-
They Need the Indictment to Beat Trump 2024
Get it yet? The point of the raid on Mar-a-Lago and the J6 hearings is aimed at one man. Nope, not Donald Trump, Merrick Garland. It is aimed at one end: get Garland to indict Trump for something and failing that, to indict the highest ranking person near Trump in hopes it will rub off on the near-certain-to-be Candidate.
The reason for this is that nothing else worked. Democrats pointed the full national security apparatus at Trump, with the FBI doing yeoman-like duty, and turned Robert Mueller loose with unlimited resources for a full year to find something Russian to indict Trump on, going as far as to suggest he obstructed an investigation which found him innocent. Alice in Wonderland stuff, that. After wading through reams of FBI investigative malfeasance to include but not limited to lying to get FISA warrants and accepting an obviously wholly-fictitious dossier as fact for months, Mueller could not find a single issue worthy of bringing to an actual court. So Democrats impeached Trump, twice, one of which was little more than a policy difference over a Ukraine few outside the DC Bubble cared about then but sure as hell do now. The aggressive Southern District of New York (SDNY) was unleashed on Trump’s finances and real estate work, given a grand jury to take testimony, and still came up with nothing indictable. And that is leaving aside the reality the IRS has had Trump’s full tax records for decades of audits and again came up with nothing indictable.
Dems’ whole remaining strategy for 2024 is to make people believe Trump does not support America’s democracy. Propaganda/journalism/TV hearings failed to sway many minds. To succeed it’s going to require something real, an actual court finding Trump actually guilty of an actual crime that meets the expectations set after flinging around words like treason and sedition like angry monkeys. Some goofy tax problem in a state court or empty process crime will not be enough. It is hard to imagine Trump taking with him some classified documents will be enough, despite the high-profile raid on Mar-a-Lago.
With the Democratic midterm massacre scheduled for November, Dems know they now have about 12 weeks left to indict Trump or someone near him. Republicans are already drooling over the prospect of shutting down the FBI and the J6 Headline Committee Machine and opening their own investigation into Hunter and Joe Biden’s financial tomfoolery in Ukraine and China. So it is now or never for the Last Man Who Can Trump Trump, Merrick Garland.
Garland seems a rare person in 21st century Washington, a man with a moral compass. Appointed Attorney General by Joe Biden, many Dems expected Garland to be an angry beast of a prosecutor. After all, the only reason he does not now sit on the Supreme Court (he might have saved Roe!) after being nominated at the end of the Obama administration was Republicans refused to allow him a Senate hearing. The unfairness of it all is supposed to be eating at him, and he should be out of blood to take down the Republicans once and for all by slashing Trump at the knees.
Garland instead seems lost in a kind of Jeffersonian Zen state, promising to follow the law and respect the civil liberties of all. In an interview’s worth of softball questions on NBC Nightly News, Garland sounded more like Mr. Rogers than a prosecutor atop his fiery pulpit. Yes, the DOJ is investigating Trump, et al, alongside the J6 Committee. Yes, it’s a criminal investigation, that’s what DOJ does. No, he has not decided to prosecute because all the information is not in. No, it doesn’t matter Trump is a former and maybe future president, the law is blind to that. Listeners were left waiting for him to say “And now anything else troubling you, young fella?”
The problem is despite all the cries about democracy under attack, there seems little to indict Trump over, and Garland seems to sense that. The original Great Dem Hope, incitement (often expressed as treason or sedition by pundits) is not mentioned much anymore. Among other problems, incitement requires a showing of intent — that the speaker wanted the crowd in this case to attack the Capitol not just protest there — and no witness has come up with anything remotely applicable and Trump’s own words fall far short. The idea that Trump spoke and the mob rioted seems attractive on TV (one thing followed another so they must be related, right?) but does not meet any legal test worthy of actual indictment. Merrick Garland knows that, even if Liz Cheney pretends she does not. The J6 people can pitch a criminal referral but that changes nothing for the man who has to actually decide if there is anything legally actionable he can take to court. It’s the gap on display between no standards and very high ones. It is very unclear anything Trump took with him to Mar-a-Lago would rise to the level of indictment after he blames staff and the movers for inadvertently packing the wrong stuff.
What will be left for Garland is some sort of charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States. This would have to take the form of persons planning to set in motion some sort of process which would have negated or at least scrambled the results of the 2020 election sufficiently that Trump could have claimed a victory and see what happens next. Garland is under huge pressure from the Democratic left, who know their time in power is numbered in weeks, to squish and squeeze the goofy rhetoric Trump’s lawyers were spouting into an indictment along those lines.
This indictment, if it comes at all, will probably not include Trump who, like any client, is not responsible for what his lawyers (or the movers) said or did. Instead, Trump lawyers John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark will likely bear the brunt of any legal opinions rendered, while the press and Dems try to drag the stain off them on to Trump. Both men recently were aggressively served with search warrants. Both men came up with complex schemes to negate the 2020 election, with no chance of success, just to placate their client, Trump. Eastman mumbled about old election law to “spin a yarn” the vice president might be able to exclude state-certified electoral votes based on speculative vote-fraud suspicions. Clark said even though the Justice Department found no evidence of voter fraud the fact that it was still investigating while Trump’s campaign claimed other election irregularities could be used to nudge contested states into auditing their elections.
If Garland is pressed to indict Eastman and Clark, he’ll face accusations that his jurisprudence is politically motivated. He’ll also face practical problems such as seating an unbiased jury. But if he thinks the cases will lead him to Trump, he’ll hit a stone wall. Trump’s conversations and interactions with his lawyers — the stuff that can reveal intent and state of mind — are protected by both attorney-client privilege and by executive privilege. The latter will also cover nearly every official who directly interacted with Trump. Garland could easily find himself facing a Supreme Court fight over the limits of such privilege which would run past 2024.
As for the work of the lawyer’s themselves and their possible indictment, Orwell would call what they might be accused of thought crimes. The legal advice was frivolous. It had no connection to the riots. It was never acted on. It is unclear what impact the opinions made anywhere, even their impact on Trump himself. In any normal world drafting a legal memo is hardly a crime. Yet they may yet prove just barely enough to bring an indictment against Trump’s lawyers and minimally satisfy the Democrats’ blood lust. The last hope is their indictment will stick to Trump and that — that — will dog him into defeat where everything short of shooting someone on Fifth Avenue has not. Call it a long shot.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Buy Peter’s Books on Amazon!
