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Comment by mingus88 | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. will never allow any former president to get prosecuted because the precedent is too severe.

By all reasonable accounts, GW Bush should have been prosecuted for war crimes. Trump should have been prosecuted the moment he left office for a spectrum of crimes. There is even a strong argument that Obama should have been prosecuted for drone strikes on citizen combatants.

But power protects power, and the moment that seal is broken all hell breaks loose amongst the ruling class.

How many people were held accountable for the 2008 crash? Zero. That would mean everyone else has to stop their criming too.

Who knows, maybe Trump is stupid and petty enough to take revenge on his enemies. If he does, no doubt his entire administration is the next against the wall as soon as the winds change.

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Nixon certainly would've been prosecuted if he hadn't been pardoned.

> There is even a strong argument that Obama should have been prosecuted for drone strikes on citizen combatants.

I don't think this is very strong at all. There is zero evidence that Obama intentionally targeted civilians outside of al-Awlaki. Suggesting that he did, and that he should be prosecuted for war crimes, puts him in the same moral category as those who ordered actual torture on enemy combatants and launched wars on fabricated evidence. It's preposterous.

War crimes are a very broad category, so no, it's not preposterous to claim that different people are both guilty of them even if the scope varies significantly.

Obama pardoned all the torturers and their instigators. He is in the same category.

I strongly disagree with that equivalency. Obama should have pursued accountability instead of pardoning them like he did, but I do not agree that it puts him in the same moral category. Your framing shifts the argument from "Obama maybe deserves some scrutiny here" to "Obama belongs in the same cells with the torturers."

You're collapsing several degrees of responsibility with this lazy equivalence, and minimizing the heinousness of the people who actually designed and executed torture programs.

The world has no shortage of evil bastards. The only thing that restrains them is the knowledge that they may be held to account. Obama undermined that.

"Don't worry, we've got your back. If your country asks you to do evil, we won't hold you to account. So go right ahead."

Who is worse? The criminal or the corrupt judge?

> There is zero evidence that Obama intentionally targeted civilians outside of al-Awlaki.

So... there is evidence he intentionally targeted a civilian?

Sorry, I actually meant to write that al-Awlaki was a citizen, as in an American citizen. Obama didn't intentionally target civilians, and he didn't intentionally target "citizens" as OP stated outside of al-Awlaki who was an American citizen turned insurgent.

But trump was prosecuted. He was found guilty.

It's just that in the meantime the rule of law in the US died and he was elected again.

If there are elections in 2028 and MAGA loses he's toast. Big if.

You'll get him this time! After 9 years of failing.

Dammit, all we need is just one more chance!

The American justice system deserves to cease existing if 4 years isn’t enough to process people for possibly capital crimes (J6 coup attempt). No state can afford that.

Even if MAGA loses in 2028, I have very low confidence that Trump will see any consequences for his crimes. There's also the fun self-pardon-by-proxy trick: on the morning of the last day of his administration, he resigns. Vance is sworn in, pardons Trump for anything he's done, and then passes the presidency on to the next one.

Regardless, Trump is old. Even if he's convicted of something in 2030 or whenever, he probably won't go to prison. He may even be dead by then; he'll be nearly 85, and no matter what his doctors have been told to say publicly, it's hard to believe the man is in super great health.

I think the “big if” in the parent comment was about whether there would be elections in 2028, not whether Trump might lose them…

> By all reasonable accounts, GW Bush should have been prosecuted for war crimes.

According to the rules we put in place at Nuremburg, EVERY US President since World War 2 has committed war crimes.

Trump was prosecuted.

They meant criminally prosecuted, which he was not.

Sure he was. He is a convicted felon, with 34 guilty counts under his belt[0]. You can't get convicted of felonies in a civil case. That was a criminal prosecution.

[0] https://apnews.com/article/trump-trial-deliberations-jury-te...

Trump was criminally prosecuted on both state (New York and Georgia) and federal charges, and convicted on New York state charges, before being re-elected. Because prosecution is an executive power exercised by the President, his re-election made it so that he would be President and thus unprosecutable by the time of trial on the federal charges for which there were still active prosecutions, resulting in them being dismissed without prejudice. (Technically, they could be refiled after he leaves office again.)

Concerns about Constitutional issues with state penalties interfering with federal duties also led the judge in the New York state case, where he was convicted of 34 felony charges, to sentence him to "unconditional discharge" -- essentially, he remains a convict, but faced no penalty beyond the fact of officially being a felony convict.

Issues relating to prosecutorial behavior have stalled Trump's prosecution on state criminal charges in Georgia, but those charges remain active (whether the prosecutor's office that was handling the case can continue to do so is an issue currently subject to appeal, and may not be decided for several months.)

You're right. I'm honestly not sure what I thinking.

… How did you miss the last year or so? I’m jealous.

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