Photo: AFP
It’s never happened before because we’ve never been this crooked before.
We, not him. This isn’t really about Trump, it’s about the betrayal of the American system and our most basic assumptions of justice.
Not since the Alien and Sedition Acts has criminal prosecution been used as a tool of political vengeance and governmental oppression.
But here we are.
Last night, in the run-up to spring break, Easter and Passover, word leaked that Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, had secured a grand jury indictment against Donald Trump, thereby commencing the first-ever criminal prosecution of a former president of the United States.
The base charge seems to be a misdemeanor, inaccurately reporting a business expenditure.
The Democrat-controlled United States Department of Justice had looked at the same incident and decided not to pursue charges. Alvin Bragg’s predecessor, Democrat Cy Vance Jr., looked at the same incident and decided not to pursue charges.
That’s because they looked through the lens of law.
Alvin Bragg looks through the lens of politics.
That’s why, when he came into office, he directed his staff of New York City prosecutors not to bring criminal prosecutions against people arrested for selling marijuana, trespassing, resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration, prostitution or fare jumping.
The legislatures of both the state and the city had criminalized all of those behaviors, meaning that the elected representatives of the people had defined them as crimes, determined their gravity and assigned sentencing ranges.
And Alvin Bragg chose to ignore that.
He chose to ignore rule of law. He put himself above the law.
Because of his politics.
One of a nationwide wave of George Soros prosecutors – something more than a million Soros dollars seem to have been sent to support the Alvin Bragg campaign – engaging in prosecutorial nullification and waging an inside war against the criminal justice system.
Alvin Bragg isn’t administering the people’s law, he is doing his party’s business.
And so it is that he has indicted Donald Trump.
Though as yet unsealed, the indictment presumably relates to a misdemeanor offense involving business documents. That charge, under New York law, can be raised to a felony if the misdemeanor was committed to further some other criminal act.
If that criminal act is avoiding election finance reporting, a federal offense, Alvin Bragg will have to argue – as has almost never happened previously – that the state charge bumps up because of a federal violation which he, the Manhattan district attorney, can’t prosecute. That’s a legal stretch. If the criminal act furthered by the misdemeanor conduct was a violation of state law, it will have to involve an allegation that has not yet surfaced publicly.
That’s what the law says, and used to be prosecutors had to go by what the law said.
But none of this matters. What this prosecution seeks to do is gin up partisanship and feed the blood lust of pissed-off progressives. They hate Trump, they want him destroyed, and anything that does that is good with them. In another day they’d be outside the Bastille shouting, “Off with their heads!”
This is the blood sport of our day, and it is the destruction of our nation.
Not that Trump matters, but rule of law does. Integrity of the criminal justice system matters, and Democrats seem intent on destroying that. They destroy public confidence in our court system by telling their supporters that it is systemic racism; they destroy public confidence in our court system among opponents by using it for political purposes.
They use it for insurrection.
Because that’s what this is. When you use governmental power to advance political interests, and you violate or bastardize the law to do so, you are engaged in open rebellion against rule of law and the democratic processes that establish that law. When the power of government is used to persecute those out of power and to aggrandize those in power, you have left the lofty heights of American purpose and waded into the swamp of self-serving oppression.
Donald Trump may be guilty of many things, but he is not guilty of this.
He is the victim of this.
Far more importantly, all the rest of us are the victim of this. Not because we are Republicans, but because we are Americans – and our nation has been diminished and endangered by this first-ever use of the criminal courts for political score-settling against a former president and his supporters.
It’s never happened before because we’ve never been this crooked before. We’ve never strayed this far from our commitment to fair play, due process and constitutional principle.
This is what the Democrats call being “progressive.”