On the Right, Furor over Trump Indictment

As a believer of l'état, c'est moi, Donald Trump told us his indictment is of such gravity that we are "a nation in decline", that "to come after Donald Trump...it's ripping our country to shreds". In a video without an audience, standing
before a large painting, he called the charges a "boxes hoax just like the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax". He made evident his belief that certain criteria should apply to exempt a person of his importance from prosecution, such as this:

"They go after a popular president, a president who got more votes than any sitting president in the history of our country -- by far. And did much better the second time in the election than the first."

Hopes expressed by personalities on left-leaning cable shows that those on the right would finally realize how unfit he is for re-election were quickly dashed. Rather than a sober assessment of how serious are the charges in the indictment — top secret documents revealing U.S. defense plans, our nuclear capabilities, plans for an attack on Iran — each of them carrying a possible 20 years imprisonment for misuse — the Right instead immediately set about reconstructing reality.

The Right has adopted a number of memes to negate the charges against the former president.

Weaponization: To dissuade Trump loyalists from reading the DOJ's indictment and learning of the charges against the former president, the Right took up the theme that the Justice Department and FBI are corrupt. "Our system has now been weaponized beyond belief", says Sean Hannity on his primetime show at Fox News. Just as Republicans protested that the FBI should never have investigated Russian influence in the 2016 election, neither should there now be any pursuit of the crimes alleged to have been committed by Donald Trump after the 2020 election.

"Weaponizing the Justice Department, weaponizing the FBI, we can't let this continue to go on", Trump tells his followers.

"The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society", tweeted presume candidate Ron DeSantis. "Our founding fathers would have absolutely predicted the weaponization that we've seen with these agencies ", he expanded. There's been a lack of "constitutional accountability", he says, that has led them to "abuse their power".

South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace calls it "Weaponizing the executive branch to take out your political enemies".

Election interference: The indictment is political. Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe tells her viewers:

"Obviously, the biggest frustration for conservatives is the unequal application of the law which we've all seen and witnessed under the Biden administration, which is infuriating. We're living in a time when the FBI is interjecting itself in elections".

"It's election interference at the highest level", said Trump in his talk on indictment night.

Out to get trump: "Joe Biden's Justice Department" seeks to remove Trump from the race. Haven't we been hearing all along that Biden hopes Trump will be the Republican nominee in his belief that he can beat him again?

It's not only the Justice Department out to get Trump, it's Joe Biden himself. Jesse Watters opened his Fox News show with, "Fox News alert: Joe Biden's having Donald Trump arrested". Mace says, "Joe Biden wants to give Donald Trump a death sentence for documents. He's facing hundreds of years for mishandling documents and they want him to die in jail and yet Hillary Clinton is standing free today".

Hannity on the night of the indictment pointedly cites Biden targeting his opponent:

"For the first time in American history a sitting president's DOJ has indicted a top political rival ahead of a presidential campaign."

Fox News colleague Maria Bartiromo says the same, that "the Justice Department is prosecuting the sitting president's former and potential re-election opponent." House Speaker Kevin McCarthy echoes with, "It is unconscionable for a president to indict the leading candidate opposing him". Trump attorney Alina Habba bemoans that, "They come after the greatest president we've ever had…They are taking away your right to vote, and that is a very scary time for our country".

None of them refer to the indictment itself — the serious evidence of what Trump is alleged to have done. Mollie Hemingway, editor in chief of the online magazine The Federalist and a contributor at Fox News, finds only sinister motive,

"I have no doubt that the Department of Justice is going to do what they've been doing for many years which is try to imprison their top political opponents."

Wouldn't those many years include the Mueller investigation, led by lifelong Republican Robert Mueller as special counsel under the Trump administration, and Trump's attorney general, William Barr, who ran the Justice Department? Does she believe they were trying to imprison Democrats?

No equal justice: The anger that there was never an indictment of Hilary Clinton for the mistreatment of e-mail, and that the supposed investigation of the Bidens has gone nowhere — those have become the most employed themes to counter the indictment. Distract the faithful from learning the charges. Shift the focus to Clinton and Biden. Elevate the allegations of their mishandling of "documents" onto a plane equal to Trump's. Their stories are vastly different, but make them the same, so as to claim that there is a "two-tier system of justice" per Nancy Mace, that "all these people are held to a different standard except for Donald Trump".

Representative Lisa McClain (R-Mi) tweets:

"The DOJ has become nothing more than a political weapon. They indict a former President because he's a Republican and let the sitting scandal-ridden President walk freely. If this is what we're calling 'justice' in this country nowadays, we are heading down a dark path."

Sean Hannity intones,:

"Yes, it is a dark day in America. We've said it often. There's no equal justice. There's no equal application of our laws. There's one set of rules for Democrats, another set of rules for Donald Trump and conservatives."

Gregg Jarrett, who Fox News calls its resident legal expert, repeats this along with others, "Two systems of justice, one for Donald Trump and one for everybody else". Trump is in fact being treated under the same laws as any American. Actually, with far greater deference than any other American. For well over a year the request by the National Archives for the documents to be returned was met with an obstinacy that would have put any of the rest of us in prison long ago. How many all across America have been immediately detained for allegations of serious crimes while Trump didn't even have to put up a bond, nor was his passport taken. No one is above the law?

