The Georgia indictment against Trump is the Left’s last, best shot
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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For better or for worse, the latest indictment levied against President Donald Trump and his 18 alleged co-conspirators in Georgia constitutes the last and most lethal shot of the progressive legal movement’s war against the former president. Luckily for Trump, it is as much a trial against the potentially criminal incompetence of his legal team as it is against him.
Why does the Georgia case matter the most? We can best answer that by looking at the relative weakness of the other four fronts of the legal war against Trump. The first and worst case is that brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who contorted federal campaign finance law into highly dubious charges about falsifying business records. The Bragg indictment intends to re-litigate Trump’s consensual affair with a porn star from nearly two decades ago and peddles the lie that the subsequent hush money payout to said porn star defrauded the electorate.
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The federal documents case against Trump may be the strongest on the merits: prosecutors maintain that they have Trump on tape conceding, “As president, I could have declassified” classified documents in his possession, “but now I can’t.” But Americans in general have a very good reason not to give a damn about accusations of mishandling classified documents, and it’s the same defense Trump has returned to time and time again: the Clintons already did it. Even if prosecutors present as watertight a case as they seem to have crafted behind the scenes, it’s not hard to imagine a Florida jury pool — one that potentially voted for Trump twice in a row — engaging in flagrant (and arguably justified) jury nullification.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment against Trump attempts to re-litigate the whole Jan. 6 disgrace while missing the entire point. Rather than go after Trump for his immediate actions surrounding the riot, Smith had to dust off a 153-year-old legal statute and, in a manner slightly less shameless than Bragg, misshape and manipulate it in a novel way. Smith focuses on Trump’s post-election deceptions, but he fails to convince us of criminal fraud, even though that is the ostensible purview of a federal indictment.
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The Georgia indictment is a different story. It’s not that it’s brilliant, but unlike Smith’s it leaves nothing up to chance and throws the entire book at Trump. Unlike a federal indictment, Trump or an eventual ally in the Oval Office cannot pardon him if he’s found guilty, and under Georgia law, neither can the unfairly smeared Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA). If Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis manages to convince a jury — which unlike in Florida, is likely to hail from precincts that voted for Joe Biden in double-digit margins — to convict Trump, he would not necessarily be immune, even if he himself became president after the 2024 election, from punishment for a state conviction.
Although Willis is more faithfully executing the law itself than Smith, the Fulton County case is still treading into uncharted waters, and if anything, the case seems stronger against the president’s sorry excuse for legal counsel than Trump himself. But if any case matters as a question of what voters care about and what can do the most damage, it is this one. Which also means that if Teflon Don beats this case, it’s game over for the progressive legal movement.