The Trump Indictment Criminalizes Political Dissent

The Trump Indictment Criminalizes Political Dissent. By Daniel Greenfield.

The serial indictments and investigations of former President Trump are meant to rig the 2024 presidential election, but the latest indictment is unique in rigging even its aftermath.

Previous indictments of the former president had broken all sorts of new legal ground by turning misdemeanors into felonies and deciding that the statute of limitations is just a suggestion, but the Jan 6 indictment by Democrat special counsel Jack Smith criminalizes election challenges.

Or at least election challenges against Democrats. And along with that, all political dissent. …

What does this latest indictment offer that the previous indictments did not? This one is designed to intimidate any Republicans who might seek to challenge the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. …

Double standards:

If contending that a presidential election was stolen is illegal, where is Al Gore’s indictment? No Democrats have ever been charged for claiming that Bush was elected by hanging chads, for challenging his election both times in Congress, or for spreading lies and launching investigations for their false claims that Trump had been elected by the Russians, even when they did this in order to “create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger.”

The last time the Democrats admitted that a Republican had legitimately been elected president was in 1988, when George H.W. Bush carried 40 states.

When Democrats spread lies about an election, they get book deals and evening slots on MSNBC …

If lobbying state legislators and searching for alternate electors is a crime then virtually every single president before 1900 would have been locked up. Not to mention aspiring political figures like Alexander Hamilton. And every time Democrats lose an election, they start plotting to eliminate the electoral college and have been seeking to do it through the back door using comprehensive measures like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact …

You too:

Describing publicly conducted election challenges as an effort to “defraud” the United States government turns 18 U.S. Code § 371 into an open-ended tool for suppressing a wide range of political dissent.

Treating lobbying or any kind of advocacy as the equivalent of witness tampering weaponizes 18 U.S. Code § 1512 against virtually anyone trying to influence a function of government. Which is to say virtually everyone who is interested in politics. …

Obama: “We Don’t Fear the Future—We Shape It”. Alas, it has arrived.

Smith has done nothing less than to take sections of the law and use them to build a criminal infrastructure that can be used to outlaw most political parties and activities on a level with that of Communist China or Russia. …

This was the totalitarian state of affairs that Russiagate had only hinted at but that is reaching its maturity with an indictment that is not merely unconstitutional, but that seeks to replace any kind of open political system with a paranoid surveillance state that ruthlessly stamps out any threat to “democracy” by abusing existing laws to selectively target and imprison political opponents. …

The indictment repeatedly accuses Trump and his associates of “fraud” on the presumption, self-apparent to Democrats, that Biden had won the election and therefore challenging it is fraudulent. Smith’s indictment bases its claims of fraud on his own party’s assertions, using rhetoric such as “baseless fraud claims”, “sham election investigations” and “false claims of election fraud”. All of these are the partisan opinions of the prosecutor rather than the law.

And that is what the indictment comes down to. Is it illegal to disagree with Democrats? If it is, as Smith asserts in his indictment, then all forms of political opposition are also illegal.

The light on the hill is spluttering. This might be a turning point in human history.