The Proper Trump Indictment We’ve Been Waiting For
Thoughts and Feelings in the Presence of the Long-Awaited Real Thing
“Normally, when there is spillage of classified material—and such events are common, including during presidential transitions—it’s treated much like the spillage of toxic waste: Even if it’s an accident, everyone involved must cooperate to find the source of the spill, evaluate the amount of danger, and contain and clean the area. What Trump has already admitted to doing—taking classified documents and then defying the U.S. government’s repeated demands to return them—is like driving off with a truckload of toxic chemicals, splashing them around, and then, when the guys in the hazmat suits show up, telling them he had every right to dump out the barrels on his own property and that they can go take a hike.” — Tom Nichols in a newsletter The Atlantic
“Just as paranoiacs sometimes have enemies, people obsessively pursued for alleged violations of the law by their political opponents sometimes commit criminal offenses.” — Editors, “The Trump Indictment is Damning” ~ National Review
I hope that in my recent dismissals and bashings of Alvin Bragg, I haven’t misled anyone to believe I wouldn’t support a Trump indictment of some kind. Please don’t confuse me with the conservatives who seem to be against Trump facing any accountability for any of the laws he has broken. In a recent newsletter, “They Just Don’t Care,” Jonah Goldberg mocks the craven political calculation of Trump’s challengers for the Republican nomination,
“All of these people—who want to be president of the United States of America—are delegitimizing the government they want to run for the benefit of someone none of them think should be president. They are saying that the rule of law either doesn’t exist in the country they profess to love or that it should be suspended for the benefit of their frickin’ primary opponent.
And what is their evidence that this is all so illegitimate? The mere fact that Trump is being charged with a crime—any crime. They don’t defend his actual actions. (I mean, JD Vance does, but that’s a whole different crock.) They start from the rhetorical and political premise that all of the blame lies with Trump’s accusers as if he never brings anything to the table.”
But I say all the conservatives, who would seem pathologically to desire to side with Trump against the deep state, regardless of whatever he does wrong, either from sheer hatred of Joe Biden, the arguable but specious double standards of the FBI and the DOJ, or both such unaccountable federal elites and the Democratic party as a whole; because besides all the rightwing pundits online, and the ship of Republican fools he’s running against in 2024, even the Wall Street Journal editorial board is siding with Trump now.
How the Journal Let Me Down
Since usually I defer to their authority as a soundboard for empirical argument and principled viewpoint, in upholding all my neoliberal ideals, the rule of law, small government, property rights, individual rights, activist foreign policy & c., I took disgruntled exception to the weakest opinion column I have ever read from the editorialists this weekend, urging prosecutorial discretion if not restraint, mostly over the optics of the indictment, making a series of false equivalencies and straw man arguments, not testifying to or openly supporting Trump’s innocence, but waxing to the effect that, at any rate, this indictment was unwise or misguided, and that perhaps it fits into a broader, darker pattern of government overreach in going after unlikable figures and everyone who threatens the status quo. First they dwell on the Biden DOJ dynamic—
“Special counsel Jack Smith announced the indictment in a brief statement on Friday. But no one should be fooled: This is Attorney General Merrick Garland’s responsibility. Mr. Garland appointed Mr. Smith to provide political cover, but Mr. Garland, who reports to Mr. Biden, has the authority to overrule a special counsel’s recommendation. Americans will inevitably see this as a Garland-Biden indictment, and they are right to think so.”
This strikes me as a stupid and a hypocritical thing to get hung up on. When the WSJ editorial board shit themselves and had an aneurysm over the “Durham Report,” as I remember, they didn’t waste any time brooding over whether the fact that John Durham was appointed by Barr who answered to Trump, maligned Durham’s Special Counsel. So by this standard, if Garland should perhaps toss Jack Smith’s recommendation, then would you say that, if John Durham wanted to prosecute Hillary Clinton or the FBI and he had a case, should he avoid doing so, because it would have been Trump’s justice department?
Probably not.
Then they say that charging Trump with violating the Espionage Act for the willful retention of the documents is dubious, because the Presidential Records Act
“…allows a President access to documents, both classified and unclassified, once he leaves office. It allows for good-faith negotiation with the National Archives. Yet the indictment assumes that Mr. Trump had no right to take any classified documents.”
Well he didn’t, didn’t he? Not after the National Archives requested them back whom he defied, eventually returning some documents, but not all of those requested, defying a subpoena, and according to the indictment conspiring with an aide to hide the additional documents from his own lawyers.
Observing that of some of the 30 out of about 40 charges referred to the Espionage Act, the editors say, “If the Espionage Act means Presidents can’t retain any classified documents, then the PRA is all but meaningless. This will be part of Mr. Trump’s defense.”
