Donald Trump is right that the special counsel’s 37-count indictment against him for holding classified documents is federal law enforcement’s latest effort to interfere in a presidential election, as they did in the last two. But there’s something else, too.
For the 2016 and 2020 elections, there was alleged evidence of the Democratic Party candidate’s corruption. The same is so for the upcoming 2024 decision. In every instance, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has moved to protect the ruling class’s preferred candidate by framing Trump.
What we’re watching unfold isn’t just the next leg in an election interference operation, but also an eight-year-long coverup of allegedly illicit financial arrangements between senior Democratic officials and the agents of foreign governments. For nearly a decade, Trump’s opponents have falsely accused him of being a Russian asset, but it appears that it’s his rivals who have been compromised by foreign powers.
Maybe it’s a coincidence that the charges against Trump were issued the same day Republican lawmakers disclosed the contents of a DOJ document regarding President Joe Biden’s allegedly corrupt relations with a foreign enterprise. According to the report, in 2017, a valued and longtime FBI source reported that as vice president, Biden demanded $5 million from a Ukrainian energy company to shape U.S. policy.
The source told the FBI he was approached by a senior executive from Burisma, the Ukrainian firm owned by a former government official that has been the subject of various Ukrainian and international investigations. In the hope of resolving its legal problems, Burisma hired a U.S. lobbying firm and named Hunter Biden to its board, at a salary of more than $50,000 a month.
The FBI source reported that the unnamed Burisma executive told him Joe and Hunter Biden wanted $5 million each. The former vice president later boasted to a New York audience that in March 2016, he'd threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees from the Ukrainian government unless it fired the prosecutor investigating Burisma.
After Trump got word of Biden’s speech, he asked the newly elected president of Ukraine to help his attorney general, William Barr, investigate what the Biden family had been up to in Ukraine. The newly disclosed FBI source information suggests that the attorney general, the FBI’s ultimate supervisor, buried evidence damaging to Joe Biden.
When a former Biden aide filed a whistleblower’s complaint that Trump asked the president of Ukraine for help investigating what potentially unlawful acts the Bidens had committed in his country, Democratic Party House members moved to impeach the president. According to the articles of impeachment, he’d threatened to withhold U.S. taxpayer resources—a weapons program—if the Ukrainians didn’t play ball with an investigation. In other words, Democrats and the media simply hung the precise pattern of Biden’s alleged corruption on Trump.
Throughout the 2020 campaign, any reports of Biden family corruption were dismissed as “Russian disinformation.” Under Barr, the FBI set up a task force to block social media and press reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The American public deserved to know that the device was full of emails and other documents that allegedly gave clear evidence of the Biden family’s influence-peddling operation that sold access to foreign governments and enterprises. By concealing it from the electorate, the DOJ perpetrated a fraud against the electorate.
The Russian disinformation theme was little more than an updated version of Russia collusion. According to the FBI and other U.S. spy services, the media, and Democratic Party operatives, Moscow was seeding lies about Biden for the same reason it stole Hillary Clinton’s emails—Trump was Vladimir Putin’s preferred candidate.
In fact, for the 2016 campaign, the FBI alleged that Trump was a Russian agent in order to obtain a foreign intelligence surveillance act warrant to spy on his campaign. They wanted to know whether Trump aides knew of emails hacked from Hillary Clinton’s unsecure server.
The fear presumably was the emails she supposedly deleted from her server might give evidence of possible corrupt financial arrangements with the foreign governments and enterprises that contributed to the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state. The Clinton campaign was worried that someone might leak those emails as an October Surprise to derail her candidacy in the closing weeks of the campaign.
The report published last month by special counsel John Durham details how the FBI ran a source against the Trump campaign to ask what they knew about Clinton’s emails, and if they had an October Surprise in store for her. The FBI never believed Trump or any of his aides were Russian agents, it simply needed a cover story to shield Clinton by spying on the GOP nominee.
The essence of federal law enforcement’s coverup operation is easy to understand—it’s a plot line used in scores of detective movies and dime-store novels. A bunch of dirty cops framed a politician to protect his corrupt opponent.
The DOJ’s indictment of Trump fits the pattern of Russia collusion and Russian disinformation. The fact that Trump has been indicted on charges related to holding classified documents suggests that whatever classified documents Biden stored in unsecure facilities in his garage and office may contain damaging information about the arrangements he made as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then as vice president.
With more than a year until the November election, the DOJ’s dirty work is far from over.
