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Republicans denied him a seat on the Supreme Court
August 20 2022
13:50 pm
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2 minutes
Washington: (AFP)
US Attorney General Merrick Garland was denied a seat on the Supreme Court by the Republicans in the Senate, but now faces a decision as important as any that might be made by the Supreme Court: to make his decision about the prosecution of a former president of the United States.
The 69-year-old former judge had personally approved a search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, and it was up to him to decide whether to indict him.
This will set a precedent for a former US president. Richard Nixon was granted pardon by his successor, Gerald Ford, before a decision was made about whether to indict him in the Watergate scandal.
“Indicting a former president, for whatever reason, is an unusual idea,” said Stephen Schoen, a professor of law at the University of Illinois Chicago, adding that “what Trump did is also unusual.”
It appears that the search of Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago is linked to the presence of secret documents, but the former president is subject to other investigations regarding his efforts to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election, and his role in the attack by his supporters on the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
So far, the US billionaire has not been prosecuted in any of these cases, but the Parliamentary Inquiry into the Capitol attack has found leads that Garland can follow.
It remains to be seen if he will do so. While the search of Mar-a-Lago sparked a political storm, an indictment against Trump could add fuel to the fire in a deeply divided country.
In this context, Stephen Schoen notes that Merrick Garland has enough political sense to assess the risks, adding that he has “other factors that are difficult to assess.”
On the one hand, Garland should think about his law enforcement mission (…) and on the other hand, he knows full well that any criminal prosecution of Donald Trump would embolden his supporters, and that there has been violence against federal agents in the past.
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