On Thursday, a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict former president Donald Trump on as-yet unknown charges stemming from a long and politically-driven investigation of the Stormy Daniels controversy, according to which Trump allegedly paid the porn star “hush money” to keep quiet about illicit sexual encounters decades ago. New York DA Alvin Bragg, who has been pursuing Trump since his election in 2021, and who repeatedly promised to indict the former president during his electoral campaign, has already begun attacking congressional Republicans for “baseless” accusations of political persecution.
Bragg’s case against Trump is fraught with legal pitfalls, including concerns over the statute of limitations, the mendacity of the prosecution’s star witness Michael Cohen, Trump’s disgraced former lawyer, and the very criminality of the alleged acts; payment of money in exchange for non-disclosure, after all, if perfectly legal.
Despite all of these concerns, hyperpartisan and radical-left DA Bragg, who during his tenure has refused to prosecute entire classes of statutory offenses in New York, has seen fit to make Donald Trump the first-ever ex-president to be indicted — and for alleged misdeeds that pale into insignificance besides well-documented malfeasance of the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe and Hunter Biden, and any number of prominent officials in the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations. While the particulars of the charges are still under wraps, it is crystal-clear that this indictment is yet another in the long and sordid chain of partisan attacks on Donald Trump, using the U.S. legal system as a cudgel.
While Trump’s supporters are portraying the indictment as farcical and easily overturned, it should be borne in mind that Trump is being indicted in New York City, where an impartial jury will be impossible to find. It is by no means a given that partisan local judges will agree to a change of venue, since the transparent and near-unanimous goal of the eastern liberal establishment is to silence Trump permanently and ensure that he never gets anywhere near the Oval Office again.
There is another worrisome angle. Popular rage at the treatment of Trump has been building since the Mar-A-Lago raid, and there is a real possibility that some may overreact, as on January 6. Any pro-Trump violence, of course, would immediately become a pretext for the Biden administration to crack down hard, which could include rounding up not only obstreperous Trump supporters on the street and online, but also could conceivably even extend to those on Capitol Hill — especially in the House — who have already been branded “extremists” and “supporters of domestic terrorism” by the radical Left in Congress and in the media.
Whatever the outcome, these frivolous charges against Trump have taken America into uncharted territory — territory where restoring rule by law and limited government under the Constitution has now become much more urgent, and more difficult.
