"Show me the Politician and I Will Find You a Useful if Imaginary Crime."
Apologies to Lavrenti Beria
The current downpour of political prosecutions of a threatening candidate for the Presidency and the political wall around another candidate’s son placing him behind an impassable wall of immunity requires revisiting two recent articles by extraordinary persons on opposite sides of the political spectrum but on the same side of our Constitutional Republic. Victor Davis Hanson, a conservative scholar of the classics, reminds us in detail of the differing tiers of justice dependent on political party.
clarifies the undoing of our long history of political competition in favor of the new blood sport of political persecution rather than persuasion, and how it will certainly backfire on the current party in power. If you have already seen these they are well worth the re-read.And Some are Aside from the Law....
Victor Davis Hanson strikes again
All pundits and elected luminaries delight in the catchphrase, “No one is above the law”. While Mr. Trump is not my favorite person, I continue to endorse his policies even if rude and disruptive in accomplishment. Mr. Bragg may have finessed converting misdemeanors (of which Mr. Trump is innocent until proven guilty, Congresswoman Pelosi) by tying these state crimes not to federal “noncrime” as previously decided but to possible violation in a federal election of New York state election law. A three dimensional curvilinear approach to prosecution. Yet the path to prosecution of many others is very direct and straightforward, as shown in Victor Davis Hanson’s commentary quoted in its entirety below:
Indict One—And All?
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
As we await the publication of all the impending indictments of former President Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Americans are trying to figure out what constitutes an indictable offense for current and retired public officials.
Most legal experts, Left and Right, have noted:
1) Bragg promised in advance that he would try to find a way to indict Trump. His prior boasts are reminiscent of Stalin’s secret police enforcer Lavrentiy Beria’s quip, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Nancy Pelosi gave the game away, when in her dotage, she muttered that Trump had a right to prove his innocence as if he is presumed guilty.
2) No former president has ever been indicted—and for good reason. Such prosecutions would be viewed as persecutions and render all former presidents veritable targets of every publicity-hungry and politically hostile local, state, or federal prosecutor. They would reduce the presidency to Third World norms. Gratuitously prosecuting former presidents would become a political tool to harm the opposing political party or to tarnish the legacy of a former president.
3) Trump is currently ahead in the polls for the Republican nomination to face Democratic incumbent Biden. And in head-to-head matchups, he outpolls Biden. For a prosecutor of the same party as the current president facing reelection to seek to destroy the viability of a likely opponent is a first in U.S. history. But again, it is now in accordance with Third World norms.
4) At least two left-leaning federal and state prosecutors previously have passed on the same evidence Bragg is now using for his indictments. They have explained that such a prosecution is infeasible because of statutes of limitations, because of a state attorney improperly appropriating the role of a federal prosecutor, and because non-disclosures agreements are a fact of life and not strictly illegal.
5) Bragg’s chief witness Michael Cohen is a felon and confessed liar, with a deep personal hatred of Donald Trump—a fact well known to all potential prosecutors.
6) The current indictment follows a long line of historic harassment of Trump, including the first incidence of two impeachments of a sitting president, the first impeachment trial of a president as a private citizen, and the first FBI armed raid of a retired president’s home, the first instance of an FBI director leaking confidential presidential conversations to the media for the purpose of appointing a special counsel to remove a president.
Such asymmetry also raises questions about the equal application of our laws as they apply to all our other officials, current and out-of-office. <emphasis added>
Or, to put it another way: what crime did Trump not do that others did with either impunity or without being arrested? Here is a sample of 20.
1) Trump did not violate federal law, as did Hillary Clinton, by destroying federally subpoenaed emails and devices in order to hide evidence.
2) Trump did not violate federal law, as did Hillary Clinton, by sending classified government communications on her own, through an unsecured home-brewed server.
3) Trump did not violate federal law, as did Hillary Clinton, by hiring—through three paywalls—a foreign national, who is prohibited from working on presidential campaigns, to compile a dossier to smear her presidential opponent.
4) Trump did not violate federal campaign laws, as did Hillary Clinton, by hiding her payments (as “legal services”) to Christopher Steele through bookkeeping deceptions.
5) Trump did not, as did Bill Clinton, use a crony to search out a high-paying New York job for a paramour in order to influence her testimony before a special counsel.
