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After Donald Trump’s arraignment on Tuesday, Ari Fleischer appeared on Fox News to make an appeal of sorts. “Here’s what I hope happens next,” he said. “I earnestly hope that conservative prosecutors in rural areas of America indict Bill Clinton, indict Hillary Clinton, indict Hunter Biden.”
Have the Clintons committed any crimes? The former Bush White House press secretary didn’t say. In fact, he didn’t appear to care, which was key to appreciating the larger point: As Fleischer saw it, a district attorney’s office in an urban area worked with a grand jury to indict a former Republican president, so conservative prosecutors in rural areas should retaliate against former Democratic officeholders.
It’s not about merit. There’s no pretense about justice. Fleischer endorsed tit-for-tat politics in its raw and unabashed form.
As my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown noted, it was the next morning when a key Republican congressman made related comments.
Appearing Wednesday morning on “Fox & Friends,” House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., told the hosts that he’d fielded calls from two county attorneys, one from Kentucky and one from Tennessee. “They want to know if there are ways they can go after the Bidens,” he said. Democrats like Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg have “opened up a can of worms; they’ve set precedents now we can’t go back on,” Comer moaned.
There are all sorts of relevant angles to what Hayes described as the “Pandora’s box” theory of Trump’s indictment. We could note, for example, that there’s no evidence of President Joe Biden having committed any crimes — in Kentucky, Tennessee or anywhere else. We could also note the legal hurdles associated with prosecuting a sitting American president.
But for now, let’s instead focus on a different element to the story.
If Comer’s version of events is accurate, he spoke with two different prosecutors, in two different jurisdictions, who admitted to the chairman of the House Oversight Committee — explicitly and out loud — that they’re interested in launching retaliatory cases for purely political purposes.
Or put another way, for all the talk in Republican circles about Democrats “weaponizing” our system of justices and the levers of governmental power, Comer appeared on national television and helped expose a pair of GOP county attorneys who were apparently eager to abuse the powers of their office in pursuit of partisan goals.
It seems the next step should be the Kentucky congressman filing a complaint against these local prosecutors for their eagerness to ignore professional standards for prosecutors, the Code of Professional Responsibility, and the bar rules of their respective states. Comer might also bring this to the attention of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and his select subcommittee on the “weaponization” of government.
What do you suppose the odds are that this will be the Oversight Committee chairman’s next move?