We’ll see how that defense goes, assuming the Presidential Records Act’s stipulations supersedes the more weighty national security concerns enshrined by the Espionage Act, even if the Espionage Act is “ancient” and “seldom-enforced” as they also write, or whatever.
Who cares? You know what, fuck the Presidential Records Act; if its privileges mean presidents can just take hundreds of the most sensitive documents, relating to our nuclear programs, how we would respond to military attack, etc. that Trump brazenly, defiantly made off with? Jesus. Anyone who gives a damn about homeland security should give less than a fuck about the god damn Presidential Records Act. For Christ’s sakes.
The Weaponized Government BS
Sometimes I suspect too many conservatives worry more about the “weaponization of government” than defending the republic these days, and oddly these things are at cross purposes in the age of Trump. Perversely this is the Jim Jordanian mentality WSJ seems to have bought into here: the security of the country against the next 9/11 or Pearl Harbor—God forbid— matters less than perhaps the willingness to overlook national security, to fight ruthlessly for the due process of people like Trump, perhaps even at the cost of ignoring the evidence against such vulnerable populist victims of harassment by an admittedly overzealous government overextending itself and their downright rabid, beastly followers of uneducated miserable working class white men— as if actually populists couldn’t be guilty per se, even when they’re fucking guilty. Because supposedly the Department of Justice and the FBI, we simply can’t trust. Give the unhinged populists the benefit of the doubt. Yeah trust the guys who try to kill Nancy Pelosi’s husband, who tried to kidnap the Michigan governor, and storm the FBI headquarters presumably to kill someone in the name of Donald Trump. But don’t trust Biden’s DOJ, because it’s Biden’s. Because of Biden. Biden. Joe Biden.
It’s as if conservatives nowadays in all seriousness are more afraid of their own government insisting their status as Christian or working class is inherently more deserving than any threat posed by Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Or wokeness. Yup Biden’s DOJ, not to mention woke corporations, Annheuser Busch, Target, Disney and ESG are more dangerous and concerning than ISIS’s resurgence, North Korea’s ICBMS, and Iran’s 84% enriched uranium, and the classified documents relating to that stuff.
They seem to betray this asinine leaning when next the editorial board says,
“That being said, if prosecutors think that this will absolve them of the political implications of their decision to charge Mr. Trump, they fail to understand what they’ve unleashed.”
Unleashed? What? That sounds like a word any one of Trump’s allies or he himself would use, as a cajoling device, suggesting that even if one does something wrong whatever the evidence is, one wouldn’t want to provoke a mob of little insurrectionists again with their Qanon flags and Statue of Liberty costumes, Confederate flags and Neonazi symbols. Nope unless we want violence…
Then by that standard, why didn’t we just donate to Trump the last election at least, so as to avoid the chaos of January 6th? Yup, so don’t prosecute Trump for anything in case a couple cops commit suicide and a crazy woman like Ashley Babbitt gets herself shot again.
What has Jack Smith unleashed? Oh my fucking God… I’m so scared… Of whatever stunts a bunch of hillbillies and rednecks like this guy might pull (Stewart Rhodes was recently sentenced to federal prison).
Ford Fisher News2Share
Or this stupid son of a bitch. Full grown adults playing cowboys and indians in tribal costumes complete with make-up on center stage of the most powerful government in the world. These guys who have a stroke whenever they hear about drag shows, but clearly don’t lack for identity-related issues of their own.
Alex Gakos Shutterstock
They go on to mention that Biden, 2024 incumbent seeking reelection, kept documents in his garage next to his Corvette. They argue that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server was also “willful.”
But did either Hillary or Biden lie about what they did or what they had, defy subpoeanas and/or horde classified documents? Did they also have documents pertaining to our nuclear programs, or, how we might retaliate if we were attacked? Did they leave their documents lying around bathrooms for someone possibly to piss on? Did they show them off to friends and random people, and brag that they were classified, flaunting that they were supposed to be secret? And even if James Comey should have charged Hillary, why does that mean we shouldn’t charge Donald Trump? Nick Catoggio writes incisively in The Dispatch, “The ‘Fifth Avenue’ Indictment,”
“Inasmuch as there’s a double standard, it’s a double standard by the right in wanting Clinton prosecuted and Trump absolved despite the fact that his misconduct was more egregious than hers.”
At the end they ask drolly, “and what about the precedent?”
Hell with the Precedent
I’m not going to quote the rest of that opinion. You can read it if you want. — Well what about the precedent? Who cares about the precedent? We overturned Roe v Wade rightly breaking precedent. The Supreme Court will hopefully strike down race-based affirmative action too. There goes another precedent. America was founded as a modern country. We are a nontraditional, unconventional free country. We’re not supposed to care about precedent. I have read other countries have indicted their former presidents and former prime ministers loads of times. We’re still a young country. Let’s get old.
And break more precedent.
Jerry Lampen AP
— Jay