“A Criminal Scheme to Corrupt the 2016 Presidential Election.” By Charles Taylor (Florida)

Alex Berenson, who presently has a court case against the Biden administration over the question of his intellectual suppression, is no particular friend or supporter of Donald Trump. However, he has written a powerful piece that Australians should read, extracted below, where he makes the convincing case that the New York trial against Trump is really about Trump somehow being involved in a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 election! So, by having a hush money deal to a porn star to keep quite about an encounter Trump supposedly had with her, money being paid by another agent, that somehow is causally linked to staling the election. As he argues, this makes no sense at all. Trump had an image of being a womaniser and he was attacked by the craze Left for numerous remarks he had made of a sexual nature.

The nominal charge of falsifying business records is normally a misdemeanour, but that has been distorted into 34 counts of a criminal nature, to put Trump behind bars for several lifetimes. Nothing as corrupt as this has occurred in the Western legal system, so the case is a remarkable study for people in other jurisdictions to ponder.

As Berenson concludes: "Trump now has every reason to view American law as hopelessly politicized and prosecutors as targeting him."

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-manhattan-district-attorneys

"A criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election."

"That's the crime prosecutor Matthew Colangelo - a top official in Joe Biden's Justice Department until he joined the Manhattan district attorney's office to prosecute Donald Trump - claimed last week Trump had committed.

That "scheme" is why Trump faces 34 New York state felony charges for "falsifying business records," a crime that is normally a misdemeanor, Colangelo said in his opening statement to the Manhattan jury that will decide if Trump is guilty.

In mid-April, a Richard L. Hasen, a left-leaning expert on election law, wrote in the Los Angeles Times the New York charges "are so minor I don't expect they will shake up the presidential race."

Hasen was half-right. The charges are minor. But the way prosecutors are framing the case is not. Local Democratic prosecutors want to send Trump, a Republican, to prison, for a "crime" that comes down to beating Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Win or lose, their effort may destabilize the American legal system for decades.

(To understand exactly why, subscribe! This one is worth it, or your money back.) In a 2009 book called "Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent," Harvey Silverglate, a veteran defense lawyer, described how

federal United States attorneys used vague laws to bring indictments against unpopular politicians and business executives.

The problem had worsened for decades as the federal criminal code expanded and prosecutors pushed its limits, Silverglate argued. He quoted Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court Justice who was also the chief American prosecutor in the post-World War 2 crimes trials at Nuremberg:

After explaining why a federal prosecutor must choose cases carefully and recognize that not every crime can be pursued, Jackson turned to the heart of his talk: '"If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants."

Here one finds "the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted."

Silverglate expressed less concern about state prosecutors. Tighter statutes restricted them and they focused on more obvious crimes, Silverglate wrote.

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But the Trump indictment flips Silverglate's concern about the power of federal prosecutors and local politicians on its head.

In this case, local prosecutors, who answer only to local voters in a heavily Democratic county, aren't just stretching a state criminal statute to its limits. They are doing so explicitly to punish a Republican politician over his tactics in his race for president - the only truly national election in the United States.

To be clear, prosecutors have not charged Trump with committing any crime in 2016. He is charged only with technical violations of obscure bookkeeping laws in 2017.

In fact, the actual crime Trump supposedly committed is almost farcical in its unimportance. He supposedly misclassified $420,000 in expenses in internal accounting records as "legal services" when they were actually reimbursements for payments that his lawyer Michael Cohen had made on his behalf.

But the 2016 election underlies the indictment, and not in a subtle or implicit way, as the prosecution has made clear. …

In 2016, Hillary Clinton's campaign used campaign funds to pay for the infamous "Steele dossier," the research report that falsely linked Trump to Russia. This is not a conspiracy theory. In 2022, Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid a $113,000 fine to the FEC to settle an investigation into the payments.

Clinton's campaign then worked with friendly news organizations to plant stories based on that research.

And Clinton's campaign had a relationship with elite media outlets like the New York Times at least as good as the one Trump had with the National Enquirer. (Famously, Amy Chozick, the Times's lead reporter on the Clinton campaign, wrote that she'd cried the day after Trump beat Clinton in 2016. Pecker and Trump may be friends, but it is hard to imagine Pecker shedding tears if Trump had lost.)

If Donald Trump is being indicted for his 2016 shenanigans, why isn't Hillary Clinton?

To be clear, I am not suggesting anyone should prosecute Clinton for the role her campaign played in generating the Steele dossier or spreading it around.

What I am saying is that, as Finley Peter Dunne famously said in 1895, "Politics ain't beanbag." Any candidate worthy of the name will want to win badly, and will do everything possible to portray himself in the best possible light and his opponent in the worst. That's true in every election, much less one where the world's most powerful office is at stake.

For local prosecutors to attempt to turn what are most technical legal violations into felonies on the basis that Donald Trump wanted to keep his private affairs private in a presidential election is a dangerous overreach.

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The fact Trump is leading Joe Biden in this year's presidential race makes the situation even worse. The New York Times argued convincingly this weekend in a long piece (paywalled) that Trump's view of the United States and the American justice system has darkened considerably …

… Trump now has every reason to view American law as hopelessly politicized and prosecutors as targeting him."