by Conrad Black
There is already a very discernible pattern to the developing presidential election campaign, although there is a widespread inability or refusal to recognize it. The campaign to portray Donald Trump as a thug and a compulsive and recidivistic lawbreaker is not succeeding, while the gradual disclosure of the corruption of his enemies and in particular the Biden family, is accelerating and gaining momentum every week.
The only case against the 45th president that authentic criminal law experts who are political opponents of Trump but reasonable people, such as Alan Dershowitz, Andrew McCarthy, and Jonathan Turley, seem to take seriously are some of the counts in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.
I don’t profess to be qualified to judge the merits of each count, but I don’t think ex-presidents of the United States, given all their powers and prerogatives, can be convicted of crimes as a result of haggling about documents, and dilatory procedures should push the trial beyond the election anyway.
The country shows no disposition to decide the election on the basis of what Mr. Trump did with some documents that he had a right to possess and declassify and there is clearly a large and growing feeling that he is being persecuted by a corrupt and carefully calibrated partisan manipulation of the power to prosecute.
This is causing him to appear for the first time as a doughty underdog rather than, as his enemies have delighted in portraying him, and in which he has sometimes been unintentionally cooperative, a blustering bully. He wears this change well, and it is not an act.
On the other side, the phrases that Mr. Trump’s enemies so much enjoyed falsely applying to him, such as the “drip, drip, drip” of scandal causing them to claim that “the walls are closing in,” have for some time applied to the Bidens.
Candidate and President Biden’s endlessly repeated claims that he knew nothing of his son’s business dealings and never discussed business with him, have gradually been reformulated by facts adduced with excruciating difficulty to suggest that the then-vice president and his son each took a straight $5 million bribe from Ukraine’s Burisma Energy Company to withhold $1 billion of US assistance to Ukraine until the chief prosecutor in that country, Viktor Shokin, was dismissed.
That was as Mr. Shokin was on the verge (he now claims) of getting to grips in his investigation, with the Biden role with Burisma. Of course, the famous benefit of doubt which the press have generally withheld from Mr. Trump, must be granted to the Bidens, but the evidence to date is damaging.
It is reprehensible but understandable that those who toiled so furiously to vilify and defame Mr. Trump are extremely reluctant to awaken to the vulnerabilities of the president whom they elevated in his place. And it is also understandable that many people are disappointed and even incredulous that Mr. Trump might be the beneficiary of this startling exposé of the Bidens’ apparent licentiousness.
Mr. Trump does not enjoy a Lincolnian reputation for uprightness; he broke an agreement to preserve a historic facade in building Trump Tower, allegedly employed illegal Polish migrants at sub-union pay grades in the construction of it, and inflicted on the public a series of exercises in unutterable hucksterism, from the preposterous “Trump University,” to his health plan, which consisted of quarterly urinalyses and vitamin pills. It isn’t hard to see why many people would be reluctant to see Mr. Trump benefit from the deepening Biden legal quagmire.
Though the Republicans found the midterm election results last year a disappointment, the fact that they regained control of the House of Representatives by a very narrow margin is all that has really cracked the glacial cover-up of Biden influence-peddling in which the former attorney general, William Barr was complicit and which the current attorney general, Merrick Garland, has imposed on these apparent larcenies.
It is hard to see the so-called special prosecutor, the United States attorney in Delaware, David Weiss, as other than a patsy for the Bidens. He allowed the statute of limitations to expire on some offenses, and attempted to gain court approval of an outright whitewash of Hunter Biden. He pretends that he will be more aggressive as a special prosecutor than he was in his five years of inertia as U.S. attorney that preceded that designation.
Mr. Weiss’s notice of intent to indict Hunter Biden on the side-issue of denying on his application for a gun permit that he had a drug problem, looks like it is just a tokenistic effort to distract the public from the real issues: apparently naked bribes to the elder Mr. Biden.
The country will soon be seriously disconcerted not just by the cupidity of the first family but by the depth of the rot in the Justice Department. The tireless efforts and deluge of subpoenas from the House of Representatives oversight committee seems to have unearthed troubling findings in an FBI report in June 2020, which the FBI director, Christopher Wray, has desperately attempted to keep secret.
That report concluded that Hunter Biden and his father each received $5 million for the vice president’s intervention to dismiss Mr. Shokin, a matter Joe Biden subsequently boasted about as if it were a disinterested and triumphant promotion of integrity of government in Ukraine.
There is no reason to doubt the present trend will continue: damaging information about the Bidens will be dragged out, as in James Joyce’s famous description of a religious confession: “sluggish and filthy.” And the country, with varying degrees of reluctance, will conclude that Mr. Trump is being sandbagged by partisan accusers abusing their offices.
The Biden administration set out to destroy President Trump with spurious accusations, but is being undermined by the steady production of evidence of their own wrong-doing. The last stand of the Trump-haters is that both Messrs. Trump and Biden are too old and that both should go.
