The Patriot Post® · Trump Indicted by Biden DOJ
Perhaps Merrick Garland isn’t content with his boss’s standing as the least popular president in American history. Or perhaps he’s merely trying to deflect the nation’s attention from a steady stream of whistleblower revelations into the dirty dealings of the Biden Crime Family and the FBI’s dogged efforts to cover them up.
Or perhaps both.
In any case, though, his special inquisitor counsel, Jack Smith, has moved with remarkable speed to pull together a seven-count indictment of former President Donald Trump on charges of having mishandled classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida. As the Adulterated Press reports, “The federal charges represent the biggest legal jeopardy so far for Trump, coming less than three months after he was charged in New York with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.”
Trump being Trump, of course, he quickly seized the narrative from Team Biden, which appears to have been caught flat-footed by the former president’s social media announcement of the indictment:
Moreover, Team Biden probably wasn’t counting on such a swift and scathing response from both Trump’s supporters and his Republican political opponents. Fox News’s Mark Levin, himself a constitutional scholar, practically threw the kitchen sink at Biden’s Department of Justice and its penchant for meting out two-tiered justice.
Better yet, though, here’s a succinct and spot-on sledgehammer from Trump’s only real competition for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis:
The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter? The DeSantis administration will bring accountability to the DOJ, excise political bias, and end weaponization once and for all.
We suspect Trump would appreciate and agree with every word above, except the part about “The DeSantis administration.”
All of this stems from an August 2022 Department of Justice raid on Trump’s Secret Service-defended Mar-a-Lago home — as opposed to the DOJ’s courteous pre-announced unarmed inspection of Biden’s unprotected garage — whereupon they snatched up documents that they’d previously requested from Trump.
Regarding the Democrats’ endless witch-hunting of the man they fear and hate more than any other — from phony Russia collusion to flimsy impeachments to criminalizing personal infidelity and election-related free speech — Geraldo Rivera makes the obvious point: “If you want to beat Donald Trump, you’ve got to beat him at the ballot box. You can’t beat him with … Stormy Daniels, you can’t beat him, I believe, on a library book that was overdue.”
As for these documents — all of them — why does it seem to be so hard for our elected representatives to not mishandle classified documents? It’s not only Donald Trump and Joe Biden but also by-the-book Mike Pence. And who here believes that if the feds decided to conduct an armed, early-morning raid on the Cheney compound in Wyoming, they wouldn’t find a document or two that George W. Bush’s vice president might’ve taken with him — maybe something to cover his hind end regarding our nation’s flawed intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s WMD program?
The prosecution’s smoking gun — if there is one, and if they’re to be believed — is apparently a 2021 audio recording of the former president allegedly admitting that he had in his possession a classified document relating to a potential U.S. attack on Iran.
Here, we have to marvel at how quickly the Biden DOJ can move when it wants to. Special Prosecutor Jack Smith has been on the case for less than seven months, having been appointed last November 18 by Merrick Garland, a demonstrably corrupt two-tiered-justice-dispensing Biden lackey masquerading as our nation’s attorney general. And in that seven months, Smith has put together the first-ever federal indictment of a former American president — a seven-count charge that is still under seal but that sources say includes obstruction of justice, conspiracy, making false statements, and illegal retention of classified documents in violation of the Espionage Act. On the other hand, as NBC News reports: “Probes related to Pence’s and Trump’s handling of classified documents have reached or appear to be reaching their ends. Biden, meanwhile, hasn’t been interviewed.”
So five months after AG Garland belatedly appointed Robert Hur to see if maybe Joe Biden, at some time during his half-century in Washington, might’ve perhaps possibly maybe stashed boxes of classified documents next to the Corvette in his Wilmington garage, or in some office in the Chinese intelligence-gathering building known as the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, Hur hasn’t even interviewed Joe Biden. But Jack Smith can put together a seven-count indictment against Trump in less than seven months.
Don’t even get us started on Hillary Clinton’s willful defiance of the law with her unsecured server on which she emailed classified information, including while on the soil of a hostile foreign country, likely Russia. After being subpoenaed, she so thoroughly bleach-bitted 30,000 emails that they were unrecoverable.
Just stunning. These people. These dirtbags.
To that last charge against Trump — the espionage-related charge — we find it grimly humorous that a man can be fully and uniquely entrusted with our nation’s most sensitive documents up until his last day in office, but immediately becomes a suspected spy if he possesses them the very next day.
National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, himself a former federal prosecutor, lays out in detail what imperils Trump:
Trump has repeatedly insisted that he declassified these documents. It is a peculiar claim, for which there is no documentary evidence and which Trump’s lawyers have declined to repeat in court proceedings. In terms of national security, it would be scandalously reckless to have declassified top-secret documents for no better reason than to keep them as mementos, rather than return them to secure government intelligence files. Moreover, legally, even if Trump had declassified the documents, it would not be a defense against the charges he is likely to face.
The Espionage Act forbids the mishandling of national-defense information not classified information. Even if a document had been declassified, it would still be national-defense information if its contents bear on the national defense — i.e., a document’s classification status is merely evidence that it likely bears on the national defense, it does not settle the question. As for obstruction, in writing the grand-jury subpoena that Trump is alleged to have defied, prosecutors took pains to demand his production of documents bearing classification markings, not classified documents. If the documents were marked classified, the subpoena mandated that they be surrendered, regardless of whether Trump had declassified them.
Another former federal prosecutor, Brett Tolman, who rightly said of the Obama administration’s Crossfire Hurricane efforts, “This was an operation, not an investigation,” was interviewed on Fox News this morning. He harkened back to his first day in the Department of Justice: “I saw a plaque on the wall that said, ‘The hallmark of fairness in the administration of justice is consistency application of the law.’ And … no one should be above the law, but we’re watching, in real time, individuals above the law. You have Hillary Clinton, you have Biden, you have Pence — all possessed classified documents. You have an Air Force retiree that was just prosecuted by DOJ, sentenced to three years for possession of classified documents in his home. It’s inconsistency, and we’re watching it play out in real time.”
Said Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley last night: “If the president in power can just jail his political opponents — which is what Joe Biden is trying to do tonight —we don’t have a republic anymore.”
He’s right. The question now becomes: What are the American people going to do about it?
UPDATE: 3:20 p.m. ET Friday: The 49-page indictment has been unsealed.