A Comparison Of What Trump Is Accused Of, As Opposed To What Democrats Did, With No Prosecutions.
Apr 3, 2023 12:18:23 #
By Victor Davis Hanson
April 2, 2023
As we await the publication of all the impending indictments of former President Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Americans are trying to figure out what constitutes an indictable offense for current and retired public officials.
Most legal experts, Left and Right, have noted:
1) Bragg promised in advance that he would try to find a way to indict Trump. His prior boasts are reminiscent of Stalin’s secret police enforcer Lavrentiy Beria’s quip, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Nancy Pelosi gave the game away, when in her dotage, she muttered that Trump had a right to prove his innocence as if he is presumed guilty.
2) No former president has ever been indicted—and for good reason. Such prosecutions would be viewed as persecutions and render all former presidents veritable targets of every publicity-hungry and politically hostile local, state, or federal prosecutor. They would reduce the presidency to Third World norms. Gratuitously prosecuting former presidents would become a political tool to harm the opposing political party or to tarnish the legacy of a former president.
3) Trump is currently ahead in the polls for the Republican nomination to face Democratic incumbent Biden. And in head-to-head matchups, he outpolls Biden. For a prosecutor of the same party as the current president facing ree******n to seek to destroy the viability of a likely opponent is a first in U.S. history. But again, it is now in accordance with Third World norms.
4) At least two left-leaning federal and state prosecutors previously have passed on the same evidence Bragg is now using for his indictments. They have explained that such a prosecution is infeasible because of statutes of limitations, because of a state attorney improperly appropriating the role of a federal prosecutor, and because non-disclosures agreements are a fact of life and not strictly illegal.
5) Bragg’s chief witness Michael Cohen is a felon and confessed liar, with a deep personal hatred of Donald Trump—a fact well known to all potential prosecutors.
6) The current indictment follows a long line of historic harassment of Trump, including the first incidence of two impeachments of a sitting president, the first impeachment trial of a president as a private citizen, and the first FBI armed raid of a retired president’s home, the first instance of an FBI director leaking confidential p**********l conversations to the media for the purpose of appointing a special counsel to remove a president.
Such asymmetry also raises questions about the equal application of our laws as they apply to all our other officials, current and out-of-office.
Or, to put it another way: what crime did Trump not do that others did with either impunity or without being arrested? Here is a sample of 20.
1) Trump did not violate federal law, as did Hillary Clinton, by destroying federally subpoenaed emails and devices in order to hide evidence.
2) Trump did not violate federal law, as did Hillary Clinton, by sending classified government communications on her own, through an unsecured home-brewed server.
3) Trump did not violate federal law, as did Hillary Clinton, by hiring—through three paywalls—a foreign national, who is prohibited from working on p**********l campaigns, to compile a dossier to smear her p**********l opponent.
4) Trump did not violate federal campaign laws, as did Hillary Clinton, by hiding her payments (as “legal services”) to Christopher Steele through bookkeeping deceptions.
5) Trump did not, as did Bill Clinton, use a crony to search out a high-paying New York job for a paramour in order to influence her testimony before a special counsel.
6) Trump did not, as did Bill Clinton, receive a $500,000 “honorarium” for speaking in Moscow while his wife, our secretary of state, approved a longstanding and lucrative desire of the Kremlin for North American uranium to be sold to a Russian consortium.
7) Trump did not, as did Barack Obama, promise Vladimir Putin that he would be “flexible” on “missile defense” if during his own ree******n bid Putin in return would give him “space”. That quid pro quo arrangement led to the U.S. abandonment of key joint missile defense systems with Poland and the Czech Republic, and, reciprocally, less than two years later a Russia invasion, mostly unopposed by the United States, of eastern Ukraine and the Crimea.
8) Trump did not boast publicly, as did Joe Biden, that he used U.S. foreign aid monies as leverage to have the Ukrainian government fire a prosecutor who may have been looking into the Biden family’s efforts to sell influence to corrupt Ukrainian interests.
9) Trump did not, as the Bidens did, set up a family consortium to leverage monies from Ukraine, Russia, and China, on their shared expectations that he might soon run for and be elected president and become c*********d. Trump is not mentioned, as is Joe Biden, in family business communications as a recipient of a 10 percent commission on such payoffs.
