Victor Davis Hanson › American Greatness What will be the endgame of all these attacks on the American legal system and the warping of it for blatant political purposes?
Tara Reade was as believable or unbelievable as E. Jean Carroll. Far poorer, and without Carroll’s New York elite connections, Reade alleged that Senator Joe Biden sexually assaulted her at about the same time as the Carroll claim. Yet Reade was written off as a nut, ostracized, and felt to have opportunistically piggy-banked on the #MeToo movement.
"None of the five civil and criminal cases currently lodged against former President Donald Trump have ever had merit. They were all predicated on using the law to injure his re-election candidacy—given a widespread derangement syndrome among the left and a fear they cannot entrust a Trump/Biden election to the people.
"These criminal and civil trials are merely the continuation of extra-legal efforts of the last eight years to destroy a presidential candidate in lieu of opposing him in transparent elections.
"As such, the current lawfare joins the Mueller investigation of the Russian-collusion hoax. It is a continuation of the laptop disinformation caper and the “51 intelligence authorities” who lied about its Russian origins. It logically follows from the two impeachments, the Senate trial of Trump as a private citizen, and states’ efforts to remove him from their ballots.
"The E. Jean Carroll case, the Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and Fani Willis local and state trials, and the Smith federal indictment share various embarrassments.
"Suspension of statutes of limitations: Carroll and Bragg could only go to court through the legal gymnastics of enlisting sympathetic judges and legislators to change or amend the law to suspend the statute of limitations as a veritable bill of attainder to go after Trump.
"Violations of the Bill of Rights: In the Bragg case, Judge Merchan’s selective and asymmetrical gag order likely violates the First Amendment (prohibiting “abridging the freedom of speech”). Bragg violated the Sixth Amendment by denying Trump the right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation”. Judge Engoron, in the juryless James case, violated the Eighth Amendment (“nor excessive fines imposed”) in assessing Donald Trump an unheard of $354 million fine for supposedly overstating the value of real estate collateral for loans, while violating the Sixth Amendment as well (“the accused shall enjoy the right … to trial by an impartial jury”). The FBI likely violated the Fourth Amendment (“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”) by raiding Trump’s private residence, seizing his papers and effects (many of them private), and then lying about its own shenanigans of rearranging the seized classified files to incriminate Trump.
"The invention of crimes: The indictments of Bragg, James, Willis, and Smith had no prior precedents. " . . .