The Trump indictments (note the plural)—are they not like the blind encountering an elephant for the first time?
One touches the beast’s trunk and says it’s shaped like a snake.
Another touches its tusks and says, no, it’s hard and bone-like.
A third, hands on the elephant’s capacious side, says it’s more like a wall of flesh.
That old story was meant to remind us of how limited our individual perspectives can be.
How easy it is to mistake the part for the whole, to seize on one thing we’re familiar with and elevate it to a general explanatory principle.
Noting the wild differences among people’s assessments of the latest—but not the last—of the Trump indictments, I, at first, thought the differences of opinion might be due to the differences in the vantage points from which individuals survey the news about the indictments.
But the more I learn about the issue, the more I think that’s too generous a conclusion.
It assumes a modicum of good faith among those issuing the judgments.
Alas, I don’t think the motives of every party to this spectacle are pure.
Some, I’m confident, are partisan actors.
Yes, the partisanship exists on either side of the spectrum.
But that isn’t to say that it’s evenly distributed.
In my view, the lion’s share of the partisanship is on the anti-Trump side.
That’s both obvious and neglected.
It’s obvious because Trump is the most investigated, the most harassed, and the most frequently indicted president in history.
Everyone knows that.
And yet, we—the public watching this happen—are continually lulled into forgetting it.
Ever since 2015, when Donald Trump made his way down the elevator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president, he has been the object of a concerted attack by the establishment.
In one sense, the indictment unsealed by special counsel Jack Smith the other day is just the latest chapter in the long-running drama called “Get Trump.”
Robert Mueller was the face of season one.
Now we’re well into Season five or six.
Have we jumped the shark yet?
Since Smith, in his 37-count indictment, drew heavily on the Espionage Act to frame his accusation, one might think so.
And yet legal experts from former Attorney General William Barr to legal commentator Jonathan Turley (among others) have publicly judged the indictment (favorite epithet) “damning.”
I hesitate to disagree with such eminent legal authorities.
But I wonder: Are they right?
I don’t doubt that Trump is in serious legal jeopardy or that he might be convicted of a felony and, possibly, as Turley and others have suggested, even go to jail, if not for his handling of documents then for “obstruction.”
The forces arrayed against him are formidable.
But the question is, what did he do that was wrong?
Barr said Trump had no right to have the documents he had at his residence in Mar-a-Lago.
“Those documents are among the most sensitive secrets the country has,” he said.
Maybe.
But the question is whether Trump, a former president, was governed by the Presidential Records Act or the Espionage Act in his handling of the documents.
As president, Trump could handle, possess, and dispose of any documents any way he wished, Watters said.
George H. W. Bush did so, as did Bill Clinton, as did Barack Obama.
The situation is different with all those boxes of classified documents that Joe Biden stashed behind his Corvette in his Delaware garage.
That’s different because Biden was a senator or vice president, not president, when he parked those documents in his home.
But even to enumerate such details is to miss the point.
At the end of the day, Trump is guilty not because of anything he has done but because of who he is.
Forget about the fact that Trump was in the process of consulting with the National Archives and the FBI about the documents when his home was raided by the FBI in August 2022.
Trump is persona non grata, an enemy of the state.
Jack Smith is well suited to his role as a modern Beria.
As Julie Kelly pointed out, he was one of those who signed off on the FISA warrant for Carter Page, back at the inception of the Russia Collusion episode of the “Get Trump” saga.
No one who has been paying attention will be surprised that Smith, although nominally an “independent,” is an anti-Trump activist.
Indeed.
Like an overactive immune system, our government is mobilizing the criminal justice system to conduct a partisan witch hunt.
It may well surround and destroy this novel threat to the host.
Unfortunately, the host won’t survive in its original form.
It will emerge distorted and perverted into something else: not a constitutional republic but a one-party oligarchy.
The former was nice while it lasted.