10) Trump did not, unlike Joe Biden, remove p**********l papers—without any authority to declassify them—and leave them scattered and unsecured in a garage and various residences and offices.
11) Trump did not, as did the FBI, wipe clean subpoenaed mobile phone records.
12) Trump did not, as did interim FBI head Andrew McCabe, admittedly lie under oath on four occasions to federal investigators.
13) Trump did not, as did CIA Director John Brennan, admittedly lie on two occasions while under oath to the U.S. Congress.
14) Trump did not, as did Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, admittedly lie on one occasion to the U.S. Congress.
15) Trump did not, as did James Comey, claim amnesia or ignorance 245 times while under oath before the U.S. Congress.
16) Trump did not, as did FBI Director James Comey, summarize a confidential private conversation with a president and then deliberately leak that classified memo to the media for his own agenda of appointing a special counsel to investigate the president—which turned out to be his friend Robert Mueller.
17) Trump did not, as did Robert Mueller, claim ignorance while under oath when asked about the Steele dossier and Fusion GPS, the catalysts for Mueller’s own investigation.
18) Trump did not, as did private citizen and former secretary of state John Kerry, meet clandestinely while out of office with Iranian officials to help them resist current U.S. policy toward Iran—or what the Boston Globe characterized as “unusual shadow diplomacy” to “apply pressure on the Trump administration from the outside.”
19) Trump did not, as did the FBI and CIA, pay clandestine money to Twitter to monitor and smother news stories deemed unhelpful to their agendas.
20) Trump did not, as did then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whip up a mob at the doors of the Supreme Court by threatening two sitting justices by name to intimidate them concerning an impending judicial ruling: “I want to tell you Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you.”
In subsequent months, mobs of protestors swarmed the private homes of these two named justices to influence their decisions, a federal crime that was ignored by Attorney General Merrick Garland, but not by a self-confessed, potential assassin of Justice Brett Kavanaugh who later turned up in the neighborhood.
What are we to make of these radical disparate applications of laws and protocols? The Left repeatedly breaks laws and long-held customs with impunity by weaponizing federal offices and bureaus, whether defined in the legal sphere by mostly exempting 120 days of mass r**ting, l**ting, arson, mayhem, and lethal violence in the summer of 2020, or procedurally by denying the House minority leader the right to nominate his party members to committees, or ceremonially having the speaker of the House tear up the p**********l State-of-the-Union Address on national television.
By any fair application of past tradition and the law, Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas should be impeached for their deliberate efforts to subvert U.S. i*********n l*w for political purposes. By any just measure, Joe Biden should be the target of a special counsel’s investigation to ascertain how and why the Biden family received hidden funds from foreign governments and whether Biden himself paid taxes on such large sums.
It is the revolutionary Left that attacks institutions deemed unhelpful for its current political agenda—one that rarely warrants 50 percent public approval—whether that effort is defined by threats of ending the filibuster, scrapping the E*******l College, adding two more states, packing the court, or radically changing b****ting laws and customs to turn e******ns into a 70 percent no-show of v**ers on E******n Day.
All of the above is predicated on a simple premise: Were the opposition to match tit-for-tat these Democratic means, then the republic would quickly descend into a spiral of illegality and chaos analogous to what ended the late Roman Republic. That fact is well known to the new hard-left Democratic Party. So it has assumed the role of the spoiled teen who feels he has a blank check of lawless behavior that his parents would not dare emulate, given that for adults to do so would destroy the family.
In other words, the Left is saying to America something along the following lines, “We are so morally superior to you that we can and must employ any means necessary to achieve our unpopular political ends. But you cannot respond in kind or deter us by mimicking our own tactics, because should both parties do so, the resulting disorder would undermine the republic. And that is something you won’t dare do.”
April 2, 2023
As we await the publication of all the impending indictments of former President Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Americans are trying to figure out what constitutes an indictable offense for current and retired public officials.
Most legal experts, Left and Right, have noted:
1) Bragg promised in advance that he would try to find a way to indict Trump. His prior boasts are reminiscent of Stalin’s secret police enforcer Lavrentiy Beria’s quip, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Nancy Pelosi gave the game away, when in her dotage, she muttered that Trump had a right to prove his innocence as if he is presumed guilty.
