Obstruction should not be a Crime

The news is filled with stories about how the Biden administration is trying to charge Donald Trump with obstruction of justice. This is always a phony charge, and shows that no serious crimes are involved.

Obstruction of justice, in United States jurisdictions, is an act that involves unduly influencing, impeding, or otherwise interfering with the justice system, especially the legal and procedural tasks of prosecutors, investigators, or other government officials. Common law jurisdictions other than the United States tend to use the wider offense of perverting the course of justice.

Prominent examples include Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Martha Stewart, Barry Bonds, Scooter Libby, and the J6 Capitol protestors. All bogus.

Real crimes are defined by the elements of the crime that must be proved for a conviction. For example:

Fraud covers any act undertaken by a party to the contract or with his complicity, intending to deceive the other party or to induce him to enter into a contract. The essential elements of fraud are:

Wilful representation or assertion which is false. Nevertheless, keeping silence would be considered as fraud or deliberately hiding a fact will also be considered as fraud.

Representation is made about a fact.

Representation or statement is made prior to the conclusion of the contract so as to instigate a party to act upon it.

The party making the representation is having the prior knowledge that it was not true or not having the belief in its truth or carelessly as to whether it is true or false.

The other party to the contract must have instigated and acted accordingly upon the assertion.

The other party must have trusted on the assertion made and got deceived, as a result of which they suffered a loss.

There is nothing like this for obstruction. It just means doing anything that the prosecutors do not like.

This is not the first time Trump's enemies accused him of obstruction. The Mueller Report listed 10+ examples of supposed obstruction, and efforts to impeach him have often mentioned obstruction.

The charges are all bogus. Obstruction became popular by Nixon-haters, but that was bogus also. They could never find any evidence that Nixon had any advance knowledge of the Watergate break-in, so they accused him of not being fully cooperative with prosecutors and inquisitors.

People didn't like Bonds because he broke Babe Ruth's record. They could never prove that he did anything illegal, or even against the rules of Baseball, so they charged him with obstruction.

Pres. Biden ranted last night about how Donald Trump was a threat to Democracy. But if he prosecutes his chief political rival for obstruction, it will be the most undemocratic thing any USA President has done since Reconstruction.