How Biden Should Investigate Trump The misdeeds and destructive acts are legion. The new president should focus on these three. Illustration by Katie Martin; photographs by Tom Brenner / Drew Angerer / Getty I. A Crimes Commission? As he prepares to occupy the White House, President-elect Joe Biden faces a decision rare in American history: what to do about the man who has just left office, whose personal corruption, disdain for the Constitution, and destructive mismanagement of the federal government are without precedent. Human beings crave reckoning, even the saintliest among us. Institutions based on rules and laws need systems of accountability. People inside and outside politics have argued forcefully that Biden should take, or at least condone, a maximalist approach to exposing and prosecuting the many transgressions by Donald Trump and his circle—that Biden can’t talk about where America is going without clearly addressing where it has been. In 2019, two professors at Princeton, Julian E. Zelizer and Kevin M. Kruse, argued that the most harmful response to Trump’s offenses would be for Democrats and Republicans to agree to look past them, in hopes of avoiding further partisan division. Eric Swalwell, a Democratic congressman from California, has proposed the creation of a Presidential Crimes Commission, made up of independent prosecutors. In the summer of 2020, Sam Berger of the Center for American Progress, an influential think tank with roots in the Clinton administration, released a detailed blueprint for conducting investigations and possibly prosecutions. It laid out the case this way: