Alberto Gonzales, who served as Attorney General when George W. Bush was in office as president, wrote in a new article for The Washington Post against some of the conspiracy theories that have been spread by Republican allies to Trump (and Trump himself) about supposedly political concerns driving the Justice Department’s actions.
Trump consistently claims that he is the victim of political persecution and, more specifically, election interference because of his ongoing campaign for president in the 2024 election, though he announced this (expected) campaign after all three of the investigations that have culminated in his three criminal cases were already publicly known. Gonzales, a Republican, contends that those rallying behind the claims that Trump is the victim of misconduct are effectively attacking the system of justice in the United States itself. There remains no evidence that Trump has been made subject to prosecutorial processes that wildly differ from those regularly used, a system that includes a necessity for a grand jury to approve charges before they’re official.
“To suggest that special counsel Jack Smith’s latest indictment on the Jan. 6 assault is just an attack on free speech, as some Republican partisans are claiming, is itself an attack on the rule of law,” Gonzales wrote in the Post. “If a private citizen had organized the events on Jan. 6, there is little doubt that they would have been arrested and prosecuted. The Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol should not be held to a higher standard than the former president. If we decide that presidents should never be charged with crimes after they leave office for actions committed while in office, we are no longer a democracy.”
Despite his dozens of criminal charges across three cases, with an expected fourth case looming in Georgia, Trump remains the front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination for the 2024 election. He leads in most polling, and many elected officials from the party continue supporting him.
