Professor Andrew Kent comments in a Mother Jones article on whether Kamala Harris and other Democratic presidential candidates are going too far by calling for charges to be pressed against President Trump for obstruction of justice once he is no longer a sitting president.
Back in 2016, it was candidate Trump who broke the post-Watergate norms that wall off the Justice Department from the politics of the White House when he made “Lock her up!” chants a feature of his campaign rallies and suggested in a debate that if he won, Hillary Clinton would go to prison. Those conventions have continued to erode now that Trump is president: He has pressured law enforcement officials at the Justice Department to pursue some investigations (of Clinton and other Democrats) while forgoing others (asking then-FBI Director James Comey to go easy on his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn). Legal experts hope that the next president will return to ensuring that the government’s prosecutorial powers are not political weapons.
Which is why some are perturbed by Harris’ comments, which they think risk politicizing prosecutions. “I think her comments do unfortunately run afoul of that important norm,” says Andrew Kent, an expert in legal ethics at Fordham University School of Law.
He added, “I think a better answer to the question is something along the lines of, ‘I would leave that to the Department of Justice to decide what’s appropriate. Unlike President Trump, I’m not going to try to dictate prosecutorial outcomes in individual cases.’”