Hannity lies to his audience, "We now know Hillary mishandled thousands of classified documents". Thousands, is it now? Kevin McCarthy says, "Joe Biden kept classified documents for decades". Gregg Jarrett, says:

"This is selective prosecution. It is unequal justice. Yeah, it's OK for Hillary to mishandle classified documents. No charges".

But Clinton didn't mishandle "documents". Hers were nothing but e-mail. One-by-one, e-mail on her private servers had to be judged for whether they contained information that should be considered classified. As Comey's statement said,

"Where an e-mail was assessed as possibly containing classified information, the FBI referred the e-mail to any U.S. government agency that was a likely 'owner' of information in the e-mail, so that agency could make a determination as to whether the e-mail contained classified information at the time it was sent or received".

Of the 30,000 e-mails examined by the FBI, 110 [not thousands, Sean] were determined by the owning agency to contain classified information. Ms. Clinton and colleagues should have realized that, and "were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information", said Comey, but the e-mail was adjudged of a classified nature only after-the-fact. There was no criminal intent, unlike Trump's deliberate hiding and retention of documents.

Donald Trump, having led the chants of "Lock her up" during his campaign, as president for four years with Bill Barr's DOJ in his pocket, made no move to indict Hillary Clinton. interesting that Jim Comey's appraisal that…

"Although there is evidence of potential violation of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutors would bring such a case"

…apparently prevailed. The case was thought to be too weak, but for the Right the facts such as these have been simplified to no more than a bumper sticker.

The complaints about Joe Biden are a better fit, that the supposed investigation goes on and on in silence. The number of Americans who know that there is another special counsel, Robert Hur, investigating the Bidens, approaches zero. Republicans ask why do they hear nothing of what's in the alleged 1,850 boxes the president has stored at Delaware University and other locations? Much dates from his Senate years, which would be in volition of congressional rules against taking material from government premises. Says former Republican Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz:

"Absolutely against the law. House and Senate members, you are not allowed to take even one document and Joe Biden took an untold, unspecified number of documents, How come they didn't go in there guns ablazing?"

Of greater concern for Biden is a document held by the FBI that the House Oversight Committee jousted with FBI Director Christopher Wray for the right to review. The form FD-1023, used to document interviews with sources, contains a whistleblower’s account that Joe Biden engaged in a "criminal scheme" with a foreign national when he was vice president, what Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asserts "allegedly details an arrangement involving an exchange of money for policy decisions." It says, according to Grassley, who has seen the 1023, that an executive at Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company where son Hunter Biden held a board position, says he paid the Bidens $5 million each and claims to have 17 audio recordings of conversations about it with Joe Biden.

The story was unleashed to drown out the indictment release, but a week later Grassley and others such as Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc) are admitting they don't actually know whether the recordings exist and they may be "just a bluff".

"I just want to tell you, I'm an innocent man, I'm an innocent person", says Trump."But still, to get indicted over nothing?" He calls Special Counsel Jack Smith a "deranged lunatic".

On his way to Georgia and North Carolina the Saturday after the indictment, Trump said to reporters aboard his private plane, "These are thugs and degenerates who are after me." At a rally there he tells the audience, "In the end they're not coming after me, they're coming after you, and I'm just standing in their way". Loud cheers. His niece, Mary Trump, said it's the other way 'round. Her uncle wants his followers "to put their bodies in the way", witness his calls on people to come from across the nation to protest even his arraignments.

“This is the final battle,” Trump told supporters that Saturday, Axios reports, and warned, “our people are angry.” He will run and serve even if convicted, he says. "I'll never leave".

There are those who even back different forms of Trump's "nothing wrong" plea despite the specific charges laid out in the indictment. In an interview with "CBS Mornings", Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had this to say:

"There's no allegation that there was harm done to the national security. There's no allegation that he sold it to a foreign power or that it was trafficked to somebody else or that anybody got access to it".

So it's okay for top secret documents to be taken home and strewn about if there's "no real damage". Only damage is Rubio's Rubicon. Does he have security clearance?

Alan Dershowitz is an emeritus Harvard law professor who masquerades as a Democrat but appears frequently on Fox with arguments sympathetic to Trump:

"If this is not the strongest case ever, then obviously this will be seen by the public, Democrats and Republicans alike, as partisan justice designed to prevent the people from deciding who the next president should be ".

Is it the strongest case? "So far, I haven't seen evidence of that", he concludes.

Alina Habba told Fox host Shannon Bream,

"What I can tell you is he has every right to have classified documents that he declassifies under the Presidential Records Act. They're making it sound like a five-alarm fire and it's not."

Fox's Jarrett says Attorney General Merrick Garland "is criminalizing a civil dispute over documents that are covered exclusively by civil statutes, the Presidential Records Act." But Jarrett contends,

"Anything created during a presidency, whether it's classified or not, can be maintained by a former president, period. The president can keep what he wants. But Garland didn't like that and he doesn't care about the law."

