How you should treat a criminal president is what we saw in action this week in France, where a court found former French president Nicolas Sarkozy guilty of criminal conspiracy for his role leading a scheme to solicit millions of dollars from former Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi to finance Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign.
This in spite of Sarkozy doing his best Donald Trump:
“This injustice is a scandal. I ask the French people, whether they voted for me or not, whether they support me or not, to grasp what has just happened. Hatred truly knows no bounds,” Sarkozy said after a judge handed down a five-year prison sentence, which the former president will have to begin serving as he seeks an appeal.
In Brazil, the most recent former president, Jair Bolsonaro, was sentenced to 27 years in prison earlier this month for trying to seize power after losing the 2022 election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Bolsonaro is under house arrest pending appeal.
Sound familiar?
One other former president, Rodrigo Duterte, who was president of the Philippines from 2016-2022, was indicted this week in connection with the murders of 79 people and related charges of torture and rape dating back to his term as a local mayor.
In France, Brazil, even the Philippines, former presidents, not above the law.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration – we’re looking at you, Merrick Garland – didn’t even bring Trump up on charges related to the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021, which Trump led to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
We let a would-be dictator get away with literal murder – nine people died in connection with Jan. 6; in any other circumstance, when people die during the commission of a crime perpetrated by another, that’s murder.
Trump was convicted in a state court on 34 felony fraud charges, but he was never sentenced on the convictions – because a former president here is above the law, and free to, among other things, use the legal system that didn’t hold him to account to punish his political enemies.
You could almost predict this, if you’d ever read a history book.
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Chris Graham
