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Trump’s trial shows there are two justice systems for the rich and poor

Laura Flanders and Rick Perlstein discuss the implications of Trump’s trial for the US justice system and the future of democracy.

Following his conviction on 34 felony counts, former President Donald Trump will be sentenced on July 11. While celebrated by many as an unprecedented example of legal accountability for elected officials, the Trump trial has also demonstrated a long-established truth: there are two justice systems in America—one for the rich, and one for the poor. Journalist Laura Flanders and historian Rick Perlstein join a special livestream discussion with the hosts of Police Accountability Report Taya Graham and Stephen Janis to discuss the inequality of the US criminal justice system, and how backlash to the trial could threaten the future of democracy.

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Posted inPolitics and Movements: US

Trump’s trial shows there are two justice systems for the rich and poor

Laura Flanders and Rick Perlstein discuss the implications of Trump’s trial for the US justice system and the future of democracy.

by Taya Graham and Stephen Janis

June 14, 2024

Donald Trump leads a prison reform roundtable in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, on January 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Donald Trump leads a prison reform roundtable in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, on January 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

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Following his conviction on 34 felony counts, former President Donald Trump will be sentenced on July 11. While celebrated by many as an unprecedented example of legal accountability for elected officials, the Trump trial has also demonstrated a long-established truth: there are two justice systems in America—one for the rich, and one for the poor. Journalist Laura Flanders and historian Rick Perlstein join a special livestream discussion with the hosts of Police Accountability Report Taya Graham and Stephen Janis to discuss the inequality of the US criminal justice system, and how backlash to the trial could threaten the future of democracy.

Studio: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino

Production: Stephen Janis, Taya Graham, Maximillian Alvarez

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Taya Graham:

Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to our Trump conviction post-verdict livestream. For the next hour and a half, we will discuss the fallout and reaction to the 34 felony count verdict that was handed out by a jury two weeks ago. It was historic, of course. Never in our country has a former or current president been convicted of a crime, but it also elicited a very revealing type of pushback, from both the punditry and the political elites. And so in the grand tradition of The Real News, we are here to offer a counter to the mainstream media narrative and to provide a different perspective from which to view this momentous event.

To do so, I’m going to be of course joined by my reporting partner, Stephen Janis, who with me, will be breaking down some alternative ways of analyzing the jury’s decision. As two reporters who have covered the criminal justice system for nearly a decade, we both find the pushback against the verdict quite illuminating, a bit of a yet-to-be-told story about how the elites of this country perceive justice when it’s applied to one of their own.

But we will also be joined by other guests who will share their own unique insights into what this verdict means for us and our country. We’ll be joined by our two outstanding colleagues, Maximilian Alvarez, our editor-in-chief and champion of the podcast, Working People, and Marc Steiner, who of course hosts the incredible show, the eponymous Marc Steiner Show on The Real News, including a fantastic series focusing on the rise of the right, so be sure to check out those podcasts if you haven’t already.

We’ll also be joined by award-winning broadcast journalist, Laura Flanders of the Laura Flanders and Friends Show, and she’s the author of six books. In 2019, she was awarded an Izzy Award for excellence in independent media, as well as a Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Media Center for Advancing Women and Girls Visibility and Power in Media. It’s an absolute pleasure to have her here.

And we will have the renowned author and historian, Rick Perlstein, author of the books, Reaganland and Nixonland, and he is the author of five bestselling books. Perlstein received the 2001 Los Angeles Time Books Prize for his very first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, and orgs like Politico have christened him the chronicler extraordinaire of the modern conservative movement. It is going to be such a pleasure to have such a nuanced conversation with these knowledgeable guests.

Also, just a note, I will be reading your comments from the live chat and posting them, and also if possible, at the end, posing some of the questions you ask. But first, I want to discuss with you, Stephen, some of what I want to call the fallout, so to speak, over Trump’s verdict.

Stephen Janis:

It’s been revealing.

Taya Graham:

As we all know, former President Donald J. Trump was found guilty by a New York City jury of falsifying business records to high payments of hush money to former adult film star, Stormy Daniels. Prosecutors allege Trump had done so to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. The trial spanned almost two months, but it took the jury two days to reach a verdict. Suffice it to say that the reaction has been fast and furious. Republicans have been calling it a weaponization of the justice system, or lawfare, and they’ve made the argument that the verdict only helps Trump in the upcoming presidential election and that the charges other result of a purely political vendetta against Trump.

