The New York Times Gaslights About Political Prosecutions

The New York Times published a 5,000-word article asserting that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy because a second term Trump Department of Justice could potentially prosecute members of the Democrat Party.

Authors Emily Bazelon and Mattathias Schwartz make this argument not only after a first Trump term with zero political prosecutions by Trump appointees but after a shocking and unprecedented nationwide lawfare campaign by Democrats against Trump and other Republicans.

The Times headline is “Why Legal Experts Are Worried About a Second Trump Presidency.” The subhed added, “In a survey of 50 members of the D.C. legal establishment, many warn that Trump could follow through on his threats to prosecute his political adversaries.” The term “gaslighting” has gained popularity in recent years, a reference to the 1944 movie “Gaslight” about a husband who manipulates his wife into thinking she is insane. Even in a sea of media manipulation, there is perhaps no better example of gaslighting than this piece.

The article begins with an unsubstantiated claim that Trump seeks to engage in political prosecutions. The only quote offered in support of this claim is Trump saying people who violate federal election laws will be prosecuted and sentenced. They inaccurately characterize this as “Donald Trump could not be clearer about his plans to use the Justice Department to seek revenge against his enemies.”

The opening paragraph also references Trump supporters chanting “Lock Her Up!” of Hillary Clinton, who had gotten away with setting up a secret server to mishandle classified information. Left unsaid by the New York Times is that Trump didn’t go after Clinton during his time in office, saying it would be “divisive” to pursue political opponents. The New York Times also doesn’t mention that the Democrat National Convention featured chants of “Lock Him Up!” when Hillary Clinton spoke.

Most importantly, though, the past four years saw Democrats at the local, state, and federal levels upend historic norms associated with rule of law. Here’s just a partial list:

• Democrat New York Attorney General Letitia James ran for office in 2018 on a Soviet-style threat of getting Trump, who she claimed had illegitimately won the 2016 election. The result was a never-before-prosecuted charge of inflated assets and an indefensible $350 million fine. After businesses began to worry that the common bookkeeping approach used by Trump officials might result in similar prosecutions for their businesses, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul reassured them this government action was “an extraordinarily unusual circumstance” — meaning it would only be used to go after Trump.
• Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg worked with a slew of Biden-connected attorneys, including Biden’s former #3 at the DOJ, to gin up a murky 34-count indictment of Trump for non-disclosure payments, even though no actual crime was alleged and the statute of limitations for looking into the payments had expired. Judge Anthony Engoron, who heavily favored the prosecution in the case, refused to recuse from the case even though he was a longtime Democrat donor whose daughter earned massive funds from Democrat campaigns during the trial.
• Billionaire Democrat activist Reid Hoffman secretly bankrolled a civil suit in New York related to outlandish allegations that Donald Trump slipped into a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s and sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, then a woman in her 50s. George Conway, who had tried and failed to get hired in the Trump administration, helped coordinate the lawfare. A New York jury awarded Carroll nearly $90 million. She and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow giggled about using the funds to go on a shopping spree.

The Democrat lawfare was even more onerous at the national level:

• The FBI conducted a shocking armed raid of Mar-a-Lago for an unprecedented presidential records and classified document case that has since been dismissed on account of Special Counsel Jack Smith having been illegally appointed. Prior to that dismissal, criminal selective leaks about that raid were distributed to a compliant press.
• Smith also violated every norm and precedent with his anti-free speech prosecution of Trump, related to Trump’s concerns over 2020 election administration. Smith had the benefit of several Democrat-appointed federal judges doing everything they could to fast-track the trial, including removing normal procedures afforded the accused.
• Democrat groups led an effort to remove Trump from the ballot, supposedly in the name of protecting democracy. The move was so radical — despite media claims otherwise — that all nine justices shot it down.

The list goes on and on:

• The Biden DOJ imprisoned conservative media giant Steve Bannon and close Trump associate Peter Navarro for contempt of Congress. Attorney General Merrick Garland was also held in contempt of Congress but has not been even close to prosecuted, much less imprisoned.
• The DOJ targeted school parents who have protested the radical trans agenda at some public schools as “terrorists,” raided the homes of pro-lifers and selectively prosecuted and imprisoned many of them as well under the unconstitutional FACE Act. It’s sued states that work to improve their election integrity, including just this week suing Virginia to force it to allow non-citizens to remain on the voter rolls.
• Biden’s DOJ indicted more than 1,243 of Trump’s supporters for a protest at the Capitol after doing nearly nothing to the tens of thousands of BLM rioters who wreaked havoc nationwide in 2020. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that a law used to target 300 of these defendants — and Trump — was improperly applied to their cases, a slap-down that hardly slowed the DOJ down.

