This week’s decision by Georgia’s Fulton County Democrat District Attorney Fani Willis to indict President Trump and 18 others for interfering in the 2020 presidential election has been rapidly and roundly criticized by legal experts in both parties. The 98-page indictment alleges, in part, that Trump and his co-defendants “knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.”
In addition, the timing of her move against the former president – less than 18 months before the 2024 presidential election in which Trump, the runaway favorite in the Republican primary, leads his likely, but weakened opponent Joe Biden according to several recent polls – appears to many as partisan election interference in its own right, as do Trump’s three prior indictments.
Leaving aside the timing and the merits of the Georgia case, the Democrat prosecutor’s aggressive, partisan move against Trump, along with those of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and U.S. special counsel Jack Smith, have indisputably set a dangerous precedent, in the eyes of many experts, and invite similar indictments by Republican state and federal prosecutors for fraud and election interference against Democrat presidential candidates while they campaign for office.
While Joe Biden is immune from prosecution as a sitting president, following the logic of Willis, Bragg and Smith, he could be impeached in office, or prosecuted after leaving office, for at least two similar instances of election interference in his own right. This is entirely separate from the serious allegations Biden faces of bribery and mishandling classified documents that, if proven, could well lead to his impeachment, conviction and removal from office.
Biden’s first case of election interference relates to his clear and documented suppression of reporting about his son Hunter’s laptop when its existence was revealed a month before voters went to the polls in 2020.
When the New York Post published stories based upon the laptop’s content that showed evidence contradicting Biden’s multiple assertions during the campaign that he had no knowledge of, and never discussed, Hunter’s overseas business dealings, Biden’s campaign ginned up a bogus letter from 51 former intelligence community officials including Obama CIA Director John Brennan, former Obama DNI James Clapper, and former CIA director Michael Hayden, among others, asserting that the laptop was fake and based on Russian disinformation.
Based on testimony earlier this year by former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell, a signatory of the letter, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio said that the Biden campaign “played an active role in the origins of the public statement, which had the effect of helping to suppress the Hunter Biden story and preventing American citizens from making a fully informed decision during the 2020 presidential election…This concerted effort to minimize and suppress public dissemination of the serious allegations about the Biden family was a grave disservice to all American citizens’ informed participation in our democracy.”
Indeed, one year ago a key poll found that “79 percent of Americans suggest President Donald Trump likely would have won reelection if voters had known the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop—that it was real and not ‘Russian disinformation,’ as intelligence officials aligned with Joe Biden falsely led the public to believe.” That’s real election interference, in this case involving at least 51 – not 18 – “co-conspirators.”
The second, and just as real, example involves Biden’s weaponizing his Department of Justice to go after Trump while the former president was emerging as his lead opponent in the 2024 election. According to the New York Times, one year ago Biden told his “inner circle” he wanted the former president “prosecuted” over January 6.
Since then, his Justice Department went after Trump for alleged crimes that, once again, Biden himself allegedly committed himself – interfering in an election and mishandling classified documents. The same Biden DOJ offered a get-out-of-jail-free misdemeanor plea deal to his son several weeks ago that collapsed immediately once its terms were revealed in his home-state courthouse. And this past week Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, named the prosecutor that agreed to that sweetheart plea deal to the position of special counsel in the Hunter matter, despite the regulations demanding that such an official be selected from “outside the United States Government.” Without a doubt, Biden’s DOJ is clearly tipping the scales in his favor against his opponent in the 2024 election, and doing so reportedly at his direction.
Once again, whatever the timing and legal problems with Democrat prosecutor Fani Willis’s controversial indictment of former President Trump, she is sliding with her two other fellow Trump-hunters down a slippery slope by criminalizing “election interference” that could easily, and more accurately, apply to leaders in her own party, including President Biden. The only question remains, are House Republicans going, in Biden’s words, “to do the hard work to ensure that equal justice under law is not just a phrase emblazoned in stone above the Supreme Court, but a reality for all Americans,” by holding him to the same standard and opening an impeachment inquiry that includes this additional charge?
Mr. Ullyot is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and former deputy assistant to the president.