Having managed to elect Mr. Biden in place of Trump, they are appalled and embarrassed at the consequences and want to call the game a draw. Problem is that neither man is too old. Mr. Biden is clearly losing his faculties and Mr. Trump clearly is not.
Age, it turns out, is a substitute for more serious issues. One assumes that the Democratic powers who installed Mr. Biden will persuade him of the virtues of retirement, but whatever happens, the Democrats have cackled too loudly and too soon: they will soon be facing an uphill fight against an imperishable Donald Trump.
First published in the New York Sun.
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12 Responses
“The campaign to portray Donald Trump as a thug and a compulsive and recidivistic lawbreaker is not succeeding”
Never was a truer word said!
Americans like someone who stands up and keeps fighting. And whatever you think of his personality, Trump has had the entire establishment gunning for him for nearly 7 years; and is still standing!
All the sneering smearing, banning, misrepresenting, impeaching, and now crude “legal” moves to criminalize him are so obviously contrived that ever more people not only no longer buy the arguments, but are reinforced in their belief that he is being unjustly persecuted. Also clear, as Mr Black points out, is that the sordid stench of corruption seeping out from our ruling class is underlining another unpleasant truth: these people most emphatically do not govern in the interests of all Americans.
For the Trump haters, the wonderful irony in all this is that Trump was right about so many things.
For example:
– There is a serious crisis on the southern border
– Working people battered by the effects of globalism do deserve opportunities; and support from US businesses.
– Endless wars which accomplish nothing impoverish Americans and enrich a handful of corporate parasites & their political fixers. The latest polls on Ukraine bear this out.
– There never was no “Russia collusion”. It was BS from the start, as Trump pointed out!
– The notion that Jan 6 was an “insurrection” is a barbaric fantasy. It’s crystal clear that key facts are still being withheld from the public: most importantly about how many agent provocateurs (FBI & probably others) were present at the protest; and why the security tapes are still being withheld from the public after a brief airing.
– The Hunter Biden laptop was legitimate, not “Russian disinformation”! And smothering it almost certainly cost Trump the election.
– Hillary Clinton & much of the ruling class are themselves “election deniers”
– Joe Biden was never a “transformative” figure “like FDR”. He’s just a doddering old crook, so cognitively deficient now that he simply won’t make the starting line for 2024.
The biggest loser for the Democrats has been the loss of public trust in the mainstream media, almost all of which has become a mere propaganda outlet for “the party”. Their systematic lying (direct or by omission) about Trump and covid has utterly destroyed public trust in the fourth estate. It’s much worse than that though. We now know that in many cases the media active conspired with the DP & govt officials to smear and criminalize Trump. Take just one instance, the long “Russia collusion”: this was nothing less than an elaborately fabricated disinformation campaign involved many high-level officials who have not suffered any consequences. The ray of sunshine in all this is that the MSM does become “legacy”. The CNNs and MSNBCs and NYTs of this world are beyond redemption.
And, irony of ironies, it turns out that the ordinary citizen today has a better chance of getting a few nuggets of truth from a foul-mouthed talk show host than the corporate media and the entire political class.
TRUMP 2024!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yep. At the very least the call has to be “Anyone but Biden”.
Of course the Democratic Party bench is empty: all they have are diversity hires, rabble rousers and senile octogenarians. And even amongst the dimmest in the DNC the penny seems to have dropped that the half-wit vice-president is, well, a half-wit! So realistically only Trump or RFK Jr.(a long shot) will be able to stop the US from sliding into a full-blown banana republic. Both these gents are being continually smeared (& worse in the case of Trump) and censored which is a good indicator that the above assessment is correct.
The gender, race, crime and open border insanity is there for all to see. But what is noticeable now is that in spite of all the censorship & the refusal of the captured mainstream media to perform their most basic function of holding the government to account, the wider public is becoming aware of the extent of corruption and criminality within the Biden regime. They have seen too, that there are zero consequences for those high-ranking officials (and lesser apparatchiks) provably responsible for egregious crimes such as election interference (the co-ordinated operation to smother the Hunter Biden laptop), weaponization of government agencies for partisan political gain (the Russia collusion hoax) and of course good old graft (the influence peddling of the Biden crime family operations).
Of course there ought to be consequences for these crimes. And therein lies the danger. The powers that be have much to lose were a Trump or RFK Jr. administration to take over. So far, we have only had glimpses of the scale of corruption. But if the whole can of worms was opened for all to see, public anger could well boil over with unpredictable consequences. Hence the desperate actions of the Biden administration to criminalize Trump and mercilessly smear & discredit RFK Jr (theoretically ‘one of their own’ but with an integrity and honesty beyond the comprehension of the current crop of DP leaders).
How much further will the regime go? Are we to suffer some new generated “crisis”: war, “pandemic” or some other “emergency” to hinder the 2024 election? Is assassination an option?
