This pseudo-judicial assassination attempt on Trump contrasts starkly with the Get Out of Jail Free cards for Secretary Clinton and President Biden for much more serious offenses.
by Conrad Black
A democracy that uses the criminal justice system to destroy partisan opponents is on the verge of constitutional suicide. President Trump, the day after his most recent indictment, stated that the country was now being governed by “fascists, crooks, and thugs.” Unfortunately, that claim has the ring of truth.
Almost all of the present complaint is a Presidential Records Act matter, a non-criminal statute which is not mentioned in the indictment, and almost all the evidence is extorted, in the manner of American prosecutors–by threats of indictment and promises of immunity for perjury. This is why 98 percent of U.S federal prosecutions are successful, 95 percent of those without a trial — it isn’t a justice system, just a conveyer belt to the bloated and corrupt prison system.
This pseudo-judicial assassination attempt on Mr. Trump contrasts starkly with the Get Out of Jail Free cards for Secretary Clinton and President Biden for much more serious offenses. Mrs. Clinton opened hundreds of classified documents to the world and destroyed 33,000 subpoenaed emails.
Mr. Biden, who, evidence suggests, ran an illegal international influence-peddling operation with his family, wrongly removed herniating masses of classified documents from his less entitled positions of senator and vice president. The whitewash of the Clinton and Biden illegalities, including the silence of the grand jury that has supposedly been investigating the Bidens for nearly four years, are themselves, crimes.
We are at the precipice because the post-Nixon addiction to trying to turn the presidency into an ejector seat when both houses of Congress are controlled by the other party spread easily: politicians are generally weak and succumb easily to bad habits. Yet the practice exploded when the sleazy bipartisan political class realized that they should stop splitting their sides laughing at Trump’s buffoonery in 2016 and recognized what a threat he was to their log-rolling and back-scratching society in Washington.
The criminalization of political differences suddenly received a gigantic gain-of-function booster when it was mixed with the overpowering intoxicant of Trump-hate. As it emerged that Trump was the only prominent person who recognized the depth of discontent in the American working and middle classes, and the chronic failure of the post-Reagan Republicans to address those concerns, neither the Democrats nor the Never Trump Republicans replied with policy changes or a serious effort to reverse the inroads Trump was making, and win back the votes that were slipping away.
The system was already too rotten for that. The Clinton campaign responded with the Steele Dossier, the infamous pastiche of lies and defamations that was falsely represented as legitimate intelligence. The Trump-Russian collusion fraud almost immobilized Mr. Trump for more than two years.
When this immense and putrefied canard finally expired, Mr. Trump’s enemies moved briskly on to the most spurious presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history. The charge was that in neutrally asking the president of Ukraine by telephone and with dozens of people on the call, to find out what happened in the Biden family‘s business dealings in Ukraine, he, Mr. Trump, committed a high crime and a misdemeanor equivalent to treason by making development assistance to Ukraine contingent upon the president of Ukraine producing incriminating evidence against the Bidens.
In the 2020 election, the Democrats, ostensibly to facilitate voting during the Covid pandemic, altered voting and vote counting rules in a number of swing states by state executive fiat or the action of state courts dominated by democratic appointees, and not, as the Constitution requires, by the state legislatures.
This amplified the use of voting by mail, raising concerns of ballot harvesting, and making the election outcome dependent upon 40 million ballots that could not be verified or traced reliably from the person who allegedly filled out the ballot to the point where they were tabulated. A flip of 50,000 votes in three states would have given Trump the election.
Yet as he has done a number of times, Mr. Trump inadvertently came to the rescue of his enemies by allowing them to represent the unserious efforts of Mayor Giuliani as the principal Trump argument against the validity of the 2020 election result. The judiciary abdicated as a co-equal branch of government by refusing to judge on their merits the numerous lawsuits on the constitutionality of the voting and vote counting changes..
The Democrats and the Never Trumpers assumed Mr. Trump was finished. The dreadful Trump meteor had passed. Yet he now leads all the polls, among Republicans and against Mr. Biden, and the Trump-haters are desperate. There may be more prosecutions, as it is all the Democrats have left, apart from ballot harvest theft.
Mr. Trump can probably get the fatuous New York criminal action pitched, and may be able to get rid of most of this one also. The same prosecutor, a rabid partisan (whose wife produced an idolatrous film about Michelle Obama), may yet try to flog the dead horse of January 6, but they don’t have any case against Mr. Trump, and the Justice Department’s credibility is evaporating. Mr. Trump’s enemies have opened the kimono and revealed themselves in their ghastly moral infirmity, as being, indeed, “fascists, crooks, and thugs.”
