Just look at the source of some of the evidence. It’s not his enemies.
Just look at the source of some of the evidence. It’s not his enemies.
O n May 23, 2022, Donald Trump, formerly the president of the United States and thus the nation’s chief executive responsible for executing and upholding its laws, sat down with two lawyers he had retained to help him handle a grand-jury subpoena.
The subpoena, which is a legally enforceable court order, not a suggestion, required that he surrender to the grand jury (via the FBI) intelligence files that he had illegally retained at Mar-a-Lago, his resort club and estate in Palm Beach. Trump was bent on defying the order. He would willfully refuse the command of the subpoena and the directive of government officials.
Already, you can see a problem here. Trump and his two lawyers understood that the point of the meeting was to decide how to handle the subpoena. But, it turns out, not everyone was on the same page about what handle meant.
Trump turned the conversation to a favorite obsession, Hillary Clinton. Specifically, he spoke of a lawyer who had represented her when she was in a similar pickle: the recipient of a subpoena (hers was from Congress) demanding that she turn over emails from her home-brew, nongovernment, nonsecure server system. Humiliating emails she had no intention of surrendering.
According to Trump, then, she got herself a lawyer who would help her, you know, handle the subpoena. To the former president, this was the very model of legal acumen. Referring to this exemplary lawyer, Trump advised his two attorneys:
He was great, he did a great job. You know what? He said, he said that it — that it was him. That he was the one who deleted all of her emails, the 30,000 emails, because they basically dealt with her scheduling and her going to the gym and her having beauty appointments. And he was great. And he, so she didn’t get into any trouble because he said he was the one who deleted them.
Get it? It doesn’t require a lot of translation. But just in case anyone missed the point, the indictment recounts that the former president of the United States “related that story more than once that day.”
Now, since we’re hearing a lot, and we’re going to hear a lot more, about selective prosecution, about the sense that the “boxes hoax” is the “biggest witch hunt of all time,” understand this: The evidence of this soliloquy — wherein it was Trump-splained that a “great job” by a lawyer entails making incriminating evidence disappear and taking the fall for it so the client escapes jeopardy — does not come from Donald Trump’s enemies.
These are not the people who want to take him out. This is not Joe Biden, Liz Cheney, congressional Democrats, or the “fake news” media. It’s not even RINO Republicans or that (apparently) fiercest of political combatants, “Ada” Hutchinson.
No, the evidence comes from Trump’s lawyers. The people who were trying to minimize his criminal exposure and push back against his destructive tendencies. The people who were trying to help him.
One of these lawyers, Evan Corcoran, kept trying to help Trump even after he knew he’d been had. For his trouble in representing a former president, Corcoran was subpoenaed and forced by a federal judge and an appellate court to testify. He fought them all the way, struggling to preserve Trump’s attorney-client privilege even though, apparently unbeknownst to Corcoran at the time, Trump had blithely negated the privilege by using Corcoran to provide false information, under oath, in response to a subpoena.
It’s the Trump pattern: Good people try to help wrestle his demons, he gets his kicks out of making unsavory acts of loyalty the price of prestigious jobs, they finally realize the price is too high — usually too late for their own good — and he trashes them as they make their quietus. Rinse and repeat.
Corcoran was not trying to hurt Trump, even though Trump had thought nothing of putting the lawyer’s livelihood at risk. Corcoran provided the lurid testimony reflected in the indictment — including Trump’s suggestions that he falsely tell the FBI and grand jury that he did not have documents marked classified, and that he “pluck” out of a package of documents responsive to the subpoena “anything really bad in there” — because the law required him to, not because he wanted to.
Is the former president being unfairly singled out for prosecution by special counsel Jack Smith’s 37-count indictment? I think so . . . but not for the reasons Trump and his devotees posit.
The problem is not that Democrats, who are leveraging the government’s law-enforcement power for partisan advantage, are going after him, even though Democrats and Beltway big shots — Hillary Clinton, Sandy Berger, David Petraeus, and (soon) Joe Biden — get a pass. The problem is that Clinton, Berger, Petraeus, and (soon) Biden get a pass.
It’s not that Trump is owed a pass. It’s that every official who is entrusted with access to the nation’s secrets, and who then betrays that trust by willful law violations and cover-ups, should be prosecuted. Every . . . single . . . one.
And none of them has any business near power.
The lesson of the Hillary Clinton precedent is that Joe Biden should be investigated and prosecuted. That’s how the scales of justice are evened out. The fix for a two-tiered justice system is not equal injustice under the law.
As for Trump, say what you want about Democrats being out to destroy him. I know all about that — wrote a book about it, in fact. But if Trump ends up being destroyed in this case, it will be based on the accounts of people who had his best interests at heart.
I don’t believe that Trump’s lawyers, who were trying to help him, would testify — as they have very reluctantly testified — that he tried to get them to destroy evidence and obstruct justice, unless he really did try to get them to destroy evidence and obstruct justice.
If you tell me I need to look the other way on that because Hillary Clinton got a pass, I respectfully suggest that you’ve lost your way.