Until now, American voters have been allowed to select our next president without interference by federal prosecutors. In a free election the People can decide which issues are significant, such as entanglement in foreign wars, and which are petty, such as the location of some old papers from the previous administration.
But the federal workers who pursue political prosecutions of Trump and his supporters are as hostile to democracy as they are clueless about the loyalty of Trump voters. Special prosecutor Jack Smith, who disgracefully prosecuted Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell until Smith was reversed by the Supreme Court, now demands that Trump face a speedy trial, so that Smith’s office rather than the voters can decide the reelection of Trump.
Jack Smith’s unprecedented indictment will be heard by Judge Aileen Cannon, who had previously smacked down the feds after their excessive raid of Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago last August. In that case she told the federal Trump-haters to back off, and she properly appointed a respected former judge to review the documents that were seized in the raid.
On appeal to a higher court, Judge Britt Grant, whose husband worked for nearly a decade for the Deep State at the CIA, showed improper rudeness to Trump’s attorney. Also on the panel was Judge Bill Pryor, who is often a rubber-stamp for prosecutors, and they reversed Judge Cannon’s fair ruling.
Yet now the liberal media, led by the New York Times, are complaining about the random assignment of the Trump indictment to Judge Cannon, despite her lack of any conflict of interest. What liberals dislike is her independence from politics, which is what a good judge should display.
Few Americans would base their vote on where President Trump stored boxes of documents relating to his presidency when he moved out of his residence at the White House. Many public officials take copies of documents with them when they leave office, as Joe Biden did when he left the White House in 2017 and Biden has not been charged with anything.
But many federal workers in D.C. are too virulently anti-Trump to allow the democratic process to work without interference by fanatical federal prosecutors. They have no employable skills outside of government and yet are bankrolled by an unlimited spigot of taxpayer dollars, which would have been shut off had the debt ceiling been enforced on June 1.
The timing of this federal indictment to be less than one week after suspension of the debt ceiling, which keeps the money flowing to them, seems to be more than a coincidence. The GOP majority in the House does not have to allow taxpayer millions to be spent on biased investigators taking pictures of boxes of obscure documents stored in an unused bathroom.
Trump has built successful companies and skyscrapers, employed thousands, and defeated the idol of most federal workers: Hillary Clinton. Then Trump committed unforgivable sins in the eyes of the feds by firing their FBI director, James Comey, and by pardoning the victims of Department of Justice political prosecutions, including Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
The January 6 protests were, on top of all that, a thorough humiliation of the Deep State in D.C. for which it has been retaliating ever since. All Trump did on that day was to give a speech while serving as president, and it is very difficult to convert a presidential address into some kind of crime.
So Trump-haters hatched this plan to accuse this former and future president of “willful retention” of his own presidential papers, abusing a century-old law that has never before been used in this way. The federal bullies also indicted a U.S. Navy veteran from Guam who has been a personal assistant to Trump, Walt Nauta, over the phony separate crime of supposedly lying to the FBI as Nauta voluntarily described his service to the former president.
Local prosecutors who prosecute real crimes do not regard lying to authorities as a separate crime, yet that is the federal prosecutors’ favorite fake crime to invoke. They used it improperly against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, in what was later discovered to have been a premeditated ambush by the FBI, and threatened the respected author Dr. Jerome Corsi with this until he publicized the injustice.
Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, famously warned Trump that the intelligence community, also known as the Deep State, has “six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Just before Trump was inaugurated to his first term, Schumer said on national television that “from what I am told, they are very upset with how he has talked about them.”
This new indictment proves how vindictively the Deep State will retaliate. It needs to be defunded.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.