Thanks to both of you for the thoughtful articles. I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time, and I used to be of the opinion that Ford set a precedent that presidents truly are above the law---and that his decision enabled the worst of the Bush/Cheyney/Rumsfeld behavior. If literally the _worst_ consequence is being fired/removed, well, that's not a very significant consequence, especially when you have so much wealth and status that your children's children will never have to work for a living. It's the same calculus that people like Charlie Prince (Citigroup) and Dick Fuld (Lehman) made in the years leading up to 2008: the upside of cheating was enormous (literally tens of billions of dollars of personal wealth), and the downside was an early retirement spread among, say, three luxury properties instead of fifteen. Why not go for it?

I've lately come around to Michael's point, though. If we make the stakes too high, then it just risks tearing the country apart, and there is enough vagueness in the law that it would be easy to harass ex-presidents for the rest of their lives. That said, winning election can't represent lifetime immunity from any and all crimes---even those committed before office. That would be a horrible precedent, since it would make high office even more attractive to people like Trump.

It seems to me that a reasonable norm would be: you need to be impeached and removed before crimes committed in-office can be prosecuted. That way, there's the protection of the political system, while an accountability mechanism still exists, even if it failed in this particular case. We still have to suck it up and accept that Trump got away with crimes in-office, but in theory, the presidency isn't a carte blanche opportunity to act criminally.

I'm a bit more torn on the crimes committed _before_ office. One compromise position there would be for Biden to blanket pardon Trump in the style of Ford. Doing so would still leave the state prosecutors free to go after him but keep the federal government (and the Biden administration) out of it. Do you all think that would be a reasonable middle path?