Headline at NBC News (via Jonathan Dienst):
Law enforcement agencies are prepping for a possible Trump indictment as early as next week
Multiple agencies are discussing potential security plans for in and around the Manhattan Criminal Court in case Trump is charged in connection with an alleged hush money payment to Stormy Daniels.
Local, state and federal law enforcement and security agencies are preparing for the possibility that former President Donald Trump will be indicted as early as next week, according to five senior officials familiar with the preparations.
An honest word to describe all this is "Historic."
It was historic back in 2016 when the United States elected - through a broken Electoral process where he lost the Popular vote but won enough states - a person in donald trump who had never before held elected or nominated office.
It was historic that our nation invited into the White House a corrupt con man with a history of civil court cases, criminal allegations, and other misdeeds to where it can honestly be said trump was the most corrupt person to enter the Presidency.
Yell and scream all you want about the other Presidents of our times, but how many of them were honest-to-God as crooked as trump? trump was going into the White House after 2016 with serious allegations of money laundering from the 1980s and onwards, a series of failed bankruptcies that should have exiled him from the business community (or at least should have convinced banks to stop lending him money), and was even embroiled in a civil suit regarding fraud with his failed "Trump University" by the time he put his hand on a Bible to swear an Oath of Office he never took serious.
Remember all the trump rally chants in 2016 screaming "Lock Her Up" about the allegedly corrupt Hillary Clinton? All those investigations into her and not trump (not until it was too late)? Turns out Hillary never crossed the lines, never broke the law as her critics and haters accused. Even her Clinton Foundation that was attacked as a "fake" non-profit? It's still running, while trump's clearly fake non-profit was shut down for trump's abuse of non-profit regulations.
Remember all the Far Right demagogues convinced that Obama was crooked? Not just his "illegal" status arguing over his Hawaiian birth certificate, but attacking him on any other allegations of fraud and misconduct. Remember Solyndra? Investigations found it was the company that was corrupt, not Obama. And yet, the Tea Party (proto-MAGA) mobs howled for Obama to face their "justice".
There were - still are - a lot of angry Liberal Democrats railing against George W. Bush, especially as the War of Terror shifted from avenging 9/11 towards an uncalled and costly invasion/occupation of Iraq. When Putin just got tagged by the international courts for War Crimes against Ukraine, a lot of social media replies fell along the lines of "Now do Bush." But it should be noted that the Democrat who followed Dubya into the White House - Obama - did not pursue war crimes (or any other allegations of corruption) as a legal matter, not even pursuing it as a partisan method of punishing the Neocon pro-war Republicans. For all the evidence of human torture and battlefield atrocities happening under Bush the Lesser's watch, there did not seem to be enough for a sustainable indictment (or at least not enough to prevent the collapse of half our military and intel agencies if we did pursue it).
There were a lot of angry Liberals when Bush the Elder pardoned every major figure involved in Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal, closing the lid on that particular criminal matter, but even then the criminal allegations barely reached either Reagan or Bush, and calls for their arrests stayed on the fringes.
If you're buying into donald trump's claims that every criminal investigation is a WITCH HUNT and every prosecutor is doing so for partisan (and racist) political points, you'll have to explain why these sort of things never happened to every other former President in modern times. The closest we've ever gotten to any President under criminal investigation was Richard Nixon, facing tax evasion, obstruction, and other criminal charges in the wake of his resignation after Watergate. It took Gerald Ford's pardon - in Ford's earnest attempt to end the "long national nightmare" of scandal - to avoid that particular mess, and even then there was enough evidence for a case and a lot of Americans who preferred Nixon face his sins in a courtroom.
Look at trump's efforts to apply that belief - that partisan politics motivate criminal charges towards our political figures - to his political enemies Obama and Hillary. trump pushed for investigations into his claims he was unfairly persecuted by Obama's Justice Department, and that Hillary was corruptly dealing with others to steal the 2016 elections from trump. All of that wrapped into John Durham's special counsel investigations... that proved none of trump's claims and exposed Durham as a fool (or worse).
If you're buying into the most honest, simplest explanation into why trump is facing criminal (and civil) charges on a scale before never placed upon a political figure in American politics, it's because America never before had a con artist crook like trump operating on such a criminal scale before reach our highest political office.
All of these grand jury investigations - not just in New York involving his corrupt business practices, but also Georgia involving trump's attempt to influence the vote count in 2020, and in DC involving his call to insurrection and riot on January 6th - can't be happening without honest-to-God evidence, witnesses to his (and others) involvement, proof that something criminal took place. Durham had no evidence except for trump's gaslighting, and look where that got him. NYC prosecutors have evidence that trump paid off people to cover up his acts of adultery leading into 2016, and they've got to a grand jury to deliberate.
This is all historic because we've never had a corrupt con artist reach this high before.
This will all be historic when the indictments finally come down, because trump's panicked reactions to every criminal charge will trigger both celebration and riot.
Gods help us. The week of March 20-25 will be one of the most chaotic in our nation's history. As unsettling as September 11th and about as farcical as the Lorena Bobbitt trial.
The cops may try to get ready for it but I doubt the rest of us can.
Update: Infidel753 has a few thoughts, mostly concerns about how this will either inspire trump's supporters to vote for him in 2024, or leave the Republican primary race in the hands of DeSantis, who threatens to be worse and could win because the media are ignoring the warning signs about DeSantis' assaults on free speech.
1 comment:
Yes, his idiot hordes will buy into the persecution lie, and some will misbehave publicly.
We need to keep our ducks in a row and not take the bait, just like we did on January 6.
We probably won't be satisfied by the eventual legal outcome, but we need to remember that this isn't about satisfaction, it's about justice, and correcting a bad trend in our treatment of misbehaving leaders that sort of began with the deal they made Agnew to keep him from becoming president but let him skate for his crimes.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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