Now to be clear, we are not weighing in on Trump’s pros or cons as a potential candidate or politician. We must remain agnostic. However, we can critique how his supporters have characterized the verdict and what that says about the criminal justice system.

So as we mentioned before, Trump supporters immediately criticized the verdict and the case as both unfair and the result of political persecution. But Stephen, I think there’s something interesting embedded in this critique, notably that the outrage seems to be that these charges were simply unwarranted. The facts surrounding the case have pretty much been ignored, which is why I think this criticism is premised upon an intriguing construction of our criminal justice system, which we will discuss extensively later.

I think the pushback implies that the system in this case didn’t work because the criminal justice system cannot charge the rich or powerful or otherwise privileged. In other words, it’s perfectly fine to prosecute working people for just about anything, no matter how trivial, but a former president and billionaire? Well, any attempt to ensnare him is simply unfair. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Stephen Janis:

Well, yeah, we were talking about when the verdict came out and the response and the immediate backlash, and we were both like, wow. So they finally got the religion of the problems with the criminal justice system. Suddenly, the criminal justice system is problematic, but I think for both of us, I think for both of us, this was revealing about a theme that we’ve talked about on our show consistently and that is the role of the criminal justice system in inequality. And the reason I think Republicans were pushing back is because they’re saying, “Well, the criminal justice system can’t prosecute the rich or the powerful. It only prosecutes poor people. It only prosecutes working people.”

Taya Graham:

Right.

Stephen Janis:

And I think also the fact that they ignored the facts is another part of that, because we talked about the way that this criminal justice system effectuates its power within the system, which is to police social boundaries in one sense and make sure that the working class political efficacy is dimmed, and also to a certain extent, to make facts irrational. You have a rational system and it makes it irrational, and especially in this case, by saying that there is no way, no way that any of the evidence or any of the facts matter in this case. All that matters is you tried to prosecute one of us and you successfully did it, and so therefore, it can only be a rational outcome. And it sows confusion and I think it also brings an irrational sense to a system that we want to be rational.

So it’s really a very complicated, but also quite, like you said, like you pointed out, and that’s very important. The minute we heard it, we were like, ah, okay. So they’re defending the system of inequality just as much as they’re defending the candidate, Trump, and they’re saying that the system is nothing but irrational. But that’s what we’ve been talking about when we talk about all the people on our show who were prosecuted for nothing.

Taya Graham:

Exactly. We’ve been saying that for years.

Stephen Janis:

Whose lives are destroyed over nothing. How rational is that? Well, now they’ve had a taste of their own medicine and it’s very revealing.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely. And once again, I want to reiterate that we remain agnostic about the parties of the elites or their political agendas. I think one could argue that these wealthy elites aren’t really team blue or red. The only color they really care about is green, and my point is that these elites, these multimillionaires, the billionaires who control the criminal justice system seem to react with outrage when it turns towards them. That holding the rich accountable is prima facie an abuse of the system they constructed, which is an easy argument to make when you consider how often the ultra wealthy skirt accountability. The former CEO of Boeing, CEO Calhoun, put lives at risk by sacrificing safety to cut costs, and yet he’s not prosecuted. Instead, he receives a $45 million parachute. Or take any executive from Purdue Pharma who addicted and killed hundreds of thousands, and walked away fabulously wealthy with barely a single executive prosecuted.

And perhaps what we’re seeing is an effort to distract from this imbalanced application of justice, because instead of addressing facts like these, they simply attack the entire system. However, when it comes to the relentless persecution of the working class, these same elites are effusive in their praise. I can’t even count the number of cases that we’ve covered that seem to be at the very least capricious, if not retaliatory against working people.

And when I say that, we see an entirely different dynamic than a billionaire complaining about not being able to write off his payment of an adult film star as a business expense, or the assertion that he’s under attack because of his power. No, we see people who are targets simply because they are essentially powerless, working class people who can’t afford lawyers and publicists or hold the attention of the nation. Stephen, why is it so important to remember this in the context of the verdict?

Stephen Janis:

Well, I like the point you made. It was a great point and it is an excellent point, which is that they effectively are arguing that a billionaire should be able to write off his payments to his mistress on his taxes. That’s an important thing to me, because that’s a very difficult argument to make in rational, fact-based land, to say, yeah, we need to tear down the justice system because a billionaire wants to write off a payment to his mistress.

Taya Graham:

Those aren’t even crimes most of us can imagine committing.

