Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a presidential contender nine years ago, America’s most esteemed scholars and journalists have argued that he was violating democratic norms. Trump, they said, was ignoring the stabilizing, unwritten rules and values of American politics. This was evident in his vulgar language, vilification of immigrants, criticisms of the press, lack of cooperation with the intelligence community, and refusal to accept the 2020 election results.
But the Democrats’ relentless effort to imprison Trump has undermined the rule of law, faith in the criminal justice system, and democratic norms more than anything Trump has ever done.
According to multiple credible sources, President Barack Obama’s Director of the CIA, in the summer of 2016, illegally mobilized foreign spy agencies to target 26 Trump advisors to claim, falsely, that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin controlled Trump.
Then, in January 2017, after Trump had been elected but before he took office, the U.S. Intelligence Community falsely claimedthat Putin had favored the election of Trump when, in reality, the intelligence showed that Putin favored Hillary Clinton.
After taking office, current and former US government intelligence operatives and Democrats falsely claimed that Russian disinformation on social media had resulted in Trump’s election and worked with the Department of Homeland Security to censor social media platforms.
None of this is a defense of Trump. He uses extreme and inflammatory rhetoric, particularly about immigrants, that I strongly disagree with. He was wrong to deny and try to change the results of the 2020 elections. And I think people are right to fear that, if he were re-elected, he could weaponize the government to exact revenge on his political enemies.
But that fear is further proof of the danger of Democrats weaponizing the government. Democrats went far beyond anything Trump did when it came to abusing their political power. After the Supreme Court ruled that Biden could not legally forgive student loans, he did so anyway. By contrast, Trump did not violate any Supreme Court rulings.
It’s true that Trump has criticized judges, journalists, and intelligence agencies, but why is that a bad thing? We have a separation of powers for a reason.
As for the intelligence agencies, they broke the law multiple times in targeting Trump. As for the news media, they deserve criticism for losing the public’s trust after lying about everything from the origins of Covid to the efficacy of the Covid vaccine to the Russiagate hoax.
Or consider the prosecution of Trump for supposedly taking and holding onto classified documents. It’s not obvious that Trump put national security in greater danger than Biden. There is evidence that the Biden administration worked with the National Archives and Department of Justice to demand the confrontation. And there is the possibility that the raid was motivated in order to recover documents related to the Russiagate hoax.
And the abuse of the court system by Democrats in an effort to incarcerate Trump and keep him off the ballot is far more of a violation of norms than anything Trump ever dreamed of.
The recent felony conviction of Trump for falsifying business records relies on the idea that he misclassified campaign payments. Democrats say, “Nobody is above the law,” which is true. But Democrats are wrong to ignore the fact that prosecutors are constantly making choices about whether to pursue certain cases over others. Indeed, Hillary Clinton was found to have mislabeled payments related to the Steele dossier during her 2016 campaign, and she was never prosecuted. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) merely fined Clinton and the Democratic National Convention (DNC)) for this misconduct.
In fact, everything about New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s recent conviction of Trump is abnormal. For starters, Bragg campaigned on the promise to prosecute Trump. He turned the misdemeanor of falsifying business records into a felony by tying it to election interference. The case was so weak that both the Department of Justice and the former DA refused to prosecute it.
The judge in the case donated to Biden and his daughter is the president of a Democratic Party fundraising firm whose clients include Rep. Adam Schiff, who led the Russiagate hoax. The judge told the jurors that they didn’t need to agree on what crime Trump intended to commit by falsifying records.
The case confused even legal experts. “At the start of closing arguments,” wrote legal scholar Jonathan Turley, “most honest observers were still wondering what the prosecutors were alleging as to the crime that Trump was allegedly concealing with the falsification of business records.”
Even CNN’s top legal scholar, Elie Honig, who is also a former colleague of Bragg, said the trial violated norms. “Prosecutors Got Trump But They Contorted the Law,” explained Honig in New York Magazine. “The charges against Trump are obscure and nearly entirely unprecedented,” he said. “In fact, no state prosecutor— in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere — has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime against anyone for anything. None. Ever.”
All of this is a radical change from the ideals of the Democratic Party just a few years ago. In the 1970s and 1980s, Democrats fought to restrict and reform the intelligence community so that it would stop spying on American citizens for their political activities. Democrats defended a high standard for free speech, including the right of Nazis to march through neighborhoods of Holocaust survivors. And since the 1990s, Democrats have raised the alarm about the abuse of prosecutorial power and elected progressive prosecutors, including Bragg, to reduce prosecutions of nonviolent crimes.
Today, Democrats are pioneering new ways to weaponize the government....
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In the video above, I erroneously said, "New York Times Magazine" when referring to a New York magazine article by @eliehonig. (The text is correct). Here is the article:
Bravo to the Supreme Court for upholding the right of the accused under Alien Enemies Act to due process. "For all the rhetoric... today’s order & per curiam confirm... detainees... are entitled to... an opportunity to challenge their removal. The only question is which court..."
The Court adds, "Although judicial review under the AEA is limited, we have held that an individual subject to detention and removal under that statute is entitled to ‘judicial review’ ... as well as whether he or she 'is in fact an alien enemy fourteen years of age or older.'"
Kavanagh: "...all nine Members of the Court agree that judicial review is available. The only question is where that judicial review should occur."
