WASHINGTON — Thursday’s indictment of former President Donald Trump has set a precedent enabling Republican prosecutors to seek criminal charges against President Biden, conservative legal experts told The Post Friday.
“All bets are off. You can expect grand jury indictments of leftist politicians like Biden, [former House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer as surely as night follows day,” said Tom Fitton, president of the conservative legal group Judicial Watch.
“You can be sure that there are prosecutors across Florida and Texas right now who are looking for a state law hook into the Biden family,” he added. “And if they’re not, they’re not doing their jobs.”
Trump, 76, is the first former president to face criminal charges as he seeks a 2024 rematch against Biden. The sealed indictment reportedly stems from a novel document-falsification theory pushed by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg regarding Trump’s 2016 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
“Republicans need to learn how to take off the gloves and put on the brass knuckles and break glass jaws — politically and legally, not physically,” Mike Davis, a former chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee and president of the Article III Project, told The Post.
“If New York can turn a routine settlement of a business dispute seven years ago into a felony, I think our Republican AGs and DAs should get creative,” added Davis, who briefly worked as a federal prosecutor before clerking for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. “Two wrongs don’t make it right, but it makes it even.
“You just need probable cause. A grand jury can indict a ham sandwich. We just saw that in New York. And the Bidens actually committed real crimes. These are real crimes that the Bidens committed. There is smoking gun evidence that the Bidens were corruptly and illegally on Chinese and Ukrainian oligarchs’ payrolls.”
The recognition of the likely fallout from the Trump charges — and the sea change to US legal norms — spanned the political spectrum.
“The Republicans will be furiously seeking revenge and may try to pin Biden with something,” predicted left-wing social commentator Noam Chomsky, a professor emeritus at MIT, though the 94-year-old added that some cases — such as war crimes charges — would still be considered off-limits to partisans.
Trump ally Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., said he believes the legal system has a “double standard” against Republicans such as Trump, who in 2017 gave his first pardon to the controversial lawman in a criminal contempt case.
“The criminal justice system is not always fair, believe me, and this is an example,” Arpaio said.
“This sets a little precedent,” said the ex-sheriff of America’s fourth-most-populous county. “Now the word is out that you can go and indict an ex-president and a current president and they opened another door. But now everybody’s going to flex their muscles and use this case. So now we’re gonna threaten all presidents or ex-presidents.”
Arpaio predicted that prosecutors wouldn’t actually bring a case against any president or ex-president “unless his name is Donald Trump,” but said the he could imagine finding enough evidence to charge Biden or even former President Barack Obama, whose Hawaii birth certificate Arpaio notoriously claimed was a “computer-generated forgery.”
Davis, who oversaw federal judicial and prosecutor nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee between 2017 and 2019, laid out specific ideas for a Biden prosecution.
“I understand the Bidens may have had some oil and gas deals that deal with Texas. I think maybe Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton should start looking at this long and hard … and Louisiana with [Republican state Attorney General Jeff] Landry,” Davis said.
“Paxton and Landry, they need to look at this,” he added. “And if you can find a conspiracy and any of the overt acts of a conspiracy are committed in any of those states, you can bring charges.”
Even if the Trump case emboldens Republican prosecutors in some deeply conservative areas, it’s unlikely Delaware prosecutors would go after Joe Biden, who was the state’s senator for 36 years.
Attorney John Garey, a Republican who served as Delaware’s deputy attorney general from 1987 to 2003, told The Post that “as it relates to Delaware, I don’t believe that that’s going to happen.”
“In Delaware, we don’t have local DAs, we have a state attorney general who handles the local state prosecutions,” explained Garey, meaning “we don’t have an elected county DA” equivalent to Bragg, who was elected from one of the deepest-blue counties in America.
“Delaware is different and we pride ourselves on being different,” Garey added. “And I don’t believe we would ever get to a point where there would be any type of prosecution for purely political motivations.”
But elsewhere in the country, charges aren’t beyond conception.
“Obama is going to go down in history as the last US President not to be indicted after leaving office,” tweeted George Mason University law professor Eugene Kontorovich.
Davis said Republican retribution should amount to a “dead chicken strategy” — recounting a story that he said Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas once told him over lunch.
“[Thomas] talked about growing up on the farm in Georgia. When dogs killed chickens, you would wrap those dead chickens around the dog’s necks. And as those chickens rotted around those dogs’ necks, those dogs lost the taste for chicken,” Davis said.
“We need to do the same thing to the Democrats on politicized and weaponized bogus charges against Trump and Republicans. We need to give Democrats a healthy dose of their own medicine so they stop doing this.”
The White House declined to comment.
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