by Victor Davis Hanson
They may be the beginning of precisely what the Founders feared.
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Do not believe the White House/mainstream media-concocted
narrative that the four criminal court cases—prosecuted by Alvin Bragg,
Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis—were not in part coordinated,
synchronized, and timed to reach their courtroom psychodramatic finales
right during the 2024 campaign season.
These local, state, and federal Lilliputian agendas were designed to
tie down, gag, confine, bankrupt, and destroy Trump psychologically and
physically. They are the final lawfare denouement to years of
extra-legal efforts to emasculate him.
Indeed, the nation is by now worn out by these serial assaults on
constitutional norms: the Hillary-funded Steele dossier subterfuge; the
pre-election Russian laptop disinformation campaign; the two
impeachments without special counsel reports; the impeachment Senate
trial of a private citizen; the effort to remove Trump’s name from state
ballots; the ongoing attempt to emasculate the Electoral College; or
the radical opportune changes in state election laws to ensure massive
mail-in balloting.
Recently, Andrew McCarthy has reviewed in depth
this coordination between White House personnel and prosecutors, long
known and long denied by the left. Biden, for example, had complained to
aides about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s tardiness in getting
special federal prosecutor Smith appointed—and thus apparently ensuring
Trump was convicted before the election.
Nathan Wade, Fani Willis’s now-fired paramour prosecutor, visited and
consulted with the White House counsel’s office when he was acting
supposedly as a purely local county prosecutor. The January 6th left-wing-dominated
congressional committee consulted with the Biden administration in
sending forth its criminal referrals about Trump’s purported role in the
protests. And to handle his pseudo-indictment against Trump, Manhattan
District Attorney Alvin Bragg hired Biden Justice Department official
Vincent Colangeio.
Two, the prosecutors’ delayed criminal indictments and E. Jean
Carroll’s civil suit were predicated only on Donald Trump running for
reelection. After his 2020 defeat, the loss of the two Republican senate
seats in Georgia, and the January 6 demonstrations/riot, Trump was
written off by pundits as politically toxic.
Then his historic comeback in the subsequent year terrified the left.
The reboot prompted the subsequent indictments and suits years after
the purported crimes. It was left unsaid that had Trump not been a
conservative Republican and leading presidential candidate, he would
have never been indicted.
Three, most of the indictments either had no prior precedent in
criminal law or will likely never be used again, at least against anyone
left-wing. Moreover, many of the writs relied on manipulation of
statutes of limitations.
Neither Bragg nor any other local prosecutor had previously
transformed a supposedly local affidavit misdemeanor into a supposed
federal campaign finance violation, a gambit so preposterous that it had
been passed on by federal attorneys.
Letitia James was the first New York Attorney General to indict a
state resident for the supposed crime of overvaluing real estate to
obtain a loan, which was paid back timely and in full, to the profit of
lending institutions. No bank, after auditing Trump’s assets and
viability to pay back loans, was unhappy to loan to him. But all were
quite happy to profit from the hefty interest—and would likely be happy
to loan to him again.
James sought to make Trump a criminal without ever finding a crime,
much less a victim. Nor, until the checkered and unethical career of
Fani Willis, had any local prosecutor ever indicted an ex-president for a
supposedly improper phone call questioning whether all the state’s
votes had been fully counted.
Alvin Bragg’s case was nonexistent given the statute of limitations
on supposed misdemeanors committed over six years prior—until Bragg
transmogrified the accusations of minor crimes into felonies and, with
them, extensions granted supposedly due to the COVID lockdowns.
In Carroll’s case, her unsubstantiated accusations of a sexual
assault were also well past the statute of limitations until a left-wing
New York legislator and unapologetic Trump hater passed a special law—a
veritable bill of attainder aimed at Trump—waiving the statute of
limitations for a year in cases of accusations of long-past sexual
assault in the state of New York.
Four, all the indictments and suits took place in either blue cities,
counties, or states. And most of the jury pools in or near New York,
Atlanta, or Miami were or will be heavily Democrat. So far, the New York
judges who have overseen Trump’s civil and criminal trials—Justices
Engoron, Kaplan, and Merchan—were all liberals, appointed by Democrat or
liberal politicians, and some have donated to Democrat causes. They
were not shy about expressing disdain for defendant Trump. No changes in
venues were ever allowed.
Five, all the prosecutors, Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis, are
likewise either Democrats or associated with liberal causes. In the case
of Bragg, James, and Willis, all three ran for office and raised money
on promises and boasts of getting Donald Trump. And all three have now
set the precedent that local and state prosecutors can warp the law and
use it to go after an ex-president and leading presidential candidate of
the opposite party for naked political purposes.
Six, all these cases were equally applicable to high-profile Democrat
politicos. E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit was the most laughable of
all the court dramas, but its outline and protocols just as easily could
have applied to Tara Reade. She came forward to accuse candidate Biden
of having sexually assaulted her years earlier—roughly about the same
period’s as Carroll’s fluid timelines. Her story is about as believable
or unbelievable as Carroll’s. But the difference was that whereas the
media canonized the delusional and self-contradictory Carroll as a
useful anti-Trump tool, it demonized Reade as a crazy loon and liar—and a
potential impediment to Biden’s 2019-20 primary campaign.
