The vast majority of cases aren’t dropped when you move from one administration to another. However, there’s a great deal of correlation between cases people care about and politics so you’re more likely to hear about the kinds of cases that get dropped.
Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, *unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon*. A former US president being convicted of a crime is one.
We felt that way when Hillary Clinton avoided charges after using her private e-mail server for sending and receiving classified information, after Fast and Furious, and the IRS targeting of conservative organizations. But those weren't framed as "the rule of law is in doubt" because a different guy was in the White House.
And if you're seeing the Flynn case as an example of a solid and reasonable case being dropped due to political interference, I don't think you've read enough about it.
The bad stuff is an open secret. But people choose to discount the bad so long as it appears outweighed by the good. Eventually the grace period runs out. Voila: Scandal.
Also, scandals are manufactured distraction. There's no shortage of things to be upset about. What percolates up is governed by the politics of attention.
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I can't quickly refind the Ellsberg paper about the structure of presidential scandals. But this one is close enough. Obviously, they study presidential scandals, but the lessons apply to all scandals.
In the past it was traditional that the justice department was somewhat separate from the administration - thus it would have been scandalous, in the past, if an administration had come in and cancelled investigations undertaken by an exiting administration - or at least scandalous if there could be any suspicion of corruption being the cause of the cancellation.
So big companies have generally donated to political campaigns and as such they should not, traditionally, have their investigations quashed because this would raise suspicions that there had been a quid pro quo.
The tricky questions are all around things officials did in their official capacity. But crimes allegedly committed during the campaign prior to becoming a government official are not in this gray area.
In politics, partial victories can snowball. And vice versa: repeated loss teaches helplessness. The direct real effect of this would be small, but I'd expect it to be much more useful than a loss.
Added: If you read about Watergate, the scandal wasn't any one event or one reaction: it took over two years from the break-in to the resignation, and people weren't sitting still. Some of the important action was in Congress. (Admittedly it was a different country then.)
It's more a party thing, usually (the conservative party has been embroiled in a series of scandals concerning the last presidential elections, and the one before).
Because in one case, if allegations are true, thousands of people are sick, hurt, and dead in the chaos. In the other case, another bad man is elected as normal.
I don’t think this is a very important issue to most people. It gets harder to deny truths that are physically close and more tightly tied into personal networks. I don’t think enough people are affected by this scandal to have many change their vote because of it.
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