\n<\/p>\n
Starting with a 1998 appearance before the Ken Starr grand jury as a junior White House staffer testifying about President\u00a0Bill Clinton<\/strong>\u2019s relationship with my intern\u00a0Monica Lewinsky,<\/strong> my career has been punctuated by collisions with the law involving men, sex, and power. Following Ken Starr, it was the Obama Justice Department\u2019s case against my former boss then Senator\u00a0John Edwards<\/strong>\u00a0involving payments in an extramarital affair that brought me hours of interviews with the FBI, an appearance before a second grand jury, and my first (and hopefully only) testimony in\u00a0a criminal trial<\/a> as part of the 2012 Edwards prosecution. I was also\u00a0Hillary Clinton<\/strong>\u2019s communications director in the 2016 presidential campaign and watched as, in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape, more than a dozen women came forward to accuse\u00a0Donald Trump<\/strong> of sexual\u00a0harassment and assault<\/a> in the closing weeks before the election. (Trump has denied all accusations.) It was payments his lawyer made to adult film actor\u00a0Stormy Daniels<\/strong> during that time that led to the\u00a0indictment of Trump by the Manhattan district attorney<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Forty years ago, it was unlikely that a political aide like me would get caught up in such legal dramas; these cases almost certainly would not have been brought forward by prosecutors. But my career, which began in the early 1990s, aligned with the dawn of a new age of accountability. A politician\u2019s personal indiscretions, once considered off-limits to press and political foes alike, became fair game. Initially dubbed the \u201cpolitics of personal destruction<\/a>\u201d during the Clinton presidency, this era morphed into a new reckoning in which politicians found their sexual misconduct exposed them to significant legal peril as political opponents, prosecutors\u2014and, most recently, women they allegedly violated\u2014pursued cases against them. The last three decades have shown that asking politicians about sex is an easy way to catch them in a lie\u2014either in public or under oath. Given the number of laws governing politicians\u2019 behavior, lying about women is a surefire way to get yourself into legal hot water.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n So it did not surprise me when, out of the three criminal investigations of former President Donald Trump currently underway, it was the one involving a cover-up of an affair that resulted in the first indictment against him. He faces more accountability next month when a lawsuit brought by\u00a0E. Jean Carroll,<\/strong> the woman who has accused him of a rape occurring in the 1990s,\u00a0goes to trial in New York<\/a>. (Trump has denied her accusation.)<\/p>\n For those who are anxious to see Trump convicted for something (anything!), there\u2019s been a lot of\u00a0fretting<\/a> about whether the Manhattan district attorney\u2019s case is the strongest of the slew of possible indictments that may hit Trump this year. I understand the argument, but the notion that\u00a0 prosecutors from different jurisdictions could, or should, coordinate their potential prosecutions of Trump to maximize their chances of success is misguided. Rooting for criminal convictions of a political opponent is a human thing to do and I have been guilty of it. But it is an erroneous notion of what accountability in a democratic system looks like, and, as the Edwards mistrial shows, one that can end in disappointment.\u00a0<\/p>\n