by Victor Davis Hanson
What will be the endgame of all these attacks on the American legal system and the warping of it for blatant political purposes?
None of the five civil and criminal cases currently lodged against
former President Donald Trump have ever had merit. They were all
predicated on using the law to injure his re-election candidacy—given a
widespread derangement syndrome among the left and a fear they cannot
entrust a Trump/Biden election to the people.
These criminal and civil trials are merely the continuation of
extra-legal efforts of the last eight years to destroy a presidential
candidate in lieu of opposing him in transparent elections.
As such, the current lawfare joins the Mueller investigation of the
Russian-collusion hoax. It is a continuation of the laptop
disinformation caper and the “51 intelligence authorities” who lied
about its Russian origins. It logically follows from the two
impeachments, the Senate trial of Trump as a private citizen, and
states’ efforts to remove him from their ballots.
The E. Jean Carroll case, the Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and Fani
Willis local and state trials, and the Smith federal indictment share
various embarrassments.
Suspension of statutes of limitations: Carroll and Bragg could
only go to court through the legal gymnastics of enlisting sympathetic
judges and legislators to change or amend the law to suspend the statute
of limitations as a veritable bill of attainder to go after Trump.
Violations of the Bill of Rights: In the Bragg case, Judge Merchan’s selective and asymmetrical gag order likely violates the First Amendment (prohibiting “abridging the freedom of speech”). Bragg violated the Sixth Amendment by denying Trump the right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation”. Judge Engoron, in the juryless James case, violated the Eighth Amendment (“nor excessive fines imposed”)
in assessing Donald Trump an unheard of $354 million fine for
supposedly overstating the value of real estate collateral for loans,
while violating the Sixth Amendment as well (“the accused shall enjoy the right … to trial by an impartial jury”). The FBI likely violated the Fourth Amendment (“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”)
by raiding Trump’s private residence, seizing his papers and effects
(many of them private), and then lying about its own shenanigans of
rearranging the seized classified files to incriminate Trump.
The invention of crimes: The indictments of Bragg, James,
Willis, and Smith had no prior precedents. These cases will likely never
be seen again. Bragg bootstrapped a federal campaign violation
allegation onto a state crime. Yet still, he has never explained exactly
how Trump violated any particular law.
No one had ever been tried in New York for allegedly inflating real
estate assets to obtain a loan from banks, whose auditors had reviewed
favorably the applicant’s assets. Thus, the lending agencies issued the
loans, profited from the interest, were paid back in full and on time,
and had no complaint against the borrower, Trump. Nonetheless, James
indicted Trump and convicted him of a non-crime without a victim, due
the New York combination of a politicized left-wing Manhattan judge,
prosecutor, and juror.
No local prosecutor until Willis had ever indicted a presidential
candidate for calling up a registrar and complaining about the balloting
or alleging that some votes cast were not yet counted, followed up by
an additional request to find supposedly missing ballots. If such
criminalization was the norm, a local Florida prosecutor in 2000 could
have indicted both the Bush and Gore campaigns.
Prior to Smith’s federal indictment, all disagreements with
presidents about the classification and removal of their private papers
were handled administratively, not criminally, much less inaugurated by a
staged, performance-art FBI swat-like raid on an ex-president’s
residence.
Equal justice?: These indictments are asymmetrical, hounding
Trump when other prominent left-wing politicians have been far greater
violators of the same alleged crimes and yet were given exemptions.
Special prosecutor Robert Hur found Biden culpable for removing
classified files for far longer, in more places, in less secure
circumstances, and without the presidential authority to declassify
them. Yet Biden was not indicted on the Orwellian excuse that he, as
president, was so mentally challenged no jury would convict such an
amnesiac and debilitated defendant (who otherwise apparently can
exercise the office of President of the United States.)
Tara Reade was as believable or unbelievable as E. Jean Carroll. Far
poorer, and without Carroll’s New York elite connections, Reade alleged
that Senator Joe Biden sexually assaulted her at about the same time as
the Carroll claim. Yet Reade was written off as a nut, ostracized, and
felt to have opportunistically piggy-banked on the #MeToo movement.
James and her predecessors were aware of hundreds of New York City
developers who submitted loan applications with property assessment at
odds with those of initial bank appraisals. She knows the solution is
that either the bank’s sophisticated auditors refuse the loan or the
disagreement is deemed not sufficient enough to sacrifice profit-making
by offering a loan that will likely be timely paid back.
Willis knows that Stacey Abrams, in her own state, claimed herself
the winner of the 2018 gubernatorial race (she lost by over 50,000
votes). Abrams then declared that the actual winner, current governor
Brian Kemp, was and is an illegitimate governor. She further sued to
overturn the election in the manner that Jill Stein had tried to
overthrow the 2016 presidential election.
In a similar fashion of election denialism, Democratically-funded ad
campaigns and sycophantic celebrities hit the airways in 2016 to flip
the electors to become “faithless,” thus renouncing their constitutional
duties to reflect their own states’ tallies and instead voting
according to the national popular vote.
Bragg knows that Hillary Clinton was fined over $100,000 for 2016
campaign violations after she hid the nature of her illegal payments to
foreign national Christopher Steele to collect dirt on her opponent
Donald Trump. Barack Obama was fined—five years post facto!—by the same
Federal Election Commission a whopping $375,000 for improperly reporting
nearly $2 million in 2008 campaign donations. In neither case did a
federal prosecutor, much less a local district attorney, seek to
criminalize what was customarily considered an administrative or civil
violation of federal law.