2) No former president has ever been indicted—and for good reason. Such prosecutions would be viewed as persecutions and render all former presidents veritable targets of every publicity-hungry and politically hostile local, state, or federal prosecutor. They would reduce the presidency to Third World norms. Gratuitously prosecuting former presidents would become a political tool to harm the opposing political party or to tarnish the legacy of a former president.
3) Trump is currently ahead in the polls for the Republican nomination to face Democratic incumbent Biden. And in head-to-head matchups, he outpolls Biden. For a prosecutor of the same party as the current president facing ree******n to seek to destroy the viability of a likely opponent is a first in U.S. history. But again, it is now in accordance with Third World norms.
4) At least two left-leaning federal and state prosecutors previously have passed on the same evidence Bragg is now using for his indictments. They have explained that such a prosecution is infeasible because of statutes of limitations, because of a state attorney improperly appropriating the role of a federal prosecutor, and because non-disclosures agreements are a fact of life and not strictly illegal.
5) Bragg’s chief witness Michael Cohen is a felon and confessed liar, with a deep personal hatred of Donald Trump—a fact well known to all potential prosecutors.
6) The current indictment follows a long line of historic harassment of Trump, including the first incidence of two impeachments of a sitting president, the first impeachment trial of a president as a private citizen, and the first FBI armed raid of a retired president’s home, the first instance of an FBI director leaking confidential p**********l conversations to the media for the purpose of appointing a special counsel to remove a president.
Such asymmetry also raises questions about the equal application of our laws as they apply to all our other officials, current and out-of-office.
Or, to put it another way: what crime did Trump not do that others did with either impunity or without being arrested? Here is a sample of 20.
1) Trump did not violate federal law, as did Hillary Clinton, by destroying federally subpoenaed emails and devices in order to hide evidence.
2) Trump did not violate federal law, as did Hillary Clinton, by sending classified government communications on her own, through an unsecured home-brewed server.
3) Trump did not violate federal law, as did Hillary Clinton, by hiring—through three paywalls—a foreign national, who is prohibited from working on p**********l campaigns, to compile a dossier to smear her p**********l opponent.
4) Trump did not violate federal campaign laws, as did Hillary Clinton, by hiding her payments (as “legal services”) to Christopher Steele through bookkeeping deceptions.
5) Trump did not, as did Bill Clinton, use a crony to search out a high-paying New York job for a paramour in order to influence her testimony before a special counsel.
6) Trump did not, as did Bill Clinton, receive a $500,000 “honorarium” for speaking in Moscow while his wife, our secretary of state, approved a longstanding and lucrative desire of the Kremlin for North American uranium to be sold to a Russian consortium.
7) Trump did not, as did Barack Obama, promise Vladimir Putin that he would be “flexible” on “missile defense” if during his own ree******n bid Putin in return would give him “space”. That quid pro quo arrangement led to the U.S. abandonment of key joint missile defense systems with Poland and the Czech Republic, and, reciprocally, less than two years later a Russia invasion, mostly unopposed by the United States, of eastern Ukraine and the Crimea.
8) Trump did not boast publicly, as did Joe Biden, that he used U.S. foreign aid monies as leverage to have the Ukrainian government fire a prosecutor who may have been looking into the Biden family’s efforts to sell influence to corrupt Ukrainian interests.
9) Trump did not, as the Bidens did, set up a family consortium to leverage monies from Ukraine, Russia, and China, on their shared expectations that he might soon run for and be elected president and become c*********d. Trump is not mentioned, as is Joe Biden, in family business communications as a recipient of a 10 percent commission on such payoffs.
10) Trump did not, unlike Joe Biden, remove p**********l papers—without any authority to declassify them—and leave them scattered and unsecured in a garage and various residences and offices.
11) Trump did not, as did the FBI, wipe clean subpoenaed mobile phone records.
12) Trump did not, as did interim FBI head Andrew McCabe, admittedly lie under oath on four occasions to federal investigators.
13) Trump did not, as did CIA Director John Brennan, admittedly lie on two occasions while under oath to the U.S. Congress.
14) Trump did not, as did Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, admittedly lie on one occasion to the U.S. Congress.
