Yet another thing here in the dying days of the Biden administration.
There has been a lot of ink spilled over the last few years regarding the Biden administration’s unprecedented lawfare campaign against Trump. However we need to remember that it wasn’t just the Biden administration launching these attacks, but Democrats throughout the country
There was Alvin Bragg’s prosecution in Manhattan. There was Fani Willis’s prosecution in Fulton County. Bragg’s case secured some convictions, but it is doubtful those will survive on appeal. Willis’s case has largely collapsed over ethics.
Before we sweep those cases into the dustbin of history, we need to look again at what the Democrats have been doing the past two years is see it as a larger conspiracy against one of key foundations of a republic governed by law. That is the active coordination between the Biden administration and the local prosecutions.
The fact that the various prosecutions were historic is well-trodden ground, but we need to remind ourselves that we are dealing with the unprecedented prosecutions of not only a former president but the man who was running to unseat an incumbent of the same party as the local and federal prosecutors. When you attempt things like this, your case better be clean and tight.
Those local cases were anything but clean and tight.
The Bragg and Willis cases were certainly “novel.” Bragg’s case centered around the supposed falsification of business records, which are misdemeanors under New York state law, and whose statute of limitations had long since expired. Bragg resurrected these misdemeanors by attaching them to felonies dealing with campaign finance, which come under federal law. To call Bragg’s novel case a “Frankenstein” prosecution understates its connection to both the horror genre and to monsters everywhere.
Willis’s case was centered on a novel and complex interpretation of RICO statutes. She secured indictments against Trump and 18 others alleging they were engaged in election racketeering based on their actions to contest the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
Willis’s appointed Nathan Wade to be the special prosecutor on the case. That appointment was problematic from the start given Wade’s lack of experience in high-level cases. Then the story broke that he had been romantically involved with Willis before she hired him. However there is more to Nathan Wade than simply a forbidden love worthy of a Harlequin romance novel (“Love Trumps the Law.”)
The House Judiciary Committee investigated Nathan Wade’s involvement with Willis. During testimony before the Committee this past October, Wade admitted that he had met with Biden administration staff, a fact supported by his billing records. Wade stated that he had no specific memory of those meetings.
Sure he doesn’t
As for the Bragg case, there was the curious and as of yet unexplained resignation of the number three man at the US Department of Justice (DOJ), Matthew Colangelo, in order to join Alvin Bragg’s prosecution. Keep in mind that DOJ had passed on prosecuting Trump on the election financing allegations because it didn’t believe it had a case. Yet one of the department’s top political appointees just decided on his own to leave that prestigious position in order to prosecute that Frankenstein, long-shot of case?
Sure he did.
If you believe both those stories then you probably believe that Joe Biden was sharp as a tack as president and that all those foreigners paid Hunter millions of dollars because he was a brilliant businessman
Why does that matter? You can write Bragg and Willis off as abusive prosecutors who were looking, as with many other district attorneys, to make a name for themselves with a high-profile case. However the unprecedented nature of prosecuting Donald Trump, the ridiculous nature of their cases, and their connections with the Biden administration point to something darker.
The Biden administration was going to find a way to prosecute Donald Trump. However it had two fundamental problems, both of perception. The first was that the cases it had selected, federal documents and Jan. 6, were sketchy. As we later found out Biden was himself vulnerable on documents and for most Americans a president keeping documents from his administration borders on stealing office supplies, a crime to be sure but hardly the precedent for a history-making prosecution. Jan. 6? Most Americans are concerned about election cheating and the report of the Jan. 6 Committee, which provided the initial basis for the indictments, was problematic to say the least
The second is that the Biden administration prosecuting a once and future political opponent is something you find in a Third World country, not America.
Having other state or local jurisdictions prosecute Donald Trump would solve both of these problems. It would create a public perception that was a pervasive pattern to Trump’s “lawlessness” and deflect criticism that any single prosecution was either political or ill-founded. Both Willis’s and Bragg’s prosecutions in part “credibility-washed” the federal ones of political taint; DOJ could deflect criticism by pointing to Manhattan and Fulton County.
The fact that there existed coordination between those various prosecutions is evidence of a much larger conspiracy, one more redolent of Stalin’s Russia and that needs to be further explored. I look forward to what Wade, Colangelo, Bragg, and Willis have to say on the matter.
Hopefully Jim Jordan and the Judicial Committee will keep up the pursuit to find the answers.