6) Trump did not, as did Bill Clinton, receive a $500,000 “honorarium” for speaking in Moscow while his wife, our secretary of state, approved a longstanding and lucrative desire of the Kremlin for North American uranium to be sold to a Russian consortium.
7) Trump did not, as did Barack Obama, promise Vladimir Putin that he would be “flexible” on “missile defense” if during his own reelection bid Putin in return would give him “space”. That quid pro quo arrangement led to the U.S. abandonment of key joint missile defense systems with Poland and the Czech Republic, and, reciprocally, less than two years later a Russia invasion, mostly unopposed by the United States, of eastern Ukraine and the Crimea.
8) Trump did not boast publicly, as did Joe Biden, that he used U.S. foreign aid monies as leverage to have the Ukrainian government fire a prosecutor who may have been looking into the Biden family’s efforts to sell influence to corrupt Ukrainian interests.
9) Trump did not, as the Bidens did, set up a family consortium to leverage monies from Ukraine, Russia, and China, on their shared expectations that he might soon run for and be elected president and become compromised. Trump is not mentioned, as is Joe Biden, in family business communications as a recipient of a 10 percent commission on such payoffs.
10) Trump did not, unlike Joe Biden, remove presidential papers—without any authority to declassify them—and leave them scattered and unsecured in a garage and various residences and offices.
11) Trump did not, as did the FBI, wipe clean subpoenaed mobile phone records.
12) Trump did not, as did interim FBI head Andrew McCabe, admittedly lie under oath on four occasions to federal investigators.
13) Trump did not, as did CIA Director John Brennan, admittedly lie on two occasions while under oath to the U.S. Congress.
14) Trump did not, as did Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, admittedly lie on one occasion to the U.S. Congress.
15) Trump did not, as did James Comey, claim amnesia or ignorance 245 times while under oath before the U.S. Congress.
16) Trump did not, as did FBI Director James Comey, summarize a confidential private conversation with a president and then deliberately leak that classified memo to the media for his own agenda of appointing a special counsel to investigate the president—which turned out to be his friend Robert Mueller.
17) Trump did not, as did Robert Mueller, claim ignorance while under oath when asked about the Steele dossier and Fusion GPS, the catalysts for Mueller’s own investigation.
18) Trump did not, as did private citizen and former secretary of state John Kerry, meet clandestinely while out of office with Iranian officials to help them resist current U.S. policy toward Iran—or what the Boston Globe characterized as “unusual shadow diplomacy” to “apply pressure on the Trump administration from the outside.”
19) Trump did not, as did the FBI and CIA, pay clandestine money to Twitter to monitor and smother news stories deemed unhelpful to their agendas.
20) Trump did not, as did then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whip up a mob at the doors of the Supreme Court by threatening two sitting justices by name to intimidate them concerning an impending judicial ruling: “I want to tell you Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you.”
In subsequent months, mobs of protestors swarmed the private homes of these two named justices to influence their decisions, a federal crime that was ignored by Attorney General Merrick Garland, but not by a self-confessed, potential assassin of Justice Brett Kavanaugh who later turned up in the neighborhood.
What are we to make of these radical disparate applications of laws and protocols? The Left repeatedly breaks laws and long-held customs with impunity by weaponizing federal offices and bureaus, whether defined in the legal sphere by mostly exempting 120 days of mass rioting, looting, arson, mayhem, and lethal violence in the summer of 2020, or procedurally by denying the House minority leader the right to nominate his party members to committees, or ceremonially having the speaker of the House tear up the presidential State-of-the-Union Address on national television. <emphasis added>
By any fair application of past tradition and the law, Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas should be impeached for their deliberate efforts to subvert U.S. immigration law for political purposes. By any just measure, Joe Biden should be the target of a special counsel’s investigation to ascertain how and why the Biden family received hidden funds from foreign governments and whether Biden himself paid taxes on such large sums.
It is the revolutionary Left that attacks institutions deemed unhelpful for its current political agenda—one that rarely warrants 50 percent public approval—whether that effort is defined by threats of ending the filibuster, scrapping the Electoral College, adding two more states, packing the court, or radically changing balloting laws and customs to turn elections into a 70 percent no-show of voters on Election Day.
