The Democratic base is salivating at the thought of the Department of Justice “closing in” on Donald Trump as they prepare for an indictment.
Never mind about evidence. Such trivialities are unimportant when it comes to Trump. Trump is guilty of… something and needs to be perp-walked into the Federal courthouse in Washington, D.C. That moment of catharsis will be accompanied by a great big middle-finger salute to Republicans, conservatives, and those namby-pamby Democratic Party moderates who have stood in the way of the left’s grand design to turn America into a socialist paradise for far too long.
The irony is that the same people who want to shred the Constitution are the same people leaning on stupendously broad interpretations of that document to get Trump. But even on the left, there is opposition to legal aspects of the Jan. 6 Committee, which has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party and a continuous television commercial for the party and the radical left.
The criminal misuse of the Justice Department is one way in which the radical left is attacking the rule of law. Trump’s lawyers John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark were recently the subjects of a very public, humiliating experience of having the FBI rifle through their belongings and homes looking for… something. Whatever it is, they aren’t going to find it.
That’s because Eastman and Clark are guilty of only one thing: creating ridiculous, legally stupid rationales for Vice President Mike Pence to give the election to Trump by using the 19th-century Electoral Count Act.
Eastman exploited ambiguities in 19th-century election law to spin a yarn that the vice president might be able to exclude state-certified electoral votes based on speculative vote-fraud suspicions. Clark surmised that even though the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread vote fraud, the fact that it was still investigating and that Trump’s campaign was claiming other election irregularities (noncompliance with state law) could be used to nudge contested states into auditing their elections — perhaps persuading Republican-controlled state legislatures to substitute their preference (presumably Trump) for the voters’ (Joe Biden).
These theories were frivolous. They also lacked political support in Congress and the relevant states. If there had been no Capitol riot, they’d have been laughed off — much the way we now roll our eyes at baseless efforts by Jan. 6 committee members Bennie Thompson and Jamie Raskin to exclude electoral votes for, respectively, Presidents George W. Bush (in 2004) and Trump (in 2016).
Their client, Donald Trump, president of the United States, asked the two lawyers to come up with a legal way to steal the election. They did the best they could. But as Andrew McCarthy points out, the theories were “frivolous.” McCarthy was being polite. They were bat-guano nutzo, and no Constitutional lawyer took the argument seriously. Every Federal judge who heard an argument based on those theories strongly rejected them.
And yet the radical left wants Trump to pay for this “coup.”
There are other aspects that are equally crazy but may be illegal, including the “fake electors” scheme, for which you have to wonder what the person was drinking — or smoking — to come up with this cockamamie plan. But as far as prosecuting Trump, Garland has nothing. And he knows he has nothing.
Garland, a distinguished federal appellate judge for more than two decades before becoming AG, must be torn. He knows Eastman and Clark are not criminals. They are attorneys who devised cockamamie legal theories that had no chance of success.
But Garland is coming under increasing pressure from radicals in and out of Congress to make a case against Trump — even if one doesn’t exist.
Anyone who was willfully complicit in the use of force at the Capitol — who intended a lethal riot to happen and abetted it — should be prosecuted. But frivolous legal theories are not crimes. Sure, condemn them for being irresponsibly stupid. They’re not felonies, though — if they were, a lot of lawyers would be doing a lot of jail time.
Alas, the Democratic base wants to criminalize them. So the Justice Department is panicking. Garland knows that prosecuting Trump and such underlings as Eastman and Clark on flimsy grounds would rip the country apart. He’s also worried, however, that Biden’s left flank is poised for mutiny if there is no indictment.
McCarthy suggests that stunts like having the homes of two Trump lawyers searched may have been a signal that the Justice Department was closing in on Trump — even if the raids were mostly for show. But Garland’s problem is that, rather than sate the appetites of the radicals, these grandstanding moves only serve to make the fire burn even hotter.
Garland is going to be forced to indict Trump just to prevent an explosion of left-wing violence.
