlanta, law enforcement officials have been stepping up security in anticipation of the grand jury proceedings there.Last week, officials put orange barriers around the Fulton County courthouse in downtown Atlanta. Ms. Willis has asked the F.B.I. for “protective resources” at the court complex, and has had some members of her staff outfitted with bulletproof vests. She has also announced remote-work days for many staff members during the first three weeks of August, and has asked judges not to schedule other trials for part of that time.A “special purpose” grand jury, which did not have indictment power, interviewed dozens of witnesses and subpoenaed documents over the course of roughly seven months. The jury then issued an advisory report recommending that a number of people be indicted on charges of violating Georgia laws, according to the jury forewoman.The specifics of those recommendations have not yet been made public, although the forewoman, in a February interview with The New York Times, strongly hinted that Mr. Trump was among the people recommended for indictment.Judge Robert C.I. McBurney forcefully rejected Mr. Trump’s efforts to derail an investigation into election interference in Georgia.Ben Gray/Associated PressJudge McBurney, in Monday’s ruling, seemed to have little patience for the arguments from Mr. Trump’s legal team, and he suggested that Mr. Trump’s lawyers were gumming up the legal process with frivolous filings.“In the future, counsel is encouraged to follow the professional standard of inquiring with chamber’s staff about timing and deadlines before burdening other courts with unnecessary and unfounded legal filings,” Judge McBurney wrote.To the Trump team’s assertions that Mr. Trump would be injured by an indictment, Judge McBurney appeared to allude to the fund-raising that Mr. Trump’s campaign had done, highlighting the criminal cases against him.“For some, being the subject of criminal investigation can, à la Rumpelstiltskin, be turned into golden political capital, making it seem more providential than problematic,” he wrote in a footnote. “Regardless, simply being the subject (or target) of an investigation does not yield standing to bring claim to halt that investigation in court.”A representative for Ms. Willis’s office declined on Monday to comment on the judge’s ruling. Lawyers for Mr. Trump could not immediately be reached for comment.Earlier this month, the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously rejected a filing with a similar aim from Mr. Trump’s Georgia legal team. That filing argued, among other things, that the special grand jury’s proceedings were “blatantly unconstitutional” and that Ms. Willis had made biased public statements.Mr. Trump’s challenge in Superior Court was joined by Cathy Latham, one of 16 Republicans who tried to cast bogus Electoral College votes for Mr. Trump in December 2020, and who has been named as a target of the investigation by prosecutors. Judge McBurney also rejected Ms. Latham’s filing in his order on Monday.In addition to finding that Mr. Trump’s and Ms. Latham’s challenges were premature, Judge McBurney pushed back against Mr. Trump’s contention that prosecutors had been improperly biased. The judge also appeared to criticize the former president for his attacks on Ms. Willis, who is Black and whom Mr. Trump has called a “local racist Democrat district attorney” who is seeking to harm him politically.“The drumbeat from the district attorney has been neither partisan (in the political sense) nor political, in marked and refreshing contrast to the stream of personal invective flowing from one of the movants,” the judge wrote.A third challenge from Mr. Trump’s lawyers is set to be considered by a judge in Cobb County, Ga., in a hearing scheduled for Aug. 10. The matter was moved to the county, which is an Atlanta suburb, after the chief judge in Fulton County Superior Court ruled that he and his fellow Fulton County judges were recused from ruling on that motion. Judge McBurney wrote on Monday that the challenge in Cobb County should now be considered moot. More

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      How Is Tim Scott Spending Millions in Campaign Money? It’s a Mystery.

