Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash
The House Oversight Committee is finally getting Trump’s taxes. While they will not have time to do much with them before the new year, they should be able to turn them over to the Senate, where Democrats still have a majority for at least the next two years.
The Department of Justice also appears poised to succeed in its attempt to get rid of the Special Master in the Mar-A-Lago documents case. In addition, the DOJ recently appointed a top-tier prosecutor named Jack Smith to move forward expeditiously on that case as well as on the DOJ’s January 6th investigation — thus signaling what may be the end of Trump’s stonewalling on that front.
Meanwhile, Lindsey Graham finally testified before the Special Grand Jury in the Fulton County DA’s case against Trump for messing with the 2020 Georgia election results. Graham, who fought to postpone the inevitable, not only testified for over two hours — he answered all their questions — despite having previously stated that he should be immune from testifying.
And the Manhattan DA has recently indicated that he plans to revisit Donald Trump’s part in the Stormy Daniels hush money payment. This makes sense, given that Michael Cohen went to prison for actions he took on Trump’s behalf and at Trump’s direction.
And on Monday, the criminal trial against the Trump organization for tax fraud begins, even as a second long-term grand jury has been convened to look at additional criminal charges that might be made against the Trump organization for crimes not included in the original grand jury.
It’s hard to see how at least one of these cases will not end up resulting in a prison sentence for Trump. It’s also hard to see how at least one of these will not conclude while Biden is still president — which means no pardon for Trump — at least not right away.
Granted, before the midterms, it was looking improbable Trump would ever be held accountable for any of his criminal activities, and it is still possible for Trump or another Republican to win the presidency in 2024 and for Trump to be pardoned. However, I think that’s increasingly unlikely. For one thing, the scheme to put Republican election deniers in charge of future elections didn’t pan out the way Republicans had hoped. This means in order to win elections, they have to get more votes. For a party working overtime to curtail our right to vote, this may be harder than they think.
Noises from Congressional Republicans already signal their desire to use their small majority in the House to impeach Biden and make life hell for his son, Hunter. It’s a sad commentary on the Republican Party that they’re more focused on finding ways to trash the president and his son than helping the American people.
With headlines like “New poll shows nearly 1 in 3 American voters want incoming GOP to focus on Biden impeachment probe,” it’s easy to miss the fact that one in three means twice as many don’t want Congress to focus on investigating or impeaching Biden.
Whether the Republicans in the House choose to waste their time and energy investigating Biden or not, one thing is fairly certain: Republicans are in no position to do much of anything else. It is far more likely that Republicans will spend the majority of their time fighting with each other. Meanwhile, Democrats not only hold the majority in the Senate, but if they can keep Warnock’s Georgia Senate seat in the upcoming runoff election, they may even free themselves from the contrariness of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
So, while plenty of pundits and Medium writers will doubtless continue to say Trump will never be held accountable, I disagree. If we have learned nothing else from the recent midterms, we’ve learned that polls are wrong, Americans are smarter than most politicians or pundits think, and all of us — even most Republicans these days— would like nothing more than to see Donald Trump be put away.