New York Sun, Aug. 9, 2022
The conduct of the Justice Department and the FBI in raiding President Trump’s home at Palm Beach on Aug. 8 must rank as among the most dangerous assaults upon the rule of law in the United States since what President Lincoln referred to as an “insurrection” (with a legal precision that has eluded the mountebanks who have so described the events of January 6, 2021).
The New York Times, an unofficial mouthpiece of the regime, disclosed that the raid was caused by a dispute over archives, and their reporter Maggie Haberman conveniently claims to have evidence about Mr. Trump flushing unspecified documents down a White House toilet.
Mr. Trump has been cooperating on this matter, per custom. Archives, after all, have been subject of friction with all former presidents (Richard Nixon’s literary executors litigated successfully over his papers for years after he died 20 years after he retired as president).
Any such complaint should have been civilly litigated. The correct procedure is a subpoena; a warrant is justified only where there is reason to believe that exigible material is apt to be destroyed imminently — impossible given that Mr. Trump was at New York and the records were safely locked up in his Florida home, and the FBI had already gone through the same papers extensively.
It was also improper for the 30 agents to break into the ex-president’s safe. Mr. Trump had been entirely cooperative. If there were any complaint that plausibly justified so immensely sensitive and explosive a step, it should have been referred to a special counsel to give the current partisan attack dog-attorney general, Merrick Garland, a patina of impartiality.
This is the least that should have been done after the years of horrifying and recidivistic partisan improprieties of the Justice Department and the FBI that have poisoned American public life and vaporized the confidence the nation and the world formerly had in the integrity of the American legal system.
It is impossible not to fear the worst, given that dishonest officials within the Justice Department and the FBI filed false affidavits to enable illegal wiretaps on the Trump campaign in 2016 and allowed to pass almost without serious remonstrance Secretary Clinton’s destruction of 33,000 emails that were under subpoena.
And they were complicit in representing reports about Hunter Biden’s corrupt practices in which his father was implicated as “Russian disinformation,” even though they had already been the subject of a grand jury investigation for a year, and enabled the Russian-collusion fraud and the falsehood that Trump had acquiesced in Russian engagement of bounty-killers against American military personnel in the Middle East.
Let’s not forget that President Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, smuggled classified documents out of the National Archives “in his socks and under his pants,” according to a congressional staff report. His penalty was a fine and community service.
The Trump-hating FBI director, James Comey, improperly removed a memo that was public property. There was no action against him.
As there was no danger of imminent destruction of anything, there was no excuse for a warrant, especially one executed with such a spectacular excess of force and drama against so eminent a target. Donald Trump was president when the material was moved to Palm Beach from the White House, and the president has the ultimate authority over classified documents.
This is apparently an effort to mouse-trap Mr. Trump in a records violation which might be used to disqualify him from holding a public office again. More than that, it appears to be a lawless effort to strangle the entire democratic process.
No sane person can imagine that this invasion of the former and probable future-president’s home was justified or executed with an acceptable motive.
It is an astounding demonstration of the unutterable arrogance and moral bankruptcy of the unholy coalition of rabid Democrats and Never Trumpers. In the 2020 campaign, when Joe Biden was served softball questions about his and his son’s dubious activities in Ukraine, his response was that Mr. Trump was under investigation and had no right to have the waters muddied by any questions about the Bidens’ probity.
The Democrats and the Fifth Column of anti-Trump nominal Republicans are now shaking in their shoes as Trump supporters reassert his control of the Republican Party and lead the polls toward reelection. Mr. Garland harasses parents who express reasonable opinions about school curriculum and does nothing to help reduce the skyrocketing crime rate.
FBI director Christopher Wray put in a shabby and contemptibly evasive appearance before a congressional committee two weeks ago, and then left early in order to take a government airplane to a vacation in the Adirondacks.
The disgraced former deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, a public liar, appeared on CNN, an unofficial television organ of the corrupt Biden Gong Show, and suggested the fact that a Democratic judge on the federal bench issued this warrant proves that Trump is a criminal.
The American criminal legal system has long since been exposed as completely rotten. The federal criminal conviction rate is 98%, 95% without trial.
Ironically, George Soros had some reason in his hostility to American prosecutors but he made the grave error of promoting soft treatment of repeat violent offenders, instead of lessening penalties against nonviolent first-time offenders, which would be sensible and would be supported. Now the country has omnipotent prosecutors in a stacked system that is led by a seedy claque of Democratic Party Torquemadas.
There is a silver lining in this storm cloud. The Trump-haters must finally have aroused the irrepressible puritanical conscience of America. Obscured and anesthetized though it often is by the shabby venality of much of the system, uneasy though many Americans are about Donald Trump as president, this is an affront to every American who has any desire for an impartially just society.
The Democrats are gambling everything on their ability, with the choreographed hallelujah chorus of their lickspittles in the national political press, to give the righteous orgy of mindless Trump-hate one more try. Swaddled in their threadbare righteousness, they have forced the country to choose between a sleazy, incompetent, putschist regime, propped up by the cabal of the national political press, and the Constitution and due process.
They have made Trump, with all his infelicities, the candidate of lawful democracy. On Monday night, Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said the Mar-a-Lago police raid was entirely appropriate and then said that we don’t yet know the facts; Republican Senate leader turned Mephistophelean Never-Trumper Mitch McConnell was silent, effectively complicit.
The choice will be clear: the great Democratic Party has descended to mere thuggery. If this disgrace is as malodorous as it now seems, Mr. Trump make a broad appeal to protect the integrity of the system and reject the criminalization of policy differences.
The Republicans should sweep the midterms, and should not hesitate to use the power of impeachment against those who are again attempting a pre-emptive coup d’etat. Each side accuses the other of lawlessness; this is the final escalation and Mr. Trump wins.
Conrad Black is an essayist, former newspaper publisher, and author of ten books, including three on Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. Follow him on Twitter @ConradMBlack. Read Conrad Black's Reports — More Here.
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