It is a sobering moment when Joe Biden’s attorneys at DOJ are betting that Americans hate Donald Trump more than they love the Constitution. Joe’s shredded the Constitution and legal norms to attack his chief rival in the 2024 race for president, like the “wannabe dictator” he obviously is. And they’re hoping America doesn’t notice or care. Two defense attorneys with Constitutional expertise say Joe and his thugs at DOJ have deprived Trump of multiple civil rights in this prosecution. More on that in a minute.
Special Counsel Jack Smith and his handler Merrick Garland’s practice of lawfare continues and there’s no one to stop them but the president. Sadly, you’ll recall that Joe Biden permitted DOJ to “Get Trump” when he gave the National Archives access to guns and ammo from the FBI SWAT team to raid Mar-a-Lago based on an unconstitutionally vague or general warrant.
How does the nectar from the fruit from the poisonous tree taste, America?
A few years back, my son-in-law, who’s from Mexico and is now an American citizen, looked at the politically corrupt efforts to “Get Trump” and used Trump’s own words when he ruefully joked, “I think I’ve traded one shithole country for another.” AMLO’s got nothing on the thug sitting behind the Resolute Desk these days.
Who will speak up? The ones we hear from are constitutional experts, defense attorneys, a smattering of members of Congress, and people who shake their heads in disbelief that America has fallen so far.
Related: We’ll Save You the Time: The Trump Records Indictment Is Banana Republic BS, Too
Some believe Trump could be found guilty and imprisoned, and judging by what we’ve seen so far, that’s an entirely possible scenario, notwithstanding the Constitution and regular order because they don’t care about any of that. We were in a post-Constitution banana republic as soon as that New York meme guy was found guilty of election interference for a dumb joke that goes around before every election.
Many wring their hands and fret, Oh, he mishandled super secret papers! But here’s a clue: we don’t know if that was a super secret document about General Milley wanting to start a war with Iran that Trump supposedly dangled from afar at a friend; because Donald Trump is such a blowhard, it could have been anything. And do you know what? The Special Counsel and his Democrat cronies bringing these charges don’t care if it’s tier-one bloviating. They also don’t seem to care about General Milley sharing supposed classified material with Bob Woodward, misrepresenting Trump’s stance on Iran.
Harvey Silverglate, a founder of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, well-known defense attorney, writer, and author of the book Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, told me “We’re in uncharted waters here. All I can tell you is, I believe this is an assault on Democracy because the powers-that-be are trying to avoid having a popular candidate run for re-election.”
Silverglate, a classical liberal who voted libertarian in the last presidential election, boiled this prosecution down to one overarching issue. He said on my Adult in the Room Podcast (see the YouTube version below), “It’s candidate suppression that’s the motive. It’s so obvious.”
Silverglate explains that there’s a five-year statute of limitations on the charges, so “what’s the rush?” He answered his own question, “There’s only one explanation: it’s candidate suppression. You’ve heard of voter suppression? Candidate suppression — it’s a setup.”
Related: Here’s How You Can Tell Hillary Thinks the Trump Indictment Is Bogus
Furthermore, federal laws are so vague that it gives “federal prosecutors enormous destructive power” like Stalinist Russia’s credo, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”
“Even if a reasonable analysis of the facts and the law showed that Trump committed crimes, I think it is highly improper and unwise to be prosecuting him before a highly contested Republican primary will then result in a presidential election.” This is, he told the Adult in the Room Podcast, “a crime against the voters, because it seeks to deprive the voters of the ability to re-elect Trump if they want to.”
Robert Barnes, a well-known conservative defense attorney, put the issues in the Trump indictment in even starker terms. “This is a deep state war on democracy such that, if this crime is upheld, we don’t have a constitutional democracy anymore; we have a deep state-run government that has killed the Constitution in America,” he told his podcast audience.
He said on Viva and Barnes Law for the People podcast, “We, the deep state, get to tell you what is and isn’t a secret,” he said. “We, the deep state, get to tell you what is and isn’t classified. We, the deep state, get to tell you what is and isn’t national security information. And even your elected president can’t tell you our secrets or he goes to prison,” he fumed. “That is how dangerous this criminal prosecution is. This goes way beyond Trump.”
Indeed it does. Barnes says prosecutors ignored the Presidential Records Act and chose to prosecute the former president on the notoriously vague and what he called “unconstitutional” espionage act, in which the president is the only person in America to which this statute does not apply. In so doing, they violated Trump’s First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment civil rights. They deprived Trump, he said, of a fair grand jury because it should have been done in Florida and not in Washington, D.C., which violated the grand jury clause. Venue shopping for an indictment and then bringing the charges to the proper district (Florida) is unconstitutional in Barnes’s eyes.
Barnes says the charges demonstrate something even worse. “This is a CIA indictment,” he said. “This is an intelligence community indictment. This is a deep state indictment,” he vented. “Not only to take out Trump in the 2024 election, not only to deny us, the American people, to pick our own president, but deny the rights of the American people to know the secrets of our country when our president decides to share them with us.”
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And whose papers were they in the first place? All of a sudden, the legal world’s axis has changed, because now we’re talking about Trump and they hope you don’t notice America.
As constitutional expert Mike Davis said and many others have echoed, the legal decisions, the Presidential Records Act, and indeed, President Clinton’s sock drawer case make clear that the documents are the president’s property.
Barnes agrees. “When he left office, they became his. How do we know that? Because a federal district court judge already established [it] a decade ago. Bill Clinton took tapes that had national security information on those tapes, classified information on those tapes… Clinton didn’t declassify anything in there. Clinton didn’t go through a formalized process. Clinton didn’t formally declare them his personal records. Clinton just took them!”
And, he explained, under Article II of the Constitution, the president is the ultimate authority on this issue.
Bill Shipley, a former federal prosecutor-turned-federal defense attorney, believes the prosecutors arrayed against Trump have a weak case.
In January 2021” — well, up through Noon on January 20 — as POTUS, Donald Trump had AUTHORIZED possession of every one of those documents, classified or otherwise. This is a tacit — and what will later become an actual admission by SCO Smith that Trump did have authorized possession of some/all the documents at some point in time.
How does the Smith SCO criminalize this “authorized” possession? With a naked little sentence at the end of Paragraph 4 on page 2 that he is going to have to establish to be true by virtue of some magic wand that is waived at precisely Noon on January 20 [which reads: “Trump was not authorized to possess or retain those classified documents.”]
Says who? Apparently, Special Counsel Jack Smith.
Trump might be imprisoned, but not because he did anything wrong. As Silverglate puts it, these DOJ thugs “think they’re virtuous.”
If the Constitution is supposed to mean anything, perhaps someone — many someones — should try to save it.
Every time I write one of these expansive stories that poke the bear, I wonder if this will be the day that the Deep State Borg silences me and PJ Media. Will this be the day I get a visit from the Biden IRS or a gunned-up officer who wants to sit down for a friendly inquisition?
The social media companies, at the behest of Democrats, have been preventing you from seeing our brand of opinion journalism for years now. They’re trying to starve us into compliance — or non-existence. PJ Media has been censored, disappeared, thrashed, and throttled by social media companies at the behest of political Leftists. It’s wrong and un-American. That’s where you come in.
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