All of the above is predicated on a simple premise: Were the opposition to match tit-for-tat these Democratic means, then the republic would quickly descend into a spiral of illegality and chaos analogous to what ended the late Roman Republic. <emphasis added> That fact is well known to the new hard-left Democratic Party. So it has assumed the role of the spoiled teen who feels he has a blank check of lawless behavior that his parents would not dare emulate, given that for adults to do so would destroy the family.
In other words, the Left is saying to America something along the following lines, “We are so morally superior to you that we can and must employ any means necessary to achieve our unpopular political ends. But you cannot respond in kind or deter us by mimicking our own tactics, because should both parties do so, the resulting disorder would undermine the republic. And that is something you won’t dare do.”
Has the statute of limitations run out on all the above? Cannot a Republican majority House not pursue those who lied under oath before it? Apparently not. Just as some benefit from “rules for thee, not for me”, so do they stand aside from the law.
And now Dr. Naomi Wolf, an experienced Democrat operative, fills us in on the more current disaster for our future banana republic:
"Happy Indictment Day!"
In a Deep Blue State, Recoiling from the Celebrations
DR NAOMI WOLF
AUG 3, 2023
I am in a deep blue small town in a deep blue state, here on the West Coast.
The natives are jubilant today.
“Happy Indictment Day!” shouted the neighbor of my host, as my host and I sat out on a balcony. The neighbor was emerging from a car, three stories below us. The building must have contained thirty apartments. The man was certain that everyone who was in earshot of his joyous shout, agreed with his sentiments.
He witnessed my silence. “Don’t you agree?” he goaded me, a near-stranger, still shouting. “Don’t you?”
Finally I responded, “I am not sure that this sets a great precedent. Every sitting President in the future will try to indict his or her political opponent.” He cut off the discussion — a reaction, from the Left, to which I am getting accustomed — and headed inside.
Earlier, at lunch, an otherwise lovely lady had celebrated the possible-near-incarceration of “that criminal.” Again, she assumed that everyone present shared her view of the events of the day.
I am experiencing considerable inner turmoil at the spectacle of President Trump’s indictment, as well as at the almost animalistic glee that this spectacle has triggered in the solid bloc of Democrats that currently surrounds me.
I am extraordinarily sad — at the thickheaded ignorance of history that those who are celebrating tonight, reveal; and at what has become of our country.
Don’t people understand — much as they may hate this fellow — that this is exactly what coup leaders in every banana republic, do? Seek to imprison their political opponents?
Especially while the political opponents are on the campaign trail?
Another reason for my discomfort and misery is that I have a guilty conscience, because of what I experienced two decades ago and what I know — things that not that many people have experienced or know, and things that seem to be generally forgotten. These memories bear directly on current events.
The indictment of President Trump is for the crime of “election denialism”, among other alleged crimes. It’s a thought crime.
It is quite odd that many major news articles have links when the word “indictment” is mentioned, but these links take the reader to other news articles, and do not link to the actual indictment. DailyClout.io, in contrast, published the indictment. The first few paragraphs make your head explode, as they directly contradict — themselves:
“1. The Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, was the forty-fifth President of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020. The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election.
2. Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power. So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false. But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway—to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.
3). The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won. He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures. Indeed, in many cases, the Defendant did pursue these methods of contesting the election results. His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits, or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful.”
So — you are allowed to challenge the vote, and you are allowed to say what you want about the vote count, because of the First Amendment, but in fact you are not allowed to challenge the vote count, and you can’t say aloud why you are seeking to challenge the vote count? <emphasis added>
Other news stories, understandably, do not link to this word salad.
It’s odd, for instance, that Reuters itself presented what is in the indictment, as late as Aug 1, as hearsay, and simply paraphrased it:
“Based on the descriptions, they appear to include Trump's former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who called state lawmakers in the weeks following the 2020 election to pressure them not to certify their states' results; former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who tried to get himself installed as attorney general so he could launch voter fraud investigations in Georgia and other swing states; and attorney John Eastman, who advanced the erroneous legal theory that Pence could block the electoral certification.”
It seems that people around President Trump tried to pause the certification process until the votes could be fully verified. It seemed that his lawyers tried a legal theory to delay certification.
Hasn’t a version of all of that happened before in our nation’s history?
Is that not what is supposed to happen when there are charges of problems with the vote? Is that not what we are tasked with doing? Calling a halt and stopping the process until every vote is recounted and verified?
