Wasn’t It the Right That Was Against Cancel Culture and Lawfare?

What drove conservatives to anger over recent years was what they regarded as the liberal takeover of the culture, imposing dictates of diversity, equity, and inclusion
and cancelling anyone who was so gauche as to emit an opinion they viewed as politically incorrect. We wrote of this a month ago, the right-wing's rapid adoption of a cancel culture that took the form of having people fired from their jobs should they have said anything negative about Charlie Kirk. As a footnote, a website called Expose Charlie's Murderers received over 63,000 tips about people judged to be applauding Kirk's death. Urging cancelling peoples' lives came from the top, JD Vance saying,

"When you see someone's celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer."

Perhaps Nick Catoggio at The Dispatch got it right, that conservatives…

"never wanted an America where people don't get cancelled, they want an America where they get to do the cancelling."

When Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to get busy prosecuting his retribution list, she swiftly obliged by indicting
Attorney General Bondi

former FBI director James Comey, making it clear that the regime has embarked on the same "lawfare" tactic they accused the left of employing in their prosecutions of Trump. Lawfare, a coinage bound to enter the dictionary, means the use of the law as a
FBI Director Patel

weapon to damage an opponent. Republicans have accused Democratic administrations of weaponizing the Justice Department against Trump. Trump in the White House — and Republicans in Congress launching investigations with indictments the goal — are now doing the same.

The weaponizations are not equivalent.

To back their case of lawfare committed against Donald Trump, those on the right choose Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's prosecution of Trump's hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. To load the deck, he charged each of the 34 payments as a criminal count, whereas Trump supporters would argue that if it was a crime, it was a single crime divided into 34 pieces. Moreover, they were misdemeanors — payments run through the Trump business which illegally reduced the company’s taxes — and the statute of limitations of only two years had run out.

Bragg evaded this limitation by elevating each count to a felony on the grounds that the payments were to cover up a more serious crime, an offense that bizarrely was never elucidated. Clearly, we were to infer that the unmentionable crime was a campaign funding violation. But that would be a federal crime, outside Bragg's jurisdiction.

Republicans claiming the Bragg prosecution was lawfare have a case, and while at it, much as the right-wing gaslighted the Steele Dossier as the entirety of the Russia story in hopes we'd forget all the unexplained Trump campaign connections with Russians, they decided to call all the other prosecutions of Trump "lawfare".

The two cases brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith against Trump were anything but lawfare. In an unparalleled act of treason, Trump had attempted in multiple plots to find some way to overthrow the election of Joe Biden to keep himself in power, finally ending in the assault on the Capitol. In the second case, Trump had made off with hundreds of boxes of government documents, classified and secret among them, hid them at Mar-a-Lago, and then obstructed their return to the National Archives.

Conservative media has worked to minimize these crimes. We'll use a couple of examples from The Wall Street Journal to show that even this exemplar of objective journalism, labels even these cases lawfare and weaponization.

 Andrew McCarthy, who writes for the very conservative Bill Buckley-founded National Review, wrote a guest essay recently for the Journal to tell us that “those prosecutions bore some of the hallmarks of lawfare’s roughshod ride over due process”, that Trump was only “questioning state election results”.

 In an interview, Journal senior editor James Taranto spoke with George Terwilliger, who had been deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration. "Our topic is lawfare" says Taranto, and Terwilliger ventures forth with:

“I’ve known Merrick Garland a long time and I was really surprised that they went forward with that case, particularly coming on the heels of what was obviously a completely partisan exercise by the Jan. 6 Committee”.

Republicans regularly categorize the House Select Committee's investigation as partisan — as if there were another side. As if the committee should have entertained argument that an attempt to overthrow the government was a good idea. And "partisan" despite the fact that all witnesses called before the committee save just one were Republicans, many even White House staff.

About the second case, Taranto writes, "Over the next two years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided Mr. Trump’s Florida residence", which is not true. The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 but only after a year and a half of Trump stonewalling requests to return the stolen documents.

Incidentally, Mr. Terwilliger thinks it is possible the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump because mail-in ballots make fraud easy. No evidence. Curiously, there was no complaint about their continued use in the 2024 election that Trump won.

The Journal gave almost the whole of its large broadsheet pages in the print edition to this spewing of disinformation.

The indictments of Comey and New York State Attorney General Letitia James, with likely another against California Senator Adam Schiff soon to
When did we ever see Attorney General Garland and FBI Director Wray at the White House with Biden? This says Trump runs the Department of Justice.

follow, are lawfare at its purest, literally ordered up by Trump in his infamous "Pam:" tweet and dutifully executed within days by Ms. Bondi. We'll skip going into the cases in detail — they flooded the media — except to emphasize the lawfare component.

The Comey accusation is that he lied to Congress by affirming five years ago that what he had said to Congress three years
James Comey

before that was unchanged, that he had not authorized someone to leak to the media. That's all it's about. On reporting that he was unable to find evidence that Comey was lying, Erik Siebert, serving as interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, resigned ahead of Trump firing him. The Justice Department replaced him with former Trump personal attorney Lindsey Halligan, who had never prosecuted a case. With just days before the five-year statute of limitations was set to run out, Halligan obtained a grand jury indictment of Comey making a false statement to Congress and – doubling down like Bragg– made that same statement obstruction of a congressional proceeding as a second count. A mere two pages, her indictment doesn’t even identify whom she accuses Comey authorized to leak to the media.