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      Most of the money spent by the senator’s presidential campaign has gone to newly formed companies whose addresses are Staples stores in suburban strip malls.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has more political money than most of his Republican presidential rivals, and he has not been shy about spending it.Where that money is ultimately going, however, is a mystery.Mr. Scott entered the 2024 race with a war chest of $22 million, and his campaign raised $5.8 million from April through June. In that same time, he laid out about $6.6 million, a significant clip — but most of it cannot be traced to an actual vendor.Instead, roughly $5.3 million went to two shadowy entities: newly formed limited liability companies with no online presence and no record of other federal election work, whose addresses are Staples stores in suburban strip malls. Their minimal business records show they were set up by the same person in the months before Mr. Scott entered the race.Masking the companies, groups and people ultimately paid by campaigns — effectively obscuring large amounts of spending behind businesses and convoluted consulting arrangements — has become common, as political candidates and organizations test the limits of campaign finance law.Federal law requires campaigns to disclose their spending, including itemized details of their vendors, as a safeguard against corruption and in the interest of transparency. But as in many aspects of campaign finance law, campaigns have found workarounds, and the body that oversees such regulations, the Federal Election Commission, is perpetually hamstrung by partisan deadlock.Mr. Scott with voters in Iowa on Thursday. He is aiming to become the clear Republican alternative to Donald J. Trump in the party’s presidential primary race.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesCampaign finance experts said that among increasingly brazen moves by political candidates, Mr. Scott’s new financial disclosures stood out as exhibit A.“This practice completely undermines the federal campaign finance disclosure requirements,” said Paul S. Ryan, a campaign finance expert. “The public has a right to know how political committees are spending donor dollars.”Matt Gorman, a senior communications adviser for the Scott campaign, said: “These are independent companies we contract with to provide services to the campaign including managing multiple consultants. Payments to those companies are disclosed like all others on our F.E.C. report.”The F.E.C. has allowed committees to not itemize subvendor payments when those payments are an extension of the original vendor’s work. But in recent years, this interpretation of the law has widened into a gaping loophole that campaigns are exploiting. Experts say it is illegal for campaigns to pay campaign staff members through limited liability companies, or for vendors to serve merely as conduits to hide the ultimate recipient of campaign money.In recent years, the F.E.C., whose six commissioners are deadlocked between the parties three to three, has essentially allowed campaigns to get away with minimal disclosures.A spokeswoman for the commission declined to comment.Indeed, while the use of limited liability companies by Mr. Scott’s campaign is striking in its scale, it is not unique among Republican presidential candidates.The campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida made two payments last quarter, totaling more than $480,000, for “travel” to a company in Athens, Ga. The company was set up around the time he entered the race, and lists Paul Kilgore — a Republican political operative — as a manager.Neither Mr. Kilgore nor the DeSantis campaign responded to requests for comment.Former President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 campaign was the subject of litigation over its use of limited liability companies run by campaign staff and family members that were allegedly conduits for hundreds of millions of dollars of spending. His campaign defended the practice, saying the intermediary companies were acting as the primary vendors.“The idea of disclosing payments in this way defeats the whole purpose of campaign finance disclosure law,” said Saurav Ghosh, a former F.E.C. lawyer and the director of federal campaign finance reform for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit campaign ethics group that sued the F.E.C. over the 2020 Trump campaign’s actions.He added, “It’s been a problem for a while, but like most that go on unaddressed, it has a tendency to get worse, and I think this one is getting worse.”According to F.E.C. filings last week, the Scott campaign made $4.3 million in payments from April 1 to June 30 to a company called Meeting Street Services L.L.C. The money included $2.8 million for “placed media” and more for digital fund-raising, strategy and video production.Meeting Street Services has no online presence, and has not been paid by any other campaign, records show. Its listed address, in North Charleston, S.C., is a Staples store. Records show that the company was set up in Delaware in August 2022, and its incorporation documents list only one name — Barry M. Benjamin — as an authorized representative.According to business records in South Carolina, the company is managed by AMZ Holdings L.L.C., a company set up in May 2021 and based at the same Staples store in North Charleston. AMZ’s Delaware incorporation documents were also signed by Mr. Benjamin.Mr. Scott’s campaign did not provide information about Mr. Benjamin or further details about the companies. Efforts to independently determine Mr. Benjamin’s identity were unsuccessful.There are several notable absences in the campaign’s second-quarter filing, including Targeted Victory, a major political fund-raising firm that has said it works for the campaign, and FP1 Strategies, a political advertising firm, which was also reportedly brought on by the campaign. Several people from the two firms who are working for the campaign also do not appear in the disclosure.Mr. Scott’s use of Meeting Street Services L.L.C. predates his entry into the presidential race. In the last four months of 2022, his Senate campaign