Jarrett seems to be referring to a court case Fox colleague Jesse Watters expects will end the debate. "Everyone has the law wrong", Watters says. "Nothing about this document drama is criminal. The Presidential Records Act is not a criminal statute. Classification has nothing to do with this." Over at MSNBC, Georgetown University Law Center Professor Paul Butler would have reminded both of them that,

"The Presidential Records Act is not anything that Donald Trump is charged with — he's charged with very serious federal felonies."

Watters bases his argument on a case brought by far-right Judicial Watch 13 years ago demanding from Bill Clinton access to cassette tapes he had made while in the Oval Office. Clinton refused, claiming the tapes belonged to him. In Watters's rendering, the tapes that Clinton took home to Chappaqua and stuffed in a sock drawer were conversations with foreign leaders. A judge appointed by Obama ruled that the tapes were personal. "The decision to segregate personal material from presidential records is made by the president during the president's term and in his sole discretion". So Trump has every right to claim everything he has taken as personal and his to keep, is Watters's conclusion.

Watters doesn't tell us that the 79 tapes were not a Nixonian Oval Office system, but were interviews conducted by historian Taylor Branch who was documenting the Clinton presidency. Mentioning only "foreign leaders" deliberately misleads. Any such phone calls were occasional interruptions of the interviews and the tapes only heard Clinton's side of the conversations.

Watters then undercuts his assertion of "sole discretion" when he says, "All presidents negotiate with the Archives what's personal and what's presidential." When he tells us that "George W Bush's records ended up in a strip mall between a Chinese restaurant and a bowling alley… Obama kept his in a defunct furniture store right across the street from Micky D's", etc., clearly the Archives would not have allowed presidential records to be so treated, that these are truly personal records and not the classified trove Trump spirited away to Mar-a-Lago.

The question for Watters making an extreme bid for all those top secret documents to be Trump's personal papers is, why does he?

Twisting Trump's possession of the documents to be personal under the sock drawer defense clashes with the growing realization by others of the severity of Trump's wrongdoing.

Nikki Haley criticized the FBI and the Department of Justice, joining other Republicans defending Trump who argue the former president is being treated unfairly, but nevertheless said,

"If this indictment is true, if what it says is actually the case, President Trump was incredibly reckless with our national security…I’m a military spouse. My husband’s about to deploy this weekend. This puts all of our military men and women in danger."

Bill Barr appeared in several interviews. He gave Trump no quarter. A composite of what he said:

"He's not a victim here. He was totally wrong that he had the right to have those documents. The government acted responsibly, and it was Donald J trump who acted irresponsibly.

Those documents are among the most sensitive secrets that the country has. Battle plans for an attack on another country or Defense Department documents about our capabilities are in no universe Donald J Trump's personal documents. They have to be in the custody of the archivist. He had no right to retain them and he kept them in a way at Mar-a-Lago that anyone who really cares about national security, their stomach would churn."

Quoted everywhere was Barr's summation about the indictment: "If even half of it is true, then he's toast".

Jonathan Turley, who teaches law at George Mason University, is a fixture on Fox News where he has steadfastly been a Trump supporter:

"The problem is, he's got to run the table. He's 76-years-old [days later Trump turned 77]. All the government has to do is stick the landing on one count and he could have a terminal sentence. You're talking about crimes that have a ten or twenty-year period as a maximum. The evidence here is quite strong…some of this evidence is coming from his former counsel and these are very damaging statements that have been made against him…Yes, the Department of Justice may have been out to get him but he … If you look at what has been described in this indictment… he couldn't have made it more easy for them to do so."

Harold Ford, a former Republican congressman from Tennessee, marveled that,

"[T]he indictment is one of the more incredible documents that I've ever read with regard to the specificity that is included there and it talks about witnesses who are either former lawyers of the president or others who have been close to him under oath which is unique in a charging document such as this".

Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) spoke up:

"I'm angry. The country's going to go through tumult as a result of one thing: President Trump didn't turn over military documents when he was asked to do so. All he had to do was hand 'em in. I'm sure his counsel told him, 'hand the documents in', particularly when the subpoena came. But for some reason he decided not to. He held on to them. Why? That's the question. Why's the country going to have to go through all this angst and tumult?"

Byron York is the chief political correspondent for the conservative magazine The Washington Examiner and a Fox News contributor. He is not sanguine about those on the Right coming around:

"I was in Iowa last week, a big Republican event, and Republicans almost universally believe that Donald Trump was unfairly targeted during his years in the White House and any time some new event happens negative toward him, they fit that into that context."

That they do, sure enough, and confirmed by a focus group session with eight members of Iowa's Republican caucus. We heard from them every catchword and phrase we've gone through above — "weaponized", "election interference", "two-tier justice system" , "what about Hillary Clinton", "a current president who is siccing all of the DOJ on a potential candidate". If convicted, six of the eight would support Trump more. All eight still think the 2020 election was stolen. January 6th "was a setup".

Good luck America.