WASHINGTON — So far, Donald Trump is following a well-honed template for politicians facing criminal charges. Dismiss the allegations as baseless. Accuse the accusers of pushing an agenda.
Texas history is replete with candidates facing legal and career peril. Some escaped conviction only to see their electoral prospects hobbled anyway. Those who bounced back usually managed not only to win acquittal but to discredit the prosecution.
Tom DeLay’s fall from power was nearly instant in the fall of 2005.
Indicted on political money laundering charges, the Sugar Land Republican was quickly ousted from his job as U.S. House majority leader. GOP colleagues were eager to distance themselves from the “culture of corruption” that Democrats were saying he’d fostered.
Kay Bailey Hutchison, on the other hand, thrived after her indictment.
Three months after winning the U.S. Senate seat in a 1993 special election, Hutchison was indicted by a Travis County grand jury on charges that, as state treasurer, she used state workers and equipment to effectively turn her office into a political boiler room.
Hutchison asserted that the charges were “designed solely to damage my reelection effort next year by trying to tarnish my reputation.”
“The Democratic game plan will not work,” she said.
It didn’t.
When the trial began in Fort Worth, a judge refused to let the jurors see reams of records obtained from the treasurer’s office with a grand jury subpoena but no search warrant. With the prosecution too hobbled to proceed, the judge directed the jury to acquit the senator on four felony counts and one misdemeanor.
As with Trump, fellow Republicans rallied to Hutchison’s defense, depicting the prosecution as a baseless smear.
“This investigation has smelled of raw politics from the beginning,” said Texas’ senior senator at the time, Phil Gramm. Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas denounced the “political effort to discredit a rising star in the Republican Party whose vote-getting ability has Texas Democrats running scared.”
The Travis County prosecutor, Ronnie Earle, insisted he’d only followed the evidence and cited his record of trying to put plenty of top Democrats behind bars, too.
In Manhattan on Tuesday, district attorney Alvin Bragg took much the same tack.
Charges against Trump related to falsifying business records are ordinary on his turf, “the financial center of the world,” he said. As for disguising hush money payments to an adult film star as payments for legal services, Bragg said that violated state election law because it’s “a crime to conspire to promote a candidacy by unlawful means.”
Hutchison went on to win three six-year Senate terms and served as Trump’s ambassador to NATO.
Tarnished attorneys general
Others targeted by the Travis County district attorney, whose office has purview over state officials, also have survived.
In 1983, Texas attorney general Jim Mattox, a Democrat, was indicted on a felony charge of commercial bribery. An Austin jury acquitted him, and he won another term in 1986.
The state’s current attorney general, Ken Paxton, elected in 2014, has been reelected twice since his felony indictment in July 2015 on three counts related to securities fraud.
Paxton denies the allegations and has been awaiting trial for nearly eight years.
Historically, in Texas and elsewhere, it’s far more common for indictments to end a political career.
Prosecutors tend not to press charges against politicians unless they feel the case is airtight. And voters tend to shun tainted candidates, though Trump has boasted — with justification — that he enjoys such unshakeable support that he could get away with murder.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Trump told Iowans two weeks before the 2016 caucuses. “It’s, like, incredible.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, for instance, denounced the “plot” against the former president.
Sen. Ted Cruz called the case “utter garbage.” Rep. Michael Burgess of Pilot Point called it a “baseless subversion of the rule of law.” Rep. Keith Self, a Collin County Republican, called it a “political persecution.”
Wanted, but not by voters
Hutchison did lose a bid to unseat Gov. Rick Perry in the 2010 primary.
In 2014, he, too, was indicted in Travis County.
Earle’s successor, Rosemary Lehmberg, had pleaded guilty to drunken driving. Perry pressured her to resign and vetoed funds for her office when she refused.
A grand jury indicted him on two felony counts. A state appeals court threw out a charge of coercion of a public servant.
The other charge against Perry, abuse of official capacity, hung over him as he launched a presidential bid in June 2015.
Trump has raked in millions from donors through a barrage of emails labeling the indictment a persecution.
Perry likewise tried to capitalize on his troubles. His campaign hawked $25 T-shirts featuring his booking mug shot and Lehmberg’s, with the message: “Wanted … for securing the border and defeating Democrats.”
Trump and other rivals largely ignored Perry’s criminal case, which GOP voters also shrugged off. Still, his campaign lasted only three months, an early casualty of Trump’s needling. (“He should be forced to take an IQ test before being allowed to enter the GOP debate.”)
A court threw out the other charge a year later.
Pa Ferguson
Like Trump, Texas Gov. James “Pa” Ferguson, elected in 1914 and reelected two years later, had a devoted following.
The humorist Will Rogers joked that if Ferguson blew up the U.S. Capitol, the small farmers and day laborers he crusaded for would shrug it off by saying, “Jim was right. The thing ought to have been blowed up years ago.”
During his second term, a Travis County grand jury indicted Ferguson on nine counts related to a funding dispute with University of Texas regents. Charges included misapplication of public funds and embezzlement.
Impeached and convicted, the Legislature barred him from holding state office, though he tried for governor again in 1918. He lost bids for president in 1920 and the U.S. Senate in 1922.
Unable to overcome the whiff of scandal, Ferguson devised a workaround. In the 1924 election, he promoted his wife. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson became Texas’ first female governor, with Pa pulling the strings as first gentleman.
‘Vote for the Crook’
One comparison to Trump that comes to mind is the late Edwin Edwards, a womanizing Louisiana governor.
On the eve of winning a third term in 1983, he made the Trump-like boast that “the only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.”
By then, Edwards had weathered a revelation in the Koreagate scandal that a South Korean rice broker who’d tried to bribe members of Congress had handed his wife $10,000 in an envelope.
Shortly into his third term, Edwards was charged in a corruption case involving hospital contracts and nearly $2 million in payments.
A Democrat, he followed the standard politician-in-the-dock playbook, accusing Republicans of concocting a case to tarnish him. The U.S. attorney in New Orleans who’d pressed the charges was a Carter appointee kept in place by Ronald Reagan after switching to the GOP.
Edwards was acquitted, but all sorts of damning tidbits surfaced at trial, among them that he kept $800,000 of unknown origin around the house — that is, the Governor’s Mansion — and paid gambling debts with suitcases full of cash.
The cloud cost him his next race. He later spent eight years in federal prison on a 2001 racketeering conviction, much of it in Fort Worth. His reputation battered, he lost a 2014 congressional race.
But by then he’d made one last comeback, securing a fourth term as governor in 1991 when he trounced David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard.
A popular bumper sticker summed up voters’ choice: “Vote for the crook. It’s important.”
It’s a choice familiar to Trump supporters, who — in addition to deep skepticism about the criminal case — would rather see him in the White House than any Democrat.