Bragg had to torture the law to fabricate a federal campaign finance
indictment against Trump. But Hillary Clinton clearly violated federal
campaign statutes—and was variously fined—when she tried to hide her
“opposition research” payments to Christopher Steele as “legal
expenses.” In truth, Steele was hired and paid to concoct a fake
anti-Trump dossier and likely should have been barred from working for a
presidential campaign given he was not a U.S. citizen.
In the case of Smith, simultaneously with his case against Trump, his
twin special prosecutor, Robert Hur, found that Joe Biden had
unlawfully removed classified files for much longer than Trump (30 years
plus), in a much less secure location (his rickety garage), and without
a president’s authority to declassify his documents. Moreover, he had
disclosed their contents to his ghostwriter, who destroyed evidence
under subpoena by Hur. Yet unlike Trump, Biden was not charged, given
that Hur claimed that Biden, in his opinion, was so old and amnesiac
that he might win sympathy rather than a conviction from a jury.
Willis indicted Trump for supposedly trying to pressure officials to
“find” missing Trump ballots, thus supposedly violating “racketeering”
statutes, as he oversaw an attempt to find troves of ballots he thought
had been cast for him. Of course, in the same state, Stacy Abrams, after
losing the gubernatorial race of 2018, claimed she had actually won,
despite losing by over 50,000 votes. She sued to overturn the election
and then made a celebrity-political career touring the nation, falsely
claiming she was the real governor and her victorious opponent was an
illegitimate governor.
For that matter, in 2016, left-wing organizations, celebrities, and
thousands of political operatives sought to overturn the Trump victory
by appealing to the electors to renounce their states’ popular vote
tallies and thus become “faithless electors.” In sum, there was a true
conspiracy, or, better, a “racketeering” scheme, to use Willis’s
parlance, to coordinate various groups to overturn the constitutional
duties of electors to throw the election to Hillary Clinton. Clinton,
along with the likes of ex-president Jimmy Carter and soon-to-be House
Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries, would continue to deny that Trump was
the legitimately elected president.
In sum, the number of suits against and indictments against Trump
grew in correlation to his political fortunes. They were designed in the
election year 2024 to do what Democrat voters likely cannot. They are
ridiculous and sui generis, and will never be used against anyone other
than Trump. They have done more damage to democracy, the rule of law,
and equal justice to the law than all of the antics that Trump is
accused of.
Moreover, they will set in motion a dangerous tit-for-tat cycle of
weaponization that threatens the very constitutional order of the United
States.
If Trump is elected to restore the rule of equal justice, will a
Republican special counsel revisit Robert Hur’s work and find
ex-President Biden quite capable of standing trial for the crimes Hur
has already investigated and confirmed?
Will then a new Republican-appointed FBI director order a SWAT-like
raid, with Fox News forewarned and Newsmax reporters on the scene, to
descend into the Biden beach house?
Will county and state prosecutors in Utah, Montana, and Oklahoma feel
that to stop this cycle of illegality, they must charge the Biden
family members by bootstrapping local indictments onto federal crimes?
Will conservative women in the future come forward in Arkansas,
Idaho, and Alabama to claim that in their past, they now suddenly
remember that decades ago a prominent Democrat candidate harassed them?
Will their right-wing lawyers cherry-pick the proper red-state judge?
Will conservative district attorneys find ways to indict Joe Biden on
the various imaginative bookkeeping and “loan repayments” used to
disguise the fact his corrupt family received well over $20 million from
illiberal foreign interests, much if not all of it camouflaged to avoid
income taxes?
Will some South Carolina legislator get a bill of attainder passed in
the legislature, ending the statute of limitations for a year for all
those in 2016 who sought to undermine the electors and flip them to
Hillary Clinton?
In August or September, will a right-wing state prosecutor and a
conservative judge find that Joe Biden’s creative bookkeeping warrants a
$450 million fine, payable before appeal?
And will Republican officials and judges in purple states move to get Biden’s name off the ballot?
Such scenarios are endless and, given the current precedents, could
all be justified as desperate deterrent measures to shock the left into
ceasing their efforts to sabotage our constitutional system and rule of
law.
A final note. There is a divine order of balance in the world, one
known variously by particular civilizations as kismet, nemesis, karma,
or what goes around, comes around payback. We’ve already seen such
forces at work: Sen. Schumer at the head of a mob at the doors of the
Supreme Court, calling out threats to justices by name, only now finding
pro-Hamas thugs circling his own home. Or Democrats during the Trump
years straining to find ways to invoke the 25th Amendment, now humiliated into claiming a non-compos-mentis Joe Biden is “sharp as a knife.”
Tragically for the country, to stop this left-wing madness, the Trump
travesties may not be the end, but the beginning of precisely what the
Founders feared.
Victor Davis Hanson
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-travesties-of-the-trump-trials/
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