The invertebrate Trump-hating Republicans who were useful doormats for the Democrats by impersonating an opposition, are already coming to light. National Review has effectively pronounced Trump guilty. Comments such as those from Governors Hutchinson, who is polling one per cent, and Sununu, who trails Mr. Trump by thirty points in his home state of New Hampshire, but shouts at any nearby camera that Mr. Trump can’t win, will fall away. Governor Christie is trying to be a human torpedo aimed at Trump, but is merely floundering.
Mr. Trump’s followers will not desert him and any Republican candidate who implies that Mr. Trump is guilty will vanish as if through a trap-door. If he can’t get rid of these ridiculous charges without trying them, Mr. Trump should take dilatory procedures to ensure they are not tried before the election. The Senator McConnell-Ambassador Haley attempt to duck the issue with unctuous noises about assessing the evidence won’t fly; a Republican can wait and see on the verdict but has to condemn the timing and probable motive of the indictment, and the contrast with the treatment of the Bidens and Clintons.
Mr. Trump should promise not to pardon himself and face the charges after his next term. If the Republicans can counter-attack effectively on ballot harvesting, Mr. Trump should win. His opponents are as he described them and the public still objects in principle to persecution of the innocent and to shredding the Constitution.
Whatever happens, Mr. Trump has now received more votes for president than anyone else in history. He is an improbable defender of American political ideals; ideally the role thrust on him would be played by a less blemished character, but this office has sought this man.
No one should under-estimate what is at stake. If America is to become a permanent ballot-stuffing prosecutocracy, it is finished as the project its founders launched and Lincoln and other great men have preserved. It would lose all moral authority and take all of Western Civilization down with it.
This is what the ethical bankruptcy of the Democrats is in danger of achieving. Lincoln famously said that the United States would never be invaded, yet “as a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” That is now the choice, and that day of judgment is almost at hand.
First published in the New York Sun.
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7 Responses
from the Internet: Conrad Black was convicted in 2007 of fraud and obstruction of justice. U.S. President Donald Trump has signed a full pardon for former media mogul Conrad Black, who was convicted in 2007 of fraud and obstruction of justice. Black, 74, spent almost 3½ years in a Florida prison before being released and deported back to Canada.
Which renders your defense of Trump tainted Black. A person of conscience, acknowledging bias, would have recused himself. Instead, you assume the role of judge and jury. No surprise that it hasn’t occurred to you that Trump might be guilty as charged; just as it didn’t occur to you when it mattered most. Loyalty at the expense of virtue is a slippery one-way slope.
As a Canadian, I have tended to consider that Black may well have been guilty of some genuine business/corporate offense that might even be a real such offense under Canada’s less obscurantist and corrupt legal system. But I’ve also failed to understand the nature of the offense on which he was convicted and why it should have been or be a crime, so I tend in the end to put it down to America’s fantastically obscurantist and corrupt legal system and unbelievably powerful and essentially unbelievable prosecutors.
Then again, I haven’t really figured out why Martha Stewart deserved jail time, either.
As to this, “A person of conscience, acknowledging bias, would have recused himself.”, who, on the other side, now ever does anything like that or expects it of his cohorts? This is something only demanded of conservatives. It’s long past time to be foolish enough to play by uneven rules imposed by the other side of a contest in which there is no neutral arbiter.
And indeed who, in the realm of opinion columnists, has EVER, or at least in the last 50 years, been expected to recuse themselves from opinionating in the press as though they were testifying to a jury? That is a wholly new alleged standard.
Now that my favorite president Donald Trump is facing a 37-count indictment from the feds, I join with my brothers and sisters in MAGA and with all sensible Republicans in saying this: I’m not sure I want to live in a country where a former president can wave around classified documents he’s not supposed to have and say, “This is secret information. Look at this,” and then be held accountable for his actions.
What kind of country have we become? One in which federal prosecutors can take “evidence” before a “grand jury,” and that “grand jury” can “vote to indict” a former president for 37 alleged “crimes”? Look at all the other people out there in America, including Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, who HAVEN’T been indicted for crimes on the flimsy excuse that there is no “evidence” they committed crimes. That is totally unfair!
It’s like Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin wrote in a tweet Friday: “These charges are unprecedented and it’s a sad day for our country, especially in light of what clearly appears to be a two-tiered justice system where some are selectively prosecuted, and others are not”.
What kind of country holds a president accountable for alleged crimes a grand jury charges him with?
Or as Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn tweeted: “Where are the investigations against the Clintons and the Bidens? What about fairness? Two tiers of justice at work”.
TWO TIERS! One tier in which President Trump keeps getting indicted via both state and federal justice systems and another in which the people I don’t like keep getting not indicted via all the things Fox News tells me they did wrong.
It’s like America has become a banana republic, as long as you do as I’ve done and refuse to look up the definition of “banana republic”.
