More With Jack Goldsmith

Jack Goldsmith was kind enough to engage with my reply to his piece on potential criminal investigations of Donald Trump. Here’s his reply to mine. I’m going to take some time to work through the points Goldsmith makes. But I will try to address them in another post that I’ll publish soon. One immediate thought I had on a cursory read was that Goldsmith rightly makes a distinction between potential crimes committed while a person is president and things that come after. But it seems to me that one of the key complexities and unique dangers of Trump is that he is not allowing us that neat distinction. Much of his wrongdoing is continuous from one phase to the next. Indeed, in the last couple days he has grown increasingly explicit in threatening to retaliate against Garland, Biden, et al., in a hypothetical future term as President. In any case, more soon.