Give me the man and I will find the crime.

–Attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, Chief of Josef Stalin’s Secret Service.

A similar but more detailed offering was given by Robert Houghwout Jackson, Attorney General of the United States and Assosociate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm-in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.

–Kerri Kupec Urbahn on X

Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan D.A., campaigned as the best candidate to go after the former president.

–New York Times