Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
President-elect Donald Trump is apparently a threat to democracy because he has the power to use the Department of Justice (DOJ) the way Democrats did against him.
In an interview released with MSNBC this week, former President Bill Clinton complained Hunter Biden’s crimes “pales in comparison with a deliberate use of the criminal justice system to punish your political enemies.”
Lest anyone might think Clinton was referring to President Joe Biden’s weaponization of the Justice Department, the 42nd president condemned Trump.
“This whole thing has been thrown off for several years now because of the dominance of what I call Roy Cohn politics. Roy Cohn was Sen. Joe McCarthy’s main adviser. Then he came back, and he was Donald Trump’s father’s main political adviser, and then President Trump,” Clinton said. “And Roy Cohn said, no matter what happens, always deny everything, always attack, and always accuse other people of doing what you’re doing.”
Either Clinton was speaking with absolutely zero self-awareness or was offering a textbook example of outright projection after Democrats launched a crusade of civil and criminal litigation to bankrupt and imprison their top challenger with nearly 100 state and federal charges across multiple jurisdictions.
Clinton isn’t the only one fretting about Trump’s return to the Oval Office as a supposed authoritarian who happened to be elected for a second time. National Public Radio (NPR) published this headline last week: “Could the FBI be weaponized under Trump?” Was anyone at NPR paying attention under Biden? Here’s another headline from The Washington Post: “Many Republicans are okay with Trump ignoring the law to target enemies.” The legacy media is reporting as if the Democrats’ unprecedented lawfare campaigns never happened.
But let’s go through Trump’s alleged crimes. In New York, a re-opened investigation from a Manhattan prosecutor received federal assistance to pursue charges previously declined by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Southern District of New York’s U.S. attorney’s office. Alvin Bragg, the district attorney who campaigned on a platform to prosecute Trump, ultimately captured a conviction on 34 charges for falsely characterizing payments to a lawyer as legal expenses.
In Florida, Trump was prosecuted for the alleged mishandling of classified documents after top secret records were found throughout the former president’s private Mar-a-Lago residence. FBI stormtroopers raided the property in 2022 under sweeping warrants that granted officials authority to confiscate any and all documents Trump may have come in contact with as president. The case was dropped this summer after a federal judge in Florida ruled the special counsel’s appointment was unconstitutional. Federal prosecutors dropped a similar case against Biden earlier this year after Special Counsel Robert Hur reported the president had a “poor memory.”
In Georgia, Trump faces criminal charges related to objections over the 2020 election. Trump is being prosecuted by local officials plagued in scandal because he made the same challenges to the election outcome which Democrats have made for decades. In fact, Democrats objected to more states in the 2016 election than Republicans did in 2020, but none faced criminal charges.
In Washington, D.C., federal prosecutors indicted Trump on charges related to the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, wherein a horde of demonstrators descended on a joint session of Congress before the president finished speaking at the White House. While Trump urged supporters to make their voices heard “peacefully,” prosecutors still charged the president with inciting the riot, and only dropped their case following his re-election.
Even if Trump might escape jail time and additional fines beyond the civil cases brought against him by partisan prosecutors in New York, others within Trump’s orbit did not. Former Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon both spent four months in prison this year for refusing to comply with the Democrats’ Soviet-style inquisition run by the since-disbanded Jan. 6 Committee.
Trump was asked last weekend on NBC about whether he would seek “retribution” against political opponents who weaponized the state to put him in jail.
“I’m not looking to go back into the past,” Trump said. “Retribution will be through success.”