Since Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg reached back to the 1930s to credit Republican Thomas Dewey for “usher(ing) in the era of the modern, independent, professional prosecutor” in Bragg’s defense of his role in the conviction of former president Donald Trump, perhaps Bragg should consider a speech delivered in 1940 by U.S Attorney General Robert H. Jackson to the country’s chief federal prosecutors and U.S. Attorneys.

Jackson said something that might be considered relevant to the Trump trial: “If a prosecutor can choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor, that he will pick people that he thinks he should get rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crime a prosecutor stands a chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.”

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Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ new book “America’s Expiration Date: The Fall of Empires and Superpowers and the Future of the United States” (HarperCollins/Zondervan).

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