Stephen Janis:

Well, that’s the thing, and to a certain extent, it exposes the inequality of the system in and of itself because it really poses a crime that none of us would ever have… Well, at least I know personally. I can’t speak for you, but I don’t have the ability to participate in that kind of crime. But what it really shows is the irrationality of an unequal system and how it manifests every day. So they’re in this dilemma I think, where they seem to be being righteous about something that is really outlandish, and also at the same time, trying to defend a system that upholds their inequality and the inequality that we all suffer from.

Taya Graham:

Well, let’s remind our viewers of some of the cases that clearly emphasize this point that we’ve covered.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, sure.

Taya Graham:

There is a Texas first responder with 30 plus years as a career firefighter, Thomas C, who is falsely charged with a DWI. This case dragged through the courts for over two years, even though the police never turned in the toxicology evidence that proved his innocence. However, during that time, while the charges of a DWI hung over his head, he was forced to resign, literally a man who ran into burning buildings and saved lives as an EMT. Let’s just take a moment to listen to Thomas describe how this false DUI just nearly destroyed his career.

Now, despite the difficulty in being arrested, separated from your pet and having them taken to animal control, there were other consequences. You almost missed your father’s funeral because of this, and it cost you your job and impacted your finances, right?

Speaker 1:

I’d already been on light duty because of my eye. I would need a cornea transplant to get my eye fixed. The fire department only gives you so long to be on light duty before they turn you loose, no more pay. If they have another job, I believe they’re obligated to offer you another job, so they sent me to go work in communications as a dispatcher and I was in training to become a dispatcher at the time. Because of the DWI, I was no longer allowed on the floor of the dispatch center. Because I was no longer allowed on the floor of the dispatch center, they ended up giving me a letter, “You can retire now or go work in another department in the city.” Or by then, I already knew that once I’d been charged, I’d go to tell someone, “You wouldn’t believe what happened. I got charged with a DWI. I don’t even drink. I haven’t in 33 years.” Never heard of someone getting a DWI that doesn’t even drink.

Taya Graham:

This is just a heartbreaking case, to know that Thomas C, he thought of these firefighters as his family. It is absolutely a heartbreaking case.

Stephen Janis:

And even when we reached out to the union officials and the people who should be protecting him, they just turned their backs on him and he lost his job, his whole career, over nothing, over a crime he didn’t commit.

Taya Graham:

I know.

Stephen Janis:

But there was no backlash from conservatives on that, or anyone from… You can’t reach politicians about these cases. They don’t comment. I know because I’m a reporter, because I ask. And when these things occur, there’s just silence, deafening silence. So just keep that in mind when we’re support… When… Yes. Okay.

Taya Graham:

That’s an excellent point.

Stephen Janis:

I’m not going to go too deep in the-

Taya Graham:

No, no, that’s an excellent point. The silence is deafening.

Stephen Janis:

It is deafening.

Taya Graham:

And I want to give you all another example. Consider the case of Michelle Lucas. Now, this is a hardworking grandmother of four who was charged with passing counterfeit money, one counterfeit $100 bill. Lucas had been forced to plead guilty to two felony counts until we investigated and exposed the flaws in this case.

The case focuses on a person you might remember. Her name is Michelle Lucas and she was one of the stars of our documentary, the Friendliest Town, a film that recounts the firing of the first Black police chief of a small town on Maryland’s lower eastern shore called Pocomoke City. But the reason we reported on her a few months ago is because the hardworking grandmother of four and community activist was facing two felony counts of, wait for it, passing counterfeit bills.

So how did this happen? Well, because Michelle did a favor for coworker. She was delivering pizzas for a Pocomoke restaurant when a cook asked her to pick up a bottle of tequila. To pay for it, he handed her a $100 bill. On her way back from her delivery, she paid for the liquor, gave it to the cook, and went back to work. But two hours later when she returned to the restaurant, she was greeted by a parking lot full of cops. I’ll let Michelle explain.

Speaker 2:

Two hours later, I’m coming back to the restaurant and there’s three sheriffs and two Pocomoke cops, and then he will say, “Hun, you’re getting charged with a felony.” And then I was like, “What?” I have never in my whole life, whole life, not even as a teenager with my mom, been in any trouble. So when he’s telling me I’m getting charged with a felony, my mind, I blanked out.

Taya Graham:

Fortunately, after we published her story and after Stephen sent some very effective emails to the public defender’s office, she was assigned a new public defender who withdrew her plea and the charges were dropped. Stephen, what do these unjust arrests and the silence of the elites about them say to you about our criminal justice system? And to be fair, there were hundreds of thousands of illegal arrests made in our Democrat-run city, just to be fair.