Bias: Never has an ex-president and leading presidential
candidate been targeted with promises of indictment by candidates
running for state and local offices. Yet that is precisely what Bragg,
James, and Willis have done, fueling their campaigns for offices by
promising to find ways to go after Donald Trump and subsequently raising
money from such boasts.
Willis’s paramour, fellow prosecutor Nathan Wade, met with the White
House counsel’s office. One of Bragg’s prosecutors, Matthew Colangelo,
left his prestigious job as a senior federal prosecutor in the Biden DOJ
temporarily to work on contract with Bragg’s Manhattan office to go
after Trump.
Jack Smith was appointed by the Biden Department of Justice; his
left-wing filmmaker spouse helped to produce a puff-piece documentary on
Michelle Obama.
The judge in the Bragg case, Juan Merchan, donated to the 2020 Biden
campaign. So did one of the lead prosecutors, Susan Hoffinger, who gave
generously to Biden in 2020. Merchan’s own daughter, Loren, has made a
small fortune as a Democratic campaign consultant, having guided her
left-wing clients’ fundraising efforts to the tune of $90 million.
Given these egregious violations of the law, abject political bias,
conflicts of interest, asymmetrical application of the law, and
manipulations of the statutes of limitations, the public has slowly
grown incensed. They rightly conclude that the lawfare is a left-wing
coordinated effort to destroy candidate Trump by exhausting him
physically and psychologically in five separate cases at the height of
the campaign season, bankrupting him with what will likely be $1 billion
in legal fees and fines, silencing him with gag orders, defaming him
with salacious and sensational but irrelevant court testimonies, and
keeping him off the campaign trail.
And now? The sheer preposterousness has resulted in two unexpected
developments. One, the more the left tries to subvert the legal system
to emasculate Trump, the more the latter wins popularity, especially in
traditionally non-Republican constituencies, even as Biden slumps in the
polls. And two, the four criminal cases are starting to fall apart
because of their sheer ridiculousness and abject bias.
Will and her boyfriend, prosecutor Wade, likely lied under oath about
both their covert romantic relationship and the money that fueled their
global junketeering. A Georgia state appellate court is reviewing
Willis’ suitability to continue the prosecution. One might ask, “How can
a prosecutor who lied under oath while trying a case retain any
credibility?” Whatever the state court’s findings, a state appellate or
federal court will eventually exonerate Trump. No other prosecutor or
jurisdiction would likely take over Willis’s tainted indictment.
Smith’s indictment is in limbo, largely because: 1) in unusual and
partisan fashion, he sought to rush the prosecution to coincide with the
2024 campaign; 2) the Supreme Court is determining to what extent a
president either has immunity or can be hauled into court by a special
prosecutor appointed by the opposition party; and 3) his office lied to
the court about the condition of the Trump files they found at his
residence, collected, and then took possession of—in a fashion that was
intended to prejudice the case in the government’s favor.
Bragg’s gambit of putting Stormy Daniels on the stand to offer
irrelevant but lurid testimony to hurt candidate Trump may have
backfired, given she proved unstable, narcissistic, unreliable, hateful,
and promised to break the law and refuse a legally ordered payment to
Trump after losing a defamation case against him. Convicted felon and
liar Michael Cohen, the prosecution’s key witness, has already hit the
internet trying to get rich and will have less credibility.
James’s civil conviction of Trump and massive fine (originally $450
million with interest) may also be overturned on appeal, given it
violates Eight-Amendment protection from “unusual punishment” (“bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed”), in addition to the selective prosecution of Trump where there is no criminal act and no victim.
So what will be the endgame of all these attacks on the American
legal system and the warping of it for blatant political purposes?
One, we have entered new territory. There will soon be hundreds of
local and state prosecutors who feel they have now been given license in
election years to go after national presidential candidates for
political advantage, both local and national.
Two, conservatives are in a dilemma: whether to restore deterrence by
boomeranging the left’s extra-legal effort to ruin a candidate and
president or to refrain from what would be a descent into third-world,
tit-for-tat criminalization of politics.
Three, the persecution of Trump, coupled with the derelict candidacy
of Joe Biden, threatens to erode the traditional base of the Democratic
Party and redefine politics in terms of class rather than race.
Minorities are beginning to empathize with the gagged, railroaded, and
victimized Trump while distancing themselves from the victimizers, who
are using their “privilege” to warp the law on behalf of a bullying
president.
Four, the U.S. has lost a great deal of credibility abroad due to the
erosion of what was once seen as the greatest system of jurisprudence
in the world. No longer.
Enemies like China and Russia now boast that America’s new political
prosecutions are similar to their own systems, or even more egregious,
and will welcome us into their own customs of bastardized justice.
Latin-American, African, and Asian dictators are delighted that the
U.S. has lost the moral authority to lecture them on the need for a
disinterested and independent judiciary and the rule of law.
Our democratic allies in Europe and Asia are increasingly disturbed
that the instability and unlawfulness apparent in the current lawfare
put into question the reliability of the United States and its adherence
to a rules-based order—whether at home or aboard.
Any president who would sic the justice system on his opponent might be equally vindictive and lawless to his allies abroad.
Victor Davis Hanson
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/13/the-fall-of-the-house-of-presidential-persecutions/
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
