The Fulton County DA's legal vendetta against Donald Trump is remarkably audacious in two respects.
One, it pulls 18 additional defendants into the leftist/establishment dragnet, some of them guilty of nothing more than publicly questioning the fairness of the 2020 election, or of asking for someone's phone number on Trump's behalf. Thus, the Georgia trial, if the prosecutor follows through on her intention to try all 19 defendants together, will be a judicial and media circus on a scale not seen since the O.J. Simpson murder trial. It will be, from the perspective of almost every Republican and conservative, a new low in American jurisprudence.
Two, the Georgia case is also uniquely atrocious in that it posits that all the defendants are part of a broad criminal “conspiracy” to mislead the American public, to subvert government officials and institutions, and to overturn the result of a free and fair election. Because this was allegedly an organized conspiracy to violate the law, RICO charges have been brought against the defendants, including Trump, meaning that they will be treated like mafia bosses and will face potentially tougher penalties and longer sentences. The substance of the crimes themselves – charges like “false statements and writings” and “solicitation of violation of oath by public officer” – will be accentuated by the prosecutor's decision to frame them as an organized criminal enterprise.
This begs the question, of course, of why the Democrats' exceedingly organized effort to challenge Florida's certified presidential election results in 2000, and thus overturn George W. Bush's victory over Al Gore, were not also a criminal conspiracy against truth, justice, and the American way. We might further inquire why the shadow campaign conducted on the Left in 2016 to convince members of the Electoral College not to honor their pledges to vote for Donald Trump was not also an anti-democratic conspiracy. We might then ask whether Stacey Abrams' refusal to accept the results of the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia, and countless Democrats' and progressives' declarations that she was, despite her certified loss, the legitimate Governor of Georgia, was not also an organized conspiracy to subvert the democratic will of the people of that state, as well as the legitimacy of the rightful governor, Brian Kemp. We might further demand to know whether Democrats' and progressives' aggressive peddling of false accusations of Trump-Russia collusion was not similarly an organized conspiracy to overturn (indirectly) the results of the 2016 election, by fraudulently soliciting the impeachment and removal of the duly-elected president.
We could ask any, or all, of these questions, in light of the Fulton County prosecutor's brazen attempt to criminalize the questioning of election results only when it is done from the political right, but we would be, presumably, wasting our time, since the concept of equal justice under the law does not compute for people who view the purpose of the law, in the first place, as the destruction of their political enemies.
Republicans and conservatives ought to ponder, however, just how sweeping the implications of the current prosecutions are, and how potentially chilling for any and all future efforts to oppose and/or criticize the establishment Left's reign of error.
If the criticism of the 2020 election was a vast criminal conspiracy, that means that anyone connected to it, or supportive of it, is also a criminal. I, for instance, who wrote articles questioning the fairness of the 2020 election, thus engaged in behavior not so different from that of some of the defendants soon to be tried in Fulton County. My, uhh, obscurity would not, legally speaking, mitigate the seriousness of my “crimes.”
What's more, millions of Americans contributed financially to the Trump campaign, which was deeply involved in efforts to question the election results and to try to overturn them. Presumably, every one of these donors was a cog, however small, in crime boss Donald Trump's elaborate election-busting machine. It need not matter, moreover, whether support was given to the Trump campaign before or after the election, because Trump's and Republicans' (supposedly illegal) efforts to criticize the terms and fairness of the election began well before voting commenced. Furthermore, given the breadth and brazenness of this “conspiracy,” one could even argue that all 74 million Americans who voted for Trump share criminal responsibility for the damage that he, his campaign, and his administration did to American democracy.
That's right, dear reader: YOU were in on it all along! You too, when the Democrats bestir themselves to expand their dragnet still further, could be subject to prosecution and severe criminal penalties.
How can one criminalize voting, you ask, or political donations? Why, free speech is the first and most important right guaranteed by our Constitution. If the mere exercise of that right can be turned into a crime, then it stands to reason that anything can.
In short, the temerity and dangerousness of the Georgia prosecutions are difficult to overstate, and perhaps the most shocking thing about them is that their horrifying implications seem not to have occurred to a single figure on the Left – or, if they have, they seem not to be troubled by them. But then, why would a party that has embraced censorship of oppositional speech, and the persecution of dissidents in and by the private sector (with the helping hand of federal authorities), blanch at taking progressive authoritarianism to the next level: the criminalization of the democratic process itself?
That is how low we have sunk in this country, and that is how close we now are to losing, for all intents and purposes, the right and the ability to fight back against leftist tyranny.