I would not bet on them moving gracefully off the stage as happens in a healthy democracy. “Our democracy” has different rules.
I am not convinced that any presidential right to declassify executive branch information, which I am prepared to consider does or should exist for the only constitutionally empowered executive officer of the government, should nevertheless be able to be inferred after the fact by his mere possession of them.
There should have to be a procedure for recording and marking documents declassified by presidential order.
On the other hand, at this point were more than a generation into these kinds of scandals and nobody seemed to care this much about them before, Democrats in particular cavalierly dismissing them. Never mind email servers- Did I miss the revelations about what was in Sandy Berger’s pants?
Sure, dude. It’s totally honest to compare someone sneaking five copies of a report in his socks (for which he received a criminal conviction AND a disbarment) with the President of the United States carting enough boxes of top secret documents out of the White House to , then spending months alternately refusing requests to give them back, denying he ever took anything, and crying persecution. Totally, without a doubt, an intelligent and honest comparison to make.
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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.”
Wouldn’t pay too much attention to the slander below Graham.
“Koolaid” is a well-known pedlar of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories on these pages.
He’s a troll tasked with trashing anything remotely positive about Trump. He has an extremely limited imagination: has been pasting that same old quote for years; and obviously possesses zero wit. Not surprisingly, he exhibits classic TDS symptoms: he believes Trump is a Russian agent, the Biden laptop is Russian disinformation, Trump’s wife hid nuclear secrets in her underwear and so on. All rather sad.
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
Yea, and the troll doth speak. And righteously doth he condemeth all who would stray from his only true cult
..
Let’s see if a little humour can help you, Koolaid.
…
There was an old troll called Koolaid
Whose day was simply not made
Till the Trump on his brain
Triggered the endless refrain
Trump Trump Trump and Trump yet again!
Lol. The real laugh here is the follower of a personality cult calling other people cult like. Your comments are otherwise devoid of a single intelligent idea and the deafening silence you hear in future will be the sound of anybody with a brain disregarding the angry ravings of a confused moron
Have a nice day!
Well, humour was worth a try but clearly it didn’t work; just finished wiping the spittle away!
OK … this looks serious. We need to be careful, because TDS is often terminal.
BUT … the good news is that with a sympathetic and sensitive shrink it CAN be cured.
I have to tell you that your instant dismissal of anyone who disagrees with your violent anti-Trump rhetoric as a “Trump supporter/follower” or “MAGA extremist” combined with your total lack of humour are classic signs of chronic TDS.
Let me try and educate you a little. First of all, I am not a “Trump follower”. I think the man’s a bit of a creep. But I do understand that he is a consequence, not the cause, of the state of the US since the great recession of 2007/8. I also acknowledge hard facts, chief of which is that in spite of the fact that Trump has been systematically smeared and misrepresented for well nigh 6 years, at least half the country still supports him. It is also true that Trump at least had some concrete policies, and also, as I point out above, has been proved correct about many issues of the day.
The key point is that the response to Trump’s election in 2016 was beyond infantile. It said a whole lot more about the political class than Trump himself. Supposedly intelligent people hooked on to wild conspiracy theories, promoted absurd lies & spewed out vicious invective against Trump & anyone perceived to be in his orbit. Hysteria reigned supreme & “Hate” took on a new meaning. These people also supported violent street protests: the current vice-president is on record literally inciting violence. They simply could not accept that Trump had popular support.
To paraphrase your quote:
For years, CNN, MSNBC and other corporate media viewers had become ever more accustomed to flattery and less willing to hear news that challenged their expectations. Instead of trying to understand why Trump appeared to be so popular they were told there was NO way Hillary Clinton could lose. Having been spoon-fed the idea that Clinton would win by a landslide it came as a terrible shock to their systems when Trump won. The result was a colossal, collective hissy fit which lasted for more than 4 years. Hysterical reactions were sprayed across the US by corporate media and prominent public figures: voting had been rigged, the election was stolen, Trump was an illegitimate president, Russian hacked voting machines and so on.
Once the affliction took hold, TDS spread throughout the ruling democratic party so that today their only policy seems to be “blame Trump” for everything. The corporate media, already a mere DP propaganda tool, has played along. It’s utter nonsense of course: Trump is not responsible for Biden family corruption, inflation, mass illegal immigration, soaring crime, gender insanity and all the other unpleasant consequences of DP rule; he also doesn’t use taxpayer money to stage disinformation hoaxes with intelligence officials or engage in kangaroo lawfare against his opponents.
So if people turn to him as the least bad option who can blame them? I suspect many will back RFK Jr. too.
Nothing to see here but more of Conrad’s usual wishful thinking. He thinks if he shouts loud enough it will make the serious legal trouble his master is in (ninety-one charges across four criminal indictments) go away. It won’t, the law will take its course.
_________________________
“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.”