The original draft of this email was sent to Washington Post reporters Shayna Jacobs, Josh Dawsey and David Fahrenthold, criticizing their front-page story fed by leaks from shamelessly partisan New York prosecutors who, at significant taxpayer expense and with help from the Post, New York Times and other media allies, have pursued for years politically motivated “investigations” into “possibly criminal conduct” by former President Trump, the Trump Organization and its employees.
Dear Shayna, Josh and David,
While it’s common for criminal suspects to “lawyer up” and negotiate with prosecutors before any formal charges are filed, leaked and well-publicized deadlines for suspects to argue the negative — why they shouldn’t be charged — are rare, even absurd, are they not? Yet your front-page story today provides no such context [“Trump lawyers face deadline to argue case against charges,” A1, June 28].
Fair-minded lay readers might ask how or why a suspect — not yet a defendant, per se — could or should argue publicly against charges that haven’t been leveled yet. Cruder, more colorful readers might ask: Shouldn’t the onus be on the shamelessly partisan New York attorney general and Manhattan district attorney to excrete or get off the pot already since, as you report, they’ve been “investigating” former President Trump, the Trump Organization and its employees for years?
One needn’t carry water for the Trump Organization or its CFO Allen Weisselberg (I certainly don’t) to nonetheless acknowledge their constitutional right against self-incrimination. And one would think that journalists, themselves protected by the Constitution, would dutifully note in their reportage Mr. Weisselberg’s and his employer’s basic rights. But you failed to do so (again). Why is that?
In any case, if New York’s Trump Derangement Syndrome-suffering prosecutors are bent on living in the political past and relentlessly picking divisive scabs at significant taxpayer expense, they ought to indict those suspects against whom they can prove — beyond reasonable doubt — actual criminal charges. But if, like Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann before them, they don’t have such proof and can’t make charges stick, they should, unlike Messrs. Mueller and Weissmann, admit it and move on rather than trying, with the media’s help, to coerce plea agreements and damning testimony against Mr. Trump. (Remember the joint FBI-CNN pre-dawn raid of aging, unarmed Roger Stone’s Florida home, replete with assault rifles and helicopter search lights?)
Meanwhile, if reporters and editorial boards were as fair-minded as their readers, they’d aggressively remind prosecutors of their obligation to afford all suspects and defendants “due process.”
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.