President Donald Trump failed to warn Americans about the coronavirus pandemic at the start and has continued to mislead the public, and some legal experts think he should face criminal prosecution.
There’s ample public evidence that Trump knowingly misled the public about the dangers from COVID-19 because he believed that doing so would advance his re-election efforts, and that some Americans died as a result of those lies and other misconduct, argued former attorney Dean Obeidallah in a new Daily Beast column.
“The question that needs to be asked is: Should a president be held criminally responsible for knowingly failing to inform the American public about the risks associated with a deadly virus during a pandemic because he believes, by doing so, it helps his political fortunes?” Obeidallah wrote. “Any answer but ‘yes’ gives a future president a green light to do the same thing as Trump at the expense of the lives of our fellow Americans.”
Obeidallah asked several former federal prosecutors and a Harvard Law professor whether Trump could or should be prosecuted for his misconduct during the pandemic, and they agreed his actions satisfied the three elements of either involuntary manslaughter or negligent homicide — but proving those elements would be nearly impossible.
“Trump had a duty to act as president and violated that by knowingly failing to warn the public about the known threats of the virus,” former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner told Obeidallah.
Kirschner, now an MSNBC analyst, argued the president would have known his actions or failures would likely produce death or serious bodily injury, and that his conduct was a substantial factor in causing the death of others, but Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe agreed to a point.
“Trump is almost certainly morally responsible for tens of thousands of coronavirus deaths that would not have occurred but for his recklessly misleading public pronouncements and his grossly negligent failures to act rationally on the basis of the medical evidence available to him,” Tribe said.
But, Tribe argued, “proving that Trump caused these deaths beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal trial would be almost impossible.”
Former Watergate prosecutor and current MSNBC legal analyst Jill Wine-Banks told Obeidallah that Trump’s lies were “an impeachable offense,” but probably couldn’t be proven as a crime, and former U.S. attorney and fellow MSNBC legal analyst Joyce Vance agreed.
“I don’t see a sustainable charge,” Vance said. “[But] I’m not per se ruling that out.
