It’s all starting to sound like something out of an old-fashioned banana republic dictatorship. Spying on political opponents, ginning up fake dossiers, weaponising the state bureaucracy to pursue vendettas, dubious elections, show trials and secret police raids.
Such is the state of what was once the world’s leading democracy.
Monday’s unannounced Federal Bureau of Investigation search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home isn’t a moment for anyone to cheer. The Justice Department is unleashing political furies it can’t control and may not understand, and the risks for the department and the country are as great as they are for Mr. Trump.
As everyone knows by now, an FBI law-enforcement action of this kind against a former American President is unprecedented. Monday’s search needed a judicial warrant in service of probable cause in a criminal probe.
Here, it gets into even sleazier tinpot-dictatorship stuff. The official who authorised the warrant is none other than the official who offered a sweetheart deal to a convicted paedophile suspected of running a child-sex business catering to the country’s elite.
The media leaks say the search is related to potential mishandling of classified documents or violations of the Presidential Records Act. If that is true, then the raid looks like prosecutorial overkill and a bad mistake. Document disputes are typically settled in negotiation, and that is how Mr. Trump’s disagreement with the National Archives had been proceeding.
Mr. Trump has already returned 15 boxes of documents, but the National Archives wants to know if the former President retained classified material he shouldn’t have. This is what appears to have triggered the FBI search, but it’s far from clear why this couldn’t be settled cooperatively, or at most with a subpoena.
It’s not the first time that a high-profile politician — in fact, a presidential candidate and former occupant of the White House — has apparently mishandled classified documents, including highly sensitive foreign intelligence. That politician was, of course, Hillary Clinton.
She was never prosecuted, as Mr. Trump was quick to point out. Unless Mr. Trump’s offence involves a serious risk to national security, half of America may see the Trump search as an example of unequal justice.
Then there’s the matter of the sitting president’s son, implicated in crimes from sex trafficking to tax fraud, and dodgy business dealings that reach straight to the White House. All swept under the carpet by the media and Deep State.
At the same time, the Democrats are running a ludicrous, literally made-for-television, show trial. A show trial which has, if anything, cleared the former president of everything except maybe failing to act quickly enough when a political rally spiralled out of control.
On the public evidence so far, a Jan. 6 indictment would be a legal stretch. Political responsibility isn’t the same as criminal liability. In our view, the evidence would have to show that Mr. Trump was criminally complicit in that day’s violence at the Capitol.
Given its inherently political nature, the burden of proof is especially high for indicting a former President, all the more so for an Administration of the opposition party. The evidence had better be overwhelming — not merely enough to convince a 12-person jury in the District of Columbia, but enough to convince a majority of the American public.
With the exception of the less-than-one-third (and dwindling) Americans who still view the Biden presidency favourably, the whole sorry affair will be seen as nothing but a continuation of the five years of Deep State harassment that began with the Obama administration spying on the Trump campaign, and the Clinton campaign faking up the “Russiagate” scandal — and the media knowingly chiming in.
Worse in the long term is the precedent being set and the payback it is likely to inspire. Once the Rubicon of prosecuting a former President has been crossed — especially if the alleged offence and evidence are less than compelling — every future President will be a target. William Barr, Mr. Trump’s second AG, wisely resisted pressure to indict political actors without a very strong case. The next Republican AG will not be as scrupulous.
Democrats may also be wrong in their calculation about how a prosecution would affect Mr. Trump’s future. The FBI search alone makes it more likely that Mr. Trump will run again for President, if only to vindicate himself. He will run as a martyr.
The Australian
And that — at the risk of sounding conspiratorial — may be precisely the point. Trump is not exactly know for cool-headed restraint — and the suspicion is that the Democrats are deliberately goading him to run again, at the expense of the other front-runner, Florida governor Ron de Santis.
The Democrats are desperate to keep the spectre of the Bad Orange Man alive. It’s why, it’s been revealed, Democrats have been secretly funding so-called “Ultra MAGA” Republican candidates, in order to whip up a parade of boogey-men.
If they’re willing to sink to that level of dirty politicking, there’s no telling where they’d stop.