Editor’s Note: Fareed Zakaria hosts “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” airing at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET Sundays on CNN. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.
CNN
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The news of former President Donald Trump’s indictment has left me feeling torn.
On the one hand, Trump is a walking advertisement for rich privilege. For decades he has flouted rules, norms and even laws as he climbed his way to the top, brazenly convinced that the usual standards didn’t apply to him. His company was found guilty of tax fraud, he’s been taken to court countless times over unpaid bills, and he’s even stolen money from his own charities.
For those who saw Jon Stewart on “GPS” last week, that was the gist of his passionate argument. Jon was certainly right that the law should not care about the popularity of a person or the political effect of an indictment — and no one can really be sure what that effect will be in the long run anyway.
And yet this case is not simply one of the law in all its impartial majesty holding someone to account. The prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, is an elected district attorney who ran a campaign for that office boasting that he had helped sue Donald Trump “more than a hundred times.” Even so, once elected and after looking over the evidence, he is reported to have put the case on the back burner, which triggered a storm of criticism from his Democratic base. He then reversed course and decided to pursue the case on a new basis, if reported accounts are correct, which goes like this: Trump’s offense is to have violated New York state law by falsifying business records, but the statute of limitations for that misdemeanor has expired.
So Bragg’s office will argue that the misdemeanor is actually tied to a felony because it violates federal election laws. But that violation is one that the Justice Department under both Trump and President Joe Biden looked at and decided against prosecution. That is, as many experts have pointed out, a novel legal theory. I should note that Trump denies any wrongdoing.
Given the circumstances, this case has the feel of zealous prosecutors minutely examining all possibilities to find some violation of the law. This upends the notion in Anglo-Saxon law that you first have a crime and…
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