Trump has gotten away with criminal and corrupt behavior his whole life, largely because the authorities just couldn’t ever be bothered with taking the risk of doing anything about it. That remains true today:
Days before then-President Donald Trump left the White House, federal prosecutors in New York discussed whether to potentially charge Trump with campaign finance crimes once he was out of office, according to a new book from CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig.
Prosecutors from the Southern District of New York developed significant evidence against Trump when they charged his former attorney Michael Cohen in 2018 over a hush money scheme paying two women claiming affairs with Trump, including adult film star Stormy Daniels, Honig writes. But prosecutors did not consider charging Trump at the time because of longstanding Justice Department guidance that a sitting president cannot be indicted.
With Trump about to leave office in January 2021, however, Audrey Strauss, the acting US attorney, held multiple discussions with a small group of prosecutors to discuss its evidence against Trump. They decided to not seek an indictment of Trump for several reasons, Honig writes, including the political ramifications and the fact that Trump’s other scandals, such as efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and the January 6, 2021, insurrection, “made the campaign finance violations seem somehow trivial and outdated by comparison.”
“We were well aware of the prudential reasons why you wouldn’t charge a president, even after he was out of office,” one person with knowledge of the investigation told Honig.
Honig’s book, “Untouchable,” explores how Trump and other powerful people “get away with it,” focusing both on the former president as well as some of the mob bosses Honig took on when he was an assistant US attorney in New York from 2004-2012 and a state prosecutor in New Jersey.
They jailed Michael Cohen instead after he cooperated, pled guilty and testified before congress.