We have long argued here that whatever one may think about Donald Trump – and whether Democrat or Republican – it behooved all of us to oppose the obvious Democratic conspiracy to overwhelm Donald Trump with a blizzard of arbitrary, contrived criminal prosecutions with a view to precluding his election in November.
And the juxtaposition of the news that President Biden is considering dropping charges against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, for publishing classified documents and the start of the first of the Trump criminal trials got us thinking again how really political it all is.
Thus, this past Monday, the jury selection phase began in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan in the so-called “hush money” case, which has been ridiculed by most legal experts as based on a labored, novel amalgam of New York state and federal statutes. In fact, the other criminal cases followed a similar pattern of unprecedented readings and applications of criminal laws.
One of those cases is the one in which former President Trump is being charged in federal court with unlawfully “possessing” classified documents after he left office. No one denies that he was entitled to possess the documents while president. No one has claimed that he could not have declassified the documents – only that he didn’t. No one has charged that he compromised national security by retaining them. Yet. he is being charged under the Federal Espionage Act!
Consider now the case of Julian Assange, who has been jailed for nearly five years in London while fighting extradition to face U.S. charges related to his publication of thousands of documents detailing secret military operations and diplomatic intelligence.
As the Washington Examiner reports, in 2019 and 2020, the Justice Department charged Assange with one violation of the Espionage Act, including collaborating with the U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into classified Department of Defense computer systems. Much of that stolen material was later posted online by WikiLeaks, doing serious damage to American security.
The published material included unredacted documents which revealed the names of local human sources who were supplying information to the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of those individuals disappeared.
According to the indictment, Assange was responsible for “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.”
Assange also played a key in the 2013 defection to Russia of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who, according to The Examiner, stole and leaked more than a million classified U.S. defense documents before winding up in Moscow where he still remains.
Yet despite all of this – and there is more – last week President Biden that he was “considering” dropping the charges against Assange because of pressure from Australia, Assange’s home country.
Can Mr. Biden explain his determination to nail Mr. Trump but possibly let the seemingly more harmful Mr. Assange skate? We think not, but then again there is the political thing.
