Less than a week after President Trump’s electoral success on November 5, The New York Times ran a front-page article with the headline, “As Trump Returns To Power, Allies and Adversaries Expect A Wave of Revenge.” The story also carried the somewhat convoluted sub-heading, “President-elect Donald J. Trump’s momentary talk of unity on election night may underestimate the depth of his resentment after multiple impeachments, investigations, indictment and lawsuits.”
And in a true self-fulfilling prophecy, last week, within hours of Pamela Bondi’s swearing in as U.S. Attorney General and her prompt issuance of a memo outlining her plans going forward – including establishing a task force to examine the alleged weaponization of the justice system – The Times headlined a report “Justice Dept’s Weaponization Group Underscores Trump’s Quest for Retribution.” The piece also carried the sub-heading, “The Memo signaled the most significant first step in deploying the levers of government to carry out President Trump’s repeated suggestions that he will pursue those he perceives to be his enemies.”
The New York Times is a major Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer. It is also a major opinion influencer. So, when its initial story appeared, we expressed the fear that it marked the opening broadside in what would be a sustained effort to avoid any light being shed on how the improbable slew of dubious legal assaults on President Trump could have come about. But surely, the cases brought against him did not pass the smell test. They were obviously conjured up and patently designed to either bankrupt him, drive him from office, discredit him with voters or distract him from effective campaigning. Or all of the above. Yet The Times crowd was determined to discourage any inquiries by referring to them as “revenge” and “retribution” in order to further discredit President Trump.
What made their task easier was the fact that except, perhaps, for the Russian collusion adventure, there were some arguable issues with some of the facts of the various cases even if they were of minor significance. There may have been some technical irregularities with some business book entries, but they were not the kind of things anyone “makes into a federal case.” Think about it. President Trump was charged with 34 felonies for having labeled a certain expense a “legal fee” instead of a “campaign contribution,” which his lawyers said was proper but Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg said wasn’t.
At all events, the anti-Trump cabal dwelled on the technical misstatements and argued that since the charges were predicated on fact, however tenuously, they were valid. And it all worked because the juries involved in the various cases were drawn from jury pools that overwhelmingly consisted of anti-Trumpers.
Consequently, they maintain, any effort to investigate how it all came about was simply a way of Donald Trump seeking vengeance. But, as we have noted, the charges here plainly were not the result of the objective pursuit of criminal acts in the normal course, but rather of the selective targeting of an individual who is deemed an enemy and then grasping at any possible criminal charge, however inconsequential and unlikely to otherwise attract the attention of prosecutors.
So, finding out how the charges against Trump were arrived at is not just a Trump concern. It is important for all of us to know with as much certainty as possible, whether, how and by whom our criminal justice system may have been hijacked. Weaponization of the legal system is not always a matter of making up fake facts. It sometimes involves exploiting the ambiguous and magnifying the unremarkable.
