A top Democratic Party election lawyer and Supreme Court litigator who served as counsel to Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election recount in Florida argues that his colleagues should end the legal cases against President-elect Donald J. Trump. Thomas Goldstein, who now publishes the legal commentary website SCOTUSblog, echoes an argumentmade last week by former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, contending that the 2024 Election serves as its own verdict on the prosecutions.
“Democracy’s ultimate verdict on these prosecutions was rendered by voters on Election Day,” Goldstein writes in an essay for the New York Times. The long-time Democrat litigator continues: “The charges were front and center in the campaign. The president-elect made a central feature of his candidacy that the cases were political and calculated to stop him from being re-elected.”
He adds: “Despite the prosecutions, more than 75 million people, a majority of the popular vote counted so far, decided to send him back to the White House.”
Goldstein contends that the two federal cases against Trump “are history” as Biden-Harris Department of Justice (DOJ) special counsel Jack Smith has indicated that he intends to resign from his constitutionally questionable appointment. Interestingly, Goldstein contends that the two state-level prosecutions against the President-elect in New York and Georgia “invoke legal strategies that had never been used to criminalize the behavior that prosecutors charge.” He notes both cases “…carry the stench of politics and, if pursued, could lay the groundwork for political prosecutions of future presidents.”