This won’t take long. I just want to give a shout-out for justice.
Read the news today: three stories that remind us that for all the efforts to subvert it, justice sometimes still carries the day.
The biggest is the verdict against Donald Trump. He can call his trial “a scam” and “a witch hunt”— like his two impeachments, that’s what he calls all the investigations that target him— but a federal jury of his peers, not partisan politicians but common citizens, found him guilty of sexual abuse and defamation. The verdict was unanimous. Trump’s own crude conduct during the 2022 deposition the jury watched couldn’t have helped his cause. He was asked whether it was true about women, as he said in the infamous Access Hollywood tapes, that “when you’re a star,” you can “grab ’em by the pussy, you can do anything.” His response was, “If you look over the last million years I guess that’s been largely true. Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.”
Unfortunately or fortunately.
Who knows, maybe he takes solace that despite the allegation of his accuser, E. Jean Carroll, he wasn’t found guilty of rape, but sexual abuse is nothing to be proud of. And although his stalwart supporters will likely dismiss the jury’s damning decision that Trump’s a sexual abuser, just as they’ve dismissed all the earlier accusations against their idol, most Americans probably won’t. Sure, there are diehards like Alabama’s senator Tommy Tuberville who told The Huffington Post after the verdict, “It makes me want to vote for him twice,” but I have faith that myopic apologists like Tuberville are the outliers, not the mainstream. As New York Times political reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan wrote today, “There is no world in which the result of that civil trial was a positive development for the project he is most focused on: the presidential campaign.”
Trump is appealing but for now, justice has been served.
The second biggest story today about justice is the indictment against George Santos. Remember, he’s the freshman Republican representative from New York who got himself elected by telling more falsehoods than truths about his past. But those lies, while contemptible from a candidate for Congress, were not at the heart of the federal charges. The thirteen counts against him are for real crimes like money laundering, wire fraud, and stealing federal pandemic funds. He is accused of raising cash for what he claimed was a political committee but then spending it to buy clothes and pay off credit cards. He is accused of applying for almost $25,000 in pandemic-related unemployment benefits even though he was earning in the six-figures from an investment firm. He is accused of lying on financial disclosure forms to Congress during his campaign for a seat in the House.
Naturally, Santos says he didn’t do it, not any of it. But since we already know the man lies as easily as he breathes, his denials have no credibility. And yet, in the spirit of Mr. Trump, Santos tweeted today after being released on a half-million-dollar bond, “WITCH HUNT!” Santos has so little shame that he already has announced his campaign for re-election but if he had any chance before, the indictment makes it slimmer because justice is being served. If he’s convicted, he faces up to 20 years. In prison, not Congress.
The third story of justice is about the sentencing today of a sergeant in the Army named Daniel Perry, who shot and killed a veteran from the Air Force named Garrett Foster who was participating in a racial justice rally in Austin, Texas, a couple of months after the death of George Floyd. Perry called the shooting self-defense, claiming that Foster approached his car holding a rifle, and that because he thought the protester was going to turn the gun on him, he pulled out his own pistol and shot him.
But Perry’s case was undermined by his own internet postings. Just a few days after George Floyd’s murder, when riots were roiling cities across America, he said in a text, “I might go to Dallas to shoot some looters.” In a message on Facebook a few weeks later, he told a friend that he “might have to kill a few people” who were holding a George Floyd protest outside his apartment. Other postings unmasked racial hate, all of which weakened his claim that he only acted out of fright. (The victim, like his killer, was white.)
What gives this case special weight though is the stance of Texas’s governor Greg Abbott. Although Perry’s sentence is 25 years in prison, Abbott argues that he was entitled to shoot Foster dead because of the state’s “Stand Your Ground” laws. That’s why, shortly after the sentence was announced, Abbott asked the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to expedite their review of the case and to recommend that he set Perry free, which the governor cannot do without their blessing. Given the politics in Texas, and the number of political appointees who owe their power to the governor, justice eventually might be derailed but for now, it has been served.
Donald Trump wrote about his own case on his website this morning, “Hopefully justice will be served on appeal!” As in the case of George Santos if he’s convicted, and with Daniel Perry as well as with Trump, I share the same hope. We just hope for different outcomes.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Bravo Greg. This is why i am optimistic that we’re in the midst of the dissipation of the trumpist era....an independent judiciary in most but not all jurisdictions is operating effectively.
Certainly promising news at a time when most news isn't.