Trump is losing support from Republican “financiers”, say the media. First, did it ever cross their mind that Wall Street may not represent the American interest? Of course not. Second, @FT irresponsibly omitted the small detail that Ken Langone’s @HomeDepot is long Vietnam.
Perhaps the most entertaining part of the Trump tariffs is how they have brought together financiers and @BernieSanders , thus exposing just how full of baloney his whole “oligarchy” shtick is.
@BernieSanders Why are we taxpayers funding this dishonest partisan garbage?
Not a single mainstream media outlet has acknowledged that Bernie is with the oligarchs. And that’s fine but don’t make pay to just repeat their propaganda.
One FBI employee involved in the cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop was Bradley Benavides (ctr-intel div). Weeks earlier he played key role in an apparent FBI scheme to smear @SenRonJohnson & @ChuckGrassley — who were investigating Hunter — as tools of Putin. Sinister.
According to @SenRonJohnson & @ChuckGrassley , Benavides and a colleague on August 6, 2020 provided "an unnecessary briefing on behalf of the FBI and Intelligence Community on matters purportedly related to the senators’ investigation into Hunter Biden."
The FBI said it didn't interfere in the 2020 election, but it did. It tricked Twitter & Facebook into censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story. Now, newly released chat messages show the FBI issued a "gag order" after an employee accidentally confirmed the laptop's authenticity.
This is a CatherineHerridgeReports @C__Herridge / Public Investigation
In 2024, an FBI official admitted to House investigators that an FBI employee had inadvertently confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop to Twitter on a conference call the morning of October 14, 2020, the day the New York Post published a story about it.
“I recall that when the question came up, an intelligence analyst assigned to the Criminal Investigative Division said something to the effect of, ‘Yes, the laptop is real’,” testified the then-Russia Unit Chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force in a closed door transcribed interview.
“I believe it was an (Office of General Counsel) attorney assigned to the (Foreign Influence Task Force) stepped in and said, ‘We will not comment further on this topic.’”
For the first time, and with a change of administration, the FBI has now turned over to GOP House investigators the internal chat messages that show Bureau leadership actively silenced its employees.
The FBI, which had a special task force to counter foreign election interference, could have set the record straight by confirming the laptop was real and the subject of an ongoing criminal probe. Instead, FBI leadership allowed the false narrative about the laptop to gain momentum.
The FBI provided the chat messages to congressional investigators with heavy redactions.
Some of the redactions on the chats are marked “OGC AGC,” which appears to mean that they were made by the FBI’s Office of General Counsel and Associate General Counsel.
An individual whose name is blacked out, tells Elvis M. Chan, the San Francisco-based FBI special agent tasked with interacting with social media companies, there was a “gag order” on discussion of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In a separate exchange, Chan is told “official response no commen(t).”
In the chat, the FBI officials showed awareness that the laptop may have contained evidence of criminal activity.
Asked Chan, “actually what kind of case is the laptop thing? corruption? campaign financing?”
Another FBI employee responds, “CLOSE HOLD —” after which the response is redacted.
To which Chan responds, “oh crap” appearing to underscore the serious nature of the probe, which included felony tax charges. Chan adds, “ok. It ends here”.
In the same conversation, Chan is asked if “Anyone discussing that NYPost article on the Biden’s?” Chan responds, “yes we are. c d confirmed an active investigation. No further comment.” “C D” is likely shorthand for the FBI’s Criminal Division.
Said another FBI employee, whose name was redacted by the Bureau, “please do not discuss biden matter.”
We asked for a response from the bureau and the FBI employees identified in the chat messages. An FBI spokesman declined to comment.
According to the IRS whistleblowers, DOJ prosecutors blocked standard investigative protocols that might have led to Joe Biden ahead of the presidential campaign.
“There were a lot of overt investigative steps that we were not allowed to take because we had an upcoming election,” said Joseph Ziegler, the IRS case agent on the Hunter Biden probe.. “And it related to the president's son. So not even the candidate.”
The FBI chat is cryptic and the heavy redactions make it difficult to discern context. For example, an employee says to Chan that “[redacted] has a gag order from [redacted]... got checked by [redacted] had to backtrack - sorry!”
Another cryptic exchange came from Laura Dehmlow, the FBI employee who told House investigators that an FBI employee had accidentally confirmed that the laptop was real. “WTF(redacted) No COMMENT.”
An employee whose name is also withheld wrote, “nope, just a domestic hit job, yay” to which Dehmlow responded, “Yup.”
The exchange may be referring to the FBI’s knowledge that the laptop was authentic and not a foreign “hack and leak” or “Russian information operation,” as 51 former senior intelligence officials alleged at the time.
The IRS whistleblowers said there was no basis for the statement from the former intelligence officials....
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The Twitter Files revealed that the FBI ran a sophisticated info operation aimed at convincing journalists and social media companies that the Hunter Biden laptop, which it had possessed since 2019, was the result of a Russian "hack and leak" operation.
The Right is a threat to democracy, the media says. But it isn’t. It’s winning elections and respecting constituitons. It’s the Left that is undermining democracy. It tried to jail Trump, is about to jail Bolsonaro, and just sentenced Le Pen to prison. This is a five alarm fire.
And when the Left can’t incarcerate a presidential candidate, it simply prevents them from running, for no good reason, and in flagrant violation of the law, as the totalitarian creeps just did in Romania.
The reason the court convicted @MLP_officielis because she is 10 points ahead of her nearest rival in the presidential race.