Partisan Drive To Indict Trump Will Backfire on Democrats

As with all intolerable conditions, this desperate showdown of irreconcilable political forces, some of which have unprecedentedly corrupted the justice system, is bound to explode.

by Conrad Black

Never in the nearly 70 years that I have followed American presidential politics have they been so nasty, so awash in hypocrisy, so poorly served by an intellectually and morally bankrupt national political press, and so close to breaking down completely because of the pervasive sleaze that has tainted the entire system.

Any serious examination of the 2020 election shows that where 50,000 flipped ballots in Pennsylvania and any two of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin would have given the election to President Trump, the existence of millions of unsolicited, unverifiable, ballots imprecisely circulated and largely cast in unsupervised drop boxes out of hours, it is impossible to determine which candidate was the real winner, though the question is now academic.

This is the basic grievance of the Trump campaign over the 2020 election result. That complaint is weakened by the fact that although Mr. Trump early warned of the dangers of ballot harvesting, he did not take the prompt necessary measures to challenge changes to voting and vote counting rules that were enacted in the swing states other than, as the Constitution requires, by the action of the state legislatures. The fact that it was such a dubious election result justifies the widespread anger of many of the 75 million Trump voters.

All of the principal allegations of illegal conduct by Mr. Trump’s campaign are just as much piffle as the criminally confected Trump-Russia collusion fraud and the spurious Zelensky telephone call impeachment trial. There is almost no chance that Mr. Trump or President Biden violated the Espionage Act or that Mr. Trump violated any significant statute in the retention of classified documents and the FBI raid on his Florida home, including the prurient march through Melania’s dressing room was a politically ordered hit job by Attorney General Garland, on the orders of the Democratic Party managers.

The director of the FBI, and no one’s idea of a Mr. Clean super-sleuth, Christopher Wray, told a committee of the Congress shortly after January 6, 2021, there was no evidence connecting the hooligans who broke laws at the Capitol with the Trump campaign. The failure of prosecutors to wring anything inculpatory to the Trump campaign out of the hundreds of people that they have detained for years uncharged and frequently in abominable conditions over the January 6 trespass at the Capitol, speaks for itself.

If Mr. Trump had suggested so much as breaking a window it would have led to a star-spangled prosecution by now. As for the Georgia election, the governor and the secretary of that state knew that they blew it when they made their shameful settlement with Stacey Abrams’ spurious lawsuit and the Democrats tried to cover their skulduggery with all the fatuities about ballot verification being a return to Jim Crow if not slavery itself. The investigation of Mr. Trump in Georgia, as the remarks of the bigoted grand jury forewoman confirmed, is just another mudslinging operation as the Democrats excavate to new lows of corruption and cynicism in the criminalization of election campaigns.

Orthodox Republicans who were reasonably well disposed to Trump but would prefer a change, speak wistfully of bringing back gentlemanly politics. Improprieties in the intelligence services and the FBI to try to derail the 2016 election, and unprecedented smear campaigns and pseudo-legal harassments of an incumbent president to make it impossible for him to function, one of the dodgiest elections in the country’s history, and now the scattergun attempt to violate the guardrail rule as old as the Republic that former presidents are not indicted, especially when they are front-running candidates for reelection, while the incumbents have obviously been conducting an influence-peddling operation of at best questionable legality for many years and on a grand scale, make all of this nostalgia completely irrelevant.

Is there anyone with an IQ in triple figures above the age of six in America who does not understand that the system is on the verge of doing potentially mortal damage to itself? Secretary of State Clinton got away Scot-free with destroying 33,000 subpoenaed emails and bankrolling the ultimate dirty tricks campaign in American history with the complicity of senior officials of the intelligence agencies and the FBI. The Bidens have had their hands in the till of international influence-vending up to the shoulder for decades and the most redundant United States attorney in the country, in the pocket borough of Delaware, just sits on it.

As with all intolerable conditions, this desperate showdown of irreconcilable political forces, some of which have unprecedentedly corrupted the justice system, in American history or in the modern history of any important democracies, is bound to explode. If corrupt Democratic prosecutors attack Mr. Trump with no evidence and no apparent crime, as Alvin Bragg was about to do in New York last week, it will reelect him.

The charade in New York is a stale-dated and a dubious charge based on a stretch of another weak charge, all of it relying on the testimony of a convicted and disbarred perjurer. Mar-a-Lago, January 6 and the Georgia election, legally, as they concern Mr. Trump are no stronger. While it is a notorious legal fact that New York City and Washington D.C. jurors will convict any Republican of anything on no evidence, even in the District of Columbia there are enough Republicans to prevent the emergence of the required unanimous jury to bring down a conviction on this bunk. It is all the final, most malodorous and most despicable vapor of Trump hate.

Almost none of the commentators make any sense. The moral outcasts of the commentariat are those proclaimed Republicans who made demiurgic efforts to destroy Mr. Trump while he was in office and to elect Mr. Biden, and now to apologize for Mr. Biden and attempt to escape in the lifeboat of the DeSantis campaign. Yet Governor DeSantis flunked the litmus test of Republican solidarity behind Mr. Trump when he was being persecuted by the Manhattan district attorney, and has waffled and wobbled over Ukraine in a way that has made him appear over his head. The Republicans have largely rallied to Trump in the face of the continued spurious legal harassment and he has opened up a wide lead on Mr. DeSantis.

However the palsied American political press try to disguise the fact, the current administration is a disaster. Inflation; workforce shrinkage; the flood of migrants across the southern border among whom are smuggled tons of fentanyl, from which more Americans die every year than in all of the country’s wars since 1945; the green terror and the war on oil; the imminent arrival of Iran as a nuclear power to join North Korea; the abandonment of $85 billion of modern military hardware to the Taliban; skyrocketing crime rates and collapsed education standards; will not be defensible in the elections next year.

As of now Mr. Trump is the next president, whatever the evasive and outrageous measures to which crooked prosecutors and the Democratic sorcerers may be reduced. And no, what is needed is not a return to the tranquil and gentlemanly days of General Eisenhower, or even President Reagan. What is needed is someone to amputate the gangrene at Washington. All the frenzied skulduggery of his enemies just brings Mr. Trump closer to the office from which he was very questionably evicted.

First published in the New York Sun.