Indicted last week in a major corruption scandal, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba is trying to pull a Donald Trump.
Just as the president-elect claimed, successfully with Republican voters, that the multiple state and federal indictments against him were political in nature, Lumumba is saying the same.
In proclaiming his innocence, the mayor of Mississippi’s capital city said the accusation by federal prosecutors that he took $50,000 in bribes is concocted to try to hurt his reelection campaign next year.
The electorate, though, will have to be even more gullible to swallow Lumumba’s claim than it was for Trump’s. At least Trump could point out that all of the individuals prosecuting him are Democrats or were appointed by a Democratic administration.
In Lumumba’s case, though, all of the major actors in the bribery scandal — both the accusers and the accused — are affiliated with the same party. Lumumba is a Democrat, as are all of the alleged co-conspirators who hold or held elective office — Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens, City Council member Aaron Banks and former City Council member Angelique Lee. The lead federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Todd Gee, is a Democratic appointee, who came highly recommended by the most powerful Democrat in Mississippi, U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson. The Justice Department conducting the sting operation that snagged the four Jackson-area officials as well as Owens’ cousin, Sherik Marve Smith, reports to a Democratic president, Joe Biden.
As Russ Latino of Magnolia Tribune noted, it’s absurd for Lumumba to claim his legal troubles are nothing more than dirty politics.
“If this is a ‘political prosecution,’ Mayor Lumumba is implicating members of his own party — sitting President Joe Biden, and perhaps, the resident godfather of the Mississippi Democratic Party, Congressman Thompson,” Latino wrote last week as the indictments were coming down. “He’s also suggesting that Biden’s chosen man for the job — a career public corruption prosecutor — is operating as a political pawn.”
Although all of this is nonsense, none of this means Lumumba is guilty, even though it doesn’t look good for the Jackson mayor. That’s still to be determined in a court of law.
In the meantime, he better come up with a better explanation than he’s the victim of a political hit job.
He might more plausibly claim entrapment by the FBI agents, who duped him and everyone else involved into thinking they were real estate developers interested in building a hotel near the convention center in downtown Jackson and were willing to pay bribes to get the inside track.
A Supreme Court case from 1992, Jacobson v. United States, established that for a law enforcement sting operation to be legal, the person targeted must has a predisposition to enage in criminal conduct. “Government agents may not originate a criminal design, implant in an innocent person’s mind the disposition to commit a criminal act, and then induce commission of the crime so that the Government may prosecute,” the high court ruled.
The FBI, though, didn’t just pick Jackson at random for this sting operation. For some time, there have been rumors and rumblings about possible corruption in Jackson and Hinds County. And two of the accused — Lee and Smith — have indicated with their early guilty pleas that they were not preyed on by the FBI but were willing participants in taking or funneling bribes.
Trump was able to turn his criminal troubles to a political advantage. It was one of the more remarkable feats in his run toward reclaiming the White House.
If Lumumba does something similar next year, it will be even more astounding.
