Cleaning up Alvin Bragg’s mess

Former President Donald Trump understands the dangerous path set by the nakedly political prosecution brought against him by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg . “What happened to me has never happened in this country before,” Trump correctly told Fox News ’s Sean Hannity last week, “It’s a very terrible thing. It’s a terrible precedent for our country.”

The previous night on Newsmax, Trump used more incendiary language to illustrate where Bragg’s precedent for political prosecutions could lead America. “Wouldn’t it be terrible to throw the president’s wife and the former secretary of state into jail?” Trump said, in reference to Hillary Clinton’s illegal handling of classified information. “Wouldn’t that be a terrible thing? It’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to. And it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them.”

Hannity noted that Democrats are using Trump’s words to claim he would use the Department of Justice for a political prosecution of Democrats for revenge. Trump denied that was his intention. "No. 1, they're wrong," Trump told Hannity. "It has to stop, because otherwise, we're not going to have a country.”

But then, with characteristic teasing vagueness, Trump continued, “Look, when this election is over, based on what they've done, I would have every right to go after them."

Hannity pressed Trump, “Will you pledge to restore equal justice, equal application of our laws, end this practice of weaponization? Is that a promise you’re going to make?”

Trump demurred. “Look, I know you want me to say something so nice. … But I don’t want to look naive,” Trump responded. “What they’re doing to me, if it’s going to continue, we’re really not going to have much of a country left.”

Typically, Trump is right in his analysis but less than totally reassuring in his response. What Democrats are doing to him and to other Republicans is appalling and dangerous, and it must stop. But Trump, always thinking tactically, wants Democrats to worry that if they keep up their provocations, they are in danger of severe payback.

That is, in a short-term political calculation, understandable. But it is paid for at the high cost of suggesting revenge prosecutions and a spiral of politically corrupted justice.

What is needed, and what Trump should proclaim as an agenda item, is lasting reforms of the criminal justice system to make sure political prosecutions cannot happen again. Trump would not have been brought to trial by a properly restrained prosecutor, let alone convicted in a fair trial.

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Candidates from both political parties should be given the right to remove a state criminal prosecution on state charges from state court to federal court when it can be shown that the potential jury pool is overwhelmingly composed of members of the opposite party.

Our nation has become far too partisan to trust the criminal justice system when defendants are political figures. No red jury and red judge should stand in judgment of a blue defendant and vice versa. We have jurisdictions where the jury pool is mixed. Trials of political figures should be held there.