Center for American Progress report on the need for rule-of-law accountability for Trump Administration crimes

I don't know whether to take this as an encouraging sign or one of those cracks-in-spacetime warnings. But the now-safely-establishment Center for American Progress (Neera Tanden, president) has just today published a paper on the need for a Biden Administration to treat Trump Administration crimes as crimes, How a Future President Can Hold the Trump Administration Accountable by Sam Berger 08/06/2020:

[T]he lesson from the past four years is clear: The absence of accountability is treated as license to escalate abuses of power.

It is critical for leaders to make clear now that those who break the law will face accountability in the future. Ignoring the Trump administration’s attacks on the rule of law will only invite further attacks—and likely even more brazen and threatening ones.

The Trump administration’s efforts to undermine U.S. democracy have greatly escalated with the administration politicizing the deployment of federal law enforcement and casting doubt on the legitimacy of electoral processes — and are likely to grow in intensity unless it is clear that there will be accountability for wrongdoing.

Now, in deference to the duck-and-cover instincts of the Party establishment, it prefaces that with, "Whenever the Trump administration ends, there may be good-faith concerns that addressing the administration’s misconduct will be too divisive, set a bad precedent, or lead to political pushback from the administration’s supporters."

Translation: Of course our corporate donors don't want to see this, and the Republicans will howl and cry and play the victim and the knee-jerk Democratic leadership response to that is always to hide under the bed.

In fact, you might want to download the PDF immediately, because the lobbyists are probably already making a fuss over this already. Because it goes into why the duck-and-cover response would be bad for the Democrats.

This is really, seriously, a basic rule-of-law issue. It would be a "left" idea only if the Democratic leadership is actually indifferent to the rule of law for government officials and have been just blowing smoke about their "resistance" to Trumpism for the last 3 1/2 years. "To look the other way with respect to the actions of the Trump administration would mean that the rule of law is not a constant, but rather that it only exists for certain administrations and for certain people  —  which is to say that it does not exist at all."

This CAP report is surprisingly good in making the case on how serious the responsibility of a new administration is on this:

The Trump administration is not simply trying to skirt the law — it is acting as if the law does not apply to it at all. If the rule of law is to have any meaning, it is incumbent on a future administration to make clear that it applies to everyone. The moral hazard of allowing the Trump administration to escape accountability would put our democracy permanently at risk.

Greg Sargent has some favorable comments about the CAP report in If Biden wins, the post-Trump corruption purge will have to be epic Washington Post 08/05/2020. He obviously has some doubt about whether Status Quo Joe will have the stomach or it: "Which immediately highlights an interesting conundrum: to what degree members of a Biden administration could undertake such an internal examination without involving Biden in any way, since that would risk straying into the sort of politicization that is the problem under Trump."

The policy of the Obama-Biden Administration was impunity for crimes by Republicans in office from the previous Administration. And also for bank CEOs responsible for criminal acts in the mortgage crisis. I see that as a serious dereliction of duty on that administration's part. The CAP reports argues:

Another concern is that holding the Trump administration accountable for its actions would be too divisive. Trump has continually sought to divide America to try to build his political support, which will likely lead to a strong desire by a future administration to rectify this problem by uniting the country around shared ideals. But one of those shared ideals is the primacy of the rule of law: that people in the United States should be treated equally, and that there should not be one justice system for the politically well-connected and one for everyone else. Having a rule of law means that it applies at all times and in all places—not only when an administration chooses to enforce it. The law applies right now to the Trump administration; that the administration refuses to acknowledge that fact is all the more reason that a future administration must reassert it. That means holding people accountable for their wrongdoing.

Those concerned about divisiveness often point to Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon as a model. But that analogy is inapposite. Nixon resigned from office in disgrace, providing some measure of accountability for his actions—although, notably, he did not admit wrongdoing. And when Ford pardoned him, he first made sure that Nixon understood Ford’s view that acceptance of the pardon was an acceptance of guilt for his part in Watergate. Moreover, as discussed earlier, many people in Nixon’s administration as well as a number of his associates were investigated and held to account for their illegal actions. [my emphasis]