Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who served as U.S. Senator from New York and as Secretary of State in the Obama administration, assessed the landscape of former President Donald Trump‘s legal troubles and came to this famous conclusion: “Justice delayed,” Clinton said on her Morning Joe appearance today, “is justice denied.”
As Special Counsel Jack Smith‘s two federal cases against Trump dwell in limbo — this week Florida Judge Aileen Cannon delayed indefinitely the classified documents trial — Clinton lamented that the delays may mean the American people will to go the polls in November without a full picture of the GOP candidate for president, nor of the true scope of the crimes he’s accused of committing.
Democracy dicates that a knowledgeable voter is the most valuable kind, and the slow-walking of the Trump cases seems destined to prevent voters from obtaining the knowledge — before they vote — that legal due process would make transparent were Trump to stand trial.
“This is all about power. How to get it, how to keep it, how not to give it up.”
WATCH: @hillaryclinton speaks about former President Trump’s hush money trial on @morning_joe. pic.twitter.com/NNcUg7CLwC
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) May 9, 2024
Clinton reminds viewers that the current Trump trial, whatever its salacious aspects, is at its core about an alleged attempt by Trump to keep people in the dark about his character and actions prior to the 2016 election. “It’s really about election interference, about trying to prevent,” Clinton said, “the people of our country from having relevant information that may have influenced how they could have voted in 2016 or whether they would have voted.”
It’s something — keeping relevant information from becoming public — that the current trial delays are also doing.
Clinton borrowed her “delayed, denied” phrase from the 19th century British Prime Minister William Gladstone, who also said — in a bout of wishful thinking — that “nothing that is morally wrong can be politically right.” Trump’s various trials, and his bountiful fundraising around his claims of innocence, test Gladstone’s wisdom — or at least put his idealism up against Trump’s pragmatism.
Clinton and other Democrats often paraphrase Gladstone’s conclusions to describe the current state of affairs in America. Take the British PM’s notion that “Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence [while] Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.” That accurately describes how the DNC characterizes the difference between the parties today.