15) Trump did not, as did James Comey, claim amnesia or ignorance 245 times while under oath before the U.S. Congress.
16) Trump did not, as did FBI Director James Comey, summarize a confidential private conversation with a president and then deliberately leak that classified memo to the media for his own agenda of appointing a special counsel to investigate the president—which turned out to be his friend Robert Mueller.
17) Trump did not, as did Robert Mueller, claim ignorance while under oath when asked about the Steele dossier and Fusion GPS, the catalysts for Mueller’s own investigation.
18) Trump did not, as did private citizen and former secretary of state John Kerry, meet clandestinely while out of office with Iranian officials to help them resist current U.S. policy toward Iran—or what the Boston Globe characterized as “unusual shadow diplomacy” to “apply pressure on the Trump administration from the outside.”
19) Trump did not, as did the FBI and CIA, pay clandestine money to Twitter to monitor and smother news stories deemed unhelpful to their agendas.
20) Trump did not, as did then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whip up a mob at the doors of the Supreme Court by threatening two sitting justices by name to intimidate them concerning an impending judicial ruling: “I want to tell you Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you.”
In subsequent months, mobs of protestors swarmed the private homes of these two named justices to influence their decisions, a federal crime that was ignored by Attorney General Merrick Garland, but not by a self-confessed, potential assassin of Justice Brett Kavanaugh who later turned up in the neighborhood.
What are we to make of these radical disparate applications of laws and protocols? The Left repeatedly breaks laws and long-held customs with impunity by weaponizing federal offices and bureaus, whether defined in the legal sphere by mostly exempting 120 days of mass r**ting, l**ting, arson, mayhem, and lethal violence in the summer of 2020, or procedurally by denying the House minority leader the right to nominate his party members to committees, or ceremonially having the speaker of the House tear up the p**********l State-of-the-Union Address on national television.
By any fair application of past tradition and the law, Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas should be impeached for their deliberate efforts to subvert U.S. i*********n l*w for political purposes. By any just measure, Joe Biden should be the target of a special counsel’s investigation to ascertain how and why the Biden family received hidden funds from foreign governments and whether Biden himself paid taxes on such large sums.
It is the revolutionary Left that attacks institutions deemed unhelpful for its current political agenda—one that rarely warrants 50 percent public approval—whether that effort is defined by threats of ending the filibuster, scrapping the E*******l College, adding two more states, packing the court, or radically changing b****ting laws and customs to turn e******ns into a 70 percent no-show of v**ers on E******n Day.
All of the above is predicated on a simple premise: Were the opposition to match tit-for-tat these Democratic means, then the republic would quickly descend into a spiral of illegality and chaos analogous to what ended the late Roman Republic. That fact is well known to the new hard-left Democratic Party. So it has assumed the role of the spoiled teen who feels he has a blank check of lawless behavior that his parents would not dare emulate, given that for adults to do so would destroy the family.
In other words, the Left is saying to America something along the following lines, “We are so morally superior to you that we can and must employ any means necessary to achieve our unpopular political ends. But you cannot respond in kind or deter us by mimicking our own tactics, because should both parties do so, the resulting disorder would undermine the republic. And that is something you won’t dare do.”
Apr 3, 2023 12:42:17 #
Smedley_buzk**l wrote:
By Victor Davis Hanson br br April 2, 2023 br As ... (show quote)
All of trumps problems really need to be something else. Don’t they ?
*****In other words, the Left is saying to America something along the following lines,
“When the Right , also liking to be known as the Law And Order party , falls down on the job every time one of their compatriots gets their tit caught in the wringer , the left needs to step up and help them keep
law and order and justice in the forefront .
By focusing on “No One is above the Law!”
We will help them provide Justice for All !
All. … meaning ….All !!!!!
Apr 3, 2023 12:52:55 #
Milosia2 wrote:
All of trumps problems really need to be something... (show quote)
No. Let me try and explain this without using any big words you don't understand and won't bother to look up....
Liberals, especially the unapologetic ELWNJs, (you, ah, wouldn't happen to know any of those, would you?) most generally have the emotional maturity of an adolescent chimpanzee, and the rational decision making capability of a particularly bratty four year old. There needs to be an adult in the room to keep the brats from tearing the house down and then blaming everyone but themselves.
