Knowledge is power. and sometimes the lack of knowledge is a different kind of power.
This comes to mind because of the indictment of former President Donald Trump.
He was indicted by a federal grand jury in Florida in a matter which began considerably farther north, in Washington, D.C., and New York City.
This is the latest part of a roughly seven-year crusade against Trump by a powerful alliance of "progressives" in the media and in government.
It includes the so-called "Russia collusion" case, a so-called "dossier" which alleged shockingly indiscreet behavior by Trump while on a trip to Russia, and hints of bribes paid to Trump and his colleagues, which were so nebulous that basically we never learned more than swirling fog banks of character assassination.
As it turned out, there was no substance to this evil campaign.
That is, there was no "Russia collusion" of any kind that could be discerned at law.
There was no scurrilous adventure in Moscow by Trump.
There was no serious misconduct of any kind by the Trump administration.
There was just an endless caravan of smears against a man far more sinned against than sinning. The people who hated Trump had to come up with something diff erent to jam his gears and the gears of the entire conservative renaissance in America that he represented.
And they did.
They took a series of laws meant to apply to persons and acts completely different from the Trump world and make them seem to apply to him and his world.
Let’s look at history: Between 1914 and 1918, much of the industrialized world was engaged in the bloodiest war in history — World War I.
The United States tried to stay neutral, although our natural sympathies lay with the allies, namely, Britain and France.
The United States did not enter the fighting until 1917.
But before that, we were immense suppliers of arms, machinery, oil, steel, wheat, corn, beef, pork, beans, and everything else that a modern country needs.
We supplied these at a rate of about 100 to 1 to the allies.
The Germans did not like it.
They sent out saboteurs from the immense German-American population in the U.S., and even from the German Embassy itself, to blow up American arms depots.
Some of the results were breathtakingly huge.
They reported to the Kaiser Wilhelm what U.S. arms manufacturing abilities were.
They had agents in what was then called the Department of War to report on troop dispositions to Europe.
These were of great use to Germany.
When the U.S. entered the fighting, Congress enacted laws to crack-down on government workers taking home defense-related documents from their offices.
They did not just make it a crime to be caught spying or taking home defense-related documents in a briefcase.
They made it a crime to possess any documents related to defense whether you were still in the government or not.
They wanted to cast the widest possible net.
They aimed to scare the daylights out of anyone even possibly helping Germany or its ally, Austria. They were aimed at helping our own beloved U.S. in wartime.
They were aimed at stopping actual spies and/or saboteurs in wartime.
Time passed.
World War I was won and done with.
Then came the far worse menace of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, followed by the Cold War. We still had to protect our secrets from enemy spies.
The goal was protection in time of war. It was not to protect us from careless civil servants.
The laws were meant to protect us from people planting bombs at ports or passing atomic secrets to Russia. They certainly were not aimed at sloppy or incompetent workers at the White House.
They were aimed at protecting our beloved United States from the KGB or the Abwehr, not from incompetent file clerks or a chief executive unaccustomed to wartime regulation.
But somehow, now these laws have been twisted around to become implements of political warfare. Laws aimed at the KGB are now being used to destroy the Republican Party.
This is dangerous stuff, to put it mildly. A whole structure of laws aimed at fighting enemy espionage is now at work to demolish the two-party system.
The criminal law system is in use to wreck the free society in peacetime.
Wake up, America.
The enemy is not at the gates.
The enemy is inside the gates.
Twisting the Law on Trump The people who hated Trump had to come up with something different to jam his gears and the gears of the entire conservative renaissance in America that he represented.
Ben Stein is a writer, an actor, and a lawyer who served as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration as the Watergate scandal unfolded. He began his unlikely road to stardom when director John Hughes hired him as the numbingly dull economics teacher in the urban comedy, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Read more more reports from Ben Stein — Click Here Now.
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