paid the company more than $4.5 million, filings show, for television ads, digital fund-raising and other consulting.And his presidential campaign reported an additional $1 million spent with Meeting Street Services in the first quarter of this year, even though his campaign had not officially begun.The Scott campaign also made more than $940,000 in payments last quarter to Advanced Planning and Logistics, a limited liability company set up in December 2022 — again, by Mr. Benjamin — and whose listed address is a Staples store in Fairfax, Va. The company received multiple payments for air travel and event production. Again, Mr. Scott’s campaign was the only campaign that paid the company.In 2020, the Trump campaign reported paying hundreds of millions of dollars to two companies, one set up by a former campaign manager and the other by campaign officials. Neither the campaign nor the companies themselves reported specifically what the money was being spent on.The Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint to the F.E.C., accusing the Trump campaign of using the companies as “conduits” to conceal other vendors. The commission’s general counsel recommended that the F.E.C. find that the campaign had broken the law by misreporting payments, and begin an investigation into the Trump campaign’s relationships with vendors and subvendors.But the commission deadlocked last year in a vote on the matter, which meant no action could be taken. The Campaign Legal Center sued the commission, but a federal judge — while expressing sympathy for the desire of transparency — dismissed the case late last year, saying that the commissioners had discretion.“It is a lot easier to follow the money when you have a paper trail,” the judge opened his opinion.The Campaign Legal Center has appealed.Kitty Bennett More

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      Justices Ignoring the ‘Scent of Impropriety’

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      More from our inbox:The Costs of the Trump InquiryGiuliani’s False AccusationsReform the College Admissions SystemBiden’s Dog Needs a New HomeA Brit’s Struggles, After Brexit Hannah RobinsonTo the Editor:Re “What Smells Off at the Court?,” by Michael Ponsor (Opinion guest essay, July 16):Judge Ponsor’s bewilderment at the loss of olfaction on the Supreme Court is spot on. As he explained, it isn’t that hard for a judge to catch even a faint whiff of the scent of impropriety.And you don’t have to be a federal judge to smell it. Every federal employee knows that aroma. When I was a Justice Department lawyer, a group of federal and state lawyers spent months negotiating in a conference room at the defendant’s law firm. The firm regularly ordered in catered lunches and invited the government attorneys to partake. None of us ever accepted a bite.Another time, a company hoping to build a development on a Superfund site hosted a presentation for federal and municipal officials. The company’s spokesperson presented each city official with a goodie bag filled with stuff like baseball caps bearing the project’s name. To me and my colleagues, the spokesperson said: “We didn’t bring any for you. We knew you wouldn’t take them.” They were right.The sense of smell is more highly evolved in the depths of the administrative state than in the rarefied air at the pinnacle of the judicial branch.Steve GoldCaldwell, N.J.The writer now teaches at Rutgers Law School.To the Editor:Judge Michael Ponsor alludes to the Code of Conduct for United States Judges as the guide he has followed his entire career. However, he implies that the code is faulty by stating the Supreme Court needs a “skillfully drafted code” to avoid political pressure on justices. He does not elaborate on what shortcomings the existing code has that make it inapplicable to the Supreme Court.The existing code is very skillfully drafted. It emphasizes that the foundation of the judicial system is based on public trust in the impartiality of judges. The code is very clear that the “appearance of impropriety” is as important as its absence.This is at the core of the scandals of current sitting justices. The actions and favors received most certainly have the appearance of impropriety. Those appearances of impropriety are undermining confidence and trust in the Supreme Court. No amount of rationalization and argle-bargle by the justices can change that.R.J. GodinBerkeley, Calif.To the Editor:When I served as a United States district judge, it did not take an acute sense of smell for me to determine what action was ethically appropriate. I had a simple test that was easy to apply: Do I want to read about this in The New York Times? I think the current members of the Supreme Court are beginning to realize the value of this simple test.John S. MartinFort Myers, Fla.The writer served as a district judge for the Southern District of New York from 1990 to 2003.The Costs of the Trump InquiryThe scope of Jack Smith’s investigation of former President Donald J. Trump greatly exceeds that of the special counsel investigating President Biden’s handling of classified documents after he left the vice presidency.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Cost of Scrutinizing Trump Continues to Grow” (front page, July 24):We should weigh the cost of investigating and prosecuting allegations of major crimes committed by Donald Trump against the cost of doing nothing.Imagine a world in which the United States descends into an authoritarian regime — with our rulers selected by violent mobs rather than in elections. The costs to our rights as citizens and our system of free enterprise would be incalculably larger in such a world than what Jack Smith is currently spending to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his actions.Eric W. OrtsPhiladelphiaThe writer is a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting professor of law at Columbia University.Giuliani’s False Accusations Nicole Craine for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Poll Workers Get Retraction From Giuliani” (front page, July 27):If there was such widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, why did Rudy Giuliani resort to falsely accusing the two Atlanta election workers? Didn’t he have many true examples of fraud to choose from?Tom FritschlerPort Angeles, Wash.Reform the College Admissions SystemThe Harvard University campus last month. The Biden administration’s inquiry comes at a moment of heightened scrutiny of college admissions practices.Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Legacy Admission at Harvard Faces Federal Inquiry” (front page, July 26):While I applaud the focus on legacy admissions, it is clear that the entire process needs an overhaul. Every day now it feels as if a new study is released that confirms what we had long suspected: that elite colleges favor the wealthy and the connected. Does anyone believe that removing legacy admissions alone will change this?As it stands, elite schools care too much about wealth and prestige to fundamentally alter practices that tie them to wealthy and connected people. If the Education Department is serious about reform, it will broaden its inquiry to examine the entire system.However one feels about the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, at the very least it has forced us to reconsider the status quo. I pray that policymakers take this opportunity instead of leaving the bones of the old system in place.Alex ChinSan FranciscoThe writer is a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and is pursuing a Ph.D. at Teachers College, Columbia University.Biden’s Dog Needs a New HomeA White House staff member walking Commander, one of the Biden family’s dogs, on the North Lawn of the White House earlier this year.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Emails Report List of Attacks by Biden’s Dog” (news article, July 26):I support Joe Biden’s presidency and think he is generally a thoughtful, kind man. But I am appalled to learn that Secret Service agents — or any employees at the White House — have to regularly contend with the risk of being bitten by the president’s German shepherd.No one deserves to face not just the physical harm and pain of dog bites but also the constant fear of proximity to such an aggressive pet. Keeping the dog, Commander, at the White House shows poor judgment.This situation hardly reflects the Bidens’ respect and caring for those sworn to serve them. It’s time for Commander to find a new home better suited to his needs.Cheryl AlisonWorcester, Mass.A Brit’s Struggles, After Brexit Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockTo the Editor:Re “The Disaster No One Wants to Talk About,” by Michelle Goldberg (column, July 23):I am a Brit, a fact I have been ashamed of since the Brexit vote in 2016, if not before.I voted to stay in the European Union. I was shocked at the result, and I was more shocked at the ignorance of others who voted.Our lives absolutely have changed since Brexit, but not for the better. My family is poorer, and we can no longer afford a holiday or many of the luxuries we previously could. As the economy suffers, with the rise in interest rates our mortgage is set to reach unspeakable sums. Package that with a near doubling in the cost of our weekly groceries, and we have big decisions that need to be made as a family.And still, despite this utter chaos, the widespread use of food banks, the regular striking of underpaid and underappreciated key workers, despite all of this, there are still enough people to shout loud in support of Brexit and the Conservative Party.We are a nation in blind denial. We are crashing. And yes, we are being pushed to breaking up into pieces not seen for centuries.As a family we miss the E.U., we mourn the E.U., and we grieve for the quality of life we once had but may never see again.Nevine MannRedruth, England More

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      Hunter Biden Plea Deal Put on Hold as Judge Questions Its Details

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      A federal judge on Wednesday put on hold a proposed plea deal between Hunter Biden and the Justice Department that would have settled tax and gun charges against the president’s son, stunning the courtroom and raising legal and constitutional questions about the agreement.After moments of high drama in which the deal appeared headed toward collapse, the judge, Maryellen Noreika of the Federal District Court in Wilmington, Del., sent the two sides back to try to work out modifications that would address her concerns and salvage the basic contours of the agreement.Under the proposed deal, Mr. Biden would have pleaded guilty to two tax misdemeanors and averted prosecution on a gun charge by enrolling in a two-year diversion program for nonviolent offenders.Prosecutors and Mr. Biden’s team had both started the day confident that the proceeding would go smoothly and the judge would sign off on the deal immediately. As he entered the courtroom, Mr. Biden drew a deep breath and plunged forward to greet the prosecutors who investigated him for five years with handshakes and a smile.But Judge Noreika had other ideas, telling the two sides repeatedly that she had no intention of being “a rubber stamp,” and spending three hours sharply questioning them over nearly every detail of the deal.“I cannot accept the plea agreement today,” said Judge Noreika, who was nominated to the bench by President Donald J. Trump in 2017 with the support of Delaware’s two Democratic senators.An exhausted-looking Mr. Biden trudged out of the courthouse looking a bit stunned, as his lawyers puzzled over what to do next. At the end of the hearing, Mr. Biden entered a plea of not guilty on the tax charges, which he will reverse if the two sides revise their agreement to the judge’s satisfaction.The muddled outcome only underscored how Mr. Biden’s personal and legal troubles have become an entrenched political issue in Washington, where Republicans have long sought to show that his foreign business ventures were aided by, or benefited, President Biden.Those efforts have only intensified as Mr. Trump’s legal troubles have deepened and Republicans in Congress have sought to undercut the president heading into the 2024 election.Republicans have accused David C. Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Delaware who was retained by the Biden administration to complete the investigation into Mr. Biden, of cutting a “sweetheart deal” intended to help Democrats.They have sought to cast the Biden family as corrupt and assailed the proposed deal as far too lenient, citing testimony from two I.R.S. investigators as evidence that the Justice Department had hamstrung the investigation and that President Biden played a role in his son’s business deals with companies and partners in Ukraine and China.Hunter Biden’s foreign business ventures raised ethical concerns, especially while his father was vice president, and his personal problems — he has acknowledged being addicted to crack cocaine for a number of years — have given conservatives an endless stream of material to assail him. But Republicans have produced no compelling evidence that President Biden used his office to help his son in any substantive way.The White House declined to comment directly on Wednesday’s court proceeding while communicating the president’s support for his son’s efforts to put his problems behind him.“Hunter Biden is a private citizen, and this was a personal matter,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Wednesday. “As we have said, the president, the first lady, they love their son, and they support him as he continues to rebuild his life.”Judge Noreika’s concerns appeared to center on two elements of the proposed deal. One was a provision that would have offered Mr. Biden broad insulation against further prosecution on matters scrutinized by federal prosecutors during the five-year inquiry, providing him with some protection against the possibility that Mr. Trump, if re-elected, or another Republican president might seek to reopen the case. The other had to do with the diversion program on the gun charge, under which she would be called on to play a role in determining whether Mr. Biden was meeting the terms of the deal.Judge Noreika said she was not trying to sink the agreement, but to strengthen it by ironing out ambiguities and inconsistencies, a view held by some former department officials.“The judge appropriately wanted to make sure that the parties were clear on whether Hunter Biden could be prosecuted for additional crimes in the future,” said Barbara L. McQuade, who was the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan from 2010 to 2017.Judge Noreika kicked off the hearing by telling lawyers that they did not need to keep “popping” up and down every time she asked them a question.It was a signal that she was about to subject them to a relentless interrogation over elements of an agreement she described, variously, as “not standard, not what I normally see,” possibly “unconstitutional,” without legal precedent and potentially “not worth the paper it is printed on.”Judge Noreika quickly zeroed in on a paragraph offering Mr. Biden broad immunity from prosecution, in perpetuity, for a range of matters scrutinized by the Justice Department. The judge questioned why prosecutors had written it in a way that gave her no legal authority to reject it.Then, in 10 minutes of incisive questioning, she exposed serious differences between the two sides on what, exactly, that paragraph meant.Christopher Clark, Mr. Biden’s lead lawyer, said it indemnified his client not merely for the tax and gun offenses uncovered during the inquiry, but for other possible offenses stemming from his lucrative consulting deals with companies in Ukraine, China and Romania.Prosecutors had a far narrower definition. They saw Mr. Biden’s immunity as limited to offenses uncovered during their investigation of his tax returns dating back to 2014, and his illegal purchase of a firearm in 2018, when he was a heavy drug user, they said.When the judge asked Leo Wise, a lead prosecutor in the case, if the investigation of Mr. Biden was continuing, he answered, “Yes.”When she asked him, hypothetically, if the deal would preclude an investigation into possible violation of laws regulating foreign lobbying by Mr. Biden connected with his consulting and legal work, he replied, “No.”Mr. Biden then told the judge he could not agree to any deal that did not offer him broad immunity, and Mr. Clark popped up angrily to declare the deal “null and void.”The disagreement over such a central element of the deal was remarkable, given the months of negotiations that went into reaching it.“Today was very unusual, but based on my experience, I think the deal will now get done,” said John P. Fishwick Jr., who served as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia from 2015 to 2017. “Judges are reluctant to reject deals but do ask questions. These should have been cleared up before today’s hearing, but they were not, so she helped provide more clarity.”The 30 journalists in the gallery then witnessed a remarkable tableau of real-time, public deal-making. With the judge having called a recess, the defense and prosecution teams first separated into two packs, then merged into a circle to hash out a new compromise. An unsmiling Mr. Weiss paced back and forth, jaw tense and hands jammed into the pockets of his suit.After an official recess was declared, Mr. Clark agreed to the narrower terms on Mr. Biden’s behalf.But Judge Noreika still appeared to be unconvinced. She turned her attention to the fine print of the deal that had been struck on the gun offense, requiring Mr. Biden to avoid using drugs or owning a firearms during the two-year diversion program.She objected strenuously to how a violation of its terms would be handled.Typically, the Justice Department could independently verify any breach and bring charges. But Mr. Biden’s team, concerned that the department might abuse that authority if Mr. Trump is re-elected, successfully pushed to give that power to Judge Noreika, arguing that she would be a more neutral arbiter.Judge Noreika suggested that such an arrangement could be unconstitutional because it might give her prosecutorial powers, which were vested in the executive branch by the Constitution.“I’m not doing something that gets me outside my lane of my branch of government,” said the judge, adding, “Go back and work on that.”Erica L. Green More

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      Do You Know a Politically Motived Prosecution When You See One?

