Donald Trump rose to political power in 2016 because the FBI decided, 11 days before the election, to reopen an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
The same FBI is Public Enemy No. 1 to the “lock her up” crowd today.
And because of the way FBI directors are appointed, with fixed 10-year terms, to preserve independence from political pressure, it is Christopher Wray, appointed in 2017 by Trump, who is in their crosshairs.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is threatening to investigate the Justice Department. Fox News blowhard Dan Bongino is calling for the FBI to be purged.
Congressional dunce Marjorie Taylor Greene wants to “defund the FBI.”
The justice system has been “weaponized.” It’s political persecution.
The kind of thing we’ve seen many times from Third World dictatorships.
That last line came from Little Marco Rubio, who is among the many in Republican circles used as a punching bag by Trump to decide to bend the knee and kiss the ring of the mob don.
“Lock her up” was, of course, a rallying cry of convenience. Nobody really thought there was anything other than sloppiness at play with the private email server story, but the facts didn’t matter.
It’s not likely that there will be anything other than sloppiness at play with the classified documents at the heart of the search warrant executed at Trump’s golf resort on Monday.
The conspiracy theories from the left would have you believe that Trump took and kept the documents to be able to leverage whatever was in them for financial gain, and while that would fit the Trump profile, that’s the stuff of novels and action-adventure blockbusters.
As with the Clinton email server, though, the law is the law, and in the case of Trump, the law is clear. A 1978 law passed in the aftermath of the downfall of Richard Nixon requires former presidents to hand over documents from their time in office for preservation in the National Archives.
And despite Trump’s protestations, his golf estate wasn’t “raided.” The issue with these documents has been playing out publicly since January, with Trump resisting repeated requests from the National Archives to turn over what he had taken with him on his way out of the White House.
If it turns out that he was and has been in possession of documents in violation of the 1978 law, well, this guy, and his supporters, wanted to “lock her up,” referring to Clinton, over the use of a private email server that was later found not to have been in violation of federal law.
That didn’t stop Trump from continuing to suggest, during his presidency, that Clinton should be prosecuted to the fullest extent.
The idea that the justice system could be weaponized to persecute political rivals, the kind of thing that we’ve seen many times from Third World dictatorships, that idea originated with Donald Trump.
It’s just inconvenient now to the Trump cult that the chickens are coming home to roost.
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Chris Graham
