The Biden Administration is investigating the former president's attorneys and storming into their homes at the wee hours of the morning with cable news cameras rolling. Donald Trump's personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, along with DC attorney Victoria Toensing, were served with search warrants by the Justice Department.
Naturally, aspects of the investigation somehow got "leaked" (planted) with The New York Times and a full day's worth of negative press swirled around Giuliani and Trump just hours before Biden made his first major speech as president.
The build-up to his speech was peppered with news reports suggesting that Biden's predecessor was a crook.
Nice way to frame the expectations for Biden's speech, right? The not-so-subtle narrative is clear: "Biden's boring and ineffectual, and his speech is staggeringly bad, but at least his lawyers aren't going to jail!"
Wait... I thought we weren't supposed to sic the Justice Department on our political enemies, remember?
Donald Trump rode into office on a wave of disgust and disdain for Hillary Clinton's suspect use of a non-authorized, unsecured email server to conduct government business and even send and receive classified information.
"Lock her up!" was the ubiquitous chant at Trump's 2016 campaign rallies, and it was just hyperbolic rhetoric.
Clinton's confirmation hearings as secretary of state were nearly upended over the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative's tangled web of international partnerships and foreign funds flowing from countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia. She pledged to build a firewall between any future foreign entanglements with her foundation while she served as America's top foreign diplomat.
It turns out that "firewall" was made of gasoline-soaked newspaper.
The suspicious, corrupt activities of Clinton, Inc. was a rallying cry for Americans fed up with the decades of activities that danced well beyond the line of propriety and legality yet continued to be ignored by the Justice Department. The impression was clear: Laws are for the little people. If you're powerful enough and well-connected, you can get away with anything.
James Comey's unilateral and unprecedented decision not to pursue criminal charges against Clinton was the final straw for many Americans. "Lock her up!" became more than just a humorous taunt at a rally. It became a priority for the American people to see that "Justice for all" means just that.
So, when Trump won, many Americans expected a full investigation of all these matters.
So, what happened?
John Dean's political hit piece in Newsweek back in 2016 explains it all:
Trump & Company have broken new ground in modern presidential campaigning by declaring that as president he will send his opponent to prison. This, of course, has thrilled Trump's base of supporters. In a campaign with too many appalling events to catalog, this new effort to criminalize an opponent is about as troubling as they come.
Jailing a political opponent is the tactic of dictators; it is the way campaigns are run in third-world countries that pretend to be democratic. This is the stuff of banana republics, not mature democracies.
And the histrionics continued.
The ever-reliably-wrong Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post:
A party calling to lock up its opponents. A presidential nominee speaking about ordering war crimes, “opening up” libel laws to punish critical journalists, and forcibly rounding up 11-12 million people. This, folks, is the current Republican Party. If this is a permanent disposition rather than a temporary temper tantrum induced by an unhinged demagogue that will pass with Trump’s defeat, the GOP deserves extinction.
After the election, The New York Times laid out the first warning shot. If Trump makes good on his intention of investigating Clinton, we'd cross into third-world, Banana Republic status.
Trump, apparently, was swayed by these arguments. Or, he naively thought that if he took the high road, he'd be given some conciliatory support in return so he could pursue his agenda as president and put the heated campaign behind him.
“I don’t want to hurt the Clintons, I really don’t,” Trump said in late November, while Comey, Obama and Biden were ramping up their investigation of the president-elect. “She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways.”
Prosecuting Clinton was "just not something that I feel very strongly about,” Trump said.
So she walked. And America avoided becoming a third-world authoritarian regime because that's what would've happened if Trump investigated and prosecuted his former political opponent after he came into power.
And here we are.
Biden's Justice Department is pursuing criminal investigations into his political opponent after coming into power. And the corporate-owned propaganda media finds it all-too righteous.
Trump should've locked her up.