It almost seems like 5,000 words should have been written about how much Democrats destroyed rule of law in this country in short order. Instead, Bazelon and Schwartz say that the “fundamental difference” between Trump threatening to prosecute various alleged lawbreakers and Biden’s DOJ actually prosecuting hundreds of Biden’s political opponents is “[t]here is no known evidence that Biden instigated these investigations or has tried to influence their outcome.”

Biden Meddles A Lot

Oh for crying out loud. First off, the problem with the DOJ’s prosecutions isn’t which members of the Democrat Party ordered or influenced them. The problem is that they are political prosecutions designed to interfere with U.S. elections. While it’s true that Biden didn’t take an ad out in The New York Times that said, “Hey Garland, please prosecute my top political opponent immediately,” he came pretty close to that on the front page of the paper itself.

“As recently as late last year, Mr. Biden confided to his inner circle that he believed former President Donald J. Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted, according to two people familiar with his comments,” the New York Times announced on its front page on April 2, 2022. “And while the president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland, he has said privately that he wanted Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6,” the report continued in the article headlined “Garland Faces Growing Pressure as Jan. 6 Investigation Widens.”

See, Biden didn’t communicate his frustration directly! He didn’t say it in a private meeting with his attorney general or write a memo detailing his desires. He only put it on the front page of a quiet, hardly ever read Democrat Party publication called The New York Times. How would Garland ever possibly find out what Biden had two of his staffers tell The New York Times for the purpose of getting a front-page story out of it?

By comparison, King Henry II’s “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” was far more subtle.

Jonathan Lemire and Sam Stein of Politico laundered additional Biden leaks, including complaints about the slow pace of the prosecutions of his political opponent Trump, earlier this year in “White House frustration with Garland grows.”

Clearly the “fundamental difference” between Trump threatening to prosecute lawbreakers and Biden’s DOJ prosecuting all of his political opponents is not that Biden kept his views super secret.

Meddling with the DOJ is part of a pattern for Biden. In the infamous January 5, 2017, meeting where Obama, Biden, and their advisors concocted plans for how to target Trump officials, including incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, it was Biden who came up with the idea of abusing the Logan Act to go after him, according to contemporaneous notes taken by discredited FBI special agent Peter Strzok, of all people. The FBI did just that in the days that followed.

And on that note, The New York Times article scandalously pretends that the FBI and DOJ are bastions of objectivity and non-partisanship, ignoring the mountains of evidence to the contrary. The Russia collusion hoax exposed for Americans just how corrupt these agencies are.

Virtually no one was held accountable for their role in that information operation. Clinton and her fellow partisans weren’t charged for making up the Russia collusion story. Heck, British “spy” Christopher Steele is still spreading misinformation about Trump this month. The media who participated in the spreading the information operation were rewarded with prizes. And the government operatives who deceptively leaked in order to keep the hoax going were given lucrative taxpayer funded payouts. FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, who falsified a FISA warrant in order to spy on an innocent American, was given a slap on the wrist of a few months without his law license. The DOJ Inspector General found that there had been 17 major omissions and errors in the FISA warrants used to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page.

Permanent DC Is Threatened By Trump

“Maybe the most harmful thing the former president has done to the rule of law is to engage in behavior so reckless that he effectively dared his successor’s Justice Department to investigate him,” Bazelon and Schwartz opine, blaming Trump for being a victim of over-the-top prosecutions and investigations. They add, “It’s easy to see what the peril of not investigating Trump’s most law-defying conduct might have been: For laws to have credibility, they must be applied to everyone.”

Again, this is written after there was almost no accountability for the law-defying conduct of the Russia collusion hoax. But how can the Times reporters write those lines, and ignore the obvious weaknesses of all the Trump prosecutions — all of which are now falling apart, incidentally — unless they’re leftists caught in an epistemological loop where they’ve never exposed themselves to a news source that discusses those weaknesses or they just assume all their readers are too ill-informed to know about those weaknesses?

Nevermind, the point of the article is to introduce a New York Times-designed survey of 50 Washington denizens who all completely agree that the man who has pledged to “drain the swamp” is a threat to the very same swamp.

“Forty-two of the 50 former officials said it was very likely or likely that a second Trump term would pose a significant threat to the norm of keeping criminal enforcement free of White House influence,” the authors claim.