You should take this to heart and avoid mirrors like you were Count Dracula.
Apr 3, 2023 13:01:16 #
Apr 3, 2023 13:17:52 #
Milosia2 wrote:
All of trumps problems really need to be something... (show quote)
Let me explain it to you nice and slowly so you can understand.
The Democrats' creed is: "Rules for me but not for thee." They are above the law.
Apr 3, 2023 14:19:26 #
Smedley_buzk**l wrote:
By Victor Davis Hanson br br April 2, 2023 br As ... (show quote)
Smedley... hard to find any t***h in your post.. but a whole bunch of distortions and right wing wishes.. I look forward to having more indictments in the coming weeks and months..then you guys can rant for days and stop repeating your selves..
Apr 3, 2023 14:29:11 #
Smedley_buzk**l wrote:
By Victor Davis Hanson
April 2, 2023
As we await the publication of all the impending indictments of former President Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Americans are trying to figure out what constitutes an indictable offense for current and retired public officials.
April 2, 2023
As we await the publication of all the impending indictments of former President Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Americans are trying to figure out what constitutes an indictable offense for current and retired public officials.
As much as I h**e to be your buzzk**l, nothing else matters except the charges and prosecution against trump, your blathering on about other supposedly equivalent things that are in reality much too different to serve as legitimate likenesses is nothing but the obfuscation and misdirection meant to somehow negate and render trump's cases irrelevant.
They are relevant and they are all that matters for and about trump
Apr 3, 2023 14:30:07 #
Justice101 wrote:
Let me explain it to you nice and slowly so you can understand.
The Democrats' creed is: "Rules for me but not for thee." They are above the law.
The Democrats' creed is: "Rules for me but not for thee." They are above the law.
Straight out of misdirecting what the right is all about
Apr 3, 2023 14:48:21 #
permafrost wrote:
Smedley... hard to find any t***h in your post.. but a whole bunch of distortions and right wing wishes.. I look forward to having more indictments in the coming weeks and months..then you guys can rant for days and stop repeating your selves..
Rather than have your usual ignorant diarrhea of the mouth, point out what is untrue, you imbecilic ape.
Apr 3, 2023 14:49:02 #
woodguru wrote:
As much as I h**e to be your buzzk**l, nothing else matters except the charges and prosecution against trump, your blathering on about other supposedly equivalent things that are in reality much too different to serve as legitimate likenesses is nothing but the obfuscation and misdirection meant to somehow negate and render trump's cases irrelevant.
They are relevant and they are all that matters for and about trump
They are relevant and they are all that matters for and about trump
.
Apr 3, 2023 15:20:59 #
woodguru wrote:
Straight out of misdirecting what the right is all about
Nope. Look at what happened during the p******c with the forced C***d lockdowns. The Democrats failed to follow their own rules that they imposed on everyone else. Several Democratic Governors and high-profile politicians got caught with their hair down-i.e.: Nancy Pelosi got her hair done at a salon in San Francisco that she asked to be opened just for her during the C***d p******c.
Here are some others in case you forgot:
https://fee.org/articles/these-12-high-profile-politicians-got-caught-violating-their-own-c***d-rules/
Apr 4, 2023 11:43:58 #
Milosia2 wrote:
All of trumps problems really need to be something... (show quote)
What tit...What ringer. Oh your talking about the hair sniffer and his family's hands getting caught in their dirty foreign money cookie jar.
Apr 5, 2023 21:15:33 #
woodguru wrote:
As much as I h**e to be your buzzk**l, nothing else matters except the charges and prosecution against trump, your blathering on about other supposedly equivalent things that are in reality much too different to serve as legitimate likenesses is nothing but the obfuscation and misdirection meant to somehow negate and render trump's cases irrelevant.
They are relevant and they are all that matters for and about trump
They are relevant and they are all that matters for and about trump
The whole point of the article is the extremely uneven handling of crimes by major political figures. Such a comparison by definition must include more than 1 person. I feel that it is a very valid point if the left continues it's hysterical mantra of "Nobody is above the law" where "nobody" appears to be spelled t, r, u, m, p.
Apr 5, 2023 21:17:34 #
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