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      As the criminal indictments of Donald Trump continue to pile up like boxes in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, the former president’s defenders have settled on a response: They don’t claim their man is innocent of the scores of federal and state charges against him — a tough case to make under the circumstances. Instead they accuse the Biden administration and Democratic prosecutors of politicizing law enforcement and cooking up an insurance policy to protect President Biden, who trails Mr. Trump in some polls about a very possible 2024 rematch.“So what do they do now?” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy asked last week, after Mr. Trump announced that he had received a second target letter from the special counsel Jack Smith, this time over his role in the Jan. 6 attack. “Weaponize government to go after their No. 1 opponent.”Gov. Ron DeSantis, one of the few plausible Republican nominees besides Mr. Trump, warned that the government is “criminalizing political differences.”It’s not only about Mr. Trump; griping about politicized law enforcement has become a cottage industry on the right these days. No sooner did Republicans take back the House of Representatives than they formed a Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which meets regularly to air grievances and grill witnesses about their supposed anti-conservative animus, including Christopher Wray, the (Trump-nominated) F.B.I. director.If you’re feeling bewildered by all the claims and counterclaims of politicization, you’re not alone. Take the F.B.I.’s probe of ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign, which is still being hashed out in the halls of Congress seven years later: In February, Democratic lawmakers demanded an investigation of the investigators who investigated the investigators who were previously investigated for their investigation of a transnational plot to interfere in a presidential election. Got that?But even if the charge of politicized justice is levied by a bad-faith buffoon like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chairman of the weaponization subcommittee, it is a profoundly important one. There is no simple way to separate politics completely from law enforcement. The Justice Department will always be led by a political appointee, and most state and local prosecutors are elected. If Americans are going to have faith in the fairness of their justice system, every effort must be taken to assure the public that political motives are not infecting prosecutors’ charging decisions. That means extremely clear rules for investigators and prosecutors and eternal vigilance for the rest of us.At the same time, politically powerful people must be held to the same rules as everyone else, even if they happen to be of a different party from those investigating them. So how to distinguish an investigation or prosecution based solely on the facts from one motivated improperly by politics?Sometimes the investigators make it easy by just coming out and admitting that it’s really political. Mr. McCarthy did that in 2015, when he bragged on Fox News that the House Benghazi hearings had knocked a seemingly “unbeatable” Hillary Clinton down in the polls. More recently, James Comer of Kentucky, who heads the House committee that is relentlessly investigating Hunter Biden, made a similar argument about the effect of the committee’s work on President Biden’s political fortunes. (Mr. Comer tried to walk back his comment a day later.)More often, though, it takes some work to determine whether an investigation or prosecution is on the level.The key thing to remember is that even if the subject is a politically powerful person or the outcome of a trial could have a political impact, that doesn’t necessarily mean the action itself is political. To assume otherwise is to “immunize all high-ranking powerful political people from ever being held accountable for the wrongful things they do,” said Kristy Parker, a lawyer with the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “And if you do that, you subvert the idea that this is a rule-of-law society where everybody is subject to equal justice, and at the same time you remove from the public the ability to impose any accountability for misconduct, which enables it to happen again.”In May, Protect Democracy published a very useful report, co-written by Ms. Parker, laying out several factors that help the public assess whether a prosecution is political.First, what is the case about? Is there straightforward evidence of criminal behavior by a politician? Have people who are not powerful politicians been prosecuted in the past for similar behavior?Second, what are top law-enforcement officials saying? Is the president respecting due process, or is he demanding investigations or prosecutions of specific people? Is he keeping his distance from the case, or is he publicly attacking prosecutors, judges and jurors? Is the attorney general staying quiet, or is he offering public opinions on the guilt of the accused?Third, is the Justice Department following its internal procedures and guidelines for walling off political interference? Most of these guidelines arose in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, during which President Richard Nixon ordered the department to go after his political enemies and later obstructed the investigation into his own behavior. Until recently, the guidelines were observed by presidents and attorneys general of both parties.Finally, how have other institutions responded? Did judges and juries follow proper procedure in the case, and did they agree that the defendant was guilty? Did an agency’s inspector general find any wrongdoing by investigators or prosecutors?None of these factors are decisive by themselves. An investigation might take a novel legal approach; an honest case may still lose in court. But considering them together makes it easier to identify when law enforcement has been weaponized for political ends.To see how it works in practice, let’s take a closer look at two recent examples: first, the federal investigations into Mr. Trump’s withholding of classified documents and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and, second, the investigation by John Durham into the F.B.I.’s Russia probe.In the first example, the Justice Department and the F.B.I., under Attorney General Merrick Garland, waited more than a year to pursue an investigation of Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack with any urgency — largely out of the fear that they would be seen as