Editor’s Note: Elliot Williams is a CNN legal analyst. He is a former deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department and is currently a principal at The Raben Group, a public affairs firm. Follow him on Twitter @elliotcwilliams. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
CNN
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Last week, Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, became the first former President of the United States to face a criminal indictment.
Despite Trump’s claims of selective prosecution, he will, as prosecutors and commentators have said, be treated like any other accused criminal. That won’t work out too badly for Trump, given that the “any other” here refers only to white-collar criminals.
By virtue of his social standing and the crimes of which he is accused, Defendant Trump is already getting the privileged process and kid gloves extended to white-collar defendants.
Like nearly all white-collar defendants, he has never been subjected to a “no-knock” search warrant, in which shouting officers appear at a property in the middle of the night and force their way in with a battering ram (perhaps ending with the defendant getting hauled into the street still in their underpants).
It is a common tactic used in narcotics investigations designed to catch subjects off guard and prevent them from destroying or concealing evidence — ironically, conduct Trump himself may eventually be accused of.
Likewise, news of the coming indictment dropped on a Thursday and spread quickly on a Friday. Luckily for Trump, he wasn’t immediately arrested and detained through the weekend — a routine practice for defendants who cannot afford to post their bond and have the misfortune of getting nabbed as court personnel head home for the weekend.
He had an opportunity to negotiate his surrender and will not be detained before his trial, a means of ensuring a defendant’s appearance. The practice is typically used for defendants deemed to pose either a risk of fleeing the jurisdiction or a danger to their community. Based on the crimes for which he has been charged, not even Trump’s calls to “take our nation back,” warnings about “death & destruction” that could follow, or personal attacks on judges or
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