Getting Away With Murder

Last week, Russian political activist and dissident Alexei Navalny died in a Siberian prison camp, where he was serving a 30-year sentence for what most observers agree were specious, purely politically motivated convictions.

Navalny had been an opponent of Vladimir Putin, the country's current president, and one of Putin's most vehement critics, calling Putin's political party one of "crooks and thieves." Young and charismatic, Navalny had repeatedly tried to run for elected office in Russia, but the Russian government attacked him at every turn, accusing him of being a political "extremist"; charging him with various crimes, including "organizing illegal demonstrations," corruption, embezzlement, fraud and contempt of court; placing him under house arrest; censoring his access to the internet and social media; imposing huge fines on him (and his family members) and liquidating his assets.

As might be expected, Navalny's death has produced renewed outrage against Putin, and U.S. President Joe Biden has announced new sanctions against Russia in response.

Stories like that of Navalny have traditionally served as cautionary tales about the concentration of power and the superiority of the U.S. system of government. Dictators are laws unto themselves, but America is "a country of laws and not of men," or so the saying goes.

And yet, what we are seeing in case after case -- at the federal, state and local levels of government -- is the radical abandonment of that principle in favor of shredding the law to "get" whoever the government has decided the desired target is.

And in many (though not all) of these cases, that target is Donald Trump.

In Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis is prosecuting Trump for "election interference" under a statute written to go after the Mafia. The case has holes in it big enough to drive a truck through, but no matter. Willis has been accused of serious misconduct, including conspiring with the Biden White House to prosecute the current president's chief political rival, using public funds for lavish vacations and paying her lover hundreds of thousands of dollars to be co-counsel, despite his lack of experience. A motion to disqualify Willis is pending at this writing.

Then there's New York Attorney General Letitia James, who decided to sue Trump for fraud. In this remarkable case, James argued that Trump overvalued the properties he used as collateral for loans he received. This, despite the fact that the banks that issued the loans used their own property appraisers (as banks always do), and Trump paid all loans back on time and with interest.

It gets worse. He Who Is Both King and Court(room) Jester in the case, Judge Arthur Engoron, ruled on a summary judgment motion (in other words, before any trial) that Trump committed fraud as a matter of law. Engoron justified this by declaring that Mar-a-Lago -- the massive estate Trump owns in Palm Beach, Florida -- is worth only between $18 million and $27 million.

Go to your favorite real estate app and look up housing prices in Palm Beach. Three-bedroom, single-family homes on quarter-acre lots start in high single- and double-digit millions, and there are plenty listed for $20 million, $30 million, $50 million and even higher. Mar-a-Lago is 62,000 square feet on 17 acres of land that runs from the Intracoastal Waterway on the west side to the Atlantic Ocean on the east.

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