politically motivated.With a punctiliousness that has exasperated many liberals, Mr. Garland has kept his mouth shut about Mr. Smith’s prosecutions, except to say that the department would pursue anyone responsible for the Jan. 6 attack. Mr. Garland almost never mentions Mr. Trump by name. And Mr. Smith has been silent outside of the news conference he held last month to announce the charges in the documents case.In that case, Mr. Smith presented a tower of evidence that Mr. Trump violated multiple federal laws. There are also many examples of nonpowerful people — say, Reality Winner — who were prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to years in prison for leaking a single classified document. Mr. Trump kept dozens. Even a federal judge who was earlier accused of being too accommodating to Mr. Trump has effectively signaled the documents case is legitimate, setting a trial date for May and refusing the Trump team’s demand to delay it until after the 2024 election.In the Jan. 6 case, the government has already won convictions against hundreds of people for their roles in the Capitol attack, many involving some of the same laws identified in Mr. Smith’s latest target letter to Mr. Trump.“Prosecutors will hear all sorts of allegations that it’s all political, that it will damage the republic for all of history,” Ms. Parker, who previously worked as a federal prosecutor, told me. “But they have to charge through that if what they’ve got is a case that on the facts and law would be brought against anybody else.”President Biden’s behavior has been more of a mixed bag. He and his advisers are keen to advertise his disciplined silence about Mr. Trump’s legal travails. “I have never once — not one single time — suggested to the Justice Department what they should do or not do,” he said in June. Yet he has commented publicly and inappropriately on both investigations over the years.It’s impossible to justify these remarks, but it is possible to consider them in light of the other factors above and to decide that Mr. Smith’s investigations are not infected with a political motive.Contrast that with the investigation by John Durham, the federal prosecutor appointed by Mr. Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr in 2019 to investigate the origins of the F.B.I.’s Trump-Russia probe.Even before it began, the Durham investigation was suffused with clear political bias. Mr. Trump had repeatedly attacked the F.B.I. over its handling of the Russia probe and called for an investigation, breaching the traditional separation between the White House and the Justice Department. Mr. Barr had also spoken publicly in ways that seemed to prejudge the outcome of any investigation and inserted himself into an investigation focused on absolving Mr. Trump of wrongdoing.Not every investigation or prosecution will offer such clear-cut evidence of the presence or absence of political motivations. But as with everything relating to Mr. Trump, one generally doesn’t have to look far to find his pursuit of vengeance; he has taken to describing himself as the “retribution” of his followers. If he wins, he has promised to obliterate the Justice Department’s independence from the presidency and “go after” Mr. Biden and “the entire Biden crime family.”For the moment, at least, Mr. Trump is not the prosecutor but the prosecuted. And there should be no fear of pursuing the cases against him — especially those pertaining to his attempts to overturn his loss in 2020 — wherever they lead.“If we can’t bring those kinds of cases just because the person is politically powerful, how do we say we have a democracy?” asked Ms. Parker. “Because in that case we have people who are above the law, and they are so far above the law that they can destroy the central feature of democracy, which is elections, in which the people choose their leaders.”Source photograph by pepifoto, via Getty Images.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Building a Legal Wall Around Donald Trump

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      The American legal system is on the cusp of a remarkable historical achievement. In real time and under immense pressure, it has responded to an American insurrection in a manner that is both meting out justice to the participants and establishing a series of legal precedents that will stand as enduring deterrents to a future rebellion. In an era when so many American institutions have failed, the success of our legal institutions in responding to a grave crisis should be a source of genuine hope.I’m writing this newsletter days after the Michigan attorney general announced the prosecution of 16 Republicans for falsely presenting themselves as the electors qualified to vote in the Electoral College for Donald Trump following the 2020 election. That news came the same day that the former president announced on Truth Social that he’d received a so-called target letter from Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The target letter signals that the grand jury investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is likely to indict Trump, perhaps any day now.On Monday, a day before this wave of news, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected a desperate Trump attempt to disqualify the Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis from prosecuting Trump and to quash a special grand jury report about 2020 election misconduct. Trump’s team filed their petition on July 13. The court rejected it a mere four days later. Willis can continue her work, and she’s expected to begin issuing indictments — including potentially her own Trump indictment — in August, if not sooner.Presuming another Trump indictment (or more than one) is imminent — or even if it is not — the legal response to Jan. 6 will continue. But to truly understand where we are now, it’s important to track where we’ve been. If you rewind the clock to the late evening of Jan. 6, 2021, America’s long history of a peaceful transfer of power was over, broken by a demagogue and his mob. To make matters worse, there was no straight-line path to legal accountability.Prosecuting acts of violence against police — or acts of vandalism in the Capitol — was certainly easy enough, especially since much of the violence and destruction was caught on video. But prosecuting Trump’s thugs alone was hardly enough to address the sheer scale of MAGA misconduct. What about those who helped plan and set the stage for the insurrection? What about the failed candidate who set it all in motion, Donald Trump himself?Consider the legal challenges. The stolen election narrative was promulgated