I am having relentless flashbacks to where I was and what I was doing in late 2000, when I was a consultant for Vice President Gore’s campaign for the Presidency.
As I’ve written elsewhere — and as I am trying desperately to remind everyone who will now listen, on every podcast that will have me — I was advising from a distance, and looped in, intermittently, to discussions within the campaign that were both public and private, about exactly the same issues that are now apparently criminal offenses even to entertain, let alone to mention in actual words.
So were almost all of the lawyers, campaign consultants, advisors and staffers of Gore 2000. So was the candidate himself, visibly.
So were almost all of the lawyers, campaign consultants, advisors, and staffers — and visibly, the candidate himself — on the other side.
The Gore campaign denied the claimed outcome of the election. The Bush campaign denied the claimed outcome of the election.
Both campaigns, both candidates, denied it up and down; they denied it on podiums, in front of crowds, on television interviews. They denied it in soundbites that sought to prejudice popular opinion — such as the brilliantly juvenile epithet via Team Bush, coined while it was still November, “Sore Loserman” for “Gore/Lieberman.” They both denied it via flotillas of highly compensated attorneys, gathering on both sides to spin and to find “legal theories”, legal loopholes. The Bush team denied it by sending an awkward, suburban version of Blackshirts — guys in Oxford shirts and khaki pants, the “Brooks Brothers Riot” — to create a noisy, menacing crowd outside the Miami room where the critical Florida votes were being recounted.
The Bush team astutely denied the claimed election results by inventing the phrase “hanging chad,” and then by popularizing it, to suggest that there was massive ambiguity in the casting of the vote, due to the reality of some unreadable, imperfectly punched paper ballots. The Gore team, for their part, denied the claimed outcome by seeking at one point to count only those counties in Florida that were most supportive of Vice President Gore. Both candidates denied the claimed outcome of the election, all the way up to the Supreme Court.
Both stopped the process until every vote could be checked and rechecked. <emphasis added>
Every conversation, public and private, for both campaigns, for both candidates, from the 35 days from the close of Election Day to Dec 12, 2000, the date of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v Gore, was about denying the claimed results of the election.
The drilling down — the need of the country to understand who actually won — went all the way to the level of a consortium of newspapers eventually recounting 175,000 “undervotes” and “overvotes”; and the margins of victory that they found, depending on how you are counting, were as narrow as triple digits.
And yet today, you are a criminal if you ask for everything — for anything — to pause so you can review reported voting irregularities in the tally of the race?
Why did the two sides fight so hard in 2000? Why did they battle for 35 days after the polls closed? Why go all the way to the highest court in the land?
Why?
Because that is how our system is supposed to work.
Today, based on the premise of President Trump’s indictment, all of those discussions, strategy sessions, consultations with attorneys, meetings with campaign staff, memos, emails, faxes, all of that litigation — would expose the candidates, and their campaign staffers, and their advisors, and their lawyers — to criminal charges.
Think for a moment, I beg you, about what President Trump’s indictment, for the thought crime of resisting — just as both Vice President Gore and George Bush Jr did 20 years ago — the pat, early declarations of CNN and Fox and The New York Times about who won the Presidential race, will do to the future of our nation.
In every future election, if both candidates, and all of their staffers, advisors and lawyers, do not immediately yield to the declarations of the official outlets — if they both don’t cave right away to early calls by CNN or The Washington Post or MSNBC regarding what the Powers That Be have decided for us in relation to whom our Dear Leader is to be — then they will face possible prison terms.
Why even have elections in the future, if this is the precedent that is now being set?
And there you have the answer. This kangaroo court, this 1930s-era show trial, is not about President Trump, though he is a convenient outsider to use as the much-hated exemplar for what The Powers That Be have decided needs to be done.
It is, as President Trump often reminds us, not about him; it is about us.
It is about setting a precedent that ends the right of the American people to ask any questions, in the future, about their election results.
Which is exactly how coups operate, once the coup leaders are in power.
In banana republics, they still hold elections. <emphasis added>
You just don’t get to question who you are told the winners are.
So no, here in this beautiful deep blue state, in this mellow, sage-smelling, Western evening air, though people around me are festive and gleeful, I am not celebrating.
It is not President Trump’s funeral dirge, that I am hearing.
It is our Republic’s own.