Unusually, hers was the only signature on the charge; other prosecutors refused to join so flimsy a case. Two prosecutors from North Carolina had to be brought in. Halligan has now fired the lead prosecutor in the district for not supporting the Trump agenda.

Comey, by counsel, is filing a motion challenging Halligan’s appointment. Dodging Senate confirmation has become a standard practice for Trump, appointing only interim and acting officials for 120-day terms. Siebert followed by Halligan makes for two interim U.S. attorneys in a row, which has drawn widespread objection. Even the National Review makes that argument. So did none other than Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito when he was at the Justice Department in the 1980s in the office of legal counsel, arguing that “the Attorney General may not make successive interim appointments”!

If Halligan is sent down, that ends the Comey case. It can't be brought again because the statute of limitations term has now expired. Failing that, Comey’s legal counsel will argue that this is a selective vindictive prosecution. Trump has made it so by his unending slander, recently tweeting “JAMES COMEY IS A DIRTY COP” and in the “Pam:” tweet Trump saying about Comey, James, and Schiff that “They’re all guilty as hell”. On "Meet the Press", we saw the Vice President of the United States, a Yale Law School graduate, also compromise the government's case saying, “James Comey obviously lied under oath. Letitia James obviously committed mortgage fraud" without any grounds for either prejudicial remark.

After the indictment Trump tweeted:

”JUSTICE IN AMERICA! One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to is James Comey, the former Corrupt Head of the FBI...He has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

If that isn’t ruled vindictive prosecution, there is no such thing.

Out to please Donald Trump, Bill Pulte used his post as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to selectively delve into mortgage records of Trump enemies Letitia James, Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook, and California Senator Adam Schiff
New York Attorney General Letitia James

to make fraud cases of glitches he found in their mortgage applications, (Mother Jones unearthed an illegality on Pulte's part by failing to file paperwork with the SEC when he appointed himself chairman of mortgage giants Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, but we can be sure he won’t be prosecuted.)

Ms. James stated in mortgage documents for a house she was buying in 2020 in Norfolk, Virginia, that it was to be a second home and not a rental property. Not renting is preferred by lenders and is granted better terms, in her case a savings of almost $19,000 over the life of the loan. Lindsey Halligan's five-page indictment accuses fraud, that James did rent out the house in violation of the mortgage agreement, a civil crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

But James didn’t rent. For five years her grandniece and her three kids lived there, rent free. (The New York Post reported that the grandniece is wanted in North Carolina for not completing parole after misdemeanor convictions. She had been sentenced only to probation and her “absconding” is “non-extraditable”. Unrelated though it be, prosecution will probably try to work it in).

James incurred Trump’s wrath by winning a fraud conviction in New York that proved Trump had for decades overvalued assets as collateral to obtain larger bank loans (and he deflated those same assets to lower his taxes). An appeals court threw out the $550 million judgment as “excessive”; a reduced amount has not yet been decided.

Here again defense counsel will say there is no fraud, Ms. James is free to have guests in her house, and this is another selective vindictive prosecution. Here again, contaminating the prosecution is the Vance quote above, and Trump doing the same, listing “Letitia” in his “They’re all guilty as hell” tweet to “Pam:”. He even makes it political by writing, “We can’t delay any longer. It’s killing our reputation.”

 On Thursday Justice Department prosecutors obtained an indictment of 18 criminal counts against John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor, claiming that he mishandled classified documents, that from 2018 until the present he has shared “more than a thousand pages of information” relating to national defense, some of it top secret, with “two unauthorized individuals”, his wife and daughter, transmitted through “a commercial non-governmental messaging application”.

Trump is surely delighted. Bolton, highly critical of Trump, is certainly on Trump’s enemy list, but this one is serious and we’ll not call it lawfare. Under our two systems of law, however, let’s be mindful that nothing came of Donald Trump’s far more serious mishandling of thousands of physical documents, and there has not even been an investigation of Pete Hegseth’s using a commercial application to lay bare an imminent air strike against Yemen, putting our pilots’ lives in jeopardy.

 On Wednesday, Trump in the White House, flanked by Bondi and Patel, said:

”Jack Smith in my opinion is a criminal and I notice his interview, I think that was Weissmann, and I hope they’re going to look into Weissmann, too. Weissmann’s a bad guy and he had somebody in Lisa who was his puppet, worked in the office really as the top person and I think that she could be looked at very strongly. I hope they’re looking at shifty Schiff. I hope they’re looking at all these people, and I’m allowed to find out, I’m allowed, you know, I’m in theory the chief law enforcement officer.” (grammar is his.)

He is decidedly not the chief law enforcement officer. Weissmann is Andrew Weissmann, a legal analyst at MSNBC whose sin is probably that he was lead prosecutor in the Robert Mueller investigation of Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election campaign. Lisa may be Lisa Monaco, deputy attorney general during the Biden administration.

All of that is lawfare, Trump using the taxpayer-funded justice system to try to find some way to at least ruin the lives of these perceived enemies, applying the full weight of the corrupted Justice Department to cause anguish for them and their families, draining their assets for having to hire lawyers to defeat whatever ludicrous charges the government brings. All to sate the illness of hate that consumes this sick old man.