Would that be the norm of coordinating legal operations against parents at the behest of special interest groups? Would it be the norm of shock-and-awe prosecutions of one set of rioters while letting decades of left-wing rioters off easy? What about the norm of not having Barack Obama and Joe Biden help plot aspects of the Russia collusion hoax? What about the norm of prosecuting your top political opponent for his speech in ways that have never even been considered before? What about Democrat prosecutors across the country going after every Republican official they can. What about the attempts to disbar all Republican attorneys to prevent effective election advocacy. What are these norms of which the Times speaks?

Swamp Doesn’t Like Guy Who Promises To Drain Swamp

The Times says it surveyed 50 swamp denizens, half appointed by Democrats and half appointed by Republicans, and that nearly all agree that Trump is a problem. Their first example of a “conservative” Republican appointee who opposes Trump is Peter Keisler, who is described as “a founder of the conservative Federalist Society” and former Bush official.

What Bazelon and Schwartz hide from readers, however, is that Keisler is a rabid never-Trumper and board member of the Democrat-funded anti-Trump outfit set up by Democrat activists Bill Kristol and Sarah Longwell and named, however inappropriately, Society for the Rule of Law. The group is so unhinged — if oft-quoted by Democrat media — that George Conway is its cofounder, primary spokesman, and chairman of the board. It was part of a constellation of groups that were strong proponents of using the Justice Department to perpetuate Democrats’ Russia collusion hoax. They’re so conservative that their members frequently endorse Kamala Harris and they have supported every single piece of lawfare against Trump and his supporters, no matter how extreme. For example the group filed an amicus brief in support of removing Trump from the ballot, a view so extreme that even Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson couldn’t support it.

The next person quoted is Michael Luttig, another rabid anti-Trump activist, and another board member of the Democrat-funded and Democrat-launched Society for the Rule of Law. Luttig was one of the so-called masterminds of the attempt to attempt to keep tens of millions of Americans from being able to vote for the candidate of their choice. He called the Colorado ruling removing Trump from the ballot, a ruling soon to be overturned by every single justice on the Supreme Court, a “masterful judicial opinion” and “unassailable and irrefutable in every single respect.”

Bazelon and Schwartz also gaslight about the first Trump term. They assert without evidence that Trump interfered directly in the Russia collusion scam that was perpetrated against him. They admit there is no evidence that Trump influenced any of the completely impotent investigations into some of the corrupt actors who participated in that horrific and damaging lie, but they are upset that he publicly complained about their corruption.

The article also tells a fantastical tale of Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, being an innocent victim of political prosecution. In fact, McCabe benefited from a DOJ culture that would do anything to avoid prosecuting friends such as him, even as he clearly leaked like a sieve and rampantly lied about some of his leaking. Instead of prosecution, his buddies at DOJ helped him get a massive six-figure settlement paid for by taxpayers.

They quote McCabe saying that investigations and indictments can ruin your reputation even if they don’t lead to convictions. You don’t say! Perhaps Donald Trump and his family would have something to say about the efforts to tie Trump up in legal problems, bankrupt him, distract him, ruin his reputation, and ultimately make him lose the election. McCabe, for his part, was rewarded for his role in the Russia collusion hoax and other anti-Trump efforts with a CNN contributorship, among other things.

Strategic Leaks To Subvert Constitution

The next part of the interminable article is the section dealing with how the unelected bureaucracy might be able to thwart the constitutional authority bestowed on the president, if the president is named Trump.

The Times asked its survey respondents whether there were any “external checks” on Trump’s constitutional responsibility to oversee the Department of Justice.

“Much of what we know about the clashes within the Justice Department in Trump’s first term comes from such disclosures,” the article says, referencing the deluge of selective leaks from FBI and DOJ officials to the media as part of the Russia collusion hoax that government officials and journalists perpetrated against America.

It then quotes Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor in New York, without mentioning that he was the conduit James Comey used for his deceptive leaks to gin up the Robert Mueller probe.

When Trump was in office, the corporate media gave free rein to an entire galaxy of leakers within the bureaucracy who were trying to sabotage the agenda of the president whose agenda they were supposed to serve and advanced.

The Times falsely characterized one of those leakers — dubbed “Anonymous” — as a high-level government official, strongly suggesting that he was a cabinet official. It turned out he was a low-level official at the Department of Homeland Security.

It is understandable that the Times wouldn’t want any accountability for the army of leakers it used to spread disinformation about Trump. But it’s much harder to understand why any honest accounting of the facts would lead anyone to conclude that Trump is more prone to politicizing justice than the party in power that has spent years openly plotting to throw their political opponents in jail.