by a simply staggering amount of defamation — yet defamation cases are difficult to win in a nation that strongly protects free speech. Trump’s legal campaign was conducted by unethical lawyers raising frivolous arguments — yet attorney discipline, especially stretching across multiple jurisdictions, is notoriously difficult.The list continues. Trump’s team sought to take advantage of ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act, a 19th-century statute that might be one of the most poorly written statutes in the entire federal code. In addition, Trump’s team advanced a constitutional argument called the independent state legislature doctrine that would empower legislatures to dictate or distort the outcomes of congressional and presidential elections in their states.There’s more. When we watched insurrectionists storm the Capitol, we were watching the culminating moment of a seditious conspiracy, yet prosecutions for seditious conspiracy are both rare and difficult. And finally, the entire sorry and deadly affair was instigated by an American president — and an American president had never been indicted before, much less for his role in unlawfully attempting to overturn an American election.Now, consider the response. It’s easy to look at Trump’s persistent popularity with G.O.P. voters and the unrepentant boosterism of parts of right-wing media and despair. Does anything make a difference in the fight against Trump’s lawlessness and lies? The answer is yes, and the record is impressive. Let’s go through it.The pro-Trump media ecosphere that repeated and amplified his election lies has paid a price. Fox News agreed to a stunning $787 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, and multiple defamation cases continue against multiple right-wing media outlets.Trump’s lawyers and his lawyer allies have paid a price. Last month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the bulk of a sanctions award against Sidney Powell and a Mos Eisley cantina’s worth of Trump-allied lawyers. A New York State appellate court temporarily suspended Rudy Giuliani’s law license in 2021, and earlier this month a Washington, D.C., bar panel recommended that he be disbarred. Jenna Ellis, one of Guiliani’s partners in dangerous dishonesty and frivolous legal arguments, admitted to making multiple misrepresentations in a public censure from the Colorado Bar Association. John Eastman, the former dean of Chapman University’s law school and the author of an infamous legal memo that suggested Mike Pence could overturn the election, is facing his own bar trial in California.Congress has responded to the Jan. 6 crisis, passing bipartisan Electoral Count Act reforms that would make a repeat performance of the congressional attempt to overturn the election far more difficult.The Supreme Court has responded, deciding Moore v. Harper, which gutted the independent state legislature doctrine and guaranteed that partisan state legislatures are still subject to review by the courts.The criminal justice system has responded, securing hundreds of criminal convictions of Jan. 6 rioters, including seditious conspiracy convictions for multiple members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. And the criminal justice system is still responding, progressing steadily up the command and control chain, with Trump himself apparently the ultimate target.In roughly 30 months — light speed in legal time — the American legal system has built the case law necessary to combat and deter American insurrection. Bar associations are setting precedents. Courts are setting precedents. And these precedents are holding in the face of appeals and legal challenges.Do you wonder why the 2022 election was relatively routine and uneventful, even though the Republicans fielded a host of conspiracy-theorist candidates? Do you wonder why right-wing media was relatively tame after a series of tough G.O.P. losses, especially compared to the deranged hysterics in 2020? Yes, it matters that Trump was not a candidate, but it also matters that the right’s most lawless members have been prosecuted, sued and sanctioned.The consequences for Jan. 6 and the Stop the Steal movement are not exclusively legal. The midterm elections also represented a profound setback for the extreme MAGA right. According to an NBC News report, election-denying candidates “overwhelmingly lost” their races in swing states. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the relentless legal efforts also had a political payoff.And to be clear, this accountability has not come exclusively through the left — though the Biden administration and the Garland Justice Department deserve immense credit for their responses to Trump’s insurrection, which have been firm without overreaching. Multiple Republicans joined with Democrats to pass Electoral Count Act reform. Both conservative and liberal justices rejected the independent state legislature doctrine. Conservative and liberal judges, including multiple Trump appointees, likewise rejected Trump’s election challenges. Republican governors and other Republican elected officials in Arizona and Georgia withstood immense pressure from within their own party to uphold Joe Biden’s election win.American legal institutions have passed the Jan. 6 test so far, but the tests aren’t over. Trump is already attempting to substantially delay the trial on his federal indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case, and if a second federal indictment arrives soon, he’ll almost certainly attempt to delay it as well. Trump does not want to face a jury, and if he delays his trials long enough, he can run for president free of any felony convictions. And what if he wins?Simply put, the American people can override the rule of law. If they elect Trump in spite of his indictments, they will empower him to end his own federal criminal prosecutions and render state prosecutions a practical impossibility. They will empower him to pardon his allies. The American voters will break through the legal firewall that preserves our democracy from insurrection and rebellion.We can’t ask for too much from any legal system. A code of laws is ultimately no substitute for moral norms. Our constitutional republic cannot last indefinitely in the face of misinformation, conspiracy and violence. It can remove the worst actors from positions of power and influence. But it cannot ultimately save us from ourselves. American legal institutions have responded to a historical crisis, but all its victories could still be temporary. Our nation can choose the law, or it can choose Trump. It cannot choose both. More