After Donald Trump's recent indictment by Democratic Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for 34 phantom felonies, the former president and current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination accurately accused the Democrats of having "totally weaponized law enforcement in our country."
Unsurprisingly, as Yogi Berra, the great American and D-Day veteran, famously said, "It's déjà vu all over again."
Beginning in 1961, the newly-appointed Democratic duo, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Robert Morgenthau, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), weaponized the Department of Justice to "get" Roy Cohn, the former Manhattan federal prosecutor who in 1951 helped convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg of espionage for the Soviet Union.
In the October 1976 issue of Commentary magazine, Irving Younger, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the SDNY, published a landmark article, "Memoir of a Prosecutor," about the extraordinarily partisan targeting of Cohn by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which began during the first months of John Kennedy's presidency.
Younger's mea culpa begins with the recollection of a meeting in the summer of 1961, with Robert Kennedy and Morgenthau in the latter's Manhattan office, during which he was designated as the DOJ's point man whose "job is to find out whether Cohn is guilty of something. The department wants Cohn."
The 28-year-old Younger, just three years out of NYU Law School, enthusiastically replied "I'll get him."
Over the next nine months, Younger conducted an exhaustive investigation of Cohn, traveling twice to Switzerland, once to Panama, and to "various places within the United States." He also subpoenaed Cohn to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan.
But in the spring of 1962, Younger informed Morgenthau that "I'm licked. If he [Cohn] has violated the law, I can't find it."
Recognizing that he was "no longer the Department's man on Cohn," Younger resigned a few months later. Nevertheless, Attorney General Kennedy and U.S. Attorney Morgenthau relentlessly pursued Cohn, indicting him in September 1963 for giving false testimony before the federal grand jury and for obstruction of justice.
Cohn was acquitted by a Manhattan jury in July 1964.
While Robert Kennedy resigned as attorney general in September 1964 to successfully win a U.S. Senate seat from New York two months later, U.S. Attorney Morgenthau continued the ruthless persecution of Cohn, indicting him in November 1968 for "fraud and related crimes." But a second jury acquitted him.
Finally, according to a remarkable oral history from Cohn about his "hostile relationship with Robert F. Kennedy," which was given in March 1971 to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Morgenthau indicted him for a third time in January 1969.
But Cohn was acquitted in late 1969, and a few days later, according to the oral interview, Republican President Richard Nixon "fired Morgenthau," nearly one year after his inauguration.
Customarily, all 93 U.S. attorneys general submit their resignations on the day that a president from the opposite party is sworn into office.
Younger's path-breaking 1976 Commentary confession was published two years after Robert Morgenthau won a 1974 special election for Manhattan district attorney, which was necessitated by the resignation, due to ill health, of Democrat Frank Hogan, who had served in this powerful position since 1942.
In 1977, Morgenthau was elected to eight successive, 4-year terms, serving as Manhattan district attorney for a total 35 years, until he finally retired in 2009. He died in 2019, just weeks before his 100th birthday.
In January 1977, Norman Podhoretz, Commentary's indomitable editor, printed a dozen letters, denouncing or praising Younger's cri de coeur, under the headline "Getting Roy Cohn." A 1,700-word, tendentious diatribe from District Attorney Morgenthau was totally demolished by Younger's 2,500-word rebuttal.
A December 1976 New York Times article about this monumental, pre-Watergate scandal quoted a "delighted" Cohn that Younger's article "vindicates me," and it "will help other who have been less successful in surviving similar vendettas."
In a March 29 Newsmax article I argued that Morgenthau's only legacy is the many prominent Democrats, including Sonia Sotomayor, Andrew Cuomo, Eliot Spitzer and Charles Rangel, who worked under him during a 44-year reign, as either the chief federal or state prosecutor in Manhattan.
Three other Morgenthau proteges are currently making national headlines, including Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing Donald Trump's criminal case in Manhattan, and who was an assistant Manhattan DA between 1994 and 1998.
Special prosecutor Jack Smith, who was appointed in November 2022 by President Joe Biden's highly partisan Attorney General Merrick Garland, is conducting two criminal investigations of former President Trump. Smith worked as assistant district attorney under Morgenthau between 1994 to 1999.
And last week, Robert Kennedy Jr., who was hired in 1982 by Morgenthau as an assistant district attorney, and who lasted just one year after an arrest for heroin possession, declared his candidacy for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.
Undoubtedly, the multiple, ongoing persecutions of Trump over the last eight years by Democratic politicians and prosecutors are a replay on steroids of their predecessors' abominable witch hunts against Cohn, which were launched more than six decades ago.
Mark Schulte is a retired New York City schoolteacher and mathematician who has written extensively about science and the history of science. Read Mark Schulte's Reports — More Here.