And of course, you know who’s behind this travesty of justice, right? It’s so-called President Biden, who is both frail and senile and also a laser-sharp master at conducting witch hunts.
Sure, they’ll tell you the indictment came via a special counsel investigation, and that the federal special counsel statute keeps such investigations walled off from political influence.
But that’s complete nonsense. Unless we’re talking about special counsel John Durham, who was appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr while Trump was president and tasked with investigating the nefarious left-wing crimes committed in the Trump-Russia probe.
Durham was above reproach, and the fact that the New York Times reported he “charged no high-level F.B.I. or intelligence official with a crime and acknowledged in a footnote that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign did nothing prosecutable, either” is something I will ignore.
Current special counsel Jack Smith, on the other hand — he’s bad news. I know this because Trump has said repeatedly that Smith’s investigation is a witch hunt, and I’ve never known Trump to lie about anything.
Keep in mind, in 2016, Trump said: “I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law”.
So after he said that, you expect me to believe he didn’t protect classified information? Just because, according to the indictment, there’s a recording of him holding a classified document in his office at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and saying to two staff members and an interviewer: “See, as president I could have declassified it … Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret”.
You call that “damning evidence”. I call it, “What about Hunter Biden’s laptop?” Putting Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden in prison? Now that makes sense!
Now I can already hear all the libs out there whining and saying that if it was Biden or Hillary or Hunter getting indicted, I wouldn’t be saying a word about two-tiers of justice or the weaponization of the Department of Justice or anything like that.
Well, those whiners would be right, but the difference is I believe Biden and Hillary and Hunter are all guilty and should be locked up for life, whereas with Trump, I believe he is great and innocent and the best president America has ever known.
It’s like this: If Hillary got indicted for murder, I would say, “Yes, she is absolutely a murderer. Lock her up”.
But if in some outrageous scenario President Trump was indicted for murder just because he told a bunch of people that he committed a murder, I would say: “How dare you charge this man with murder when others in the U.S. Have not been charged with murder! There are clearly two tiers of justice, one in which my favorite president, who said he murdered someone, is charged with murder and one in which people who haven’t murdered are not charged with murder!”
And that, my liberal friends, makes perfect sense to me and my MAGA companions. So watch out. The Trump Train’s a comin’.
The U.S. constitution was wonderfully constructed, the Communist Manifesto proposed a wonderful ideal, the United Nations a noble attempt to put an end to war.
All of them at this point in civilization are in the trash can because of the aptly described ” log-rolling” politicians and the corrupt legal systems supporting them at every step of the way.
I’m no fan of Mr. Black for sure and his own position on matters of corporate/political morality are tainted by his own shady background (which doesn’t seem to bother him one whit).
But, you don’t have to like someone to agree with their opinions and he is absolutely spot-on with his evisceration of the compliant media and the fortress that is the upper level U.S. Justice system.
Access to either of these estates is virtually impossible for a person whose view of things is that there should be personal responsibility attached to the protection the Constitution affords.
Even if you’ve got unlimited funds at your disposal it means nothing if you go against the great weight of the State.
One day that constitution will have to be ditched and a new one drawn up, we just have to wait for a new Napoleon to show up.
I quite agree with William Corden’s overall take, save that I do not consider that the Communist Manifesto proposed a wonderful ideal, even if it could have been achieved without the intervening period of terror and mass murder under overwhelming state power. Although I recognize that Marx’s, and later Marxists’, most positive presentation holds some instinctive appeal, neither it nor its rationale represented anything like justice.
Graham, I maybe didn’t think through what I was saying about the Communist Manifesto. I should have said ” The proponents of the Communist Manifesto proposed what THEY thought was a wonderful ideal”
In actual fact it was just another theory of running the human race with no responsibility on the individual.
And from that issued forth such things as food stamps, getting your welfare cheque without having to leave the house, jobs for incompetents etc. There’s not enough ink in this computer to complete the list.
Conrad (Lapdog) Black is a shameless propagandist. His writings are full of distortions and omissions and he thinks he can live in his own reality.
While from a legal perspective Donald (The Demagogue) Trump is to be presumed innocent, from a realistic one the characterization of the evidence against him lies somewhere between “slam dunk” and “avalanche”. There are no prizes for guesing what Conrad’s tune would be if a Democrat president had knowingly carted boxes upon boxes of documents out from the White House and told other people he’d done so.
Like it or not, the United States of America is a democracy and the law is impartial and will run its course. Conrad’s scribblings aren’t good enough to wipe one’s behind with.
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“In the four years since, Fox viewers had become even more accustomed to flattery and less willing to hear news that challenged their expectations. Instead of understanding his narrow win in 2016 as the upset it was, they were told forecasters were going to be wrong again. Me serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years came as a terrible shock to their systems.”