OPINION:
In Washington, there are no coincidences. A day after a key eyewitness testified President Biden participated in his son Hunter’s pay-for-access scheme with foreign business entities, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith decided to indict former President Donald Trump in the District, where he received barely 5% of the vote.
As distractions go, this is a powerful one.
Mr. Smith’s charges read as if they were translated from an indictment filed in a South American dictatorship. He claims that Mr. Trump “spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud” in a “conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.” Basically, he is saying that Mr. Trump lied about the 2020 election.
If that indeed is a crime, what charges have been laid against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for blaming her 2016 electoral defeat on “the unprecedented interference, including from a foreign power whose leader is not a member of my fan club”?
By that, she meant Vladimir Putin, a claim that was central to an actual conspiracy to falsely tie the Trump campaign to Russia. The Clinton campaign funded the creation of the Steele dossier that the Justice Department relied upon to justify its first of many investigations of Mr. Trump, despite knowing early on that every claim in the document was unsubstantiated.
Reviews of the improprieties of that investigation revealed an FBI agent’s willingness to falsify evidence to conduct unprecedented surveillance against a political campaign. The agency’s “get Trump” mentality was clear from the rabidly partisan text messages investigators exchanged.
The same manic energy leaps from the pages of the indictment as the special counsel invents phrases such as “outcome-determinative fraud” to advance his dubious legal argument. The new limitation admits there may actually have been fraud in the 2020 election — just not enough to tip the final result.
In 2020, suggesting that even a single vote had been irregularly cast was as taboo as saying the COVID-19 virus had its origin in the Wuhan, China, lab that had been experimenting on making flu viruses more deadly. Now we know what was once censored as medical “disinformation” is the more likely hypothesis.
There is a precedent for doubting the reliability of political assertions that are presented to the public as unquestionable.
Was Mr. Trump guilty of intemperate remarks that gave fuel to the unfortunate Jan. 6 fracas at the Capitol? Perhaps. But whatever he did then will not damage the republic more than this transparently political indictment will if it succeeds.
Making it a crime to dissent from the Washington establishment’s agreed-upon narrative is a direct assault on the First Amendment. Attempting to remove the leading obstacle to Mr. Biden’s reelection by putting him in prison is a direct assault on democracy.
There is scant hope for a just outcome given the low odds that a juror open to Mr. Trump’s defense would be summoned to jury duty, much less be allowed to serve on the case by a judge appointed by President Barack Obama.
One can only hope that common sense somehow prevails before it is allowed to go to trial.
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