How Trump Can Flip the Script on His Conviction: Sam Patten

As a fellow bearer of a politically motivated felony conviction, I have some unsolicited advice for Donald J. Trump on how he could flip the script on his recent status change. Now that he is part of “the club,” Trump may come to see some wisdom in talking about his status differently.

After I had to eat a charge that came from an investigation into him (that ended up being based on vapors and disinformation) in 2018, I elected not to ask Trump for a pardon because, frankly, I didn’t see much point to it.  Unlike those he did pardon at the tail end of his presidency, I was not a supporter of his and even if I pretended to be, a pardon wouldn’t change my Google search results anyway.

But today Trump may come to recognize the principle at play if he is willing to admit that it is bigger than he himself. What he has learned at a very personal level is that our country’s criminal justice system can treat people differently based on who they are.

Consider the underlying crime in Trump’s case:

Not reporting the hush money settlement to a woman with whom he’d had an extramarital dalliance was, the jury found, a violation of campaign finance transparency rule. But when the campaign of Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, failed to report the money it spent on the discredited “Steele dossier,” (which served as the basis of the Russia probe), there were no charges filed and they were allowed to pay a fine to Federal Election Committee.

Somehow a 34-count felony conviction does not seem equal to a $100,000 fine paid with virtually no accompanying media coverage of the offense or the admission of it. Whatever you think about Trump, or extra-marital affairs with porn stars, or hush money settlements, the outcome doesn’t seem fair.

Neither is life. People get strung up on charges every day whenever collar-hungry prosecutors think they can get away with it. If Trump wants to run a transformational campaign over the next several months, he will make it not about himself but rather about criminal justice reform.

Irrespective of the political charges that have been flying about the pre-election season like black flies in the deep woods, Trump actually has a leg to stand on here. That is because as president, he pushed through the First Step Act – a major legislative achievement that opened the door to reviewing harsh sentencing in non-violent Federal felony cases. Much of the credit for this goes to his son-in-law Jared Kushner, but Trump’s administration pushed the reform through and he signed it into law.

By stark contrast, incumbent President Joe Biden was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1994 when the rancid crime bill on which Republicans and Democrats frothily agreed was passed into law. Imbued with such provisions as “three strikes and you’re out,” that set of laws mushroomed America’s prison population ten-fold – from 250,000 to 2.5 million – with many of the new convicts getting sent up river for non-violent drug crimes.

In 2020, Trump’s support from Black Americans soared higher than it had for a Republican presidential candidate in recent memory and the First Step Act had a lot to do with that. Even Pew pegs Trump support among Blacks today in the ballpark of 20 percent (Romney got seven in 2012), though others see it higher still. If you want to talk to someone in this country who has reason to believe our justice system is rigged, that community is a good place to start.

The simple fact is, America puts too many people in prison and there is too little relationship between this practice and the safety on our streets. The reason is that the system is broken and we often lock up the wrong people simply because it is easier than keeping the truly dangerous one under lock and key. This is not a political opinion; rather it is a basic fact.

When people get out of prison, the stigma of a felony conviction follows them like Hester Prynne’s Scarlet Letter and this story in America is older than Hawthorne’s writings. At the same time, America elected its first felon to Congress in 1798 – a factoid I checked myself before pleading guilty to an obscure and seldom-enforced statute (Merrick Garland’s Justice Department deliberately allowed the FARA statute of limitations to expire in Hunter Biden’s case, for instance).

If Trump is ready to talk to people like me about how he’s going to change the system, we are going to listen. But if he’s going to bemoan how he got railroaded, we’re more likely to tune him out. The choice is his.

A Maine Wire columnist who has worked for Maine’s last three Republican senators, Patten is the author of Dangerous Company: The Misadventures of a “”Foreign Agent”