Lawfare Against Trump Is Running Out of Gas

Victor Davis Hanson

We should dispense with the tired narrative that four conscientious state and federal prosecutors—independently and without contact with the Biden White House or the radical Democrats in Congress—all came to the same disinterested conclusions that Donald Trump should be indicted for various crimes and put on trial during the campaign season of 2024.

The prosecutors began accelerating their indictments only once Trump started to lead incumbent Joe Biden by sizable margins in head-to-head polls. Moreover, had Trump not run for the presidency, or had he been of the same party as most of the four prosecutors, he would have never been indicted by any of them.

Yet now they are in a doom loop of discovering that the more they seek to rush to judgment before the election and gag Trump from speaking publicly about these star-chamber proceedings, the more he rises in the polls.

In truth, each succeeding cycle of corrupt leftwing lawfare that ends in failure—the Russian collusion hoax, the weaponized first impeachment, trying ex-president Trump in the Senate as a private citizen, the laptop disinformation set-up, the Alfa bank ping caper, the pathetic attempt to erase Trump from state ballots, and the unfolding Fani Willis moral debacle—does not return things to zero.

Rather, they serve as force multipliers for each other. Each overreach geometrically increases the dangers to democracy, ever more turns the public off, and ironically cascades sympathy and poll numbers for the very target of their paranoias.

Some of the prosecutors have colluded with White House lawyers and congressional liaisons. Some had run for office, offering campaign promises to get Trump convicted for something or other.

Now, after years of delays and dead ends, all four are rushing to synchronize their trial dates to ensure that the front-running Trump is on the docket daily and not out on the 2024 campaign trail.

The other three indictments are even weaker. Alvin Bragg claims that Donald Trump’s efforts a near decade ago to enact nondisclosure agreements and payments to remain silent about embarrassing behavior constituted “campaign finance violations.”

If so, what then defines campaign violations when Ms. Clinton brazenly destroyed nearly 30,000 subpoenaed campaign-era emails, ordered subpoenaed communication devices smashed, illegally hired a foreign national to find dirt on a campaign rival, and used three paywalls to hide her hush payments to British subject Steele to concoct a smear dossier—with help from Russian sources—to destroy her 2016 rival?

Letitia James, apparently for the first time in New York history, believes a bank was somehow wronged when its seasoned auditors viewed Trump’s assets, approved a loan to him, profited from his timely payments of interest and principles, and lodged no complaints against Trump or his company.

James apparently believes that Donald Trump is the first and most egregious real estate baron in New York history who inflated the value of his holdings. Her indictments thus supposedly have nothing to do with a left-wing political activist who ran for attorney general on promises to get Trump.

As far as Jack Smith, he supposedly was to be focused on Trump’s removal of classified presidential files to an insecure location at his Mar-a-Lago home and Trump’s “insurrectionary” actions on January 6. But he seems way beyond that now and is trying to put a gag order on the presidential frontrunner and to ensure Trump is in court during the 2024 campaign—challenging the very administration that appointed Smith in the first place.

In truth, Trump was the first ex-president in history to be indicted for a dispute with archivists over the status and security of removed classified files. Such disagreements were historically adjudicated bureaucratically rather than criminally, and certainly not with performance-art FBI swat raids into an ex-presidential residence.

Moreover, true insurrectionists do not instruct protestors to assemble peacefully and patriotically. Insurrectionists themselves do not try to overthrow governments while unarmed and accompanied by bare-chested buffoons with cow horns and slow-moving septuagenarians draped in American flags. And during an “insurrection,” unarmed “rebels” are usually not invited into the government quarters by supposed government doormen, among them perhaps 150-200 FBI informants. They are usually not shot and killed for the crime of entering a broken window while unarmed. And governments need not lie about the violence of insurrectionaries if they are truly insurrectionists.