By Victor Davis Hanson
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.
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.
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.
The entire set of trials against Donald Trump are lawfare designed to hurt his candidacy and they, like all the machinations of the devilish left, are failing to hurt him.
In fact, they have surprisingly, helped him!
But the idea that one or more of them are based on “laws” that were created just to “get Trump,” is a Bill of Attainder.
And that was something so bad the original Founders put it in the body of the US Constitution.
See:
Article I, Section 9, Clause 3
They didn’t need to be prodded by states saying more rights were needed for them to sign on.
In the pre-Revolutionary War age of America, the Brits commonly used bills of attainders to “get” any persons they wanted out of the political or even business arena.
Adding to the weight that some of these really are Bills of Attainders, one of the creators of one of these “charges” practically said so when he was accused under his same “law” he himself had helped write!
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF DEMOCRATS. THE DEMOCRAT HOUSE CAME CRASHING DOWN,MAKING LOUD CRASHING SOUND,IT FELL INTO THE BAY,AND WASHED BRAGG AND SOROS AWAY,CLEAN A MESS UP,YOU WILL SEE,AND WASHED THE UN,OUT TO SEA
By their very nature they had to be illegal and over the top. While it’s cost Trump millions to fight them, they’ve all been shown to be nothing but what they were suspected of being: fascist lawfare. The Democrats absolutely f**ked themselves right up their own asses with their overt trampling of the Constitution and disregard for truth, justice, due process and an individual’s rights. Once again, their refusal to see outside their gated, protected, rarified world has cost them dearly.
All they have left is election fraud.